Stories of Symphonic Music; A Guide to the Meaning of Important Symphonies, Overtures, and Tone-Poems from Beethoven to Debussy

The purpose of this book is to offer in a compact and accessible form such information that will allow a potential concertgoer to prepare in advance for a comprehensive listening to those symphonic works of a suggestive or illustrative nature, from Beethoven to Debussy, which are part of the standard orchestral repertoire, and others that, will likely become such to serve, in effect, as a guide to contemporary orchestral program music. For notational convenience, the subtitle “tone poems,” is used in its broadest sense to characterize all contemporary orchestral delineation music in more free forms. No purely musical analysis of the works in question is undertaken, since it is aimed at giving the concert visitor such information about their illustrative purpose that will allow him to take a reasonable attitude towards their performance. In addition, the author did not allow any speculative "interpretations" of the poetic content of these works; he limited himself in each case to the presentation of only those facts and arguments that were established or justifiably inferred. Exhaustive cataloging of contemporary program music has not been undertaken. It was deemed appropriate to include only such important musical works as would likely be of interest to American concertgoers in the country's symphony programs.