The Portuguese Symphonic Poem (1884-­1909)

By the 1870s, a large proportion of Lisbon’s audiences seem to have become dissatisfied with the dominant trends in concert programming. In spite of a few attempts to introduce what was by then called “philosophical” or “classical” music, the programming at the musical venues still tended to favour opera, virtuosity and social dances, made up of excerpts, fantasias and pot-pourris for soloist or orchestra from the new and established Italian and French operas, solo character pieces, waltz suites, polkas, mazurkas, and other dances.
This discontent was part of an acute perception of a certain decadence in Portuguese life in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. A range of agendas that aspired to develop the social, political, aesthetic and cultural institutions, issued forth from an intelligentsia known as the Generation of 1870,
led by the poet-philosopher Antero de Quental and made up of some of his earlier colleagues at the University of Coimbra. With regard to music, the demand for a more elevated taste in musical listening and the favoring of the musical classics within concert programming (what William Weber has called“musical idealism”) found as its promotors a generation of critics that, due to their ontological and historical musical knowledge and wealth, were bestowed with the authority and means to establish and maintain specialized musical periodicals, an endeavour which had been attempted and failed ever since the 1850s. In the wake of the discourses that promoted “musical idealism”, professional and amateur musicians brought about the foundation of two important institutions – the Society of Classical Concerts in 1879 and the Royal Academy of Amateurs of Music in 1884. In the years to come, with the aid of foreign conductors, they were to promote the introduction of repertoires from among the German classics and contemporary French and Russian composers, leaving aside the long dominant tradition of works related to operatic genres and salon music. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the invitation of several well-known conductors and orchestras to Lisbon and the creation of a number of professional orchestras contributed significantly to the gradual establishment of “classical music” in Lisbon’s concert life.
The transformation of concert programming, the rise of a “symphonic culture” and the dynamic enterprise of Lisbon’s musical shops in the importation of musical works by renowned foreign composers seems also to have promoted a change in the favored genres for orchestra. Since the 1880s, the composition of ouvertures (following the Italian model) declined (virtually the point of disappearing), due to composers’ fostering of other genres, such as the symphonic poem, the paraphrase, the rhapsody, the symphony, among others.
This presentation discusses one of these genres, namely the Portuguese symphonic poem between 1884 and 1909. The known works (in the current state of research) produced in this chronological period share as a common characteristic the use of Portuguese literary works as source of inspiration. Our objects of study are the following symphonic poems: Alfredo Keil’s A hunt at the Court (1884), a symphonic poem (later First Suite for orchestra) based on “Autumn Tales” by Casimiro Dantas; José Viana da Mota’s D. Ignez de Castro, an Overture (1886) inspired by Canto III of “Os Lusíadas/The Lusiad” by Luís Vaz de Camões; Luís de Freitas Branco’s Antero de Quental, a symphonic poem (1908) based on the Sonnets of Antero de Quental; and Luís de Freitas Branco’s After a reading of Guerra Junqueiro, a Fantasia (1909) inspired by “The Death of D. João” by Guerra Junqueiro.
Although it might seem odd to classify all of these works as symphonic poems, we do so because they are all based on a literary programme. The works by Keil and Viana da Mota are inspired by excerpts of literary works that are cited in the first pages of the manuscript score. The symphonic poems by Freitas Branco, on the other hand, retain the exact (excerpts of the) literary source more conspicuously. In the several copies made, none mentions the literary works; our knowledge of them is due to posterior references made by the author to the press or in letters sent to his relatives.
Hence, our purpose is to identify possible literary sources for the symphonic poems, discuss the degree of relationship between the musical output and the literary narrative through an analysis of their structure and content according to topic theory, as well as to study the use (and existence) of topics in a myriad of works with Post-Classical, Romantic and post-Romantic stylistic characteristics. The possible influence of works by other European composers, presented at the Lisbon concerts, in the compositional processes of the above-mentioned Portuguese symphonic poems is also discussed. Finally, a study of the reception of these symphonic poems enables us to assess the importance of this genre (and particularly of Portuguese examples) in the processes of transformation of concert programming and of the listening processes of the audiences, during the coeval reception of the conceptual notions of “absolute music”.