LDV103

26 POÉTESSES SYMPHONIQUES With the works selected for this recording by the Orchestre national de Metz Grand Est, we enter the realm of so-called ‘programme music’. Composers proclaim therein their ability to depict, through purely aural means, a non-musical subject. Works of this kind were popular with a vocal minority of European Romantic composers, who saw them as a way of escaping the rigidity of classical forms while at the same time striving for a synthesis of the arts. A poem, a narrative, a painting, a scene from a play or even a sculpture could be used as the basis for the score of a symphonic poem. The notion of programme music was coined in the first part of the nineteenth century, but it can also be applied to earlier works: Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1725), for example, was already based on a series of four sonnets tracing the course of a year through changing climatic conditions. As this trend spread from Germany across the western aesthetic landscape, it met with fervent detractors: the proponents of ‘pure music’ took the view that their art had nothing to express and needed no external prop to touch its audience.