ABSTRACT
The years from 1899, the year of Verklärte Nacht, through the First World War saw an enormous output of programmatic chamber music. This activity largely disappears in the years between the World Wars, the years of so-called neoclassicism,1 and reappears after 1945. But, as we shall see, there is a fundamental difference between programmatic chamber music composed before World War I and after World War II. The earlier music tells a story or depicts a scene, as we saw in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and the two Ives sonatas for violin and piano. The later music, like the earlier, often uses titles; but now those titles more often describe the work itself rather than anything extramusical, or are so general that one cannot find in them a program for the music.2 In the music of the post-World War II era, though, we will find a concern with contemporary literature, especially with literary techniques, as for example in the conception of a poem as a “scaffolding” (the term is Boulez’s) on which the composer may construct his or her music. We also find in these years a widespread interest of various composers in early twentieth-century literature, especially in Joyce. The focus of this chapter is on how the music discussed here is more or less specifically programmatic. We are interested here, for example, in who is telling a story and in how that narrator is doing so. We are also interested in matters of time, which will prove to be of some importance for nonprogrammatic music as well.
