The lied and the character piece for piano — the two main forms of early Romantic miniature compositions — were intimately tied up with nonmusical, usually poetic, ideas. Furthermore, in a work such as Schumann’s Carnaval, the various piano portraits are juxtaposed in such a way as to hint at their interaction — hint, that is, at a shadowy story line. Poems, stories, and nonmusical ideas in general were also associated with large-scale instrumental pieces.

As we have seen, program music is a term used for instrumental compositions associated with poems, stories, and the like. Program music for orchestra grew up naturally in opera overtures, for even in the eighteenth century it was seen that an overture might gain special interest if it referred to moods or ideas in the opera to come by citing (or, rather, forecasting) some of its themes.

This happens in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the next-to-last scene has Don Giovanni carried off to hell by the statue of the murdered Commandant (see page 190). The otherworldly music associated with the statue is first heard in the opera’s overture, even before the curtain has gone up. Lively, effervescent music follows; but the serious undertone of Mozart’s opera is already loud and clear at the start of the work’s overture.