![]() ![]() It was lost as it were in the smoke and stunning tumult of a battlefield.’ Nonetheless, Les Préludes is regarded as the most popular of the thirteen symphonic poems that Liszt wrote. Another critic found himself overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of the music: ‘The poetry we listened for in vain. Liszt’s new idea wasn’t universally accepted, with the critic Eduard Hanslick, himself an advocate of ‘absolute music,’ i.e., music that exists for the sake of its self, rather than to represent another idea, thought that the symphonic poems’ need to rely on an external programme made it less than profound. In a letter he wrote in 1857, Liszt also says that the title, Les Préludes, could also be referring to his own compositional development. These words, written not by Liszt but by his companion, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, that gives the key to the work. What else is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown Hymn, the first and solemn note of which is intoned by Death?-Love is the glowing dawn of all existence but what is the fate where the first delights of happiness are not interrupted by some storm, the mortal blast of which dissipates its fine illusions, the fatal lightning of which consumes its altar and where is the cruelly wounded soul which, on issuing from one of these tempests, does not endeavour to rest his recollection in the calm serenity of life in the fields? Nevertheless man hardly gives himself up for long to the enjoyment of the beneficent stillness which at first he has shared in Nature’s bosom, and when “the trumpet sounds the alarm”, he hastens, to the dangerous post, whatever the war may be, which calls him to its ranks, in order at last to recover in the combat full consciousness of himself and entire possession of his energy. There’s very little in Lamartine that would connect with Les Préludes, but when the score was published in 1854, there was a text preface in the score: To obscure the connection with the choral music, Lizst gave it the title of Les préludes (d’après Lamartine), referring to an Ode by that name in Alphonse de Lamartine’s 1823 collection Nouvelles méditations poétiques. Les Préludes as we now know it, uses material from the choral setting but then was separated and made into its own work. The Autran work, Les quatre éléments, was made up of four poems: La terre, Les aquilons, Les flots and Les astres. ![]() The work started out as the overture to a choral setting of four poems by Joseph Autran. ![]() and so the later title of ‘symphonic poem’ was applied to the two earlier works. Les Préludes, given its premiere in 1854, was the first work formally called a ‘symphonic poem.’ As with much of Liszt’s work, Les Préludes and the two earlier works were revised and rewritten and re-orchestrated, etc. The second work, Tasso, Lamento e Tionfo, is based on ideas about the 16th century Italian poet Torquato Tasso as expressed in poems by Goethe and Byron. Liszt’s first work, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne (What one hears on the mountain), was based on a poem by Victor Hugo looking at the contrast between Nature’s perfection and the misery of man. ![]()
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