Although it is customary to point to Franz Liszt as the inventor of the symphonic poem, the term is not of his authorship, and it seems to be born almost unthinkingly. While in Weimar (1842-61), the master wrote twelve works in this genre, in the company of his writer Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who collaborated with the texts that usually accompanied them.
The third of these, called "The Preludes", was the first to bear the title "symphonic poem", although, in a letter to one of his publishers, dated February 1854, Liszt presents the work simply as "one of my new orchestral works: the Preludes".
A new genre
Two days later, however, a Weimar newspaper announced the work's premiere with the words: "Les preludes - symphonische Dichtung" (Dichtung = poem). Thus was born a new genre, the symphonic poem, which will have exalted continuers of the stature of Smetana, Dvorak, or Richard Strauss.
Considered the seed of the "programmatic music" of the 19th century, it is defined, in general terms, as a musical form in which a literary or other source provides the narrative basis for a single-movement orchestral work. Liszt's symphonic poems, in particular, are intended to inspire the listener to evoke scenes, images, or moods.
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| Liszt, in 1856 (1811 - 1886) |
In the case of The Preludes, the most popular of them, the maestro "reconditioned" musical materials he already had, organizing them in such a way that they would tell a certain story, that would contain some kind of plot. It was not easy.
But he found the solution in a poem by Lamartine, precisely called The Preludes.
Now, the precise connection between Lamartine's poem and Liszt's music is rather vague, apart from the fact that both works mix, compare, or contrast, elements of idyll and stark reality. The work contains four sections that focus, successively, on love, war, country life, and fate.
Liszt's words
And since it was a matter of beginning the path of programmatic music, Liszt added to the premiere program a long text that begins with these words:
"What is our life but a series of preludes to an unknown song, of which the first solemn note is the one that sounds death?"
The text continues, wearily romantic, with references to love, fate, and death here and there. The audience who attended the premiere, on February 23, 1854, in Weimar, went home convinced that they had been given pieces of Lamartine's prose. Today, they are believed to have originated in the boundless stylistic loquacity of Carolyne, the princess writer.
Some pieces of the work have become part of popular culture. The most recognizable makes its first appearance at minute 2:35.
