Les préludes

In the 1850s, Liszt was at the forefront of a defining controversy of musical Romanticism—an ongoing debate about the relationship between form and content, an issue that Beethoven had wrestled with but was now setting composers against each other. While Brahms found stimulation in traditional Classical forms, Liszt introduced orchestral works that were little understood by his contemporaries. These included a series of symphonic poems, a term he invented to describe a single-movement orchestral work that had a connection to other arts (especially poetry and painting), and whose internal contrasts cohered by means of thematic transformation. Les préludes (1856) was the first work to be published with the title of symphonic poem. It was conceived in 1844 as the overture to a cantata Liszt eventually abandoned, before being revised in 1854 and renamed after an ode by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine. The central themes of Lamartine’s poem—love, sorrow, aggression and a distinctive kind of Romantic pastoralism—are clearly mirrored in the music, albeit in broadly general terms.