Battle and victory (bars 345–420) (including recapitulation of ‘Question’, bar 405 ff.).Question (Introduction and Andante maestoso) (bars 1–46).Wikipedia quotes Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Nineteenth Century with the below breakdown: Seems odd.Īt least here we have some structure, sections, and themes that give this work a really tight construction. It is as if the composer, the artist had created a thing, the existence and meaning of which he himself continues to ponder after its creation. like we’ve already talked about, programs can be a hairy business, and while the music didn’t change (much, if at all) for these subsequent performances, the program notes or prefaces did considerably, logically leading one to question the significance of such verbal explanations or contexts of the work. According to this, Les préludes represents the prelude to Liszt’s own path of composition. Liszt himself, in a letter to Eduard Liszt of March 26, 1857, gave another hint with regard to the title Les préludes. Ultimately, any association with the original work seemed almost entirely gone. With each revision, it seems Lamartine’s original words, Liszt’s original ‘source material’ were given less and less importance, even quoting Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein (author of the above quote) as Lamartine. The quote at the top of this article was from a preface to an early version of the score, but it (and/or program notes) were considerably revised and shortened throughout the piece’s early history. Well, it was originally to be the overture to a chorale cycle that Liszt had written a decade or so earlier called Le quatre élémens, and indeed much of its content is derived from that work. In fact, in sharing my small score with a friend, he asked “That’s the title? Just ‘preludes’? To what?” The Wikipedia article on the piece (from which the above lengthy quote comes) says, “The full title of the piece, “Les préludes (d’après Lamartine)” refers to an Ode from Alphonse de Lamartine’s Nouvelles méditations poétiques of 1823.” But the work itself began earlier than that. It, like the other two from this week, is also based on literature. Of Liszt’s output of thirteen symphonic poems, this third in the chronology is considered by most to be the most famous, or successful, or at least most often played (these days) of the whole bunch. (And there’s a link here to an article about this very piecefrom just last week on a blog that I enjoy reading. This is the symphonic poem you’ve been looking for. 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?… 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.
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