Well in the amidst of my current research for an essay on the Piano Concertos of Mozart for my Classical Music History course at school, I came upon in my mid-morning proceedings the discovery of the last time I posted here.

It feels so long, I feel cheated in a way.

Anyway, as my itunes continues to keep me alive by playing all sorts of various music, including the Concertos that I'm writing on, it took me to a piece by Liszt that I have more recently discovered.

The symphonic poem, Les Préludes d'après Lamartine or simply "Les Preludes" is the third of the twelve Franz Liszt would compose and it was premiered in 1854 in Weimar on February 23rd. It was conducted by Liszt himself and had the full score published in 1856 and wouldn't see the individual orchestra parts published until 1865.

Part 1


The work
Part 2

According to a comment posted on the video, the performance is from the Georgian SIMI Festival Orchestra with Evgeny Vovkushansky conducting.

Published on the score, the work came with this preface:

"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 lightening of which consumes its altar; and where in 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."

With a little bit of trivia on this work, the term "Symphonic Poem" may have first come to exist with Les Preludes as the work was the earliest to exemplify at the time for what was later to be considered a symphonic poem. In a letter to his friend Franz Brendel on February 20, 1854 Liszt talked of "his new orchestral work (Les Preludes," and three days later in theWeimarische Zeitung of February 23, the concert was called "Les Preludes - symphonische Dichtung," of which may have originated the term.