Harold Williams (Baritone) and Orchestra
This is one of a set of five songs which Wagner wrote in 1857. Two of them were later published as 'Studies for Tristan and Isolde.' While Wagner was working upon this Music Drama he found a melody from the song Dreams constantly recurring to his mind, and used it in the love music of the drama.
Thousands of Symphonies have been written, but this one, published a hundred and seventeen years ago, remains, throughout the world, the most popular of them all.
The First Movement (Quick and Lively) opens with a little tune of four notes. Beethoven himself once called it ' Fate knocking at the door.' (Say pretty quickly, 'Rap-a-tap-Top,' and you will know the theme every time you hear it in the Movement, which it pervades almost from beginning to end.)
Liszt had great ideas as to the power of music to interpret a poem or a plot. He felt it necessary, in order to do that, to get away from the more or less conventional plan of a symphony, in separate, contrasted movements. In his 'Symphonic Poems' he uses the large proportions of the symphony, while remaining free to adapt the form to suit the dramatic or poetic demands of his subject.
The basis of Preludes, the third of his series of symphonic poems, is taken from a poem by Lamartine, the French poet and statesman, whose gentle muse is something akin to that of Wordsworth. The words above are from this work, in which the poet goes on to picture love as 'the enchanted dawn of all life,' and to speak of the tempests that shatter love's bliss and dispel its illusions. Then the wounded soul seeks a refuge in a pastoral life; but when the trumpet calls him to arms, ho seeks the post of danger, to find in battle full consciousness of himself and his powers.
Liszt follows his 'programme' closely enough, while keeping to the main lines of 'Sonata' form.
He uses the two main themes that we are accustomed to meet in a symphonic movement, but when he has 'exposed' and 'developed' them, he brings in an Episode - a Slow section, and then, when the delayed 'Recapitulation' of the original material comes, its themes are still further developed.
