THE B.B.C. ORCHESTRA
(Section D)
(Led by LAURANCE TURNER)
Conducted by T. H. MORRISON

WHEN Liszt was in Paris in his early twenties, he heard Victor Hugo read his own poem 'Ce qu'on entend sur la Montagne,' and it so impressed him that the idea of rendering the subject of it in terms of music remained with him for years. He finally carried out his plan when he was in Weimar, and comparatively settled. Here he wrote his famous twelve symphonic poems, Victor Hugo's verses suggesting the first of them, and in so doing set his stamp very forcibly on the development of nearly all modern music. Scarcely a composer of all those, great and small, who followed after him but has composed works in the symphonic poem form. Of these, the examples with which Richard Strauss has enriched the orchestral repertory are among the finest and most successful. The methods of Strauss, however, differ from those of Liszt in an important respect. Strauss worked to a programme, practically to a scenario, and the literary incidents of his subject are reproduced more or less faithfully and in the same order in his music. This was not Liszt, the inventor's method, which has been well described by Ernest Newman: 'Instead of trying to tell us in music precisely what the poet has told us in verse, Liszt re-thinks in music what the poet has already said, and gives it out to us as something born of musical feeling itself.' For example, the subject of Les Preludes is taken from Lamartine's Meditations Poetiques, and is a commentary on life as a series of preludes to the unknown song of which death is the first dread note.