Franz Liszt: Les Préludes

Today I’d like to look more closely at one of the emblematic works of the Romantic era, Liszt’s Les Préludes. This piece is especially dear to us Hungarians. Part of its popularity comes from the 1956 Revolution: during the days of the uprising it was played on the radio almost without pause, alongside the Egmont Overture, drumming the work’s heroic yet triumphant character into us across the generations. It is no accident that the fervour of the revolution chose these two works as its symbols, for in both we see heroism above all, and we love the soaring triumphal music that sounds at the close. There is a strange and fateful bond between these two works and our revolution—which, seen historically, was bound to fail—in that the triumph of neither is a true triumph.

Egmont, the fallen hero of liberty, is exalted in our memory, while the triumphant-sounding close of Les Préludes is only the success of a single moment in a life, a moment that already carries within it the struggle, the failure and the hope of success of the moment to come. Liszt was among the first to use the new genre label, the symphonic poem.1 The musical material of Les Préludes was largely in place by 1848; in the order Liszt later settled on, the work stands third among his symphonic poems.2 The most immediate forerunners of Liszt’s symphonic poems are the so-called programme overtures. The overtures of the Baroque, the Classical and even the early Romantic periods were essentially curtain-raisers to larger stage works, operas above all.

For the most part they matched the opera in mood—if they matched it at all—though one and the same opera overture might, in some cases, also serve as a prelude to other works within a composer’s output. The first shift can be felt in the history of German opera: the overtures to Weber’s operas already capture the essence of the whole opera, in their musical material and their atmosphere alike. Of the overtures Beethoven wrote for his opera Fidelio, the third version became the most famous; but it was so programmatic in folding in the opera’s central moment—the motif of liberation—that Beethoven finally rounded the opera off with a fourth, neutral overture. Of Mendelssohn’s seven overtures,3 four count as programme overtures,4 each with a particular literary background or story behind it. Another important forerunner of the symphonic poem is Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.

This is not yet a symphonic poem—the composer calls it a symphony—but it carries a programme that, without spelling things out, hints at a great deal through the titles of its movements. The work is a chain of movements that summon emotions and paint specific, picture-like scenes. The overture to Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser marks the high point of the programme-overture genre. Its structure is unmistakably symphonic, yet behind its ternary form we can make out dramaturgical thinking. From the proportions and the layout of its three sections a purely musical composition emerges, and still we can read the various contents, characters and events—the programme, if you will—out of the musical events themselves.

As far as we know, Liszt meant Les Préludes, too, to serve as the overture to a larger work,5 and a good deal of its musical material does indeed turn up in his choral piece for male voices The Four Elements, written to a text by Autran in the mid-1840s. In the end he called the piece a symphonic poem. That choice of label uniquely reflects two things at once: the intention to reinterpret the precedents just mentioned in his own distinctive way, and the wish to stay tied to tradition—while also sounding a note of warning. Liszt enriches the characters and imagery of the programme pieces with a wholly new means of expression: he uses the hitherto unseen many-sidedness of a single musical idea, together with the distinctive and in many ways extremely consistent juxtaposition of certain ideas, to carry the programmatic content of the work.

And yet, having surveyed the whole of Liszt’s output, I am convinced that behind the programmatic character of these works lies less a wish to express than a wish to be understood. In the very notion of the symphonic poem, then, Liszt’s intention seems plain: although the more or less articulate programmes of these works offer the listener of the day points of reference and chances for recognition, they are nonetheless first and foremost musical works, and can only truly be grasped through the logic of centuries-old musical thought. Perhaps the catastrophe of the next century of music was already gnawing at Liszt’s mind—namely, that audiences were ever more inclined to look in music for a meaning and content that could be put into words. Yet this is a mistake, as I have told you many times.

Music cannot be described in words; music, whether it be vocal music or a stage work, in the end always expresses music, and music alone. Put plainly, even a rough grasp of the system of musical devices built on the contrast between simpler and more complex elements brings us closer to understanding music than any text that seems to explain everything. Romanticism increasingly sets the act of creation itself at the very heart of art, letting the audience in on its struggles and its grandeur. For the final 1854 version, Liszt eventually chose a written programme for the printed score. By some accounts he first asked Victor Hugo—presumably under the spell of his Mazeppa—for a description to suit the existing work, but the programme was based in the end on a poem by Lamartine, which undoubtedly helps in recognising the work’s musical characters and is, on top of that, a magnificent Romantic creed.

I quote:

‘What is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death? Love is the glowing dawn of every heart. But whose destiny is there in which the first thrill of happiness is not interrupted by some storm, whose harsh breath scatters love’s tender illusions and strikes its altar with lightning? And what wounded soul, when one of its tempests has passed, does not seek to rest its memories in the sweet calm of country life? Yet man does not long resign himself to the kindly tranquillity that first held him to nature’s bosom; and when the trumpet sounds the alarm, he hastens to the post of danger, whatever the war that calls him to its ranks, so that in the struggle he may once more come fully into possession of himself and of his strength.’6

Les Préludes is, of course, not about this. These elements are present within it, and we shall point them out, but at bottom that is not what it is about. Let me walk you through the piece so that you can see what I mean. The work begins by not really beginning. ‘How am I to start? Is this right? What is the key?’—this kind of searching has long been part of music history. There was a practical reason for it, first of all: some members of the esteemed audience did not always reach the hall on time, and even those who had arrived only gradually turned their attention from sizing up the rest of the crowd to the work itself.