Les Préludes

Most of Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems - a form he more or less invented - you can take at their face value. The title of Hamlet, for example, is a true indication that the music that goes with it was inspired by Shakespeare’s play in one way or another. Les Préludes is different. According to the title page it is based on a poem of the same name from Alphonse Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques while the truth is that it was originally conceived, in about 1848, as a kind of overture to a choral work called Les Quatre Éléments to words by Joseph Autrun. Unfortunately, the Marseilles poet Autrun had nothing like the reputation of Lamartine, a towering figure in the literary Paris of the day, and it might well be for that not very good reason that Liszt chose the title Les Préludes, dedicated the score to Lamartine and prefaced it with a commentary suggesting that certain ideas in the poem are reflected in the music. So there is no point in attempting to trace details of Lamartine’s Les Préludes - a poem based on the idea that life is a series of “preludes” to death - in a symphonic poem inspired in the first place by aspects of the Mediterranean, even though there are episodes in it that can be associated with the poet’s thoughts on love, storms of adversity, solace in nature and heroic struggle.

In other respects Les Préludes, which was completed in 1854 and first performed in Weimar in the same year, is a characteristic example of Liszt’s symphonic poems. While the construction is distinctly (and deliberately) episodic, it is held together by the scarcely failing presence of one or two main themes which are continually transformed in shape and character according to the poetic situation they are in. The basic material, quietly introduced by the strings in the Andante opening bars, is no more than a three-note motif - just a descending semitone and an upward fourth. Extended in various ways, those three notes prove to be an extraordinarily fruitful source of melody. When the tempo changes to Andante maestoso, on a fortissimo entry of the whole orchestra, they are presented as a robust challenge on lower wind and strings and then, as the dynamic level falls, as a more lyrical statement on cellos and, a little later, a solo horn.

The next melodic idea to be heard, a tenderly expressive song in four-part harmony on horns and violas, could be construed as another derivative of the basic material but is perhaps best regarded as a theme in its own right, suggesting a love scene perhaps. Before long, however, the tempo accelerates to Allegro tempestoso and a storm breaks out violently tossing the main theme (now in its basic three-note form) from trombones to woodwind and strings and involving the participation of the love song in a scarcely recognisable militant version on trumpets and horns. The storm blows itself out and, by way of cadenzas on oboe and harp, subsides to a slower Allegretto pastorale tempo for a tranquil countryside scene - one so suggestive in atmosphere, by the way, as to tempt Wagner to imitate it when he came to write the “Forest Murmurs” episode in Siegfried some years later. Beginning with its own pastoral material introduced by horn and woodwind, it incorporates the love song in something like its original sweetly expressive form on violins.

Again, however, the pace accelerates, transforming the idyll into something very much more urgent until the tempo settles into a brisk Allegro marziale animato. The main theme is now presented as two different march tunes - one on trumpets and horns, one on woodwind, both against a background of swirling strings - and the love song is once again called upon to do its military duty. In fact, by the time the march reaches a broad climax on the challenging Andante maestoso material familiar from the introduction to the work, just about every main theme and every variant has been recalled and firmly integrated into the structure.

Gerald Larner ©2004