Les Préludes

Les Preludes began life as an overture to Les quatre elemens, a set of choruses Liszt wrote in 1844 to poems by Joseph Autran. He detached it, reworked it as an orchestral piece in Weimar, and conducted the first performance there on 23 February 1854: the third of his thirteen symphonic poems and the only one that has kept a firm place in the repertoire. The programme note attaching it to Lamartine's Meditations poetiques was added afterwards, and the Lamartine text does not in fact fit the music's argument.