Late Romantic program music took its impetus from an important series of works called symphonic poems, composed in the 1850s by Franz Liszt. A symphonic poem is a one-movement orchestral composition with a program, in a free musical form. By using the word poem, Liszt insisted on the music’s programmatic nature.

It is not often that a great virtuoso pianist such as Liszt, who started out composing études and other miniatures of the kind cultivated by Chopin and Schumann, turns himself into a major composer of large-scale orchestral works. Liszt’s formula was simply to write a one-movement piece for orchestra associated in one way or another with a famous poem, play, or narrative. In its single-movement format — unlike a Berlioz program symphony — the symphonic poem is descended from the concert overture as practiced by Mendelssohn (see page 248). But unlike the concert overture, it often is formally free, showing no sign of sonata form. Symphonic poems, also sometimes called tone poems, became very popular in the later nineteenth century.

Among Liszt’s symphonic poems are Hamlet, Orpheus, Prometheus, and Les Préludes, the last loosely connected with a poem by the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine. But except for Les Préludes, these works are heard less often today than other symphonic poems written by composers influenced by Liszt’s example. The most popular of later symphonic poems are those by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss (see page 335).