t this was publicly acknowledged. One reason itwas so easy for listeners to connect a scene or a story or a poem with a pieceof Romantic music is that often the composer himself, perhaps unconsciously, wasworking from some such ideas. Writers on music projected their own conceptionsof the expressive functions of music into the past, and read Romantic programsinto the instrumental works not only of Beethoven, but also the likes of Mozart,Haydn, and Bach! The diffused scenic effects in the music of such composers asMendelssohn and Schumann seem pale when compared to the feverish, and detaileddrama that constitutes the story of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830).Because his imagination always seemed to run in parallel literary and musicalchannels, Berlioz once subtitled his work "Episode in the life of an artist",and provided a program for it which was in effect a piece of Romanticautobiography. In later years, he conceded that if necessary, when the symphonywas performed by itself in concert, the program would need not be given out forthe music would "of itself, and irrespective of any dramatic aim, offer aninterest in the musical sense alone." The principle formal departure in thesymphony is the recurrence of the opening theme of the first Allegro, the ideefixe. This, according to the program, is the obsessive image of the hero'sbeloved, that recurs in the other movements. To mention another example: in thecoda of the Adagio there is a passage for solo English horn and four Tympaniintended to suggest "distant thunder". The foremost composer of program music after Beriloz was Franz Liszt,twelve of whose symphonic poems were written between 1848 and 1858. The namesymphonic poem is significant: these pieces are symphonic, but Liszt did notcall them symphonies, presumably because or their short length, and the factthat they are not divided up into movements. Instead, each is a continuos formwith various sections, mor...
