[Illustration: Music score] and then his boisterous acclamation by the crowd in Rome: [Illustration: Music score] And here, for a moment, the listener hides his face. For Liszt has become as cheap as any bar-room fiddler. His theme will not stand this transformation. It happens again and again in Liszt, this forcing of a theme into a mold in which it sounds banal. No doubt the acclamations of the crowd _were_ banal (if Liszt intended it that way), but this thought cannot compensate a listener who is having his ears pained. It is one of the regrettable things about Liszt, whose best is very nearly equal to the greatest in music, that he sometimes sails into a passage of banality without seeming to be at all conscious of it. Perhaps in this case he was conscious of it, but stuck to his plan for the sake of logical consistency. (The most frenzied radicals are sometimes the most rigid doctrinaires.) The matter is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it is one of the most characteristic faults of the great man. In the present case we are compensated for this vulgar episode by the grand ‘apotheosis’ which closes the work: [Illustration: Music score] Such is the method, and it is in principle the same as that since employed by all composers of ‘symphonic poems’--of program music in fact. Liszt’s symphonic poems number twelve (excluding one, ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’ which was left unfinished at the time of his death). When they are at their best they are among the most inspiring things in modern music. But Liszt’s strange absence of self-criticism mingles with these things passages which an inferior composer might have been suspicious of. In consequence many of his symphonic poems have completely dropped from our concert programs. Such ones as the ‘Hamlet,’ the _Festklänge_, and ‘What is to Be Heard on the Mountain,’ are hardly worth the efforts of any orchestra. _Les Préludes_, on the other hand, remains one of the most popular of our concert pieces. Nowhere are themes more entrancing than in this work, or his structural form more convincing. ‘The Ideal,’ after Schiller’s poems, was one of Wagner’s favorites among the twelve, but is uneven in quality. ‘Orpheus,’ which is less ‘programmistic’ than any of the others, in that it attempts only an idealized picture of the mythical musician, is worked out on a consistently high plane of musicianship. ‘Mazeppa,’ narrating the ride of Byron’s hero tied on the back of a wild horse, is simply an elaboration and orchestral scoring of one of the piano études published as Liszt’s opus 1 in 1826. The étude was even entitled ‘Mazeppa,’ and was descriptive of the wild ride, so we may, if we choose, give Liszt the credit of having schemed the symphonic poem form in germ before he became acquainted with the works of Berlioz. ‘Hungaria,’ a heroic fantasy on Hungarian tunes, should have been, one