would think, one of the best of Liszt’s works, but in point of fact it sounds strangely empty, and exhibits to an irritating degree the composer’s way of playing to the gallery. The _Festklänge_ was written, tradition says, to celebrate his expected marriage with the Princess von Wittgenstein, and, in view of Huneker’s remark that Liszt accepted the Pope’s veto to this project ‘with his tongue in his cheek,’ we may assume that its emptiness was a true gauge of his feelings. In most of these works there is more than one chief theme, and sometimes a pronounced antithesis or contrast of two themes. In this classification falls ‘The Preludes,’ which, in attempting to trace man’s struggles preparatory to ‘that great symphony whose initial note is sounded by death,’ makes use of two themes, each of rare beauty, to depict the heroic and the gentle sides of the hero’s nature, respectively. The antithesis is more pronounced in ‘The Battle of the Huns,’ founded on Kalbeck’s picture, which is meant to symbolize the struggle between Christianity (or the Church) and Paganism. The Huns have a wild minor theme in triplets, and the Church is represented by the Gregorian hymn, _Crux Fidelis_. Thus by works as well as by faith Liszt established the musical type which best expressed his fervent romantic nature. The symphonic poem form, coming to something like maturity at the hands of one man, was a proof of his intellectuality and his high musicianship. We may wish that he had written less and criticized his work more, but many of the pages are inescapable in their beauty. In them we are in the very heart of nineteenth-century romanticism. VI Since the early days of violent opposition to Berlioz and Liszt the question of the ‘legitimacy’ of program music has not ceased to interest theorists. There are not a few writers to-day who stoutly maintain that the program and the pictorial image have no place in music; that music, being constructed out of wholly abstract stuff, must exist of and for itself. They wish to have music ‘pure,’ to keep it to its ‘true function’ or its ‘legitimate place.’ Music, they say, can never truly imitate or describe outward life, and debases itself if it makes the unsuccessful attempt.