Manuscript sources for Edward MacDowell's Sonata Eroica (1895) divulge a radically different, notably more sinister program than the commentary that the composer imparted to Lawrence Gilman, his first biographer. Gilman's widely promulgated account, merely comprising four character sketches based on Tennyson's Arthurian epic, Idylls of the King, maintains that the score's movements respectively depict the coming of Arthur, Doré's engraving of a knight surrounded by elves, MacDowell's idea of Guinevere, and the passing of Arthur. Inscriptions in a continuity draft preserved at the Library of Congress, however, reveal that the first movement was initially conceived as an independent ballade (an intrinsically programmatic genre) and was originally inspired by Tennyson's portrayal of Vivien seducing Merlin. Another inscription discloses that MacDowell envisioned the third movement as Lancelot's adulterous serenade to Guinevere. Additional manuscript variants and close correlations between the score's vibrant musical topics and Tennyson's literary contexts demonstrate that the entire sonata, including the elfin scherzo and war-like finale, embodies a tale of seduction and its dire consequences.Although the Eroica's vivid, newly discovered program remains compatible with MacDowell's professed aesthetics, he suppressed the inscriptions. Speculative reasons for his doing so include formal considerations, critical opinions on programmaticism, and his attitudes toward sex.

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The historical importance of the 12 symphonic poems that Franz Liszt composed as Kapellmeister in extraordinary service to the Weimar court (1848-1861) is indisputable. They marked a new degree of sophistication in orchestral programme music's ongoing development. Their explicit connections with salient themes of European literature and art, coupled with attendant formal innovations, provoked vitriolic responses from advocates of absolute music. They also directly motivated composers of diverse nationalities to contribute to the genre, including Saint-Saëns, Smetana and Borodin. Nevertheless, they are surprisingly underserved in scholarly discourse. Indeed, the lone English-language book on the subject with any pretensions to comprehensiveness was until now Keith T. Johns' The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt, graciously edited by Michael Saffle and posthumously published over 20 years ago. 1 Several German monographs on the subject, some billed as concert guides, date from Liszt's day through the 1930s. Articles in periodicals or edited collections are more numerous, but in general they either cursorily survey the symphonic poems or examine a single work in the series. Not only are existing studies of the symphonic poems scarce, but they also often adopt restricted perspectives. Whereas Johns' investigations of each score dwell on contemporary reviews and straightforward identifications of musical topics, other analyses of individual pieces typically emphasize Beethoven's influence or seek to relate Liszt's distinctive musical structures to normative sonata forms. Such preoccupations frequently yield disagreements over the locations of structural boundaries and overlook insights that Liszt's programmes offer into the relationship between a work's expressive gestures and its unique unfolding. By contrast, Joanne Cormac provocatively contends and persuasively demonstrates that Liszt's symphonic poems are most fruitfully understood as products of their original contexts at the Weimar court, where they crucially involved theatrical performances or the inspiration of Liszt's theatrical experiences. To support her contention, Cormac closely integrates a dizzying array of ancillary subjects and methodologies: theatre history, contemporary reception, Hegelian philosophy, archival excavation, manuscript studies, performance practice, sonata theory, topical analysis, principles of the visual arts and more. The result is that Liszt and the Symphonic Poem is not merely a welcome addition to a sparse secondary literature, but instead offers cohesive, intriguing views of Liszt as a man of the theatre, of his symphonic poems as works of astonishing ambition and breadth and of his pivotal position as an innovator in the tradition of nineteenth-century orchestral music. Critical to Cormac's argument is that Liszt's immersive theatrical activities not only influenced his symphonic poems, but also represented significant contributions to German theatrical history. As Cormac's introduction and opening chapter

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