The idea that musical form in Liszt's orchestral music is mainly program-driven has loomed large in twentieth-century musicology. It undoubtedly originates with Liszt himself. In his seminal 1855 essay Berlioz und seine Harold-Symphonie- a thinly disguised apology for his own symphonic poems- Liszt defends the formal innovations in contemporaneous orchestral music by invoking its programmatic nature. Over the last few decades, it has become generally accepted that Liszt did not refrain from

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... cling traditional patterns of formal organization for the expression of these "new ideas", perhaps more than he was aware. For the Lisztian symphonic poem- and maybe for large-scale single-moment instrumental music form the second half of the nineteenth century in general- the increased degree of formal complexity typical of two-dimensional sonata form compensates for the absence of an explicit multi-movement design. It the characteristics of the sonata form, and the complexity they engender, that allowed these works to engage in a dialogue with the tradition of the multi-movement symphony.