The late 19th century “War of the Romantics” pitted “absolute music,” like that of Brahms that was about nothing but itself, against “programmatic music” like that of Wagner that supported a narrative. A Wagnerian critic, Adolphe Jullien, asked composer Édouard Lalo what descriptive ideas guided the composition of his 1887 Symphony in g-minor. Lalo took his stand in the “War” with his reply to Jullien that, “I had no literary thought in the sense that you mean. When I write a composition to words, I become a slave to…a given text. But when I write music without a literary text, I have before and about me only the domain of sounds, melodic and harmonic. For a musician, this immense field possesses in itself, aside from all literature, its poems and its dramas.”

The only symphony, and the final orchestral composition, by Édouard Lalo is today’s Midday Masterpiece.