Symphonic poem Borodin's "In the Steppes of Central Asia" "powerful orchestral pictures, each unique in its composer's output". Titled a "musical portrait", "In the Steppes of Central Asia" evokes the journey of a caravan across the steppes. "Night on Bald Mountain", especially its original version, contains harmony that is often striking, sometimes pungent and highly abrasive; its initial stretches especially pull the listener into a world of uncompromisingly brutal directness and energy. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote only two orchestral works that rank as symphonic poems, his "musical tableau" "Sadko" (1867–92) and "Skazka" ("Legend", 1879–80), originally titled "Baba-Yaga". While this may perhaps be surprising,
Symphonic poem to be shortened, Liszt tended to cut sections of conventional musical development and preserve sections of thematic transformation. While Liszt had been inspired to some extent by the ideas of Richard Wagner in unifying ideas of drama and music via the symphonic poem, Wagner gave Liszt's concept only lukewarm support in his 1857 essay "On the Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt", and was later to break entirely with Liszt's Weimar circle over their aesthetic ideals. Composers who developed the symphonic poem after Liszt were mainly Bohemian, Russian, and French; the Bohemians and Russians showed the potential of the form as