Symphonic poem Tchaikovsky's work as "Isle of the Dead" (1909) does its independence from it. A similar debt to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov imbues Igor Stravinsky's "The Song of the Nightingale", excerpted from his opera "The Nightingale". Alexander Scriabin's "The Poem of Ecstasy" (1905–08) and "" (1908–10), in their projection of an egocentric theosophic world unequalled in other symphonic poems, are notable for their detail and advanced harmonic idiom. Socialist realism in the Soviet Union allowed program music to survive longer there than in western Europe, as typified by Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonic poem "October" (1967). While France was less concerned than other countries
Symphonic poems (Liszt) of Liszt's idea or doing, since evidence exists that his then-companion Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein helped shape or create them. Overall, Walker concludes, "Posterity may have overestimated the importance of extra-musical thought in Liszt's symphonic poems. We would not want to be without his prefaces, of course, nor any other that he made about the origins of his music; but we should not follow them slavishly, for the simple reason that the symphonic poems do not follow them slavishly either." Hugh MacDonald concurs that Liszt "held an idealized view of the symphonic poem" as being evocative rather than representational. "He