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 Lord Byron, and written twelve years before Liszt treated the same subject orchestrally. The musicologist Mark Bonds suggests that in the second quarter of the 19th century, the future of the symphonic genre seemed uncertain. While many composers continued to write symphonies during the 1820s and 30s, "there was a growing sense that these works were aesthetically far inferior to Beethoven's... The real question was not so much whether symphonies could still be written, but whether the genre could continue to flourish and grow". Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Niels Gade achieved successes with their symphonies, putting at least a