Symphonic poem temporary stop to the debate as to whether the genre was dead. Nevertheless, composers began to explore the "more compact form" of the concert overture "...as a vehicle within which to blend musical, narrative and pictoral ideas." Examples included Mendelssohn's overtures "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1826) and "The Hebrides" (1830). Between 1845 and 1847, the Belgian composer César Franck wrote an orchestral piece based on Victor Hugo's poem "Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne". The work exhibits characteristics of a symphonic poem, and some musicologists, such as Norman Demuth and Julien Tiersot, consider it the first of its genre, preceding
Overture to a Picaresque Comedy is a waltz in the promised Straussian pastiche, in which, Cardus commented, Strauss's characters Octavian, the Marschallin and Till Eulenspiegel play hide and seek. Harty recorded the work for Columbia in 1935, conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Subsequent recordings have been conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos, Igor Buketoff, Bryden Thomson and David Lloyd-Jones. Overture to a Picaresque Comedy The Overture to a Picaresque Comedy is a concert overture composed by Arnold Bax in 1930. It was premiered by the Hallé Orchestra conducted by the dedicatee, Sir Hamilton Harty, in November 1931. The work is untypical of its composer, who was not