It seems that Liszt took steps to obscure the origin of the piece, and that this included the destruction of the original overture's title page, and the re-ascription of the piece to Lamartine's poem, which however, does not itself contain anything like the music's 'question'. The 1856 published score includes a text preface, which however is not from Lamartine. The earliest version of this preface was written in March 1854 by Liszt's companion Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. This version comprises voluminous reflections of the Princess, into which some lines of quotations from the ode by Lamartine are incorporated. It was drastically shortened for publication in April 1856 as part of the score; there only the sentence, "the trumpet sounds the alarm" and the title "Les préludes", survive from Lamartine's poem. A different version of the preface was written for the occasion of a performance of "Les préludes" on December 6, 1855, in Berlin. In the 1855 version the connection with Lamartine is reduced to his alleged query, "What else is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown Hymn, the first and solemn note of which is intoned by Death?" However this sentence was actually written not by Lamartine, but by Princess Wittgenstein. For the occasion of a performance of "Les préludes" on April 30, 1860, in Prague a further version of the preface was made. This version was probably written by Hans von Bülow who directed the performance. It is rather short and contains no reference to Lamartine at all. According to this version, "Les préludes" illustrates the development of a man from his early youth to maturity. In this interpretation, "Les préludes" may be taken as part of a sketched musical autobiography. Liszt himself, in a letter to Eduard Liszt of March 26, 1857, gave another hint with regard to the title "Les préludes". According to this, "Les préludes" represents the beginnings of Liszt's own path of composition. With the first performance of the work a new genre was introduced. "Les préludes" is the earliest example for an orchestral work that was performed as "symphonic poem". In a letter to Franz Brendel of February 20, 1854, Liszt simply called it "a new orchestral work of mine ("Les préludes")".