In view of the propinquity of the French Revolution and nineteenth-century society, Liszt’s progressive attitudes have sometimes caused the artist to be cast as a ‘revolutionary’. In July 1830, Liszt did indeed sketch a Symphonie révolutionnaire, and while the work was never completed, its composer used elements from it in his later symphonic poem Héroïde funèbre. Between 1830 and 1854, the insurrectional dimensions of the July Revolution would metamorphosize, in his mind, into a meditation upon the relationship between heroism and death, apt in a revolutionary era, now however undertaken when immediate danger to the social order seemed to be a thing of the past.