The titles of the first two Masterworks concerts in the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's season indicate a distinct shift - from the pure music of Beethoven 5 (named for the showcase piece) to the literary-themed Poems on Fate.

Concert planners were obviously aiming to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between language and music in the November concerts. But somewhere between the idea for Poems on Fate and the selection of its music, the conceptual glue lost its cohesion. The audience's perfunctory response at the Adler Theatre on November 5 was in stark relief to the profuse applause and standing ovation that greeted Beethoven 5's first performance, and it was clear that something had gone wrong.

All four pieces in the Poems on Fate program clearly fit the theme. Johannes Brahms' Song of Destiny used text from a poem, Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Forza del Destino a libretto, and Richard Strauss' Death & Transfiguration and Franz Liszt's Les Preludes inspired poems that were included as prefaces in their published scores.

The challenge for program planners was to maintain the integrity of the musical experience while coherently demonstrating its connection to literature. (It would have helped if the prefaces had been included in the printed program, to provide a fuller literary context for the audience but also to demonstrate the florid style characteristic of the period when the music was composed.) And while the literary connections worked, the music, as a program, didn't.