liszt gets most of the credit for inventing the symphonic poem genre, a process about which you can read here. but for all that, only one of his symphonic poems has actually entered the standard repertoire, the completely overplayed les preludes.
the kernel of the symphonic poem, if you don't feel like clicking that link (it's kind of a long article, but if you're interested it's good reading) is that it have the scale of the first movement of a symphony but also be infused with a program. heftier than an overture, but not quite a symphonic movement. it doesn't like sonata form and generally just goes with the development of several different motifs.
liszt wrote prometheus in 1850 and revised it in 1855. it is based on the greek myth of prometheus (who you might remember, if your memory is better than mine for these names, is the guy who stole fire and gave it to the humans, punished afterwards by being chained to a rock while a hawk daily comes to rip his ever-regrowing entrails out). in the original version this work was not a symphonic poem but an overture, followed by eight choruses w/ orchestral accompaniment. afterwards the overture became a symphonic poem, and the choruses, a concert stage work.
apparently with this work liszt wanted to depict the pain and eventual triumph of prometheus, but the concert stage work fell flat, with the poem gaining a sort of life as a free-standing work. this can be taken as a sort of indicator of why the symphonic poem is a unique genre - expanded to a symphony, it would probably have suffered the same fate as the choral work. but it has too much material to be merely an overture, which was why liszt expanded it in the first place.
ok, on to the piece itself.
huuuuge bombastic ominous beginning. this is the beginning of the drama. liszt uses dark colors, lots of dissonances, and lots of stretched diminished chords, though he holds the harmonies long enough for us to comprehend that they don't sound quiiite atonal yet (though we definitely have a hard time finding a tonal center after the opening measures). we get a meandering theme in mid and lower strings, with a motif consisting of a falling semitone followed by falling minor and diminished thirds.
2:27 is where the upper strings come in with a furious play on that same motif, falling diminished chords. grinding semitones dominate the landscape, whether they are oscillating or moving up and down in extended chromatic scales. maybe this is all to demonstrate the drama and fear of having stolen from the gods.
middle section, starting at the beginning of the second video, hesitates with those diminished chords for a while before a luxurious cello melody comes in. still with uneasy murmurings from the inner voices, and an unstable tonal center, we go to a rising g-sharp major chord, expecting it to resolve to c-sharp major. instead we are led on to the next episode, a sort of scurrying f minor fugue that lets everyone join in section by section, including percussion. then liszt does something that he pretty much does in les preludes - he progresses back through all the sections he's already gone through. we get a sort of recapitulation, then a rephrase of the the fury section. at 6:00 though, we get some new material - this is the coda of the piece. in the article i cited above, the writer mentions that symphonic poems usually have extended codas that affect our perceptions/recollections of the "principle" musical material. the finale tends to become an episode in itself, much like the final movement of a symphony. that's how this coda sounds to me - the material relates back to the original themes but in a very morphed way that goes on for some time, much longer than typical classical codas.
also, if you had asked me what key this was in before the last minute or so, i probably couldn't have given you an answer. liszt wrote some of the very first "atonal" music.
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