Franz Liszt: Faust Symphony

In today’s performance you will meet one of the greatest works in the history of music. I don’t usually talk this way; I tend to call works good, important or exciting. But this composition is truly epoch-making. If we call Beethoven the father of Romanticism, then we can just as confidently call Franz Liszt the father of the twentieth century. That is partly because this work brings to full fruition Liszt’s revolutionary new way of thinking and his musical dramaturgy, which we had already met in Les Préludes and the Sonata in B minor. This symphony of Liszt’s was inspired by Goethe’s drama Faust, which shaped nineteenth-century thought and exerted a great influence on the music of the age as well. Goethe had much to do with the fact that a great many composers felt an ever-stronger pull towards expressing literary ideas, or situations and emotions drawn from literature.

We know a great many musical settings of the Faust theme—most of them significant.1 Less well known is the opera by Spohr,2 who took up the subject as a contemporary of Beethoven. Nor does Wagner’s Faust Overture rank among that composer’s most important works. But Berlioz’s dramatic legend The Damnation of Faust is an epoch-making piece, and Gounod’s five-act opera Faust is perhaps the most popular of all the Faust adaptations. Another emblematic work in music history is Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, whose second movement is an oratorio-like setting of the closing scene of Faust. And of course it doesn’t occur to us at once that Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale is a Faust story too—only there it is not Faust but a soldier who sells his soul to the devil; and Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita is also a Faust story, from which Levente Gyöngyösi made an opera.

¹ The first musical setting dates from 1797, by the German composer Ignaz Walter (1755–1822), under the title Doctor Faustus. ² Louis Spohr (1784–1859), German composer, conductor and singing teacher: alongside Paganini, the most celebrated violinist of his day. He wrote his Romantic opera Faust in 1813. If I may put it this way, I believe that in Liszt’s reading we are faced, in essence, with the Goethean conflict, in an approach that seemed new at the time but is timeless: namely, that Faust and Mephistopheles are two sides of the same man. It might seem the logical thing to base an opera on Faust, since it is an exciting, action-packed, dramatic work built on a wealth of situations.

Liszt was not an opera composer—though at the age of thirteen he wrote a superb little opera, Don Sanche, or The Castle of Love, which might well have marked him out for it—but he was an instrumental musician par excellence, in his piano pieces and his orchestral works alike. A good many of his piano works carry titles, and his symphonic compositions—the great majority of them symphonic poems—can be tied, more or less, to specific programmes. It is for just this reason that Liszt is generally counted one of the fathers of programme music, which is fair in the sense that we can often make out literary works, mythological figures and heroes of liberty behind his pieces. These works teem with pictorial, illustrative scenes and with dramatic contrasts bound to the theme at hand—yet we reach their essence through the logic of the musical language.

Take what is perhaps his most famous symphonic poem, Les Préludes—for which Liszt certainly had no programme of his own in mind as he composed it—and we can see plainly that the work’s musical development lies not in the run of characters we can pick out here and there, but in thematic thinking. This shows itself in the metamorphoses of a mostly simple musical idea, in which one theme can portray its own birth and can serve as the material for struggle, downfall, love, glorification or, in some cases, death. So if, in Les Préludes, Liszt paints the artist’s life by a strict thematic logic, we can be sure that in Goethe’s Faust, too, he is far more taken with the moral and philosophical questions than with the plot, and that in his mind musical devices like those in Les Préludes stand ready to give all these ideas voice.

On Liszt’s reading—and, thanks to him, this has become an obsession of mine as well—the fundamental question of Faust is whether man is the victim or the shaper of the struggle between the divine and the diabolical. The answer is clear: the shaper. It is worth mentioning here, in passing, Madách’s The Tragedy of Man, which, because it was written in Hungarian, never became as influential a work of world literature as it might have, had it been written in, say, German. In it, Madách tells the story of man torn between Lucifer and the Lord, and his conclusion is plain: the fate of human existence lies in our own hands, in the balance of good and evil within us.

And allow me one last thought from the history of ideas: around the same time Faust was written, Hegel was formulating the theory of dialectics in his philosophy, the gist of which is that everything contains its own opposite, and that the driving force of the world is precisely this struggle of opposites merging into a higher synthesis. I have said all this because the historical significance of Liszt’s work lies in its portraying Faust and Mephistopheles as the positive and negative faces of a single musical idea—which, in Hegelian terms, can also be understood as thesis and antithesis. In Liszt’s reading, Mephistopheles embodies the creative force within us—which Christian thought attributes unequivocally to God—as well as the doubt indispensable to gaining knowledge, and the sin bound up with the joy of life.

Let me come back for a moment to the relationship between Romantic music and literature! Although we often speak of how setting literary works to music enriches the part of musical meaning that can be put into words, we must still stress that, however hard Liszt may work to help his audience understand through his choice of literary subjects, the essence of his works can be reached only through the consistent dialectic of music itself. As I always stress, music expresses, first of all, music—that is, the relationships between sounds: whether one sound is shorter or longer than another, louder or softer, whether the sounds agree or clash, and so on. Liszt’s Faust Symphony3 is a three-movement work, with an epilogue added later.

Liszt writes a symphony that, in the end, has no programme; only the titles of the three movements offer us guidance: each of the three depicts one of the main characters from Goethe’s Faust. The three movements are essentially symmetrical; the first and third are portraits of Faust and Mephistopheles built on all but identical musical material. The middle movement, given to Marguerite, is wholly unlike them, embodying a sacred beauty and refinement. Today we shall hear the two outer movements, since I want to dwell on the contrast just mentioned, which Liszt presents with self-evident genius. Let us get to know the portrait of Faust! In Liszt’s eyes Faust plainly shines as a hero, just as a hero stands at the centre of most of his symphonic poems.

And ever since Beethoven’s Eroica, we have known that the heroes who appear in the musical works of the Romantic era mostly stand for the composer himself. The opening of the work is deeply enigmatic.