The other day I was discussing the first movement of Liszt's Dante Symphony. At the same time he was composing that work, he was also labouring over an even bigger, more complex creation, which he finally entitled, A Faust Symphony in Three Character Portraits. To my mind, this is an even more revolutionary work than its partner based on Dante, and the reason lies in that title.
In common with most programmatic music up to this time, the Dante Symphony presents a musical portrait of the events of a story. This work, though, goes somewhere that no composer (as far as I know) had gone before: a composition which describes character and personality rather than narrating events.
The result is, like the Dante Symphony, a suite of tone poems, but these tone poems are totally unlike any of their predecessors, and most of their successors.
The first movement is a portrait of Faust. It presents a lengthy pageant of themes which illustrate many different aspects of this most complex character in Goethe's drama. The first, consisting of four chromatic triads presented in succession as arpeggios, may contain all 12 notes of the octave but its primary function is to illustrate the world-weary scholar. Other themes present the determined man of action, the would-be lover, the victorious man of power, and so on. No labels are needed -- each theme has a distinct and different character all its own. In a long and complex movement lasting 30 minutes, the themes are worked into various orders and combinations. There is no point in trying to refer this piece to the traditional sonata form of other symphonists; Liszt instead developed a form which suited his material. The overall symmetry of the work becomes apparent later.
The second movement depicts Gretchen. It's a long, rhapsodic song for winds and strings which manages to combine the young girl's innocence and the blossoming of the young woman in one. A short figure repeated over and over, high and low, in various instruments represents the famous "He loves me; he loves me not" episode, but such detail is really not significant. Into the middle of the movement one of the Faust themes intrudes roughly. Again, this is not so much a depiction of specific incident as it is the intrusion of Faust into Gretchen's life that matters. The music ends quietly, restfully, a lovely point of repose before the finale.
The third movement, of course, then has to be the demonic Mephistopheles. Liszt's greatest achievement is the spectacular way in which he fires up this ferocious scherzo by subjecting each of the main Faust themes to diabolical distortion. This of course mirrors the way that Mephistopheles, himself the spirit of destruction and negation, distorts everything that Faust tries to accomplish. Gretchen's song appears briefly in the middle, untouched by the demonic discolouration surrounding it. But the scherzo returns and works up to a frenzied final climax before sinking down to exhausted silence.
Here the work originally ended with a final reference to Gretchen and an optimistic coda in the major based on two of Faust's themes. Three years after the first performance, Liszt revised the ending. Since he never explained why, we have all the fun of trying to guess. The new ending emerges out of the silence with a male choir chanting the Chorus mysticus which concludes Part II of Goethe's drama. At the words, "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" ("The Eternal-Womanly leads us beyond") a tenor solo appears, soaring rhapsodically above the choir in exactly the manner that Mahler would later use with soprano when setting the same text in his Eighth Symphony. The orchestra bursts out fortissimo and the choir joins in repeating the first six lines of the stanza with full affirmation. The tenor gently repeats his lines, and eventually the choir joins in a long, slow crescendo to the organ-crowned final cadence.
This amazing work was neglected for years after its first performances, and practically dropped out of sight altogether (along with much of Liszt'ts output) in the first half of the twentieth century. It remained for such conductors as Sir Thomas Beecham and Leonard Bernstein to resurrect it. Indeed, Bernstein recorded it twice, and I don't think any other conductor has ever done that. In programme notes to the LP issue of his second version, he mused about whether the long neglect of Liszt's music was the result of the composer making a Faustian bargain with the devil himself. If that were so, he added, it was ironic that the one piece saving Liszt from his reputation as a second-rate composer was the Faust Symphony!
Bernstein's second outing, on Deutsche Grammophon with the Boston Symphony, is the one to go for if you can find it. It's a fine example of DGG's late-analogue recording techniques, the acoustic of Boston's magnificent Symphony Hall comfortably accommodates the loudest passages, and the Hall's famous organ makes a powerful contribution in the finale. Tenor soloist Kenneth Riegel gives a distinguished account of his high and quiet lines. Most of all, the conductor pulls the whole huge structure together into a taut, unified whole. In Bernstein's hands this becomes the kind of work where you may look at your watch after 75 minutes and say, "What? It's already over?"
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