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Faust
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Faust Symphony fell flat on its first performance in Manchester. There seems to be something in our national temperament which makes it peculiarly difficult for us to penetrate the secret of Liszt and learn to understand his tone-language. In musical society on the Continent
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is regarded as a fixed characteristic of the Englishman, and those few Englishmen who have learned to like Liszt remember the gradual process by which their ears were opened, like the learning of a foreign language after one is grown up. Some composers have a manner of utterance that may be picked up half unconsciously; but for Britons, at any rate, Liszt's is not of that kind. Patience, persistent study, reflection, observation, comparison, besides an ear of some subtlety, are necessary for the understanding of it, and we have not the habit of taking music seriously (except in the abstract) or of giving it our whole attention. So a thing like the
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Faust Symphony goes over our heads as if it were a poem in some foreign language of which we only apprehend the rhythm. It is a pity, for to those few who understand the poem is very great and splendid. Like some ghostly Ancient Mariner, the spirit of the master holds us
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and speaks as one who is full of matter and wisdom and is a master of life. His story is that old one about Faust and Gretchen--not the Berlioz version ending with the Damnation of Faust, but the original Goethe version which deals with the working out of Faust's salvation (the difference between the two being really quite considerable),--and in the telling of this story he conveys lessons to the heart that are much too delicate for words. A good many composers have made
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Faust music of one kind or another. Spohr and Schumann, Berlioz and Boïto, Wagner and Liszt, all paid their tribute to the inexhaustible interest of the theme, besides Gounod--most superficial and consequently best known of them all. Even in Gounod, however, there is a little genuine
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Faust music--a very little. It is to be found in the first few bars of the overture, in the Mephistopheles Serenade, and, perhaps one might add, in the song about the King of Thule, though Berlioz did that much better. Wagner's
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Faust Overture is quite a great composition, and it is nearest akin to Liszt's Symphony. But it is much too one-sided to vie in interest with Liszt's tremendous composition, which seems to grasp the whole subject and tear the very heart out of it, with a kind of imaginative power suggesting Victor Hugo's, though the touch is more true. He begins with the solitary Faust in his study, plunged in gloomy meditation, every phase of which the music expounds (to him who listens closely enough)--intellectual pride, reduced to impotence in the endeavour to solve the
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; the tranquillising of the spirit by mystical influences seeming to emanate from a higher world; then the reawakening of pain in the consciousness that had been hushed and charmed. Here the music, passing up the chord with each note preceded by the semitone above, sounds like a series of broken sighs. And presently we encounter something quite new. A plaintive theme on the clarinet, answered by a single viola, symbolises the vision of feminine companionship. Hope reawakens, and the strength of Faust's nature asserts itself in the splendid E major theme for full orchestra, destined to play the leading part throughout the work. The movement is long, thoughtful, and no less apt in invention than rich and glowing in tone-colour. In the second movement, headed
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Gretchen, we encounter quite a different atmosphere. It is a worthy counterpart to the Gretchen episode in Goethe's poem--no doubt the best picture of a girl, from the man's point of view, that exists in literature. Inexpressibly beautiful is the contrast between the fancy-free and the loving Gretchen. There is nothing in all music more rich and rapturous than the ensuing love-scene, which reminds one of the point in the first act of
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Die Walküre where the doors swing open and reveals to the enchanted gaze of the lovers the spring landscape bathed in moonlight. But Liszt is here more to the point than Wagner. Then comes Mephisto with his diabolical dance, turning everything into derision, till a light shines down from heaven, where the soul of Margaret appears among the angels, and the
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with his mask torn off, shrinks away, trembling and baffled. Here the
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gives utterance to the crowning idea of the
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Faust drama--
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The woman-soul draweth us upward and on. Such a work as the
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Faust Symphony departs from the classical model inasmuch as it is unified altogether by dramatic and characteristic and not at all by architectural principles. It may also be regarded as three character-sketches, which, with the help of some cross-reference, together tell a story. Any person well versed in modern music, on hearing this composition for the first time, cannot but be astonished at the number of ideas, afterwards used by other composers, that it contains. The most glaring case is the transformation music just before the entry of the
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which has been conveyed bodily by Wagner, with only quite unimportant changes, into the third act of
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Die Walküre, after the words--
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So streif' ich dir die Gottheit ab. But dozens of other ideas in Wagner's
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Tristan and
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Siegfried and Strauss's
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Till Eulenspiegel
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Messiah