Faust Symphony

A Faust Symphony in three character pictures (German: Eine Faust-Symphonie in drei Charakterbildern), S.108, or simply the "Faust Symphony", was written by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama, Faust. The symphony was premiered in Weimar on September 5, 1857, for the inauguration of the Goethe–Schiller Monument there.

The first clue as to the work's structure is in Liszt's title: "A Faust Symphony in Three Character Sketches after Goethe: (1) Faust, (2) Gretchen, (3) Mephistopheles." Liszt does not attempt to tell the story of Goethe's drama. Rather, he creates musical portraits of the three main protagonists. By doing so, though this symphony is a multi-movement work and employs a chorus in its final moments, Liszt adopts the same aesthetic position as in his symphonic poems. The work is approximately seventy-five minutes in duration.

This large-scale movement (usually lasting around 30 minutes) is a very loose sonata-form with a short central development and a protracted recapitulation. One might say that this movement represents the very synthesis of the whole symphony, since many of its themes and motives appear throughout the score in various guises, a process of thematic transformation which Liszt mastered to the highest level during his Weimar years. The basic key of the symphony (C minor) is already rather blurred by the opening theme made up of augmented triads and containing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale consecutively (this is the first published use of a twelve-tone row, other than a simple chromatic scale, in any music). This theme evokes the gloomy Faust, a dreamer, in everlasting search for truth and knowledge. Next follows the so-called 'Nostalgia' theme introduced by the oboe. At the end of a slow crescendo, there appears a violent Allegro agitato ed appassionato theme, depicting Faust's insatiable appetite for the pleasures of life – this theme establishes a gingery C minor threatened with collapse under the weight of highly chromatic elements. A melody of the oboe and clarinet represents the hero's 'painful delights'. The last theme is pentatonic and resolute. From all these elements Liszt weaves a musical structure of power and grandeur, in which some critics recognise the composer's self-portrait.

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