Faust-Symphonie

Few literary works had such a strong influence on European culture in the 19th century as Goethe's "Faust". Various important composers were inspired by it and Franz Liszt seems to have had a particularly close connection with Goethe's masterpiece. He had the idea for a symphony "in three characteristic pictures", each dedicated to a main character in the play: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. Instead of telling the story of the play, Liszt composed a psychogram of these three main characters. He was also a pioneer in the use of leitmotifs, i.e. short musical ideas that emphasize a character trait or evoke emotions, a process that his future son-in-law Richard Wagner would develop further in his operas. The Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, conducted by Gergely Madaras, presents the original, purely instrumental version of the Faust Symphony from 1854. This gigantic work is supplemented with the first of the Mephisto Waltzes, inspired by Nikolaus Lenau's vision of the Faust myth. These two works offer two very different perspectives on Liszt's intense relationship with the character of Faust and in particular with that of Mephistopheles, around which much of his compositions are built. They are key works for understanding Liszt's aesthetic project and the typical 19th-century tendency to combine the arts.