Faust Symphony
choral symphony composed by Franz Liszt
A Faust Symphony in three character pictures (German: Eine Faust-Symphonie in drei Charakterbildern), S.108, or simply the Faust Symphony, is a choral symphony written by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama, Faust. The symphony was premiered in Weimar on 5 September 1857, for the inauguration of the Goethe–Schiller Monument there.
Structure
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 male chorus in its final moments, Liszt adopts the same aesthetic position as in his symphonic poems. The work is approximately 75 minutes in duration.
I. Faust
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 12 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.
The public source identifies “Faust Symphony” as choral symphony composed by Franz Liszt. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Faust, Symphony and choral.
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This entry incorporates text from “Faust Symphony” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.