Today, we retool this blog with Franz Liszt's A Faust Symphony. I've read that Liszt's skills as a composer are not as highly regarded as his contemporaries, though he was a dynamic and dramatic virtuoso pianist who set hearts (especially female ones) swooning on his many tours of Europe in his younger years.
Yet, his "symphonic poems," when the mood is there, can be fascinating excursions into literature, history, characterization and dramatic symphonic expression. The notes to this Naxos release include a negative critique from Edouard Hanslick, a prominent music critic, who complained about Liszt's "fiddling and blowing" in an attempt to make his work sound profound.
Having read Göethe's Faust a quarter century ago, but remembering the feelings evoked by that romantic work, the drama of bombast alternating with meditative passages in A Faust Symphony is a powerful musical representation of the tragic Faust and his selling of his soul to Mephistopheles (a.k.a., the Devil.) The Orchestra of the Ferenc (Franz in Hungarian) Liszt Academy, conducted by András Ligeti, and the Hungarian State Choir perform beautifully.
When in the mood, Liszt's symphonic poems can be very enjoyable and this is an example.
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