The Dante idea had obsessed Liszt for years. In 1847 he had planned musical illustrations of certain scenes from the epic with the aid of the newly-invented Diorama. This plan was never carried out. The Fantasia quasi-sonata for pianoforte (Années de Pèlerinage), suggested by a poem of Victor Hugo, "Après une lecture de Dante," is presumably a sketch; it is full of fuliginous grandeur and whirling rhythms. Composed of imagination and impulse, his mind saturated with contemporary literature, Liszt's genius, as Dannreuther declares, was one that could hardly express itself save through some other imaginative medium. He devoted his extraordinary mastery of instrumental technique to the purposes of illustrative expression; and, adds the authority cited, he was now and then inclined to do so in a manner that tends to reduce his music to the level of decorative scene painting or affresco work. But the unenthusiastic critic admits that there are episodes of sublimity and great beauty in the Dante Symphony. The influence of Berlioz is not marked in this work.
WEINGARTNER'S AND RUBINSTEIN'S CRITICISMS
In his The Symphony Since Beethoven, Felix Weingartner, renowned as a conductor and composer, has said some pertinent things of the Liszt symphonic works. It must not be forgotten that he was a pupil of the Hungarian composer. He has been discussing Beethoven's first Leonora overture and continues thus:
"The same defects that mark the Ideale mark Liszt's Bergsymphonie, and, in spite of some beauties, his Tasso. Some other of his orchestral works, as Hamlet, Prometheus, Héroïde Funèbre, are inferior through weakness of invention. An improvisatore style, often passing into dismemberment, is peculiar to most of Liszt's compositions. I might say that while Brahms is characterised by a musing reflective element, in Liszt a rhapsodical element has the upper hand, and can be felt as a disturbing element in his weaker works. Masterpieces, besides those already mentioned, are the Hungaria, Festklänge the Hunnenschlacht, a fanciful piece of elementary weird power; Les Préludes, and, above all, the two great symphonies to Faust and Dante's Divine Comedy. The Faust Symphony intends not at all to embody musically Goethe's poem, but gives, as its title indicates, three character figures, Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. The art and fancy with which Liszt here makes and develops psychologic, dramatic variation of a theme are shown in the third movement. Mephistopheles, the 'spirit that denies,' 'for all that does arise deserves to perish,' is the principle of the piece.
"Hence, Liszt could not give it a theme of its own, but built up the whole movement out of caricatures of previous themes referring specially to Faust; and it is only stupid lack of comprehension that brought against Liszt, in a still higher degree than against Berlioz, the reproach of poverty of invention. I ask if our old masters made great movements by the manifold variation of themes of a few bars, ought the like to be forbidden to a composer when a recognisably poetic thought is the moving spring? Does not invention belong to such characteristic variation? And just this movement reveals to us most clearly Liszt's profound knowledge of the real nature of music. When the hellish Devil's brood has grown to the most appalling power, then, hovering in the clouds of glory, the main theme of the Gretchen movement appears in its original, untouched beauty. Against it the might of the devil is shattered, and sinks back into nothing. The poet might let Gretchen sink, nay, become a criminal; the musician, in obedience to the ideal, noble character of his art, preserves for her a form of light. Powerful trombone calls resound through the dying hell-music, a male chorus begins softly Goethe's sublime words of the chorus mysticus, 'All that is transient is emblem alone,' and in the clearly recognised notes of the Gretchen theme a tenor voice continues, 'The ever-womanly draweth us up!' This tenor voice may be identified with Goethe's Doctor Marianus; we may imagine Gretchen glorified into the Mater Gloriosa, and recall Faust's words when he beholds Gretchen's image in the vanishing clouds:
'Like some fair soul, the lovely form ascends,
And, not dissolving, rises to the skies
And draws away the best within me with it.'
"So, in great compositions, golden threads spun from sunshine move between the music and the inspiring poetry, light and swaying, adorning both arts, fettering neither.
"Perhaps with still more unity and power than the Faust Symphony is the tone poem to Dante's Divine Comedy, with its thrilling representations of the torments of hell and the 'purgatorio,' gradually rising in higher and higher spheres of feeling. In these works Liszt gave us the best he could give. They mark the summit of his creative power, and the ripest fruit of that style of programme music that is artistically justified, since Berlioz.
"Outside of these two symphonies Liszt's orchestral works consist of only one movement and, as you know, are entitled Symphonic Poems. The title is extremely happy, and seems to lay down the law, perhaps the only law that a composition must follow if it has any raison d'être. Let it be a 'poem,' that is, let it grow out of a poetic idea, an inspiration of the soul, which remains either unspoken or communicated to the public by the title and programme; but let it also be 'symphonic,' which here is synonymous with 'musical.' Let it have a form, either one derived from the classic masters, or a new one that grows out of the contents and is adapted to them. Formlessness in art is always censurable and in music can never win pardon by a programme or by 'what the composer was thinking.' Liszt's symphonic works show a great first step on a new path. Whoever wishes to follow it must, before all things, be careful not to imitate Liszt's weakness, a frequently remarkable disjointed conception, nor to make it a law, but to write compositions which are more than musical illustrations to programmes."
Rubinstein, though he had been intimate with Liszt at Weimar, and profiting by his advice, made no concealment of his aversion to the compositions. In his "Conversation on Music" he said: "Liszt's career as a composer from 1853 is, according to my idea, a very disappointing one. In every one of his compositions 'one marks design and is displeased.' We find programme music carried to the extreme, also continual posing—in his church music before God, in his orchestral music works before the public, in his transcriptions of songs before the composers, in his Hungarian rhapsodies before the gipsies—in short, always and everywhere posing.