the heart of St. Francis. I do not wish to abuse the patience of the reader, and so I say that nothing is more agreeable to Satan for accompaniment to the dance than the ancient pagan lyre."
In 1858–59, Liszt composed two orchestral paraphrases of episodes from the Faust of Nicolaus Lenau, and in the second of these, The Dance in the Village Tavern, more commonly known as the Mephisto Waltz, the devil plays the violin, while Faust, in sensual excitement, prances away with a black-eyed peasant girl. John Sullivan Dwight, once a prominent Boston critic, held that this music was "positively devilish, simply diabolical . . . it shuts out every ray of light and heaven, from whence music sprang." Perhaps the spirit of ataraxy is in the air; at any rate, today we can listen to this piece without trembling.
Rubinstein's orchestral poem, Faust, seems to lack any reference to the devil, but in his opera. The Demon, which until recently, at least, has remained popular in Russia, he drew a full length portrait of the tempter.[1] There are minor
- ↑ Satan is also a character in Rubinstein's Paradise Lost, in which the fiend and a chorus of rebel angels are frequently heard to shriek and howl. The orchestral introduction to Part III paints the "temptation and the fall." In Sir Arthur Sullivan's The Golden Legend, Prince Henry of Hoheneck, lying sick in body and mind in his castle of Vautsberg on the Rhine, has consulted the physicians of Salerno and learned
