decked with Wagnerian melodies and harmonies. Liszt's Faust Symphony is certainly with us both in spirit and flesh. The third movement is devoted to Mephistopheles. Ernest Newman observes that this "section is particularly ingenious. It consists, for the most part, of a kind of burlesque upon the subjects of Faust, which are here passed, as it were, through a continuous fire of irony and ridicule. This is a far more effective way of depicting 'the spirit of denial' than making him mouth a farrago of pantomime bombast, in the manner of Boito. The being who exists, for the purposes of drama, only in antagonism to Faust, whose main activity consists only in endeavouring to frustrate every good impulse in Faust's soul, is really best dealt with, in music, not as a positive individuality, but as the embodiment of a negation—a malicious, saturnine parody of all the good that has gone to the making of Faust. The Mephistopheles is not only a piece of diabolically clever music, but the best picture we have of a character that in the hands of the average musician becomes either stupid, or vulgar, or both. As we listen to Liszt's music, we feel that we really have the Mephistopheles of Goethe's drama." Mr. Apthorp remarks, "One may suspect the composer of taking 'Ich bin der Geist der stehts verneint' for the motto of this movement," and James Huneker tells us
Page:Red (1925).pdf/175
