No doubt, you loved your native land. But your patriotism recalls dangerously the restaurant Magyar, the fiddler in the frogged coat. You draw from your violin passionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy you celebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you pass the hat.
Once, only, your eye did not wander liquidly to the gallery. Once, only, your workmanship was not marred by schemes for titillating effects, for sensational contrasts, for grandiose and bombastic expression. Once, only, you were completely the artist, impregnating your work with a fine glow of life, making it deeply dignified and impassioned, sincere and firm, profoundly moving. For you, too, there was the cardinal exception. For you there was the "Faust Symphony." The work is romantic music, the music of the Byronic school _par excellence_. Here, too, is the brooding and revolt, the satanic cynicism, the expert's language. But here the miracle has taken place, and your music, generally so loose and shallow and theatrical, has the point, the intensity, the significance that it seems everywhere else to lack. Here, for once, is a work of yours that moves by its own initiative, that has an independent and marvelous life, that is brilliant and yet substantial. Here you have materialized yourself. We believe in your Faust as we believe neither in your Tasso nor in your Mazeppa nor in your Orpheus. For he utters your own romantic brooding in touching and impressive terms. In the theme that conjures up before us "Faust in ritterlicher Hofkleidung des Mittelalters," you have expressed your own seigneurial pride and daintiness. Goethe must have tapped with his tragedy, his characters, some vein long choked in you. In each of the three movements, the Faust, the Marguerite and the Mephisto, you make your best music. There is real drama in the first. There is a warm, fragrant hush in the second. Perhaps Gretchen plucks her daisy a little too thoroughly. But there is a rare sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling in her music. It is all in pastels. There is something very youthful and warm in it that perhaps no other composition of yours displays, as though in composing it you had recaptured pristine emotions long since spoiled.