"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.