Nor was Wagner the only one of the Forty Thieves who visited this Ali Baba cavern. If Liszt learned much from Chopin, Meyerbeer--the duo from the fourth act of Huguenots is in the Gretchen section--and Berlioz, the younger men, Tschaikowsky, Rubinstein, and Richard Strauss, have simply polished white and bare the ribs of the grand old mastodon of Weimar.
Faust is not a symphony. (Query: What is the symphonic archetype?) Rather is it a congeries of symphonic moods, structurally united by emotional intimacy and occasional thematic concourse. The movements are respectively labelled Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles, the task, an impossibly tremendous one, being the embodiment in tones of the general characteristics of Goethe's poetic-philosophic master-work.
Therefore, discarding critical crutches, it is best to hear the composition primarily as absolute music. We know that it is in C minor; that the four leading motives may typify intellectual doubt, striving, longing, and pride--the last in a triumphant E major; that the Gretchen music--too lengthy--is replete with maidenly sweetness overshadowed by the masculine passion of Faust (and also his theme); that in the Mephistopheles Liszt appears in his most characteristic pose--Abbé's robe tucked up, Pan's hoofs showing, and the air charged with cynical mockeries and travesties of sacred love and ideals (themes are topsy-turvied à la Berlioz); and that at the close this devil's dance is transformed by the great comedian-composer into a mystic chant with music celestial in its white-robed purities; Goethe's words, "Alles Vergängliche," ending with the consoling "Das Ewig weiblich zieht uns hinan."
But the genius of it all! The indescribable blending of the sensuous, the mystic, the diabolic; the master grasp on the psychologic development--and the imaginative musical handling of themes in which every form, fugal, lyric, symphonic, latter-day poetic-symphonic, is juggled with in Liszt's transcendental manner. The Richard Strauss scores are structurally more complex, while, as painters, Wagner, Tschaikowski, and Strauss outpoint Liszt at times. But he is Heervater Wotan the Wise, or, to use a still more expressive German term, he is the Urquell of young music, of musical anarchy--an anarchy that traces a spiritual air-route above certain social tendencies of this century.