Liszt and the Diabolical: Mephisto, Dante and the Dance of Death
Abbé and virtuoso, Liszt devoted famous works to the demonic: the Mephisto Waltzes, the Dante Sonata, the Faust Symphony and the Totentanz for piano.
Franz Liszt is one of the most contradictory figures of nineteenth-century music. A virtuoso adored in the salons of half of Europe and a celebrated lover, in 1865 he received minor orders in Rome and became Abbé Liszt. Yet the same man who wrote oratorios and masses devoted some of his boldest pages to the devil and to death. In his work the sacred and the demonic do not exclude each other, but look at each other as two faces of the same spiritual quest.
The Mephisto Waltzes and Lenau's Faust
The most famous of his diabolical pieces is the first Mephisto Waltz, composed around 1860 as part of two orchestral episodes drawn from the Faust of the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau, and best known in its piano version. The scene is a feast in a village inn. Mephistopheles takes the violin from the fiddler's hands and strikes up a dance so overwhelming that it sweeps everyone into a sensual whirl, while Faust escapes into the woods with a girl.
Liszt renders the violin's tuning with stacked open fifths at the start of the piece, as if the instrument were being tried before the dance. In his last years he returned to the subject, writing three more Mephisto Waltzes, increasingly sparse and harmonically daring, together with a Mephisto Polka. In these late pages the diabolical seduction becomes more abstract and uneasy, almost ghostly, and traditional tonality begins to waver.
Dante and Hell at the Piano
Another source of infernal images was Dante's Commedia. The so-called Dante Sonata, titled Après une lecture du Dante after a poem by Victor Hugo, became part of the second volume of the Années de pèlerinage, devoted to Italy and published in 1858. It opens with the tritone, an interval that theoretical tradition associated with the diabolical, and moves through chromatic passages describing the lament of souls.
In the same years Liszt composed the Dante Symphony, presented in Dresden in 1857, with one movement devoted to Hell and one to Purgatory, closed by a choral Magnificat. Wagner had dissuaded him from trying to depict Paradise in music. Paradise, in his view, lay beyond the reach of any music. Liszt followed the advice, and the symphony stops at the threshold of heaven, leaving the listener to imagine the rest of the journey.
Faust Symphony and Totentanz
In the Faust Symphony, performed in Weimar in 1857, Liszt devotes three movements to Goethe's characters: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. The third is the most original, because the devil has no themes of his own. Mephistopheles merely distorts and parodies Faust's motifs, consistent with Goethe's line «I am the spirit that always denies».
The Totentanz, for piano and orchestra, takes as its subject the medieval dance of death. Liszt builds in it a series of variations on the Gregorian sequence Dies irae, the chant of the Last Judgement, with hammered chords that sound like striking bones. According to tradition, he was inspired by a fresco of the Triumph of Death seen in the Camposanto of Pisa.
Liszt showed the Romantic public that evil could become artistic material without losing its disquiet. His diabolical harmonies, born for Mephistopheles, opened paths that twentieth-century composers would follow to the end. Extreme chromaticism, suspended harmonies and the use of the tritone as an expressive colour became part of the vocabulary of modern music.