Paris in the first third of the 19th century: (almost) everyone who had a reputation in music – or who wanted to make one – gathered in the French capital. When Richard Wagner arrived in Paris in the fall of 1839, he found a city in the grip of a veritable »Faust« fever: Ever since Gérard de Nerval's French translation appeared, Goethe's drama had been on everyone's lips. Wagner had been familiar with this text since his youth, but it was only in Paris that he began to compose a »Faust Symphony«. Although this was to remain unfinished - not least in favor of other composition projects, including "Rienzi" and the "Flying Dutchman" - Wagner combined the already composed parts into a dramatic concert overture,
Shortly after completing his First Piano Concerto in 1831, the 22-year-old Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy traveled to the French capital and met Liszt for the first time in one of the many salons there. A kind of pianistic cockfight ensued, culminating in Liszt Mendelssohn not only playing Bartholdy's piano concerto flawlessly from sight, but also adding a series of pianistic embellishments - an addition that this elegant concerto, which in the opening movement also pushes forward with a youthful, stormy spirit not needed at all, as the lasting success of this work (of course without Liszt's additions) showed, especially in the 19th century.
Two years after conducting Wagner's Faust Overture, Liszt began his own compositional adaptation of the Faust theme: the result was a monumental symphonic poem for large orchestra, which the composer added to a tenor solo and male choir when he revised it in 1857 added. Instead of retelling the plot with musical means, Liszt composed "three character pictures" entitled "Faust", "Gretchen" and "Mephistopheles". But as with Goethe, the diabolical does not have the last word. Gretchen's pure soul cannot conquer Mephistopheles, Liszt's work ends with Goethe's famous final verse: »The Eternal Feminine / Draws us up.
