ving. 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.

But it is the third movement, the _Allegro ironico_, that opened your
sluices and produced your genius. For in the conception of Mephisto you
found in Goethe, you found your own spiritual equation. You, too, were
victim of a disillusioned intellect that played havoc with all you found
pure and lovely and poured its sulphuric mockery over all your
aspiration. For all your mariolatry, you were full of "der Geist der
stets verneint." And so you were able to create a musical Mephisto that
will outlive your other work, sonata and all, and express you to other
times. For here, all that one senses dimly behind your sugared and
pretentious compositions speaks out frankly. Listening to this mighty
scherzo, we know the cynicism that corroded your spirit. We hear it
surge and fill the sky. We hear it pour its mocking laughter over grief
and longing and pride, over purity and tenderness in