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.
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