As recent attempts to theorise the practices of post-classical composers enjoy encouraging momentum, a comprehensive study of Liszt’s large-scale forms is long overdue. Due to an apparent resistance of standardised sonata-form procedure, these works are often explained solely in terms of their programmatic content, thereby subordinating their relationship with formal models. Liszt’s narrative allusions do, however, provide a particular problem for analysts, given that there is an evident mutual inclusivity between form and programme. While Liszt’s works might reasonably be analysed abstractly, this paper argues that a greater understanding of his formal practice can be gained with contextual reference to these ‘extra-musical’ inspirations.
When viewed through the lens of Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory (2006), the third movement of Liszt’s Eine Faust Symphonie can be read as a narratively charged deformation process which reflects the character of its namesake, Mephistopheles—if ‘generic markers’ such as thematic syntax, cadential closure, rotational and tonal plots hold currency for a nineteenth-century symphony, then this movement appears to distort, challenge, and break normative practice at every junction. Keeping Goethe’s Faust close to the reading, the analysis shows how contemporary theoretical concepts such as breakthrough (Hepokoski, 1993, 2006), becoming (Schmalfeldt, 2011), formal-functional regression (Martin and Vande Moortele, 2014) and proliferation (Horton, 2017), thus act as hermeneutic windows onto the unfolding drama of the movement; isolated, these formal features appear confusing, ill-conceived, and in poor practice, but with the overarching narrative in mind, they reflect a Mephistophelean gloss on the sonata principle.