The melancholy fact has to be recorded that the "Faust" Symphony fell flat on its first performance in Manchester. There seems to be something in our national temperament which makes it peculiarly difficult for us to penetrate the secret of Liszt and learn to understand his tone-language. In musical society on the Continent "not to like Liszt" is regarded as a fixed characteristic of the Englishman, and those few Englishmen who have learned to like Liszt remember the gradual process by which their ears were opened, like the learning of a foreign language after one is grown up. Some composers have a manner of utterance that may be picked up half unconsciously; but for Britons, at any rate, Liszt's is not of that kind. Patience, persistent study, reflection, observation, comparison, besides an ear of some subtlety, are necessary for the understanding of it, and we have not the habit of taking music seriously (except in the abstract) or of giving it our whole attention. So a thing like the "Faust" Symphony goes over our heads as if it were a poem in some foreign language of which we only apprehend the rhythm. It is a pity, for to those few who understand the poem is very great and splendid. Like some ghostly Ancient Mariner, the spirit of the master holds us "with his glittering eye," and speaks as one who is full of matter and wisdom and is a master of life. His story is that old one about Faust and Gretchen--not the Berlioz version ending with the Damnation of Faust, but the original Goethe version which deals with the working out of Faust's salvation (the difference between the two being really quite considerable),--and in the telling of this story he conveys lessons to the heart that are much too delicate for words. A good many composers have made "Faust" music of one kind or another. Spohr and Schumann, Berlioz and Boïto, Wagner and Liszt, all paid their tribute to the inexhaustible interest of the theme, besides Gounod--most superficial and consequently best known of them all. Even in Gounod, however, there is a little genuine "Faust" music--a very little. It is to be found in the first few bars of the overture, in the Mephistopheles Serenade, and, perhaps one might add, in the song about the King of Thule, though Berlioz did that much better. Wagner's "Faust" Overture is quite a great composition, and it is nearest akin to Liszt's Symphony. But it is much too one-sided to vie in interest with Liszt's tremendous composition, which seems to grasp the whole subject and tear the very heart out of it, with a kind of imaginative power suggesting Victor Hugo's, though the touch is more true. He begins with the solitary Faust in his study, plunged in gloomy meditation, every phase of which the music expounds (to him who listens closely enough)--intellectual pride, reduced to impotence in the endeavour to solve the "riddle of the painful earth"; the tranquillising of the spirit by mystical influences