lines: ‘Through me the entrance to the city of horror; through me the entrance into eternal pain; through me the entrance to the dwelling place of the damned.’ And immediately another motive for the horns and trumpets to the famous words: ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ The movement, with an excessive use of the diminished seventh chord, depicts the sufferings of the damned. But presently the composer comes to a different sort of anguish, which challenges all his powers as tone poet. It is the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. It is introduced by another motive of great beauty, standing for the words: ‘There is no greater anguish than, during suffering, to think of happier times.’ In the Francesca episode Liszt lavishes all his best powers, and achieves some of his finest pages. The music now descends into the lower depths of the Inferno, and culminates in a thunderous restatement of the theme, ‘All hope abandon,’ by the horns, trumpets and trombones. The second movement, representing Purgatory, strikes a very different note, one of hope and aspiration, and culminates in the Latin _Magnificat_, sung by women’s voices to a modal tune, which Liszt, now once more a loyal Catholic, writes from the heart. The ‘Faust’ symphony, written between 1854 and 1857, is hardly less magnificent in its plan and execution. It is sub-titled ‘three character-pictures,’ and its movements are assigned respectively to Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. Yet the last movement merges into a dramatic narration of the love story and of Faust’s philosophic aspirations, and reaches its climax in a men’s chorus intoning the famous final chorus from Goethe’s drama: ‘All things transitory are but a semblance.’ The Faust theme deserves quoting because of its chromatic character, which has become so typical of modern music: [Illustration: Music score] The whole work is in Liszt’s most exalted vein. The ‘character pictures’ are suggestive in the extreme, and are contrasted in the most vivid manner. Liszt has rarely surpassed in sheer beauty the Gretchen episode, the theme of which later becomes the setting for Goethe’s famous line, ‘The eternal feminine leads us upward and on.’ These two works--the ‘Dante’ and the ‘Faust’--are doubtless not so supremely creative as Liszt imagined, but they remain among the noblest things in modern music. Their great difficulty of execution, even to orchestras in our day, stands in the way of their more frequent performance, but to those who hear them they prove unforgettable. In them, more than in any other of his works, Liszt has lavished his musical learning and invention, has put all that was best and noblest in himself. V