Dante Symphony - Composition

Composition

Liszt had been sketching themes for the work since the early 1840s, and in 1847 he played some fragments on the piano for his Polish mistress Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. At this early stage in the composition it was Liszt's intention that performances of the work be accompanied by a slideshow depicting scenes from the Divine Comedy by the artist Bonaventura Genelli. He also planned to use an experimental wind machine to recreate the winds of Hell at the end of the first movement. Although Princess Carolyne was willing to defray the costs, nothing came of these ambitious plans and the symphony was set aside until 1855.

In June 1855 Liszt resumed work on the symphony and had completed most of it before the end of the following year. Thus, work on the Dante Symphony roughly coincided with work on Liszt's other symphonic masterpiece, the Faust Symphony, which was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama Faust. For this reason, and because they are the only symphonies Liszt ever composed (though certainly not his only symphonic works), the Dante and Faust symphonies are often recorded together.

In October 1856 Liszt visited Richard Wagner in Zürich and performed his Faust and Dante symphonies on the piano. Wagner was critical of the Dante Symphony's fortissimo conclusion, which he thought was inappropriate as a depiction of Paradise. In his autobiography he later wrote:

If anything had convinced me of the man's masterly and poetical powers of conception, it was the original ending of the Faust Symphony, in which the delicate fragrance of a last reminiscence of Gretchen overpowers everything, without arresting the attention by a violent disturbance. The ending of the Dante Symphony seemed to me to be quite on the same lines, for the delicately introduced Magnificat in the same way only gives a hint of a soft, shimmering Paradise. I was the more startled to hear this beautiful suggestion suddenly interrupted in an alarming way by a pompous, plagal cadence which, as I was told, was supposed to represent St Domenic.

"No!" I exclaimed loudly, "not that! Away with it! No majestic Deity! Leave us the fine soft shimmer!"

Liszt agreed and explained that such had been his original intention, but he had been persuaded by Princess Carolyne to end the symphony in a blaze of glory. He rewrote the concluding measures, but in the printed score he left the conductor with the option of following the pianissimo coda with the fortissimo one.

Liszt's original intention was to compose the work in three movements: an Inferno, a Purgatorio and a Paradiso. The first two were to be purely instrumental, and the finale choral. Wagner, however, persuaded Liszt that no earthly composer could faithfully express the joys of Paradise. Liszt dropped the third movement but added a choral Magnificat at the end of the second movement. This action, some critics claim, effectively destroyed the work's balance, leaving the listener, like Dante, gazing upward at the heights of Heaven and hearing its music from afar. Moreover, Liszt scholar Humphrey Searle argues that while Liszt may have felt more at home portraying the infernal regions than the celestial ones, the task of portraying Paradise in music would not have been beyond his powers.

Liszt put the final touches to the symphony in the autumn of 1857. The premiere of the work took place at the Hoftheater in Dresden on 7 November 1857. The performance was an unmitigated disaster due to inadequate rehearsal; Liszt, who conducted the performance, was publicly humiliated. Nevertheless, he persevered with the work, conducting another performance (along with his symphonic poem Die Ideale and his second piano concerto) in Prague on 11 March 1858. Princess Carolyne prepared a programme for this concert to help the audience follow the unusual form of the symphony.

Like his symphonic poems Tasso and Les Préludes, the Dante Symphony is an innovatory work, featuring numerous orchestral and harmonic advances: wind effects, progressive harmonies that generally avoid the tonic-dominant bias of contemporary music, experiments in atonality, unusual key signatures and time signatures, fluctuating tempi, chamber-music interludes, and the use of unusual musical forms. The Symphony is also one of the first to make use of progressive tonality, beginning and ending in the radically different keys of D minor and B major, respectively, anticipating its use in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler by forty years.

Liszt was not the only symphonic composer who was inspired by Dante's Commedia. In 1863 Giovanni Pacini composed a four-movement Sinfonia Dante (the finale depicts Dante's triumphant return to Earth).