Abstract of the dissertation project

(German) title of the dissertation project:

Franz Liszts „Eine Faust-Symphonie in drei Charakterbildern nach J. W. von Goethe“: Werkgenese – Schaffensprozess – Fassungen

Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony is one of the key works of the symphonic canon of the 19th century. Despite the variety of studies on the work to date (albeit with a stronger focus on music analysis, semantics and reception history), there are essential music-philological aspects of its genesis that have not yet been thoroughly researched. A mosaic of handwritten and printed sources, most of which are preserved in Weimar and Budapest, testifies to Liszt’s almost thirty years of work on the symphony. However, their documentation and evaluation last took place in the 1960s, in keeping with the state of Liszt research at the time. Moreover, the successive stages of creation and revision have not yet been reconstructed in detail.

Based on an updated documentation, description, dating and evaluation of all source materials, the dissertation aims to reconstruct the creative process in all its developmental stages. Using the methodological and terminological tools of music-related genetic text criticism, the sources are to be explored from a text-genetic perspective: In the autograph sources, the individual writing layers are deciphered, the variants that arose within the documents are reconstructed and conclusions are drawn regarding Liszt’s text-dynamic writing processes. In addition to the textual variants, changes in instrumentation as well as reworkings in the form disposition are examined across all sources.

The reconstruction of the creative process is divided into three segments, which also correspond to the composer’s working phases: the first segment concerns the creation of the first sketches and two extensive working manuscripts (early orchestral version and early version for two pianos); the second segment focuses on the revision and preparation of both versions (for orchestra and two pianos respectively) for publication; and the third segment examines Liszt’s late revisions that followed the printing of the score.

The term ‘Fassung’ is critically examined and discussed in this study: despite clearly separated stages of revising and editing, Liszt’s working process in the case of the Faust Symphony showed –from a content point of view– strong continuity, so that the crystallization of individual ‘Fassungen’ can sometimes fall into the category of a philological construct. On the other hand, the early versions should by no means be devalued and viewed as merely preliminary stages of a ‘final version’. These issues dealt within the dissertation thus touch upon the current music- philological discourses regarding the relativization of a fixed concept of a ‘work’.