Liszt, lecteur antimoderne de Faust

Moysan, Bruno (2014) Liszt, lecteur antimoderne de Faust. Studia Musicologica, 55 (1-2). pp. 65-80. ISSN 1788-6244

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Abstract

The article offers a definition of the concept of anti-modernity, based at first on Antoine Compagnon’s 2005-volume Les antimodernes, de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes. The role of the mundane sociability of the aristocracy, returned from emigration, and of the aesthetic culture of political legitimism is examined in the acclimatization process of German Romanticism in France during the Empire, the Restoration, and the first years of the July Monarchy. A hypothesis is proposed about the connections between Liszt’s interpretation of the Faust myth as it is exposed in the poems of Goethe and Lenau, on the one hand, and the political, aesthetical, and ideological resistance of French artists from the first half of the 19^th century, directed against modernity, liberal individualism, the upheavals of the 1789 Revolution, and the rationalist constructivism of the Enlightenment, on the other. A survey of the aesthetics of negativity and its musical implications in Liszt’s compositions inspired by Faust reveals that the composer distanced himself from the “naive modernism” (Compagnon) of many of his contemporaries and came close to the flamboyant aesthetic of Chateaubriand’s Christian Vanity as well as to the scepticism, related in our post-modernist era with the idea of progress and of the completed work. Thus, Liszt’s relationship to the myth and the character of Faust becomes much more complex and ambiguous than it usually appears in the French literature, where Liszt’s view on the Faustian freedom is associated systematically and rather simplistically with the modern and liberal process of the individual’s emancipation.

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