Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514

The Mephisto Waltz opens as if a fiddle player at a country dance has made a deal he shouldn't have made. The opening fifths, hollowed out and perfect, sound like the tuning-up before a performance, before the melody enters — dark, insinuating, rhythmically unstable in the way that something genuinely seductive is unstable. Liszt based this on a scene in Lenau's Faust, in which Mephistopheles seizes the fiddle at a village inn and begins to play with such supernatural skill that everyone falls into a wild, half-drunk ecstasy. The music delivers exactly that: it is erotic and dangerous and wildly alive, its waltz rhythm distorted and pushed, the melody appearing in fragments before the whole piece accelerates into increasingly feverish territory. The chromaticism anticipates Wagner and even early Schoenberg — this music was harmonically decades ahead of when it was written, and it still sounds unsettling, still sounds like something slightly off-register, as if the normal rules have been suspended for the duration. The middle section introduces a second, more lyrical theme that represents, in the narrative, Faust seducing Gretchen in the moonlight, and the contrast between this tender passage and the surrounding demonic energy makes both more powerful. The piece ends not with resolution but with dissolution — the waltz rhythm scattered, the music disappearing into the upper register as if it simply stopped caring about you.