In 1848 Liszt abandoned his career as a piano virtuoso and accepted the post of kapellmeister to the court of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. In Weimar he had an orchestra at his command and expanded his ambitions to the composition of orchestral works. With the help of Augustin Conradi and, later, Joachim Raff, he rapidly mastered sufficient orchestral technique not only to handle the orchestra with assurance but to orchestrally conceive music and execute it with boldness and originality. One of the first fruits of his enlarged powers was the Faust Symphony, which he specified as "three character sketches after Goethe," its movements depicting, respectively, Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. December 4, 1830, marks the first meeting of Liszt and Berlioz—Berlioz presented Liszt with Gérard de Nerval's recent translation of Goethe's Faust, a work about which Liszt remained ambivalent until novelist George Eliot visited Weimar in the summer of 1854 in search of materials for a biography of Goethe. Extensive conversations with Liszt sparked a renewed interest in Faust—Part II had been published only after Goethe's death in 1832, adding a new dimension to a work of which Liszt had been largely dismissive—and Liszt composed his Faust Symphony (which plays around an hour-and-a-quarter) in the startlingly brief space between August and October 1854. (The Chorus Mysticus, from Part II, with which the symphony concludes, was added in 1857.) The work is dedicated to Berlioz. So well in command of his orchestral métier was he that Liszt composed the "Gretchen" movement directly into the score. In this tenderly loving portrait of the artless village girl who the rejuvenated Faust seduces, impregnates, and abandons, Liszt combines the ethereally idealized and the psychologically acute. Where Berlioz, in La Damnation de Faust (1846), sketched her character with allusive rapidity in the before and after numbers Le Roi de Thulé and L'Amour, l'ardente flame, Liszt takes the unspoilt Gretchen as she is just entering her affair with Faust, dwelling lingeringly over her as she plucks petals from a flower murmuring "He loves me...he loves me not...he loves me!" Liszt had an evident affection for this movement for, while he arranged the Faust Symphony for two pianos, four-hands in 1856, he returned to the Gretchen movement in 1874 arranging it for solo piano, in which guise it joins that other Faustian moment originally composed as an orchestral works but far better known in its solo piano version: Mephisto Waltz No. 1.

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