Mephisto Waltz No 1 Franz Liszt Khatia Buniatishvili live 2014

Mephisto Waltz No 1 Franz Liszt Khatia Buniatishvili live at iTunes festival 30 09 2014

The Mephisto Waltz No. 1 is a typical example of program music, taking for its program an episode from Faust, not by Goethe but by Nikolaus Lenau (1802–50). The following program note, which Liszt took from Lenau, appears in the printed score:

There is a wedding feast in progress in the village inn, with music, dancing, carousing. Mephistopheles and Faust pass by, and Mephistopheles induces Faust to enter and take part in the festivities. Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains. The amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blooded village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song.