Few works of classical music have been as momentous or as misunderstood as Liszt’s Faust Symphony. Premiered in Weimar in 1857 to inaugurate the Goethe–Schiller Monument, as if it wasn’t massive enough already, the composer revised his 75-minute musical monolith three years later, adding a Chorus Mysticus for male voices and tenor soloist to the finale ahead of a second performance.

Hans von Bülow, who conducted it from memory on that occasion, later turned on the work. “I have given that nonsense a thorough going-over! It’s sheer rubbish, absolute non-music! I don’t know which was greater, my horror or my disgust!” he declared sourly, though by then Liszt’s daughter Cosima had abandoned him for the charms of Richard Wagner – nuff said.

Though he pretended not to be, Wagner himself was hugely influenced by Liszt’s technique of thematic metamorphosis, a method reaches its apogee in this work. Cast in three movements – Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles – the opening motif representing Faust himself is the first known use of a whole 12 tone scale, half a decade before the doings of Schoenberg and his crew. But perhaps Liszt’s masterstroke is the way he invents no new themes for...