One of the most controversial and multifaceted aspects of Liszt’s life and career concerns his involvement with religion and the Catholic Church. The young Liszt maintained a distinctively secular profile as a flamboyant piano virtuoso of Mephistophelean powers and a restless Don Juan, replete with all the indulgences afforded a musical icon of his time. In his forties and fifties, however, his close relationship with the Catholic Church intensified; after a residency in the Vatican, he received minor orders and subsequently was known as Abbé Liszt. Audiences and critics remained suspicious: How sincere could his attitude toward religion be when he had led such a flamboyant and unconventional life? During his ‘years of pilgrimage’ he retained a long and public relationship with Marie d’Agoult, a woman he never married; he had had three illegitimate children; and after their breakup, he met and carried on an equally public relationship with Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. The fact that he decided to become an Abbé only after the thwarted nuptials to Sayn-Wittgenstein in Rome, continues to fuel mistrust of his motives.

Upon its publication, Goethe's Faust II met with perplexing reception as to its generic classification and complex narrative. Writers who boldly proposed an allegorical interpretation also reflected on its resistance to traditional stage presentation. Robert Schumann, who set to music scenes from both Parts I and II of Faust, made Faust the protagonist of his oratorio Szenen aus Goethes Faust (1844–53). Franz Liszt's setting of the ‘Chorus mysticus’ at the end of his Faust- Symphonie (1854) represented an unconventional response to Goethe's text. But it was not until Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony (1906) that the Schlußszene from Faust II received an admittedly monumental treatment. By setting to music the parts of Faust II that were rarely set to music, Mahler made redemption – with all its interpretative baggage – the epicentre and eventual apogee of his work.

Mahler set the First Part of the Eighth Symphony to the Latin Pentecost hymn Veni creator spiritus (‘Come Holy Ghost, Creator’), while the Second Part comprises an exalted melopoiesis of the final scene of Part II of Goethe's Faust. The setting of the sacred hymn Veni creator spiritus abounds in secular musical references (band music and marches, with subtle allusions to sacred music), whereas Goethe's secular text is clothed in music of unmistakably religious character. The protagonist's struggle and the drama's mystical message of redemption seem to have resonated with the composer, as revealed in the genesis of the work and subsequent interpretations gleaned from his correspondence. Like Goethe's Faust, the Eighth traverses the genre's boundaries, and its musical ethos defies generic expectations. By sculpting the text in the mould of a symphony, Mahler upholds – and simultaneously critiques – the prevailing tradition of the venerable symphonic genre. At the same time, the Eighth reinforces perceptions of universality and authority appropriate to a setting of Faust, while it also offers a musical analogue to its ambivalent and multivalent status as a genre.