The story comes not from Goethe but from Nikolaus Lenau’s Faust, and the episode is called “The Dance at the Village Inn.” Liszt printed the plot in the score: a wedding is in full swing, with music and dancing. Mephisto and Faust walk in. Mephisto takes the fiddle from a sleepy village fiddler and starts to play, and the room goes mad. Faust waltzes a dark-eyed girl out the door and into the woods. A nightingale sings.
The devil as fiddler is an old archetype. Tartini dreamed the devil played him a sonata; people said Paganini had sold his soul. Liszt heard Paganini at twenty and decided to become the Paganini of the piano. So here is a pianist writing the devil’s violin. The opening, fifths stacked on fifths, is the fiddle being tuned.
He wrote it around 1859–62, at the end of his Weimar years, in his late forties. No longer the touring virtuoso, not yet the austere abbé of the late pieces: this is middle Liszt, court Kapellmeister, writing symphonic poems.
Which makes the orchestral version odd. Liszt had an orchestra at his disposal for a decade, and the piano version is still better: tighter, more consistent, and somehow more like a fiddle. The orchestral one sounds like a piano piece in costume. There’s a reason it’s the piano version everyone plays.