Something about the perception of Dante as being inferior may be that the tone-row in Faust allows those who don't neccesseraly care for the music all that much to at least claim it to have some "significance" to musical history. Dante may be seen as the opposite, as the Magnificat setting is somewhat kitschy. But it's also an undeniably beautiful moment as well, more so than anything in Faust - I like both about equally although can't claim to listen to either all that often.
Well, I just read the Wikipedia article about the Dante Symphony, and it says that there are a few 12 note rows throughout the work. Maybe this is harder to hear than in the Faust Symphony? I'm not sure, being only newly familiar to the Dante Symphony. In any case, it's probably much easier to see the row in the score rather than just hear it in the music without a score. I'm not really fixated on the row, but I can understand how this may have become a focus for musicians and musicologists later, particularly with regard to how music developed from the 1850's onwards.
Well, the Magnificat may sound "kitschy" and a bit cheesy to our ears, but I'm sure that it would have been one of the first times (if not the first) that harmonies from Renaissance music were made part of a symphony. I know that Liszt became highly acquainted with Palestrina's music later in Rome during the 1860's after he left Weimar (I have a rare LP recording of the "Szekszard" Mass for men's voices and organ that is highly reminiscent of Palestrina's harmonies). However, listening to the 2nd part of the Dante Symphony, I don't doubt that Liszt was aware of Palestrina's (& perhaps other Renaissance composers') music before he heard it in the flesh in the Vatican.
It actually took me 12-18 months to appreciate A Faust Symphony more deeply, but I think that I'll come round to the Dante Symphony much quicker now given my familiarity with the eariler symphony. What strikes me when listening to these symphonies is just how pared down and lean the orchestration often is, it sometimes sounds very un-Romantic and more Twentieth Century - Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Debussy and even Messiaen sometimes come to mind. Maybe fleetingly amongst some of the more overtly Romantic sounding bits, but the innovation is still there, and can clearly be heard. Indeed, it is what kind of initially put me off the Faust Symphony, just like with my first encounter with Schoenberg's music, I found it a bit colourless and bland. Now, I can hear nothing but colour and subtlety in both Liszt's and Schoenberg's music. If Liszt's music struck me, a listener of today, as a bit difficult and harder to grasp than say Brahms or even Wagner, then I wonder what the audiences of his time would have thought? I'd say the majority of them would have simply balked in a big way. It's really only the fellow musicians like Saint-Saens, Berlioz and Wagner that recognised the genius of Liszt's writing in many of the genres he composed in - not only solo piano, but orchestral, choral and chamber music as well. Brahms even sent Liszt the manuscript of one of his piano concertos to apparently lure the Hungarian back onto the stage as a soloist after he'd been retired for many years in that department (eventually, one of Liszt's piano students premiered that Brahms concerto). In a way in his time, apart from having a kind of "film star" status as a pianist, he was really a "musician's musician" only fully appreciated by his peers. The majority of the public only knew him as a great & sensational pianist, but his peers had a much deeper understanding of his art in it's totality...
