Sancta Dorothea was a 4th-century Christian martyr, executed in the year 311 during the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. She is venerated as a patron saint of gardeners, having sent to her persecutor Theophilus a headdress full of roses which, legend has it, promptly inspired him to profess the faith, for which he too was put to death. Liszt’s own faith was a complex affair: having declared a teenage intention to enter the priesthood, he threw himself into the secular world of the virtuoso, but in Rome, in 1861 he took minor orders and increasingly withdrew into a life of contemplation and solitude.