Faust Goes Dancing

This chapter discusses four ballets, all based on Goethe’s Faust, created over the period 1832–48 by four leading choreographers: August Bournonville in Copenhagen, André-Jean-Jacques Deshayes in London, Salvatore Taglioni in Naples, and Jules Perrot in Milan. Each was significantly influenced by the early French Romantic ballet and the great Parisian Faust vogue of the 1820s and 1830s. Of the musical scores, only those from Copenhagen and London are extant, the former being largely a compilation. The London version, by Adolphe Adam, is an original composition treated here in some detail. The power of Adam’s music to evoke something of the variety and profundity of Goethe’s Faust as conceived by Deshayes is explored.

Berlioz, Faust, and the Gothic

On reading Gérard de Nerval’s translation of Goethe’s Faust, Hector Berlioz set nine lyrics, grouped into eight miscellaneous pieces, which he immediately published (April 1829) as Huit scènes de Faust (Eight Scenes from Faust). This, his opus 1, was well received by fellow musicians, but he withdrew it, subsequently reworking the material in a full-scale dramatic work, La damnation de Faust (The Damnation of Faust) (1846), the title of which separates it from Goethe’s larger scheme in which, as Berlioz remarked, “Faust is saved.” Although Berlioz’s Faust suffers from ennui, suicide is prevented by the Easter Hymn and a nostalgic vision of childhood piety. Méphistophélès intervenes directly at this point, and controls the remaining action, in which Berlioz contrasts the purity of Marguerite (Gretchen) with demonic manifestations; in these Berlioz subverts musical expectations, notably turning a minuet of “follets” into one of music’s most fascinating evocations of the romantic grotesque.

History and Faust in Doctor Atomic

The libretto of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic (2005), by Peter Sellars, was “drawn from original sources”—one of a number of factors that endowed the opera with an aura of historical truthfulness. Yet from its inception, the composer also acknowledged a relationship between the opera and Faust mythology, even as he downplayed its impact on the work. In fact, analysis of the libretto and the musical setting reveals that they contain numerous references to earlier Faustian works, musical and literary. These references take the form of direct verbal quotation, the adaptation of musical material, and the incorporation of Faustian themes. The opera’s engagement with Faustian works by Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, Goethe, Stravinsky, and Liszt conflicts with attributions of historical authenticity that appeared at the time of its premiere.

Louis Spohr’s Tragic Faust

Louis Spohr’s Faust is the first operatic setting of the legend by a major composer. Unlike most of the Faust settings of later years, Spohr’s used a libretto based on Faustian characters and ideas, but not the main events associated with the legend. A subplot presents a second female love interest for Faust, and he is ultimately punished for his misdeeds with eternal damnation. The opera displays many of the features associated with German Romantic opera, including sophisticated characterization and motivic development. In particular, Spohr’s handling of the supernatural elements develops the disruptive procedures associated with two eighteenth-century musical styles, ombra and tempesta, the one slow and menacing, the other fast and furious, both of which lie at the root of Romantic expressivity.

Hanns Eisler and Faust in the German Democratic Republic

When Austrian composer and committed Marxist Hanns Eisler was forced out of the United States in 1948, he returned to Vienna and hoped to settle there. Instead, a commission for Goethe’s bicentennial celebration the following year drew him to East Berlin and the SBZ (Soviet Occupation Zone), soon to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany), and set him on the path to be that country’s most prominent composer. This chapter examines the piece Eisler wrote for that commission, Rhapsodie für großes Orchester (Rhapsody for large orchestra) (1949), which set text from Goethe’s Faust II, as well as his libretto for a proposed opera entitled Johann Faustus. East German reception of these pieces reveals the centrality of Goethe’s Faust for national identity formation in the fledgling GDR.

Heinrich Heine’s Faust Ballet Scenario, 1846–1948

Heinrich Heine’s 1846–47 scenario for a Faust ballet, Der Doktor Faust: ein Tanzpoem (Doctor Faust: A Ballet Poem), languished for eighty years before finding a musical setting by František Škvor and a production in Prague in 1926 that was true to its spirit. Another setting was made by a Viennese emigré, Henry Krips, in Australia during World War II. But it was only with the production of Abraxas, the version by Werner Egk, in postwar Germany, that the scenario fulfilled Heine’s prediction that it would “excite a furore beyond all our expectation, and even take a place in the annals of the drama.”

The Paradoxical Faust Cantatas of Adrian Leverkühn and Alfred Schnittke

The Russian composer Alfred Schnittke’s Faust cantata, Seid nüchtern und wachet (Be sober and watch), remarkably parallels the fictional work of the hero of Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus). Mann’s novel is a retelling of the sixteenth-century Faust story in the light of the history of German music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The central character, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, navigates the currents of social and artistic unrest. The fictional composer’s last work was the cantata D. Fausti Weheklag (The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus) with a text drawn from the 1587 Spies Faust Book. One of the first readers of Mann’s novel, Schnittke patterned much of his own life on his fictional counterpart. The main characteristic of both Schnittke’s and Leverkühn’s cantatas is a pervasive sense of paradox.

The Genesis, Transformations, Sources, and Style of Gounod’s Faust

Beginning with Charles Gounod’s lifelong interest in Goethe’s Faust, this chapter explores the genesis of the composer’s collaboration with his librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré and the circumstances leading to the opera Faust’s 1859 premiere at the Théâtre-Lyrique. It discusses the opera’s transformation from a semi-character opéra-comique-type work with spoken dialogue to a full-fledged through-composed opera, with various additions and changes that make it difficult to speak of a “definitive” version. The libretto, while indebted to the French melodrama tradition, shows that the authors were eager to remain as faithful to Goethe as the nature and conventions of the genre allowed. The result is an admittedly hybrid work, where both Faust and Mephistopheles inevitably emerge as somewhat trivialized, while secondary characters are vividly portrayed and the figure of Marguerite transmutes as the emotional core, which makes her, vocally and dramatically, one of the memorable figures in nineteenth-century opera.

Selected Settings from “Auerbachs Keller”

The chapter examines settings of two witty songs from the tavern scene of Goethe’s Faust. Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, Mussorgsky, and Stravinsky are only the most famous among the composers who devoted their attention to “Es war eine Ratt’ ” (“Song of the Rat”) and “Es war einmal ein König” (“Song of the Flea”). While many of these artists set Goethe’s lines in minor works, two of them did not. Berlioz made his “Song of the Rat” the fourth of his Huit scènes de Faust (Eight Scenes from Faust), composed in 1828 29. Similarly, another translation is the basis for the most remarkable achievement in the group: Mussorgsky’s “Song of the Flea,” a striking concert-scene composed for a famous singer in 1879.

Introduction

The Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music overviews the theme of the magician Faust and the history of the theme’s musical adaptation. The publication of the Spies Faust Book in 1587, a turning point in early modern culture, lay the ground for generations of adaptations of the Faust theme, including Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, Doctor Faustus, and the Faust puppet plays that would prove inspirational to the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but also composers such as Richard Wagner, Ferruccio Busoni, Hanns Eisler, Josef Berg, and Henri Pousseur. At the center of most of the compositions discussed in this book is Goethe’s Faust, a masterwork at once comic and tragic that has inspired a wide range of music. The music discussed here falls into three categories: symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo Faust works; Faust in opera; and Faust in ballet and musical theater.