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Program Notes
Notes on Faust
Before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came along, the historical
Johann Faust—a shadowy 16th-century figure variously described as
a necromancer, astrologer, magician, and palm-reader—had been
primarily a figure in popular theater and literature, often symbolizing
the dire fate awaiting heretics and traffickers with the devil. But in
the 1770s, Goethe, a poet, dramatist, and wide-ranging intellectual,
began to write a verse drama that eventually evolved into a two-part
tragedy that significantly transformed the main character’s nature and
the tale’s import.
In the first part of Faust: A Tragedy, the title character appears
not as a conjurer or heretic, but as an aging, discouraged seeker of
knowledge, lamenting his lack of direct, intuitive experience of life.
The bargain he makes with Mephistopheles is no simple sale of his
soul in return for youth, but rather a wager: should his rejuvenated self
ever stop striving for new experience, then “the clock may stop, its
hands fall still, and time be over. . .for me.” The central thread of the
first part (published in 1808) centers on the renewed Faust’s courtship
and eventual desertion of the guileless Margarete (Gretchen), who
goes mad and murders both her mother and her illegitimate child—a
story element introduced by Goethe, who probably derived it from a
real-life incident in 1772, and central to most subsequent treatments.
Off and on for nearly a quarter-century, Goethe worked at part
two, completing it in 1831, the year before his death. It shows Faust,
awakened by the tragedy of Margarete to the complexity of human
life, dealing with political, mythological, and historical situations; his
eventual acknowledgment of fulfillment (“I savor now my striving’s
crown and sum”) is followed by death and redemption in a vision of
saints and angels.
Though rarely staged because of its length, Goethe’s breathtaking
distillation of science, theology, philosophy, poetry, and life quickly
established itself as a literary masterpiece and became a potent source
of derivative works, spurred by impulses both artistic and commercial.
Gérard de Nerval’s French translation of part one, published in
1828, made it widely known among the French Romantics—though
the first Faust opera written in France had an Italian libretto. Fausto,
composed for the Théâtre des Italiens by the intrepid Louise Bertin,
might perhaps have lasted for more than three performances in
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1831 had Maria Malibran not withdrawn from the role of Margherita.
Greater Romantic composers paid tribute to Goethe’s epic in smaller
forms, especially by setting the various songs in the play (among them
Gretchen’s “The King of Thule” and Mephisto’s “Song of the Flea”).
Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Robert Schumann wrote larger concert
works, and Berlioz’s “dramatic legend” The Damnation of Faust would
eventually, at the century’s end, be adapted for the operatic stage
(and performed by the Met in 1906).
As early as 1827, the subject turned up on the Parisian theatrical
scene, in the form of a Faust play with a trivialized plot and “ingenious
effects of phantasmagoria.” The public appetite for works in this
vein, more notable for displays of scenic wizardry than for any
Goethean intellectual content, endured for some decades. In the mid1850s, Charles Gounod, whose career in the opera house had been
progressing indifferently, was prompted by either Léon Carvalho,
impresario of the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris, or the librettist Jules Barbier
(or both) to compose a Faust opera. Long an admirer of Goethe’s
drama via Nerval’s translation, Gounod, who had sketched some music
for it a decade earlier and later made a musical setting of the church
scene, was definitely agreeable. Though credited to Barbier and his
usual collaborator Michel Carré, the libretto was mainly written by
Barbier, freely adapting material from Carré’s 1850 stage play Faust et
Marguerite, a work for the popular Parisian theater. The opera libretto
followed the play in shunning the serious core of Goethe’s drama (and
all of his part two) and reducing the aged philosopher’s yearnings to
a purely sensual level, but nevertheless offered Gounod a range of
colorful and contrasting scenes involving serious, even tragic events.
(However, unlike Goethe’s Marguerite, the operatic one has become
an orphan before the curtain rises and is thus spared the crime of
matricide.)
The road to the premiere was paved with difficulties and
postponements. The score, much too long as composed, had to
be significantly trimmed during the rehearsal period. Then the
original tenor lead became indisposed during the dress rehearsal,
and three weeks ensued during which a substitute learned the
role. But when Faust finally reached the public on March 19, 1859, it
achieved an amazing success: by the end of the year, it had racked
up 57 performances at the Lyrique, and 150 more by 1868. It was then
transferred to the Paris Opera, where it was played about 1,000 times
in the next 25 years.
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During these years, the composer made further changes to the
score. Partly to make room for the “Soldiers’ Chorus” (salvaged by
Gounod from an unfinished earlier project), the pre-premiere cuts had
significantly curtailed Valentin’s music; to satisfy the eminent baritone
assigned the role at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, the composer
wrote a new aria for Act II (known in French as “Avant de quitter ces
lieux”), based on a melody from the opera’s prelude. Though probably
not intended to be a permanent insertion (it wasn’t used in Paris
performances for a long time), baritones have been reluctant to part
with it. Act IV originally began with a scene that included Marguerite’s
rueful spinning song and Siébel’s attempts to cheer her up, but this
has rarely been part of the “standard” performing text. Further, the
sequence of the subsequent two scenes (in the church and Valentin’s
return) seems to have been variable in early performances. When Faust
reached the Paris Opera, Gounod refashioned the original spoken
dialogue as recitative and enhanced the Walpurgisnacht scenes at
the beginning of Act V with a lengthy ballet. (These scenes and the
spinning-song episode are omitted in the current Met production.)
At the end of the 19th century, Faust was probably the most frequently
performed opera in the world, and certainly in the Met’s repertory.
But during the 20th century it gradually lost that preeminent position,
falling behind Verdi’s Rigoletto, Traviata, and Aida, Bizet’s Carmen, and
three Puccini works that only entered the Met’s repertory in the new
century. This fairly universal slippage in favor might be ascribed to the
longstanding intellectual complaint that Gounod’s opera fails to do
justice to the scope and import of Goethe’s drama—a circumstance
insisted upon in German theaters, which opted to call the opera
Margarete. But an opera long enough to encompass the scope of
the original was simply unthinkable in the operatic world of the time;
even without the addition of music, Goethe’s full work is theatrically
problematic—especially part two. (The most successful musical
encounter with part two is the second movement of Gustav Mahler’s
Eighth Symphony, a vivid, ecstatic setting of the final scene with soloists
and chorus.) Given that 19th-century French opera, except for Carmen
(and Berlioz’s works, rarely performed in their own day), has grown less
prominent in the international repertory during the 20th century, the
operatic Faust’s loss of favor may have more to do with general trends
of taste than with its relation to Goethe’s drama.
Nor do post-Gounod Faust operas really come to grips with the
whole of Goethe. Arrigo Boito made a stab at it in his Mefistofele (1868,
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revised 1875 and 1876) by including Goethe’s “Prologue in Heaven”
(where a wager between God and the Devil is set up that prefigures
the Mephisto–Faust wager later on) and some of the “Classical
Sabbath,” but aside from a few fine arias and a powerful setting of
the prologue, Mefistofele’s music is less than consistently effective.
Composers of 20th-century Faust operas have tended to avoid Goethe
as a primary source. Ferruccio Busoni’s unfinished Doktor Faust (1926)
draws its libretto from “16th-century puppet plays,” while the late
Alfred Schnittke’s Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1995) is based on
the anonymous 1587 book of the same title. Two other recent operas
approach the theme from oblique angles: Henri Pousseur’s “fantasy
in the manner of an opera,” Votre Faust (1969), is about the writing
of an opera on the Faust subject, while Giacomo Manzoni’s Doktor
Faustus (1989) is based on the novel of the same title by Thomas Mann,
a 20th-century transmutation of the tale featuring a composer rather
than a philosopher.
Taken on its own terms as a Romantic opera, however, Gounod’s
Faust remains remarkably satisfactory. The music is original and fluent,
the vocal writing graceful and rhythmically flexible, the orchestra used
with skill and virtuosity. Faust is provided with a dramatic opening
scene and, in the garden scene, one of the finest of French tenor arias,
its central section embellished by a rhapsodic solo violin. Before that,
Marguerite sings a classic slow–fast pair: spinning-song ballade and
waltzing coloratura showpiece. Méphistophélès’s arias, if not quite as
elegant as those Berlioz gave him, are still highly effective, and the
role, though sometimes overplayed, can be a delight in the hands of a
suave actor with reserves of menace for the invocation in the garden
scene and elsewhere. If Valentin’s famous aria contributes little to
the plot, it remains a splendid vocal opportunity, and his later scenes
reward more forceful expressivity. Siébel’s song can teeter on the
edge of triteness, but it offers potential for charm.
The public scenes are skillfully fashioned: in Act II, the meeting
of Marguerite and Faust is smoothly embedded in the waltz, and
the street scene in Act IV builds from the jaunty “Soldiers’ Chorus”
through Méphistophélès’s provocative serenade and the duel trio to
its tragic conclusion. The lively duet in Act I that convinces Faust to
sign the fatal pact is ennobled by an eloquent preview of the Act III
love duet, which itself follows an ingenious quartet made up of two
duets. Reminiscences enhance the prison scene, and the rising stanzas
of the final trio, though an obvious device, are undeniably effective (in
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a recording made at a 1901 Met performance, applause after the third
stanza elicits an encore!).
New York first heard Faust on November 26, 1863, at the Academy
of Music, sung in Italian—a practice described with irony by Edith
Wharton in the opening scene of her novel The Age of Innocence, set
at an Academy performance of the opera in the early 1870s:
[Soprano Christine Nilsson, as Marguerite] sang, of course, ‘M’ama!’
and not ‘he loves me,’ since an unalterable and unquestioned law of
the musical world required that the German text of French operas
sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer
understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Nilsson was again Marguerite on October 22, 1883, in the opening
performance of the new Metropolitan Opera House (and still in
Italian), and Gounod’s work fulfilled a similar ceremonial function a
decade later, when the theater reopened after a dark season following
a disastrous fire. Joseph Urban’s production, launched in 1917, was
in the repertory for all but one of the subsequent 27 seasons. As
part of Rudolf Bing’s program of scenic refurbishment, it was finally
replaced in 1953 by a production designed by Rolf Gérard and staged
(somewhat controversially) by Peter Brook, with Pierre Monteux (first
conductor of the 1917 production) back on the podium. Another new
staging served for opening night in 1965, the final season of opera
in the old house, and in 1990 a production by Harold Prince had its
premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House. The current production
was first seen on April 21, 2005, with Roberto Alagna in the title role,
Soile Isokoski as Marguerite, René Pape as Méphistophélès, Dmitri
Hvorostovsky as Valentin, and James Levine conducting.
—David Hamilton
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