Jessica Duchen<\/a><\/p>\n 21 May, 2010<\/p>\n To explore the musical legacy of Faust<\/em>\u00a0 is to discover a treasure-trail rich beyond imagination. This legend has permeated more compositions than any other beyond the Bible. In the mid-19th century, it was so all-pervasive that it even affected musical language and performance style, making an indelible impression upon the following century.<\/p>\n Goethe\u2019s version of the traditional story concerns an ageing scholar who sells his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles, in return for regained youth and sensual pleasures. He seduces a young girl, Gretchen, who bears his illegitimate child, kills the baby and is sentenced to death, but her soul is spared from Mephisto\u2019s clutches. In Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/em>, which inspired a dazzling network of composers, this is part of an extended philosophical adventure. Ultimately, Faust\u2019s soul is saved too, for his \u201cendless striving\u201d. The book is a \u201ccloset drama\u201d, a play that is unstageable. This peculiar genre partly explains why different composers took such a variety of approaches to it, sometimes overt, sometimes not.<\/p>\n Ironically, Goethe, for whom Mozart was the ideal composer for Faust,<\/em> loathed romanticism, regarding its excesses as a \u201cdisease\u201d. But it was another child prodigy who became closest to him in person: in 1821 the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter brought his pupil, 12-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, to stay with the poet in Weimar. The boy wrote home: \u201cEvery morning I receive a kiss from the author of Faust<\/em> and of Werther<\/em>, and every afternoon two kisses from Goethe, friend and father.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Mendelssohn wrote his Octet four years later. Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/em> includes a \u201cWalpurgis Night\u2019s Dream\u201d, a satirical episode showing an amateur cast performing a masquerade, with members of a Witches\u2019 Sabbath, a Kapellmeister, an orchestra of insects and frogs and a bagpipe that blows soap bubbles. Mendelssohn\u2019s sister, Fanny, wrote that the scherzo secretly portrayed a stanza from this scene while the Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd has detected links to Faust throughout the Octet, with the climax representing the struggle for Gretchen\u2019s soul \u2014 which would explain the quote from Handel\u2019s Hallelujah Chorus.\u00a0<\/p>\n By contrast, Mendelssohn\u2019s friend Schumann kept Goethe to the fore in his Scenes from Goethe\u2019s Faust <\/em>(1844-53), in which he followed the poet beyond Gretchen\u2019s story to explore Faust\u2019s reflections, whether visionary or deluded, on the creation of a new world. By 1853, Schumann\u2019s deteriorating mental condition rendered him prone to delusions. This lent his Faust<\/em> extra personal significance \u2014 it constantly preoccupied him after he went to the asylum at Endenich, where he eventually died.<\/p>\n Goethe\u2019s ideal Faustian opera was Don Giovanni<\/em>. In the 1830s, he started a bizarre \u201ctradition\u201d that claimed a \u201cdemonic\u201d element in Mozart\u2019s creativity. He wrote: \u201cHow can one say Mozart has composed<\/em> Don Juan? Composition! As if it were a piece of cake or biscuit\u2026It is\u2026pervaded by one spirit and by the breath of one life; so that the producer\u2026was altogether in the power of the demonic spirit of his genius\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Why this, years after Mozart\u2019s death? When Niccol\u00f2 Paganini toured Germany between 1829 and 1831, Goethe met and heard the great violinist, whose <\/em>playing sparked a popular parallel with the devil and his traditional violin. Paganini had brought the myth of music\u2019s demoniac side into the ascendant.\u00a0<\/p>\n A young, rather directionless Hungarian musician, Franz Liszt, attended Paganini\u2019s 1831 Paris recital. At once, he resolved to become the Paganini of the piano and subsequently transformed himself into the first superstar concert pianist. Unsurprisingly, <\/em>he tackled the Faust theme several times, writing four Mephisto Waltzes<\/em> inspired by another Faust<\/em> poem by one of Goethe\u2019s successors, Nikolaus Lenau. And listen to his B minor Sonata of 1852-53 associating its themes with Faust, Mephistopheles and Gretchen: the story is crystal-clear, culminating in a mighty struggle before Gretchen\u2019s soul rises to heaven and Mephistopheles vanishes in a pianistic puff of smoke.\u00a0<\/p>\n Liszt was introduced to Faust<\/em> in 1830 by Hector Berlioz, who was already obsessed with it. The book made a \u201cstrange and deep impression\u201d on Berlioz: \u201cI read it incessantly,\u201d he wrote, \u201cat meals, at the theatre, in the street\u2026The translation\u2026contained a num-ber of ballads, hymns and other pieces in verse. I was unable to resist setting them to music [Eight Scenes from Faust<\/em>, which he later tried to destroy]. \u201cImmediately after\u2026still under the influence of Goethe\u2019s poem, I wrote my Symphonie fantastique<\/em>\u2026\u201d And in La Damnation de Faust<\/em>, Berlioz created perhaps the ultimate Faust \u2014 <\/em>yet the furthest from Goethe\u2019s tastes, positively embodying the \u201cexcesses of romanticism\u201d.<\/p>\n Wagner approached Faust<\/em> in a concert overture finished in 1844 and in some respects presaging Liszt\u2019s A Faust Symphony<\/em>. The overture is no masterpiece \u2014 but significantly, Faust\u2019s \u201cendless striving\u201d is embodied in the chromatic harmonic language that Liszt and Wagner developed. If \u201cendless striving\u201d is the essence of Faust<\/em>, then Faust<\/em> is the essence of Wagner \u2014 and the approach that broke down tonality in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n Liszt composed his Faust Symphony<\/em> in the 1850s after much procrastination: initially he disliked the character of Faust, finding him \u201cbourgeois\u201d, dissipated and cruel. But living in Weimar, he could not escape the shadow of Goethe-everything pointed him towards Faust<\/em>. His symphony was premiered in 1857. Three years later he added extra brass and a Chorus Mysticus<\/em>. The footprints of Berlioz\u2019s Witches\u2019 Sabbath from the Symphonie fantastique<\/em> are all over the \u201cMephistopheles\u201d scherzo.\u00a0<\/p>\n The work\u2019s Faust motif is worth an extra glance. In Thomas Mann\u2019s later novel Doktor Faustus<\/em>, the central character enters a demoniac pact through which he creates a new type of music suspiciously akin to Schoenberg\u2019s 12-tone system. Liszt\u2019s Faust<\/em> motif is<\/em> a tone-row, including all 12 notes, each played once.\u00a0<\/p>\n But why exactly did Faust<\/em> spark such musical obsession? Sir Sacheverell Sitwell heard the Faust Symphony<\/em> conducted by Ferruccio Busoni (like Liszt, the greatest pianist of his day, and composer of yet another complex Faust<\/em> opera). He wrote: \u201cBoth [Liszt and Busoni], with their exceptional, magical powers, were for ever searching for a secret that was never revealed to them, or was only suffered to live in flashes before their eyes for the space of a few moments.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In Goethe, Faust and Mephistopheles agree that Faust\u2019s damnation will be triggered when he experiences one moment so perfect that he begs it not to pass. That notion is the essence of the human condition \u2014 and the essence, too, of music, which exists only in real time. That\u2019s why music is the perfect medium for Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/em>. And maybe it\u2019s why musicians are never free of its ghosts.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n\n
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Mozart\u2019s infinite riches<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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