Programme booklet »Faust«

CHARLES GOUNOD

FAUST

CONTENTS

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4

SYNOPSIS P.

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ALMOST HALF A LIFETIME BERTRAND DE BILLY P.

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TO LOVE WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL IS NOT REPREHENSIBLE FRANK CASTORF P.

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THE CREATION OF FAUST ANN-CHRISTINE MECKE

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COLONIALISM IS A SYSTEM JEAN-PAUL SARTRE P.

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NO WEAK-WILLED SEDUCED INNOCENT TINA HARTMANN P.

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THE DEVIL LIKES CHOCOLATE TOO ANDREAS LÁNG P.

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IMPRINT

CHARLES GOUNOD

FAUST OPERA in five acts Text by JULES BARBIER & MICHEL CARRÉ based on a tragic play by JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

ORCHESTRA

STAGE MUSIC

2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo) 2 oboes (2nd doubling cor anglais) 2 clarinets / 2 bassoons / 4 horns 2 trumpets / 3 trombones timpani / percussion / 2 harps violin I / violin II viola / cello / double bass tam-tam / organ

AUTOGRAPH

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris WORLD PREMIÈRE 19 MARCH 1859 Théâtre-Lyrique, Paris PREMIÈRE AT THE HOUSE ON THE RING 28 MARCH 1870 Vienna Court Opera DURATION

3 H 30 M

INCL. 1 INTERMISSION

FAUST

SYNOPSIS PART 1 Lonely, exhausted, and bitter, old Faust tries to take his own life.

Angry at his own fear of death, he calls out the devil. Méphistophélès appears and offers him wealth and fame, but Faust wants his youth back, “the treasure that contains everything.”

In return, Méphistophélès demands eternal servitude “down there.” When Faust hesitates, Méphistophélès draws his attention to Marguerite. Fascinated by her, Faust accepts the pact and becomes a young man again.

In a group of celebrating soldiers, Valentin prays for his sister Marguerite and hopes that her medallion will bring him luck in the upcoming battle. When Wagner starts a cheerful song, Méphistophélès forces his way into the group. In the song of the golden calf he sings about the power of money. Without even being asked, he predicts Wagner’s death in battle. He also prophesises misfortune for Valentin and Siébel, who is in love with Marguerite. Faust meets Marguerite and speaks to her.

Although she walks off and leaves him standing alone, his interest only increases.

Siébel picks flowers for Marguerite and plans to finally confess his love for her. Méphistophélès leads Faust to Marguerite’s house and goes to find valuable presents for Marguerite. Faust has scruples as to whether he should continue his efforts, but Méphistophélès leaves the presents at her door and hides with Faust. Against her will, Marguerite is impressed by the man who spoke to her. When she finds the presents, she is delighted.

Her neighbor Marthe encourages her to accept the jewelry.

Faust and Méphistophélès engage the women in conversation.

While Marthe and Méphistophélès soon separate again, Faust and Marguerite grow closer. Faust’s confession of love makes Marguerite happy, but she refuses his request to be allowed to stay the night with her. But while Faust is already moving away, she calls him back full of love.

Previous pages: SCENE

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SYNOPSIS

PART 2 Faust has left the now pregnant Marguerite. Ostracised and mocked, she longs for him. Siébel comforts Marguerite and wants to be by her side from now on as a friend.

The soldiers return victorious; Wagner has died in the war. Siébel responds evasively to Valentin’s questions about Marguerite.

Faust wants to see Marguerite again but at the same time fears meeting her. Méphistophélès provokes Valentin with a serenade performed for Marguerite, in which he alludes to her pregnancy.

An outraged Valentin throws away the medallion that he had received from Marguerite. He challenges Faust to a duel and is stabbed to death. In front of all the townsfolk rushing over, the dying Valentin curses his sister, even in the event that God should forgive her.

Marguerite asks God for forgiveness, but only receives an answer from Méphistophélès, who reinforces her feelings of guilt.

A church choir sings about Judgment Day. During Walpurgis Night, Faust and Méphistophélès are out among the will-o’-the-wisps, ghosts and witches. While Méphistophélès is visibly at ease, Faust cannot distract himself from his longing for Marguerite, even with a drinking song.

Faust lets Méphistophélès lead him to the dungeon jail where Marguerite is, who has killed their child. They remember the beginning of their relationship. Both assure each other of their love, but Marguerite refuses to follow Faust.

Voices from on high recall the resurrection of Christ.

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ALMOST HALF A LIFETIME No major German 19th century composer dared to set Faust. Louis Spohr approached the myth, although without reference to Goethe – but composing Faust without Goethe’s philosophical underlay and simply extracted as a love story? Unthinkable! That could only be done by a foreigner, and even then they could not go unpunished: if we read the German critics, Gounod was accused well into the 20 th century of having misappropriated the “German master.” But Gounod had no choice. Faust was his dearest project, a dream. Even as a young winner of the famous Prix de Rome, as he himself tells it, he was sitting in Capri, gazing at the sea and imagining the first scenes of the opera. That was in 1840, and the history of the composition of Faust was to take until 1869, all told.

Almost half a lifetime.

As a conductor, you always face the question of the “right” version. Despite everything, this is not nearly as difficult to decide with Faust as with other works. The first version came out in 1859 with spoken dialogue – this was normal practice at the Théâtre-Lyrique, the venue for the world première. This

was followed by revisions, insertions and additions.

Instead of the dialogue, Gounod wrote new recitatives (which I prefer to the spoken text in this work, particularly as they are by the composer himself). Valentin’s cavatina was written for a London performance, and then became a fixed part of the opera, which enormously enhanced the importance of the role. For the Paris Opéra, Gounod wrote the ballet in the Walpurgis Night scene, which was a mandatory requirement there at the time – a brilliant piece in its own right, but like most of the ballets retrospectively written for operas it delayed the action until late in the piece, and is hardly played any more today. Gounod did all this in line with and in part against his original intentions.

Did this make him an opportunist? Perhaps. Is that a bad thing? No. He wanted to be performed, like all composers, and particularly with his favourite project, Faust. This is why he accepted the libretto, far removed from Goethe and occasionally superficial, together with interventions by house directors and singers. Even so, it be-

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came a masterpiece! You won’t find a false or unnecessary bar in the opera.

But I’d still love to ask Gounod why he fixed on this libretto. Whether he felt that the text lacked depth? Perhaps he’d reply, “What a question! Naturally – but you find the drama in the music…!”

And that’s true. All the drama and profundity of the subject is in the composition here, not the libretto. In Faust, Gounod proves himself to be a composer who not only recognises but understands the soul of Goethe’s magnum opus, and, as a master of blending colour and style, he creates his effect from an – apparent – contradiction in style. Let’s take the example of the contrast between the carnival scene, where you could imagine Maurice Chevalier popping up from the alleyway, and Valentin’s aria, which follows directly after it – what a strong, exhilarating, dramatic contrast this is! Think of the great choruses, which at many points remind us of the typical grand opéra, and which offer an unusual wealth of colour, and then the small chorus ensembles, or the plain and moving a cappella chorus after Valentin’s death.

Then again, we hear a soft waltz rhy thm in Marguerite’s song to the jewels, an aria whose impact is strengthened by the fact that she has just sung “Es war ein König in Thule” with its plain and historical sound, which is obviously a routine for her.

Finally, there is the exquisite and painful beauty of the spinning wheel music, which demands superlative Lieder technique of the soprano singing Marguerite (who also has to demonstrate her coloratura brilliance in act 2). This is where we discover Gounod’s genius as a dramaturge. We have already heard the spinning wheel whirring away in

the demisemiquavers in the violins in Faust’s vision of Marguerite in act 1, but there it is combined with a horn (the Méphistophélès instrument) and harp (as a musical sign of the transfigured Marguerite image).

In retrospect we then understand that, despite the bright E major of the violins, the vision carried with it the tragic ending, showing that the story cannot end well. The finale is a particular challenge. While Marguerite’s part rises and rises, and she stands out at the end of the evening for her dramatic penetration, we see how the character develops musically, from the “ancient music” of the Thule song through the sparkling jewels aria to the dramatic and almost Wagnerian power of the finale. This makes Marguerite such an extraordinarily challenging role for any singer.

We see repeatedly in opera (for example in La traviata) how the beginning anticipates the end musically. In Faust, this is exactly reversed. In the prison scene Marguerite sings a reminiscence of her first meeting with Faust, here taking both parts. At this point the orchestral sound becomes increasingly delicate, the texture becomes filigree, and just as Faust was old at the beginning and becomes young, I feel that Marguerite, who is young, suddenly ages dramatically at this point, becoming fragile and almost already transfigured.

A good example of the intersection of two situations, in this case grotesque and lyric, is the garden scene, right in the middle of the opera, with the two couples Marguerite and Faust and Marthe and Méphistophélès. The two couples sing different words, but the music in the quartet passages unites

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them. Even so, the beautiful musical harmony doesn’t last long, as Marthe repeatedly disrupts it. Gounod uses this scene to show a particular aspect of Méphistophélès through Marthe – the grotesque side. In the libretto, Méphistophélès is not a demonic nihilist, a philosophical seducer, he has no class, is no Arsène Lupin – he’s a conjurer, a second-rate devil – which is very well brought out in this production.

However, measured in terms of the size and challenge of his role, the opera really should be named after him. He is constantly on stage and has the opportunity to display very different facets.

In act 1 he starts with an almost nimble duet with Faust, followed in act 2 by the Golden Calf rondo, thoroughly bombastic and extremely attractive for the singer (this number again is more reminiscent of grand opéra), while in act 3 he sings of the night, very beautifully (but cynically!). He has to maintain long, captivating lines – a challenge that can only be mastered by someone who is also a master of Lieder technique. In the church scene in act 4 we hear Bach’s music in Romantic costume – beauty and cynicism meet again.

His serenade is somewhat reminiscent of Don Giovanni – the singer can shine here again before delivering a dramatic character study in the prison scene in act 5. That Méphistophélès can not only appear in the church and that Marguerite also kills her baby were aspects of the action which would definitely not have made a performance at the Paris Opéra easier!

In characterising the main figures Gounod follows his own instrumental dramaturgy. Where Méphistophélès has the horn as “his” instrument, Sié-

bel has the cello – the aria sounds almost like a Schubert Lied. Faust is accompanied in his famous cavatina in act 3 (“Salut! Demeure chaste et pure”) by a solo violin, while at other points the solo clarinet plays a major role.

These concert instruments repeatedly give the work a very attractive chamber music feel.

Another stylistic element in the opera is the organ. We hear this in the church scene and in the final apotheosis. Both scenes end in C major, which because of the absence of accidentals in the key signature is favoured for “purity” or “victory”, and which shows two sides here: incredibly painful in the church scene, after Marguerite’s cry, and then liberating and redeeming at the end of the opera. One key – two expressions.

A frequently discussed question is whether and how far Faust should sound old at the start of the opera – he is, after all, a dotard in the piece. In the course of working on it, we decided that it is less a question of vocal colour, but particularly involves the articulation of the text, including a particular emphasis on consonants. At the start, Faust curses everything – youth, happiness, hope – repeating the word “maudit” (“cursed”). His age must be evident from the inflexible resentment of the curse, not from an artificially distorted voice.

After rejuvenation he is a typical French lyric tenor. He has a classic aria in which he can show off a high C, but over the course of the opera he must also develop more and more dramatic potential. The final trio, which we talked about earlier, is an enormous challenge for him as well, and like Marguerite, Faust is a character who

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undergoes a remarkable musical transformation during the performance and must present and sing this credibly.

The fact that the opera is ultimately titled Faust and not Méphistophélès or Marguerite has to do with the legend – Faust is simply Faust! The situation was very different in German-speaking areas. There, the opera was mostly called Margarethe until well into the 20th century, in order to avoid a clash with Goethe’s masterpiece.

Why – despite all the limitations we’ve mentioned – did Faust become so enormously successful in all the world’s opera houses in such a short time? Simply because the music is fantastic! You leave after the performance with a dozen catchy melodies. Gounod had something for everybody. The carnival scene at the start of act 2 shows how skilfully he can merge disparate elements – matrons, students, citizens, soldiers, young and old, everyone in the audience can recognise themselves. Later, there is the church, a bit of demonic horror, Walpurgis Night, martial and romantic scenes – all tied

together with the name of a demanding work to attract the middle class intellectual – it’s all there! Gounod himself, like many French composer of his day, was attracted by the profundity, inscrutability and darkness of the piece, a gloom that he felt was typically “German.”

This was shared by his colleague Jules Massenet, who later gave musical immortality to an equally “dark” piece

by Goethe with Werther. Gounod was like a good film director who knows that sticking too closely to a literary original seldom leads to a good film.

He understood what he needed to do for the opera stage of his time to make a successful work of the material he loved so much. Even so, you can hear from many moments of his music that he understood more of the literary original than many of his contemporaries – including and particularly in German-speaking areas – credited him with, and how much he knew of the depths and abysses in Goethe’s masterpiece.

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Next page: ÉTIENNE DUPUIS as VALENTIN

VICTOR HUGO / LES MISÉRABLES

“Paris is a synonym for the universe.

Paris is Athens, Rome, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantine.

All civilisations are there in miniature, and all barbarisms as well.

Paris would be enraged without the guillotine.

A little execution site is a good thing.

How would eternal celebration be without this spice?

Our laws have cunningly taken care of this, and so the blood of the guillotine falls on the carnival parade.”

FRANK CASTORF

TO LOVE WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL IS NOT REPREHENSIBLE FAUST BY GOETHE AND GOUNOD Like many Germans I’m naturally insulted when I hear and read what Gounod and his librettists did to Goethe’s great work. Faust is a German drama of ideas, the German myth, in short. It is also Goethe’s life work, which he worked on until his death in 1832. Part 2 is a great attempt to unite Classicism and Romantic. And along comes Gounod with music that reminded me of Offenbach on first hearing.

But then I found something specif­ ically French interesting. Gounod’s Faust is not interested at all in the knowledge of those who would explain the world – Goethe, Zarathustra, Nietzsche. He doesn’t have to know what holds the world together in its depths – he wants to be young, to love, to enjoy life. To a certain extent we see Balzac here, the bourgeois. Offenbach will mock this attitude later, but in Gounod we have a mirror of the inter-

ests of this new powerful class in the period after the coup by Napoleon III. All German melancholy is cleared away, including musically. The vision that allures Faust is not the ideal, not Helen of Troy as in Goethe, but Marguerite at her spinning wheel. She sits there and is very concretely amenable to influence by beautiful things, accessories from Dolce to Gabbana.

I was also fascinated by the singing mercenaries who say how wonderful war is. On the one hand there’s the violence of war, and then you go to a tavern, drink champagne and get involved in all the things we still feel make life worthwhile. The soldiers dance with the girls, with students, with prostitutes under the influence of drink and waltzes, and they discover that the world is good, so long as you have the power.

THE DEVIL, MARGUERITE AND LUXURY Méphistophélès is not the principle of dialectical negation, not part of that

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great power “which always means evil and always does good.” The devil here is an archetypical provocateur and cynic to his master – and one who makes possible a good standard of living and entirely pragmatically helps him get a woman. In all Balzac stories there is a fat wallet that can buy grisettes or even impoverished aristocratic women.

And Marguerite is much stronger than Goethe’s Gretchen, a woman who enjoys luxury when she sees the jewel box and the jewellery and wealth it promises. To love what is beautiful is not reprehensible. She is young and wants to live with a man who pleases her.

The whole luxury goods industry came into being in Paris at the same time as this opera. The utility of goods took second place to their value, products become desirable. They are only a surrogate for actual warm, genuine feelings, but luxury is something we can enjoy, in Paris like no other city in the world. There, we meet at wonderful festivals and celebrate together, and the waltz carries us all off. For a moment we are happy in the most beautiful cities – Vienna, Paris or Rio – and we have the illusion that we belong together. But it’s only an illusion, because I am only happy when I have the money, when I have the jewel box.

PARIS, FRANCE AND ALGERIA The city of Paris was the first world capital in the 19th century, and still is today, if it’s busy, if people can move, if they’re free. Art is freer in this city than anywhere else, and the lie is greater here than anywhere else.

In this production Paris is also the symbol of the struggle for democracy.

The novelty, the excitement of a new age is decisive in this period after the 1851 coup, in which capitalism exploded, and the new classes discover it with their wealth. But where everything seems possible, there is also the gutter, the excluded, the proletariat. Before the July revolution, 300,000 people decided what democracy is, according to the electoral rolls, later it was ten million of a total of 35 million citizens.

The ideals of 1789 were never achieved – people were perhaps free sometimes, but seldom fraternal and never equal.

Baron Haussmann will soon do something new and tear down Paris to give the city vistas that make it strategically controllable.

In 1830 France occupies Algeria, and starts to tell the Arabs what to do. Soon there are the first comments that everything has to be destroyed “that doesn’t creep like a dog before our feet.” Here we see that democracy can mean everything and nothing. In constitutional law, the colonies have always been foreign, which means the inhabitants can never participate in elections. In international law, however, they were domestic.

Which means they can be exploited. It was a gruesome colonial regime, which only ended in 1962 after a long war of independence. And in the process the bombs even reached Paris after the attempted coup by the OAS (Organisation armée secrète). I am always surprised that a country that deserves our sympathy, after the liberation of Europe from war and National Socialism, should continue to pursue its colonial interests in a gruesome war conducted through terror by both sides.

For us, this war is the background against which we tell the story.

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BAUDELAIRE, RIMBAUD AND VERLAINE In Baudelaire the images of death and woman permeate along with those of the city of Paris, as Walter Benjamin writes. Baudelaire is a dilettante like Faust – his collection of poetry, Les fleurs du mal, appeared at around the same time as the opera. Several years later, at the time of the Paris Commune, the 20-year-old Rimbaud and Verlaine meet. In this time of unrest and the first bloodbaths of democracy, Rimbaud wrote his poems and analysed society with a clarity which later verged on Surrealism – everything is for sale, we just want to live a life of pleasure. And we carry the drum into the world, into other countries, and expect them to humble themselves before us. The result is a completely new kind of literature – you could say that it also attacks Gounod.

LIVE CAMERAS What the cameras do in the production is sometimes like vivisection. This is very painful; we look inside people without anaesthetic. They also show how much singers work. They work, they sweat, the makeup runs. And suddenly you see how something emerges and takes on a life of its own in a face which is very clear from the third tier.

THE ENDING Is Marguerite “executed”? The opera ends with the apotheosis of the motivation. Marguerite rejects the forgiveness of the Catholic Church. Instead, she says “I am happy with what I experienced, now I can go on – to whatever waits.”

Faust, on the other hand, would say, “I will go on, I know not where.” Solidarity is always temporary, and fails at some point. But at the same time, this opera – for all it superficiality – tells us that life can be fairer than we imagine.

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DANIEL KELLER (Camera)

NICOLE CAR as MARGUERITE

ANN-CHRISTINE MECKE

THE CREATION OF FAUST Anyone who knows Goethe’s Faust and is reading the libretto of Gounod’s opera with the same title has a right to be confused. Faust is not out to “make mine their heights and depths” – he simply wants to be young again. Some elements of the story are abbreviated to the point where they are incomprehensible. Did Marguerite bear a child and kill it? When was the pregnancy and birth? Why did Faust abandon Marguerite? The witty and philosophical discussions between Faust and Mephisto in Goethe’s original have also disappeared, replaced by gimmicks like flowers that wilt when touched and sword hilts as a symbol of the crucifix that puts the devil to flight.

As impressive as the individual scenes of the opera are, as stirring and moving as the melodies are, and as successful as the instrumentation is, the ensemble often leaves a strange impression. The significant theme of the overture is revealed as the melody of an aria by a secondary figure, which can hardly be interpreted as the “motto” of the opera in the way its appearance in the overture suggests. The melody which Faust and Marguerite

embrace to reappears in Marguerite’s apotheosis, and in the middle of the piece a thundering soldiers’ chorus glorifies dying for the fatherland. It almost seems as if we are dealing with a paste-up, an opera put together from a number of different works. And it happened rather like this. The creation of the opera took so long and so many people contributed their individual interest that we can hardly speak of a self-contained work.

Goethe’s Faust was extremely popular in Paris in the 1850s. Gérard de Nerval’s translation into French appeared in 1827 and was enthusiastically received. In 1829 Hector Berlioz composed his incidental music Huit scènes de Faust, which became La damnation de Faust: légende dramatique in 1846.

The boulevard theatres of Paris presented various versions, although these were more concerned with the taste of their audiences than with Goethe’s original. Adolphe d’Ennery’s Faust, for example, has a surprise in an additional female devil called Sulphurine, who Faust’s assistant Wagner creates by alchemical means. Together with the impudent Wagner and his brain-

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less sidekick Fridolin, Sulphurine is responsible for several entertaining scenes. Méphistophélès also uses his magical skills to great dramatic effect.

For example, after Faust leaves Marguerite, he takes him to sunny Naples.

Faust sums up in the Italian warmth.

“Marguerite, a gentle, quiet child, with a soul as cold as our German climate.”

When he is still tormented by a sense of guilt, Méphistophélès conjures him back in time for the two to witness the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed the city of Herculaneum. In short, Adolphe d’Ennery had above all taken the advice of Goethe’s theatre director to heart: “so be sparing with programme booklets but not with stage machinery.”

Compared with this version, Michel Carré’s Faust et Marguerite, which had its world première in 1850 and subsequently became the basis for Gounod’s opera, was comparatively straightforward. But Carré wasn’t sparing in slapstick and humour, particularly in the vain conflicts between Siébel and Méphistophélès. Siébel is an invention of Carré. There is a character with this name in Goethe’s Faust Part 1, but he is only a student who clashes with Mephisto in Auerbach’s cellar and then never reappears. In Carré, Siébel is one of Faust’s students who becomes a rival for Marguerite. Valentin’s role is also significantly expanded in Carré’s play. For this, Carré completely drops the motif of infanticide, Marguerite is cursed by her dying brother solely for her affair with Faust, and subsequently the story passes quickly to its resolution and Marguerite’s apotheosis, while Faust and Méphistophélès go to hell.

LONG IN THE PLANNING Gounod was fascinated by the Faust story at an early stage. During his stay in Rome around 1840 he read Nerval’s translation with enthusiasm. Around the same time he composed the piano piece À la lune, which already included a melody from the duet between Faust and Marguerite. A year later the composer told his brother that he had composed individual “effects” for Faust and hoped to make an opera of them.

In 1848 and 1849 he wrote musical sketches for the Walpurgis Night and the church scene, all still without librettists or an opportunity for a world première.

Plans only became more concrete seven years later, when Gounod met with Michel Carré, Jules Barbier, and their associate, Léon Carvalho. Carvalho had become the director of the Théâtre-Lyrique, a young artists’ platform in the Paris opera scene which had previously had a dubious reputation. Barbier was supposed to develop an opera libretto for Gounod on the basis of Carré’s play, which Carvalho would then produce. However, when it emerged that a competitor theatre was also planning a Faust production (this was Adolphe d’Ennery’s ”fantastic drama”), Carvalho pressed for a different story, and the work on Faust was paused. The authors were only able to continue after d’Ennery’s Faust proved relatively unsuccessful despite the impressive stage effects.

In revising the piece for an opera libretto, Jacques Barbier brought the story closer to Goethe, supplementing Walpurgis Night and the prison scene, and using almost literal translations of

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Goethe’s text for many passages. The infanticide also found its way back into the libretto. At the same time, elements of the boulevard theatre piece were retained – the devil as an evil magician who, instead of philosophising, used trickery to help conquer women and win duels, comic scenes between Siébel, Marthe and Méphistophélès, and many effects from the theatrical box of tricks, such as the wilting flowers.

The Faust opera conceived on these lines was an opéra comique, i.e. the musical numbers were linked by dialogue and melodrama. Important parts of the action were conveyed in dialogues, which were also largely responsible for the character development of Marthe, Siébel and Méphistophélès in particular.

REHEARSALS The first run-throughs showed that the piece was considerably too long, and numerous cuts were made. Gounod tore the numbers involved from the music, most manuscript pages disappeared and were only rediscovered long after Gounod’s death. Several of these are still missing today, and must be regarded as permanently lost or never composed, while others are accessible again. The numbers cut before the première include: • a trio between Siébel, Faust and Wagner from act 1 • a farewell duet between Marguerite and Valentin from act 2 • a second cabaletta-style part of Faust’s aria in act 3 • c ouplets (a strophic song) by Marguerite’s friend Lise and a chorus of young girls in act 4 • c ouplets “versez vos chagrins” by Siébel in act 4

• couplets by the returning Valentin in act 4 • significant parts of Walpurgis Night in act 5 • a multi-part mad scene for the jailed Marguerite in act 5.

Méphistophélès’s mocking song in act 2 clearly caused Gounod considerable effort. While the devil in Goethe’s Faust sings a song about a flea, a song about a golden dung beetle was initially planned for the opera, which was replaced shortly before the world première by the Golden Calf rondo.

Reportedly, there had previously been four other versions which were rejected by the theatre director.

An entirely new element was added during rehearsals – the soldiers’ chorus. This replaced a song by Valentin in which he told how he had always bragged about his sister during the rigours of war. The chorus comes from another of Gounod’s unperformed operas, Ivan le terrible. Even though the extensive changes had fundamentally benefited the opera – the first version is supposed to have lasted almost five hours! – they also created numerous fragments and inconsistencies.

For example, the special relationship between Valentin and his sister has almost disappeared without the duet and couplets, without the trio Siébel and Wagner stumble into the action almost without an introduction, and the Walpurgis Night scene seems fragmentary. Musical references also are left hanging as a result of cuts: for example, the flutes quote the farewell duet which is no longer there between brother and sister, when Marguerite thinks of Valentin after the song about the King of Thule. However, Gounod

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had only limited influence in the rehearsal phase, and was subject to the moods and ideas of theatre director Carvalho, who reduced the composer to tears several times, according to eyewitness reports. In addition, the tenor had to be replaced in the final rehearsal.

W hat appeared as the world première on 19 March 1859 was stylistically between opéra comique and grand opéra. There were extended passages of dialogue only in the middle three acts, the first and fifth acts were almost entirely sung, and freed of relatively entertaining secondary characters.

The opera’s development was by no means complete with the world première. The first changes at Théâtre-Lyrique were made in 1861, when Faust was revived. As a performance with spoken dialogue was almost inconceivable outside France, Gounod began shortly after the première to compose recitatives to replace the dialogue and melodrama. These were first performed in Strasbourg in 1860, and soon entirely replaced the opéra comique version.

However, without the dialogue, Siébel, Marthe and Wagner lost significant parts of their characters. As it was largely the entertaining scenes that were lost, the remaining ones stood out starkly. Wagner was hardest hit by the changes. In the version originally planned he is a practical, fun-loving medical student, a loyal friend of Valentin and Siébel, who abandoned his studies for the physical challenges of the war. In act 4 the returning Valentin can only tell the shaken Siébel that their joint friend has fallen in a “murderous war.” In the version usually performed today, Wagner appears in act 2 as a hard-drinking soldier

whose name is not mentioned again.

He clashes with Méphistophélès and then disappears without further ado while the returning soldiers praise war.

The story of the child of Faust and Marguerite – which in any case is only told in fragments – becomes largely incomprehensible in the recitative version. In the dialogue version we learn from Marguerite at the start of act 4 that the child has been born and that Faust left her after the birth. Later, Méphistophélès mocks Faust that he fled from the “joys of fatherhood.” Without the dialogue, all that is left of the child is a single remark by Faust in the prison scene. “Her poor child, oh God, she killed it.” The director is left with the question whether Valentin finds his sister pregnant or by the cradle.

While the rehearsal phase and first performances resulted in cuts, additions were made to the opera during its victorious progress in Europe. And while its shape had previously been determined mainly by a theatre director, the wishes of the singers and public taste now played a role. In 1863 Gounod wrote new couplets for Siébel for an Italian-language performance. These subsequently replaced the couplet cut for the world première and were later translated into French. A year later there was an English-language performance in London, and this time the singer playing Valentin asked for an additional aria. Gounod promptly developed it from the main theme of the overture. He regarded it as an incidental piece and didn’t want it to be performed outside England. Once again, however, it was not for him to decide.

Neither the singers nor the audiences wanted to do without the beautiful melody, and so it returned to the score

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THE CREATION OF FAUST

in a French translation, and today is an established part of the piece.

The last additions were made ten years after the world première. For the first performance at the Paris Opéra in 1869 Gounod had to compose a ballet as convention demanded. For this, he replaced the very brief Walpurgis Night scene with a seven-part ballet intermezzo, and also wrote more couplets for the singer playing Méphistophélès who appeared as the host of the event. Both elements give the Walpurgis Night scene more weight, but also emphasise its disparate character.

The church scene had a chequered fate, requiring a substantial reworking of the middle of the act. The scene was originally placed between the return of the soldiers and Valentin’s death.

This made it necessary for Marguerite to have set up the spinning wheel in the garden in front of her house, rather than in her room – because naturally nobody wanted to lose the classic scene of Gretchen at her spinning wheel. For practical staging reasons the church scene was moved to the end of act 4 in the world première (where it’s also placed in Goethe’s Faust). In later performances, the church scene was sometimes moved before Valentin’s return, depending on the possibilities and limits of staging and stage machinery.

AND NOW? So how do you deal with a tradition that is significantly moulded by decisions that were not only not made by the composer, but were often against his will? With an opera whose “original version” is impossible to reconstruct in full? And is the (assumed) will of the composer the deciding factor when the process of audience reception has led to a thoroughly successful work?

The fact that the most effective solution has always triumphed over the most consistent one seems entirely appropriate for an opera where the focus is on the sensual enjoyment of the moment. Gounod’s Faust is accordingly a construction kit rather than a completed work. Even if (as in the present performance) we orient ourselves towards the “usual” format of the piece, numerous variants are possible and easy to justify. However, the disparate and fragmentary character cannot be denied. This receives particular attention in Frank Castorf’s production, and even the format of melodrama is reintroduced into the opera along with poems from the time of is creation.

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KS JUAN DIEGO FLÓREZ as FAUST

J EA N-PAU L SA RT R E

COLONIALISM IS A SYSTEM EXCERPTS FROM A 1956 ESSAY The fact is that colonisation is neither a series of chance occurrences nor the statistical result of thousands of individual undertakings. It is a system which was put in place around the middle of the 19th century, began to bear fruit in about 1880, started to decline after the First World War, and is today turning against the colonising nation. That is what I would like to show you about Algeria, which is, alas, the clearest and most striking example of the colonial system. I would like to show you the rigour of the colonial system, its internal necessity, how it was bound to lead us exactly where we are now, and how the purest of intentions, if conceived within this infernal circle, is corrupted at once.

For it is not true that there are some good settlers and others who are wicked. There are settlers (I do not consider settlers to be either the minor public officials or the European workers who are at the same time innocent victims and beneficiaries of the system), and that is it. When we have understood that, we will understand why the Alge-

rians are right to attack, first of all politically, this economic, social and political system and why their liberation, and also that of France, can only be achieved through the defeat of coloni­ sation.

The system did not put itself in place.

In truth neither the July monarchy nor the Second Republic really knew what to do with conquered Algeria They thought about turning it into a settlement colony. Bugeaud conceived of a “Roman style” colonisation. Huge estates would have been given to the demobilised soldiers of the Army of Africa. His proposal was not taken up.

Next, they wanted to channel to Africa the overflow of the European countries, the poorest peasants of France and Spain; for this “rabble” a few villages were created around Algiers, Constantine and Oran. Most of them were decimated by disease. After June, 1848 they tried to settle – it would be better to say “add” – unemployed workers whose presence worried the “forces of law and order.” Out of 20,000 labourers transported to Algeria, the majority perished from fever and cholera; the survivors managed to get themselves repatriated to France.

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COLONIALISM IS A SYSTEM

The colonial enterprise stagnated in this form. It took more definite shape during the Second Empire, as a result of industrial and commercial expansion. One after the other, the great colonial companies were created: 1863, Société de Crédit Foncier et de Banque (Banking and Land Credit Company); 1865, Société Marseillaise de Crédit (Marseilles Credit Company); Compagnie des Minerais de fer de Mokta (Mokta Iron Ore Company); Société Générale des Transports maritimes à vapeur (General Maritime Steam Transport Company). This time it was capitalism itself that became colonialist.

Jules Ferry would become the theoretician of this new colonialism: “it is in the interest of France, which has always been awash with capital and has exported it to foreign countries in considerable quantities, to consider the colonial question from this angle. For countries like ours which, by the very nature of their industry, are destined to be great exporters, this question is precisely one of export markets … Where there is political predominance, there is also predominance in products, economic predominance.”

So, you see, it was not Lenin who first defined colonial imperialism – it was Jules Ferry, that “great figure” of the Third Republic. And what does this consist of? The creation of industries in the conquered countries? Not at all. The capital with which France “is awash” will not be invested in underdeveloped countries; the returns would be uncertain, the profits would be too long in coming; everything would have to be built, equipped. And, even if that could be done, what would be the point in creating competition for production in France? Ferry is very clear: capital

will not leave France, it will simply be invested in new industries which will sell their manufactured products to the colonised country. The immediate result was the establishment of the Customs Union (1884). This union still exists. It ensures that France’s industry, handicapped in the international market by prices that are too high, has a monopoly over the Algerian market.

But who did this new industry expect to sell its products to? The Algerians? Impossible. Where would they have got the money to pay? The concomitant of this colonial imperialism is that spending power has to be created in the colonies. And, of course, it is the colonists who will benefit from all the advantages and who will be turned into potential buyers. The colonist is above all an artificial consumer, created overseas from nothing by a capitalism seeking new markets.

Here the second side of the colonial diptych appears clearly: in order to be a buyer, the colonist must be a seller.

But who will he sell to? To the people of mainland France. And what can he sell without an industry? Food products and raw materials. And what are the “sacrifice” that the state makes to the colonist, to this darling of gods and exporters? The answer is simple: it sacrifices the property of the Muslims to him.

Because in fact the natural produce of the colonised country grows on the land, and that this land belongs to the “indigenous” population. In certain thinly populated regions, with large uncultivated areas, the theft of land is less apparent. What you see is military occupation, forced labour. But in Algeria, when the French troops arrived, all the good land was cultivated. The so-

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J EA N-PAU L SA RT R E

called development thus relied upon a plundering of the inhabitants that continued for a century. The story of Algeria is the progressive concentration of European land ownership at the expense of Algerian ownership.

ANY METHOD WAS ACCEPTABLE Initially, the slightest stir of resistance was used as an excuse to confiscate or sequestrate. Bugeaud would say: “the main thing is, the land is good; it doesn’t matter who it belongs to.” The revolt of 1871 was very useful; hundreds of thousands of hectares were taken from the vanquished. But there was a chance that would not be enough.

So we decided to give the Muslims a handsome present – we gave them our civil code. And why all this generosity? Because tribal property was usually collective, and we wanted to fragment it to allow land speculators to buy it back bit by bit.

If, at least, the initial theft was not of colonial character, it could perhaps be hoped that mechanised agricultural production would allow the Algerians themselves to buy the product of their land at the lowest possible price. But the Algerians are not the colonists’ customers, nor can they be. The colonist must export to pay for his imports: he produces for the French market.

The logic of the system makes him sacrifice the needs of the native population to those of the mainland French.

Between 1927 and 1932, winegrowing increased by 173,000 hectares, more than half of which was taken from the Muslims. However, Muslims don‘t drink wine. On the land that was stolen from them they had grown cereals

for the Algerian market. The result has been a continual deterioration of the situation. Cereal production has not increased for 70 years. During this time the Algerian population has trebled. And anyone trying to count this high birth-rate among the benefits from France should remember that it is the poorest populations that have the highest birth-rates.

Will we ask the Algerians to thank our country for allowing their children to be born into poverty, to live as slaves and to die of hunger? For those who might doubt the truth of this, here are some official figures. In 1871, there were 500 kilogrammes of grain for each inhabitant; in 1901, there were 400; in 1940, 250; and in 1945, 200.

Translated into family budgets, which means it is impossible – for most families – to limit their spending on food.

Food takes up all their money; there is nothing left for clothing, housing, buying seed or tools. And the only reason for this increasing impoverishment is that the wonderful colonial agriculture has settled like a canker at the very heart of the country and eats away at everything.

Concentration of land ownership leads to the mechanisation of agriculture. Mainland France is delighted to sell its tractors to the colonists. While the productivity of the Muslims, restricted to the poor land, has fallen by a fifth, that of the colonists increases day by day for their profit alone.

Now mechanisation engenders technology-driven unemployment: agricultural labourers are replaced by machines. This would be of considerable but limited importance if Algeria had any industry. But the colonial system denies it any. The unemployed flock to

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COLONIALISM IS A SYSTEM

the towns where they find work for a few days doing public works, and then they stay there, for want of anywhere else to go. This desperate underclass increases year by year.

Nothing demonstrates better the increasing harshness of the colonial system. First, you occupy the country, then you take the land and exploit the former owners at starvation rates.

Then, with mechanisation, this cheap labour is still too expensive, and you finish up taking from the natives their right to work. All that is left for the Algerians to do, in their own land, at a time of great prosperity, is to die of starvation. Do those in France who dare to complain that Algerians take the jobs of French workers know that 80 per cent of them send half of their wages to their family, and that a million and a half people who have remained in the douars live exclusively on the money sent to them by these 400,000 voluntary exiles? And this is another harsh consequence of the system. The Algerians are obliged to seek in France the jobs that France denies them in Algeria.

There is only one lesson that we, the people of mainland France, can draw from these facts. Colonialism is

in the process of destroying itself. But it still pollutes the air. It is our shame; it mocks or caricatures our laws. It infects us with its racism. As the recent incident in Montpellier showed, it forces our young people to die unwillingly for the Nazi principles we battled ten years ago. It even tries to defend itself by importing Fascism to France.

Our role is to help it die. Not only in Algeria, but everywhere it exists. People who talk of abandoning Algeria are imbeciles – we cannot abandon what we have never owned It is, quite the opposite, a matter of working with the Algerians to construct new relations between a free France and a liberated Algeria. But above all let us not allow ourselves to be diverted from our task by reformist mystification. The neo-colonialist is either a fool who still believes that the colonial system can be overhauled – or a cynic who proposes reforms because he knows that they are ineffective. The reforms will come in their own good time. The Algerian people will implement them. The only thing that we can and must attempt– the essential thing today – is to fight alongside them to deliver both the Algerians and the French from colonial tyranny.

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TINA HARTMANN

NO WEAK WILLED SEDUCED INNOCENT FEMININITY IN GOETHE AND GOUNOD As the most complex of the female figures in Goethe’s Faust, Margarete/ Gretchen deals with concepts of femininity as met in reality at the time of the historical Faust action and into the late Goethe era, and which partially undermine each other. When Faust links arms with Margarete on their first encounter with “Pretty lady, here’s my arm, would you allow me to see you home?” – doing so uninvited, despite his words – this is harassment with clearly sexual connotations, not only in modern eyes. Her clothing makes it clear that she is no aristocratic “lady” but a bourgeois. Margarete recognises immediately that Faust is speaking the language of seduction here, as in the scene as a whole, and she flees. Faust is attracted by her reaction in shunning his look and touch in accordance with the bourgeois moral code.

The signs of bourgeois virtue such as purity, order and patriarchal sense RACHEL WILLIS-SØRENSEN

as MARGUERITE

in Margarete’s room also stimulate Faust’s desire. The scenes already present in Urfaust (the original version) not only show Faust’s individual dependence on the bourgeois, patriarchal code, but also express the basic dialectic dependence of the libertine on the bourgeois moral code in the sense that the seducer only enjoys seduction if the target is an object opposed to his debauchery. Female virtue is the central fetish, and its destruction is proof of personal and predominantly masculine superiority. But Margarete is not only opposed to this dialectic but also an active participant, displaying her virtue performatively. Although she sees through the libertine code and Faust’s intentions, her brief opening speech in the evening – which Faust instructively is not allowed to overhear – shows the difference between the display of morality and her actual susceptibility to Faust as an attractive

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TINA HARTMANN

man, who Margarete further assumes to be an aristocrat on the basis of his clothing and his libertine attitude, and feels flattered by his attention.

The fact that she is not surprised by the latter here – unlike her response at the encounter – also shows that she is perfectly aware of her beauty. Her response to the jewel box also shows that she wants to escape from her position and its gender-defined compulsions, although it is explicitly not marked by poverty. “What good’s your pretty face, your youth? Nice to have but little worth. Men praise you, do it half with pity. What’s on their minds is money, money, gold is their god. Oh, we poor people!” The improvement of her expression from doggerel to rhyming madrigal verse, the basic metre of Faust, takes her through the same metric evolution as the protagonist before her, and marks her as an equal partner and potential tragedienne.

The inversion of the reciprocal desire in the following scenes is based on this double game of bourgeois female virtue and presumed aristocratic masculine debauchery. While Faust is held back in his seduction by the picture of virtue with its religious connotations, Margarete increasingly takes the initiative, by presenting herself to Faust in the role of a potential wife, blending Christian virtues and natural virtues as portrayed by sentimental literature.

In the voluntary detailed report on her dead sister covering 27 verses, Margarete presents herself at the start of the acquaintance with a religious aura as a Nursing Madonna. She uses the difficulty of raising the infant without mother’s milk (which also casts a dubious light on Gretchen’s mother and the brother, presumably still living at

home, who were clearly unconcerned with the survival of the newborn, as they would otherwise have engaged a nursemaid or helped the sister with the motherhood role) to demonstrate her skill as a prospective mother, and also indicated her capacity for unconditional loving submission, which Faust will shortly exploit.

“And so I raised her by myself, with milk and water, made her mine. On my arm and in my lap she was happy, wriggling, growing big.” The episode reveals what is ultimately reserved for Gretchen’s delusion in the prison – the love for the murdered joint child which she – unlike her sister’s mother – wants to nurse. This is an infallible sign that she had already accepted her child before the infanticide, unlike the two executed infanticides Susanna Margaretha Brandt in 1772 in Frankfurt and Johanna Catharina Höhn in 1783 in Jena. Both of them, and particularly Margaretha Brandt, are likely to have had a decisive influence on the concept for the Gretchen figure in Urfaust, were working class servants, and not only virtually without rights or assets but also described as mentally simple (which could have been due to the rigours of imprisonment).

They killed their children directly after birth. In the relatively well documented case of Margaretha Brandt, it is clear from the sources that this was a textbook example of what is in modern terms known as “denial of pregnancy” (initially she even visited a doctor when her period stopped). It was not possible for the court to determine if the child was born alive. Both women had been previously abused or raped.

The situation of unwed mothers in the 17 th century was hopeless in an event

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without male support. Even if punishments varied, total condemnation of the mother and her child accompanied by loss of assets and legal status was to be expected. In urban areas the attitude towards illegitimacy was much more rigid than in country areas, as in contrast to farming environments there was virtually no employment for the children, so that their value depended entirely on their paternal lineage.

This also explains why Margarete’s mother showed no interest in the survival of her own daughter, even though she was legitimate. With support from the family, an illegitimate child would have been a manageable problem for Margarete. But after the death of the mother, and particularly Valentin’s revelation of her shame, the child meant a joint life of misery, as Gustchen rightly points out to the blind beggar Marthe in Lenz’s play Der Hofmeister (The Tutor).

That things come to this pass is due not just to Mephisto’s cunning but also – on careful consideration – the dubious social status of Margarete’s family.

The military position of Margarete’s brother Valentin is informative in a number of ways. Even though a mercenary’s pay in the 16th and 17th centuries was significantly higher than that of a journeyman (Valentin identifies himself as such here with references to the avarice of his mother, who lends money under cover of ostentatious piety), mercenaries were recruited from the “social groups not required for the economy’s production process.” As the only son of a bourgeois who was not without means, Valentin neither took over his father’s trade (?) nor his legacy but became a soldier.

This indicates that he had done something which required at least a

temporary absence from society. As a soldier, he was professionally entitled and required to rob, murder and rape, at least under the realistic laws of war in the 16th and 17 th centuries. Even so – or precisely because of this – he acted “worthily” and “correctly” in this extremist male role model, and simply by virtue of his gender assumed authority over his sister. Clearly, he had no emotional tie to her which involved any interest in her survival or even welfare.

Her only significance was in enhancing his (damaged?) honour.

As such, Valentin incorporates the patriarchal logic in its most brutal form, which – given the sole function of women – consists in ensuring the purity of patrilinear succession. Infanticide as a necessary consequence of social and family ostracism of single mothers is one of the central themes of the Sturm und Drang authors, even if the underlying motivation is less emancipatory than sexual and debauched.

For example, in Die Kindermörderin (The Child Murderess) by Heinrich Leopold Wagner, who Goethe believed had stolen the “hot” topic of infanticide from him.

The guilt for Gretchen’s infanticide is attributed to Faust, in addition to society, who – regardless of his feelings – acted as a seducer by leaving his lover for several weeks after the first night together, and even after her brother’s murder (while defending himself) not worrying about her whereabouts. This explains Margarete’s lines ”Hurry!

Save your poor child. […]” Margarete’s preceding virginal motherhood, her striving for a better position in life, her love and admiration for Faust and her apparently strong Christian ethic – particularly where Gretchen is con-

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cerned – modify her infanticide to an extended suicide, and explain why she subsequently is unable to flee with Faust and go on living.

At the same time, Margarete is anything but the weak-willed seduced innocent that she has been mainly seen as into the 20th century. The scene by the well shows her – in contrast to Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) – as aware of the possible biological and social consequences of spending the night with a lover before marriage. The decision is taken in Gretchen’s room – “My heart yearns for him” – through her own sexual desire, which is more clearly articulated in Urfaust by the word “loins”, contradicting the widespread view of Gretchen as the “personification of submission.” The way that Margarete’s song changes from the folksong “Es war ein König in Thule” to the material and formal structure of an aria is another point where she is raised to the status of an erotic individual fully capable of acting as such.

This situation, which is the first appearance of the familiar form “Gretchen” as the speaker, is where she also abandons her formal name, as she does in subsequent scenes of inner distress (by the well, at the city wall, the cathedral). In prison the condemned infanticide reappears with her full formal name.

Charles Gounod, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré present Margarete as a tragic heroine at the centre of their Faust opera, but also reduce her dramatic complexity at the same time.

Where Margarete appears in Goethe in a tug of war between society, her own erotic desire and love of Faust, the last is the driver of the action in the opera,

with the other aspects subordinated to this. As the title heroine, Marguerite is all heart, the drive of her (and Faust’s) lust is outsourced to a satanic Méphistophélès, who diverts Marguerite’s “pure” love into sexual activity.

In the mid-19 th century, female sexuality is no longer a lust which in the worst-case men are unable to satisfy. The sex act is reinterpreted in the dual sense as the “act” of love for the needs of men. This makes the woman the civil­ising corrective to male passion at the start of the Victorian era.

The libretto bundles and condenses Marguerite’s diverse reflections on her social status in the “jewel aria” before the jewel box, whose bubbling joie de vivre suffices without the accompanying “Oh, we poor people.” However, this is not a departure from Goethe’s text by the libretto, but merely from the (earlier) perception of Gretchen. By “demonising” sexuality, the opera succeeds in defining Marguerite as “pure” despite her misconduct in the Christian sense, and moving her closer to a Madonna figure through allusions to Catholic church music.

While the salvation is successful at the end, and – as the music implies – already includes Faust (anticipating the end of Goethe’s Faust Part 2), the asexual concept of love is undermined by the Siébel, who has been transformed into the drinking companion of Marguerite’s admirer. Following the logic of 19th century opera, casting Siébel as a pants part demonstrates the asexuality of the character, and shows “his” impotence in the way that “his” touch wilts flowers.

Together with the social contexts, Marguerite’s culpability is also reduced, since her mother is already dead

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by the start of the opera. Mentioned almost in passing, the infanticide is the result of the madness caused by the disappearance of the lover and Mephisto’s threats of damnation (the mad scene planned in the libretto was discarded, and possibly never composed), which reflects the legal concept of diminished

responsibility and milder punishment of infanticide by unmarried mothers at the tie of the opera’s development. By making Marguerite’s love for Faust evolve into the desire to die for him right at the start, she finds her place as his saviour in the suffering and dying female victim of the great opera of the 19th century.

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Next pages: SCENE

ANDREAS LÁNG

THE DEVIL LIKES CHOCOLATE TOO A TOUR THROUGH THE HISTORY OF

FAUST PRODUCTIONS IN VIENNA If you stroll through the Vienna State Opera for a closer look at the architecture and fittings, you’re likely to spend rather longer in the so-called Schwind Foyer in the first circle. Here, the interested visitor can see at a glance the conceptual transformation over time in what was (or is) seen as the immutable core repertory. This is because the Schwind Foyer houses paintings and sculptures of the composers and their works that were held to be decisive for the programme in 1869, the year of the opening of the house. The representatives of French opera immortalised here, for example, are Boieldieu, Meyerbeer, and Rossini with his Guillaume Tell, composers and works (with the exception of Rossini) unlikely to figure in a modern audience’s plans. This was before the world premières of many later French standard works such as Carmen, Manon, Werther or Les Contes d’Hoffmann, so there was no question

of including these composers in the Court Opera pantheon.

But where is Charles Gounod?

Hardly any other French opera composer was as popular in Vienna in the second half of the 19th century as this great Romantic, who even composed several pieces for Vienna’s St. Charles’ church. It took just three years from its world première for his Faust to be presented at the Kärntnertortheater, the smaller predecessor of the Vienna State Opera and be added to the standard works in its programme (première 8 February, 1862), although this was greatly to the displeasure of several national purists, and particularly the critics who claimed that a composer with “Romance origins” was unable to comprehend the “profundity of Celto-Germanic” creations (copyright: Wiener Zeitung).

According to these self-appointed style police, however, the “artistic vil-

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lains” were less Gounod as the misinterpreter, but the opera house director personally, who had dared present the work at all, followed by the artists who performed it, and naturally the wretched audience, who cared nothing for Philistinism and flocked to the countless sold-out performances. The only homage to Goethe, which became a tradition on all German-speaking stages, was – to preserve the necessary distinction – renaming the opera as Margarethe (although not, interestingly enough, Méphistophélès, given that his role was significantly larger than Marguerite’s). Was this prejudice the reason why there is no bust of Gounod to be seen in the Schwind Foyer today? Or were people mistrustful of the meteoric rise to fame?

In any case, there were an almost unimaginable 110 performances of Faust in the Kärntnertortheater in just under eight years, making the piece one of the most played operas, even though its famous hit (Valentin’s aria) had not even been composed yet. But there was also something for the eye to enjoy. The colourful sets varied between early Gothic and a sort of Romantic Neogothic in the style of Caspar David Friedrich, depending on whether the designs were by the Polish-Austrian Theodor Jachimovicz (acts 1, 2 and 4) or the Italian-Austrian Carlo Brioschi (acts 3 and 5). The reasons for the switch in the church scene to a spooky nocturnal graveyard (with the cathedral illuminated in the background) were mainly practical. This avoided over-long scene changes and also the “theological” problem of having a devil working his will in a church. There was nothing like a production in the modern sense.

In the 1869/70 season, Vienna had the luxury of having two court opera houses as direct neighbours – the Kärntnertortheater, with the large Haus am Ring just a few metres away.

The reason was that there were initially not enough sets to keep the new stage fully occupied, so they alternated. Existing productions were staged in the old house, which was still in existence, adapted revivals or premières in today’s State Opera. Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette was the second première at the Haus am Ring on 30 May, 1869, and Faust (or Margarethe) had to stay at the old venue a while longer. This did not take long, in fact, as the public expected the relocation.

As a result, the second Vienna Faust production took place on 28 March, 1870 (although this should really be described as a pompous series of images with staged entrances and exits). This production by the Bohemian set designer Johann Kautsky gave the aged doctor a study on the scale of the main hall of an aristocrat’s castle, which surprised many patrons. Given such princely surroundings, Mephisto’s attempts to entice Faust with gold could have little effect! By contrast, other scenes, such as the garden, were publicly criticised – the Neue Freie Presse spoke of “improbable flowers and all sorts of rubbish”, and (even worse) of a decline from the standards of earlier productions. Something new could not possibly be better than what was familiar. And because people were dissatisfied, the production stayed on the programme for four decades and 342 performances – a real Viennese fate.

When it came to casting, audiences saw pretty much all the great names, on the stage and on the podium – not

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least Gustav Mahler, who took on the piece several times with great enthusiasm. And there were many surprises, right from the start, such as the discovery of Ernestine Gindele, who replaced the public’s darling Bertha Ehnn as Marguerite in the première (postponed four days because of Ehnn’s illness), launching her career as a versatile and successful ensemble member. There were other twists and turns in the history of the piece at the State Opera – three times during this period the work was called neither Faust nor Margarethe, but Margherita.

Apparently, even an invited Italian guest ensemble did not dare to perform the work under Goethe’s original title.

In any case, the Viennese experienced a “dramma lirico” by Gounod, as a presumably welcome change from the usual German-language performances.

The first French-language performance was in 1928 in the course of a tour by the Opéra Comique, not repeated until 1963, after which it was a permanent feature.

Not everything that Felix von Wein­ gartner, Gustav Mahler’s much-criticised successor as Court Opera director, did gave grounds for criticism. For example, the new production of Faust (still called Margharete) conducted personally by Weingartner was seen as a milestone in Vienna’s reception of the piece. Wilhelm Wymetal was a skilful director, offering the public a genuine, detailed and lively theatrical experience, rather than a concert performance in costume. Wymetal created three-dimensional characters, and tried to justify their actions by subtle, psychologically motivated direction.

The fact that he had Lucie Marcel (the first Viennese Elektra, and sub-

sequent wife of the director) as a dramatically talented performer in the première undoubtedly contributed to the success. This production also lasted for many years (did singers such as Leo Slezak as Faust pay attention to all the subtleties of the staging?) and was only banished from the repertory in 1939 by the Nazi terror, along with other works of French composers.

The return of democracy was accompanied by Faust or Margarethe (in the temporary quarters at the Volksoper building), along with the approval of the audiences and the familiar objections of certain critics.

“Gounod’s saccharine Faust … is certainly a mere travesty of the original work of genius. This is not an opera for experiment by the director, the music lacks the psychological depth,” was the Wiener Kurier’s verdict after the première on 20 June, 1948. Perhaps director Kálmán Nádasdy was simply lacking inspiration? Or faith in the piece? In any case, there was no sign of any overall concept, the individual scenes stood in a row like unconnected foreign bodies in a Gothic setting. Audiences could console themselves with outstanding casts – Eberhard Waechter and Josef Metternich as Valentin, Helge Roswaenge as Faust and Eszther Réthy as Marguerite.

The next première in 1963 brought a different setting (back at the Vienna State Opera, and sung in French, although still under the title Margharethe). This production was driven less by Paul Hager’s solid direction than the unusually creative designs of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who at the time appeared in Vienna exclusively as a set and costume designer, before going on to become a world-famous

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THE DEVIL LIKES CHOCOLATE TOO

director. Ponnelle contributed a cornucopia of ideas, and found solutions in every scene which were individually enough to justify a visit. (It was not until decades later that Aleksander Denić presented stage designs on a comparable level in the current production, although very different in style.)

Ponnelle’s study was a cabinet of wonders, filled with all kinds of fantastic pieces of equipment – gearwheels, shells, mathematical studies, bizarre machines, musical instruments, hanging in a mystical arrangement from the rafters. Not only is it not surprising that the devil should appear in such a setting – it seems virtually inevitable, given the surroundings. The other scenes combine an enchanting mix of architectonic elements extending into both the magical and real realms. Casting was an embarras de choix – should Hilde Güden or Wilma Lippe sing Marguerite in the première, Giuseppe Zampieri or Waldemar Kmentt sing Faust, Hermann Uhde or Nicolai Ghiaurov sing Méphistophélès, Kostas Paskalis or Eberhard Waechter sing Valentin?

The final choice was to cast them all, with two premières (the details of the casts were changed up to the last minute, with Wilma Lippe moving from the second to the first – understandably, very much to Güden’s displeasure). There was no change in conductor, where Georges Prêtre himself conductor both premières, as his first State Opera new production.

Director Egon Seefehlner, who was also a connoisseur of programming and happily chose works and casts he personally enjoyed, presented another Faust in 1985 towards the end of his second term of office (with Francisco Araiza in the title role), which caused

a scandal that is hard to understand in retrospect. While Ken Russell put Marguerite (Gabriela Beňaćková) in a nun’s costume, had Méphistophélès eat a chocolate crucifix, added two deaf children to the scene, and came up with other, similar “shocking” details, this was hardly enough to conceal the fact that it was all “prettily arranged” (Kurier) in the old-fashioned style.

Properly speaking, the high point in the première’s staging was when Ken Russell came out in front of the curtain at the end of the performance and mooned the enraged and booing audience. The absence of Alain Lombard as conductor and his replacement by Erich Binder as “only” the Philharmonic’s concert master can be dismissed as a piece of bad luck for the theatre.

After an unusually long break for the piece of 18 years, Nicolas Joel set a new direction on 11 October, 2008. His outstanding Daphne a couple of years earlier aroused hopes of a clever and contemporary production. Unfortunately, he became seriously ill before the start of rehearsals, and was unable to carry out the work in person. In addition, the set and costume designer Andreas Reinhardt died prematurely, leaving only numerous drafts. Not surprisingly, there was a debate during rehearsals whether the first series should be given as a concert performance.

Ultimately, the piece was staged, with Stéphane Roche and Kristina Siegel as executors attempting to do justice to the drafts and ideas and breathe life into them.

There were also problems behind the scenes with the music. Bertrand de Billy, who was conducting the new production, had developed a version in which many passages would be

37

THE DEVIL LIKES CHOCOLATE TOO

heard at Vienna State Opera for the first time. However, Angela Gheorgiu successfully refused to sing Marguerite’s spinning wheel aria. A note to this effect in the programme booklet at the time documents the prima donna’s escapades. (Although this omission was made good with later interpreters, other passages in act 5 were cut from one series to another). Even so, there was well-deserved applause at the end, at least for conductor and singers (besides Gheorghiu these included Roberto Alagna as Faust, Kwangchul Youn as Méphistophélès and Adrian Eröd as Valentin). Other prominent sing-

ers enriched this sparse setting in the following ten years, for example with Jonas Kaufmann and Piotr Beczała in the title role, Soile Isokoski and Sonya Yoncheva as Marguerite and Erwin Schrott as Méphistophélès.

The première of the current production directed by Frank Castorf (in his delayed house début) was conducted

by Bertrand de Billy on 29 April, 2021.

Due to COVID, this was without an audience, although the public was able to follow the performance in a live stream, and in an ORF broadcast several days later.

38

A RT H U R R I M B AU D /

DÉMOCR ATIE

“The flag advances into the filthy landscape, and our dialect stifles the exotic drum.

In the population centres we will nourish the most cynical prostitution.

We will massacre the logical uprisings.

To the countries, hammered and softened up!

In the service of the most monstrous military and industrial exploitation.

See you again, here, wherever.

Voluntary recruits, we will have a fierce ideology, too stupid for science, clever enough for comfort.

To hell with the world.

This is the true route. Forward, march!”

Read by Méphistophélès at the start of act 1

ADAM PALKA as MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS

IMPRINT CHARLES GOUNOD

FAUST SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 29 APRIL 2021 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, ANDREAS LÁNG, OLIVER LÁNG Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Image concept MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN (Cover) All performance fotos by MICHAEL PÖHN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES – All texts were taken from the Faust-programme of the Vienna State Opera (première: April 29, 2021). IMAGE REFERENCES COVER Acrobat Karl Carsony balances on a champagne bottle 1950 – Carsony Brothers – unpubl. (Photo by Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images). ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith.

Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.

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