Another Take on Faust

When it comes to the world of music, no writer held more influence over the composers of the nineteenth century than Goethe, and no work of his had more impact on music than his lengthy poetic-philosophical drama Faust.  The first part of this enormous work is full of elements calculated to fit perfectly into the sensual side of the Romantic movement: magic spells, demonic influences, exotic locales, mythical beauty queens, and passionate love affairs are only the most prominent ingredients.  The second part ends in a mystical scene of an ascent to a kind of secular heaven revisioned in humanist terms.

It's no wonder that so many composers were drawn to this rich store of material.  Among them, you have to number Berlioz and his famous "dramatic legend," La Damnation de Faust.  Also, there is the magnificent Faust Symphony in Three Character Portraits by Liszt (discussed in this previous blog post:  Three Characters in Sound ).  Perhaps grandest of all the concert works on the Faust theme is the second part of Mahler's majestic Eighth Symphony (the Symphony of a Thousand as it's often called, not by the composer's wish!). 

In the opera world, there's Gounod's Faust, which mainly appeals to me because of the delicious ballet score embedded in the work.  There's Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele (discussed in this previous blog post: A Very "Heavenly" Opera ).  Ludwig Spohr also wrote a Faust opera.  Then there's the very rare Doktor Faust by Ferrucio Busoni which actually reaches back for source material beyond Goethe to the medieval puppet plays upon which Goethe based his work.

This is pretty impressive company, but certainly Robert Schumann's work can hold its head high with the best of these composers.  And yet, for reasons which baffle me, his late masterpiece, Scenes from Goethe's Faust has remained a truly rare bird.  It's not often performed and has only been recorded in studio twice, as far as I can discover.  I can only say that I feel this work, which occupied Schumann at intervals over a period of nine years, is a real masterpiece deserving of much wider hearing.

Schumann has made no effort to cover the whole of the Faust story, as his title makes quite clear.  Instead, he has covered selected events from both parts of Goethe in a sequence of six scenes divided into two parts.  A third part sets the final scene of the entire drama, the scene of Faust's transfiguration and ascent.  Listeners familiar with the Mahler Eighth Symphony will certainly recognise the text of this final extended scene!  It's intriguing to compare and contrast between the approaches of these two composers to the same text.

Schumann's concert work opens with a turbulent, dramatic overture which he considered one of the finest things he ever wrote (I concur).  The riches in the first two parts fully live up to the power of this opening.  With skillful writing for solo and choral voices and suitably vivid orchestration, Schumann paints effectively each of the six scenes he has chosen: a Garden Scene, a scene in front of a statue of the Mater Dolorosa, a scene in the Cathedral, a sunrise, a midnight scene, and the death of Faust.

The third part, the transfiguration and ascent of Faust, consists of seven movements.  Each of the seven is well suited to the portion of Goethe's esoteric and image-laden poetry being set.  The approach is very different from Mahler's setting of the same text in one continuous movement with much reference to the same basic melodic materials throughout.

Up to this point the music has been beautifully suited to the texts at every point, eminently singable and with much originality in harmony and orchestration.  The grand final Chorus mysticus starts out very much in keeping with the deeply mystical tone of the final stanza of Goethe's poem.  But then comes the one real miscalculation in Schumann's scheme.  When he arrives at the final line, "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" ("The Eternal Womanly leads us onwards"), the choir and orchestra pause expectantly on a promisingly mysterious chord.  Then, instead of a magnificent peroration as with Liszt or Mahler, the music lapses for that final line into a schoolboyish fugue of such robust jollity that it could as easily have been a drinking song in a beer cellar.  The first time I heard it, it simply made me cringe!

It's an unfortunate lapse of judgement, and a sad blot on an otherwise impressive work.  I can only think that Schumann was suffering from long-learned scruples about how a major work for choir and orchestra must contain a fugue!  This is the kind of academic thinking that generated hundreds -- thousands -- of scholarly and boring fugal movements by all kinds of composers throughout this time in musical history.  In many ways, I think the composers who are most known today were those who had the strength of will to burst through those academic rules and find their own path.

At any rate, after the fugue has mercifully run its course the music returns to a more subtle and contemplative tone for a brief, quiet coda.

Even with that misbegotten fugal movement sticking in the road, I certainly feel that Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust is in no way unfit to stand alongside the settings by the other composers I've mentioned.  It remained largely unknown until Benjamin Britten's trailblazing performances and recording in the 1960s.  Much more recently, just a few years ago, Antoni Wit added to his long list of magnificent choral performances in Warsaw with a new recording for Naxos, which is still readily and easily available either on disc or as a download.  I remember listening to the Britten recording once, many years ago, and would love to hear it again now that I've become much more familiar with the work from Wit's version.