La Damnation de Faust Op.24

Part One

Introduction

Peasants’ Dance

Hungarian March

Part Two

Faust alone in his study – Easter Hymn

Faust and Mephistopheles

Drinking Chorus – Brander’s Song – Mephistopheles’ Song

Mephistopheles – Chorus of Gnomes and Sylphs – Dance of the Sylphs

Finale: Soldiers’ Chorus – Students’ Song

Part Three

Faust’s Aria

Faust and Mephistopheles

Marguerite – The King of Thule

Evocation – Minuet of the Will-o’-the-Wisps – Mephistopheles’ Serenade

Marguerite and Faust

Trio and Chorus

Part Four

Marguerite’s Romance

Invocation to Nature

Recitative and Hunt

The Ride to the Abyss

Pandaemonium

In Heaven

Berlioz first read Goethe’s Faust in 1828 in the recently published version by Gérard de Nerval, the earliest French translation worthy of the German original. “I couldn’t put it down,“ the composer recalled. “I read it incessantly, at meals, at the theatre, in the street, everywhere.” He was so thrilled by it, in fact, that within a year he had written Eight Scenes from Faust for solo voices, chorus and orchestras, which he published at his own expense as Oeuvre 1 – “the most outstanding Opus I,” according to Ernest Newman, “that world of music has ever known.” He had the Eight Scenes performed in the Salle du Conservatoire towards the end of 1829 and then, in spite of having made a small profit, withdrew the score from circulation, destroying as many copies as he could get hold of.

The reasons for this drastic rejection of the work are not entirely clear. We know that the Paris performance had convinced him that some of the score was “very badly written,” but that applied to only two of the Eight Scenes and these he could have revised in a second edition. The probability is that he had already conceived the idea of a very much more comprehensive treatment of Faust than a few songs and choruses and picturesque orchestral pieces. Other work intervened, however – the Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini, Roméo et Juliette – and it wasn’t until 1845 that he made a start on the Damnation of Faust. It would be a large-scale concert work incorporating the Eight Scenes but within a context covering all the major events in Part I of Goethe’s drama (Nerval’s translation of Part II, in which Faust is saved from damnation, had been published by then but it was not part of Berlioz’s concept). The work was completed in less than a year and first performed, to a disastrously small audience, at the Opéra-Comique in December 1846.

The fact that Berlioz conducted the Damnation of Faust in an opera house, the only space available at the time, does not mean that he considered it a stage work. He did think of adapting it, as Mephistopheles, for the London opera season in 1848 but that didn’t happen and as far as he was concerned it remained a “concert opera” or, as he described it on the title page of the score, a “dramatic legend.” The first stage version was made by Raoul Gunsbourg, director of Monte Carlo Opera, who shortened it, re-ordered it and presented it as an opera in five acts in 1893. Many other opera companies have done something similar since then but never without either seriously betraying the composer’s intentions or accepting that, as Berlioz wrote it, the Damnation of Faust is not viable in dramatic terms. As a concert piece, of course, it doesn’t have to be.

Part One

What reasonably competent librettist would, for example, open an opera set in Germany with its hero observing the weather, peasants and soldiers on the plains of Hungary? Dramatically, the whole of Part One is superfluous. Musically, it contains some of the most inspired material in the whole work. The opening pastoral episode, which rises to a kind of ecstasy in spite of Faust’s dissatisfaction with the human condition, is followed by a choral peasants’ dance and, the whole point of Part One, the Hungarian March – a devastatingly effective arrangement of the Rákoczy march which had caused such a sensation in Pest in February 1846 that Berlioz just had to use it again.

Part Two

The second part opens where Goethe’s Faust begins – in Faust’s study as he contemplates his unhappiness, decides to put an end to it and is saved at the last moment by the intervention of an Easter hymn. The sombre chromatic fugue that opens the scene, symbolising the pointless complexity of his learning, meets the pure F major harmonies of the Easter Hymn which reminds him of the faith he once had and, indeed, renews it. This is too much for Mephistopheles (Mephisto from now on) who, with an explosive gesture from the brass, makes his first appearance at this point. Promising Faust untold pleasures, he whisks him away on flying violins to Auerbach’s Cellar in Leipzig. Not surprisingly perhaps, what Faust hears there – a drinking chorus for tenors and basses, Brander’s drunken song about a poisoned rat baked in an oven, a blasphemous four-part “Amen” fugue on Brander’s tune, Mephisto’s eerily scored song of the flea – only repels him.

Mephisto whisks Faust away again, this time to a blissfully peaceful scene amid woods and fields on the banks of the Elbe where, in a short aria accompanied by the trombones now associated with his devilry, he puts him to sleep and fills his dreams with a complex and yet magical chorus of Gnomes and Sylphs and a vision of the beautiful, innocent girl he has selected for him. This, as one gathers from his ecstatic exclamations of “Marguerite!” is very much more to Faust’s taste than Auerbach’s Cellar. After an enchanting, delicately scored waltz-time Ballet of the Sylphs, the melody poised over a long-sustained monotone on cellos and basses, Faust demands to be taken to Marguerite. Faust and Mephisto follow groups of soldiers, who sing in 6/8 time, and students, who sing in 3/4 time, first separately and then, in a technical tour de force, together.

Part Three

The significance of the trumpets and drums sounding the retreat at the beginning of Part Three, and allowing Berlioz to indulge in his favourite offstage brass effects, become clear in Part Four. The action begins with the tender aria sung by Faust as, in her absence, he breathes the chaste air of Marguerite’s room. Mephisto bursts in with his explosive brass companions and, hearing a brief anticipation on clarinet of Marguerite’s “King of Thule,” warns Faust that she is coming, hides him behind a curtain and disappears. As she enters we learn that she has already fallen in love with Faust in a dream. She cannot believe there is any future for her with him, however, and, to the accompaniment of an eloquent solo viola, consoles herself with the ballad of the king who remained faithful to the grave.

In the street outside Mephisto summons the will-o’-the’wisps to help in the seduction-by-proxy of Marguerite. In an extended orchestral episode featuring mainly woodwind they dance their brilliantly colourful minuet and, as if that were not enough, Mephisto sings a diabolically handsome serenade. It is clear from what follows, however, that Marguerite needs no such supernatural encouragement. Beginning with a reminder on oboe of her “King of Thule” ballad before she is aware of Faust’s presence, their duet develops with rare romantic inspiration to a lyrical passion which, alas, is interrupted at its height by another explosive entry of Mephisto. This time it is to warn the lovers that the neighbours suspect what is going on and have alerted Marguerite’s mother. At the end of an urgently expressive, dramatically constructed trio and chorus Mephisto drags Faust away.

Part Four

The last part of The Damnation of Faust begins with the second of Marguerite’s two great arias. Accompanied by a cor anglais as eloquent as the viola in her “King of Thule” ballad, her romance is based on the same words from Goethe’s drama as those that inspired Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. The trumpets and drums sounding the retreat remind her, poignantly, of when she and Faust first met.

The scene changes to a landscape of forests and caverns where, in a fearless Invocation to Nature, Faust declares that it is only in nature that he can find relief from his misery, however wild it (and its four bassoons, cellos and basses) might be. The storm subsides but now, against a background of hunting horns, he is confronted by Mephisto who happily breaks the news that Marguerite is in prison, condemned to death for (inadvertently but reprehensibily) causing the death of her mother. Faust is horrified and will do anything to save he. This is Mephisto’s opportunity to get Faust to sign his soul away – which, with an ominously quiet stroke of a gong, he duly does.

The Ride to the Abyss, as Faust and Mephisto mount black horses to take them to Marguerite’s rescue, or so Faust thinks, is one of the most imaginatively scored episodes in all of Berlioz – galloping rhythms on violins, an urgent commentary on the oboe, a peasant chorale for women’s and children’s voices, dramatic exchanges between Faust and Mephisto, low brass and then high woodwind representing hallucinations of, respectively, hideous monsters and terrifying night birds, a death knell on tubular bells. It ends not with the rescue of Marguerite but with a plunge into the abyss. “I am the victor!” proclaims Mephisto.

The last two scenes are vividly contrasted. The first, an infernal chorus set in a luridly coloured Pandaemonium, confirms in no uncertain terms the damnation of Faust and the supremacy of Mephisto. The second, which is as heavenly – with its rippling harps, radiant strings, celestial choirs and children’s voices – as the first is hellish, secures the redemption of Marguerite, whose only sin was that she loved too much.

Gerald Larner © 2009