The development of the Faust legend in modern European consciousness; the essential implications of the two parts of Goethe’s Faust.
It is probably the case that most people, when asked if they are familiar with the story of Faust would think of Gounod’s opera. Students of German may well have studied Goethe’s Faust in the original language, and those studying English literature might have read Christopher Marlowe’s play, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. The majority though, will be familiar with Faust through the popular opera.
The legend of Faust seems to have emerged in the middle of the sixteenth century. The first story was published anonymously in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1587, and in 1604, a short version of Marlowe’s play went into print (ten years after his death), the full version being published ten years after that. Goethe’s version of Faust took most of his life to complete. Parts of Part I, written in his early ‘twenties and now known as Urfaust, were never published in his lifetime. Twenty years later he took up the project again, and finally published Faust, der Tragödie, erster Teil (Faust, The Tragedy, Part I), in 1808 when he was nearly sixty. The second part of the work, Faust, der Tragödie, zweiter Teil, was published after his death in 1832. Thus there exists the minor curiosity that both Marlowe’s and Goethe’s full versions of Faust were published posthumously (albeit in Goethe’s case according to his own wishes).
In considering the question of Faust in modern European consciousness therefore, we are presented with a problem: which Faust? The Faust of Gounod’s opera (based on Goethe’s Faust, Part I) is by far the best known, and considering the argument to be followed, will be summarized here.
Faust, an old man, rails against nature and the Creator[1]:
I see nothing! I know nothing! Nothing ...
But this God, what can he do for me?
Will he give back love, youth and faith?
Be damned, oh human delights …
Damned be happiness …
Damned science, prayer and faith …
Come to me, Satan! Come to me …
Satan in the form of Mephistopheles duly appears and offers Faust riches, glory, and power; however Faust craves:
… a treasure which contains all … Youth!
Mephistopheles agrees to provide this in exchange for:
Almost nothing … Here, I am at your service …
But, (down) there (là-bas), you will be at mine!
The duet that follows betrays Gounod’s view of what lies at the root of Faust’s desires. In Faust’s words:
For me pleasures … young maidens ... their caresses … their desires!
For me energy, powerful instincts …
And wild orgies of the heart and senses!
Ardent youth, to me your desires … your intoxication, your pleasures …
As the opera unfolds, Faust seduces Marguerite, an innocent young virgin, with the help of a box of jewels supplied by Mephistopheles. He then kills Marguerite’s brother, Valentin, who challenges him for dishonouring his sister, again with Mephistopheles’ assistance. In the final scene, Faust, having deserted Marguerite, now appears to have fallen in love with her and comes to free her from her prison cell where she is condemned to death for killing their new-born child and poisoning her mother. Marguerite is teetering on insanity, but although she recognizes Faust, having seen Mephistopheles she refuses to come with them. Mephistopheles urges them both to make haste otherwise it will be too late, but Marguerite appeals to Heaven for redemption:
My God, protect me ... Pure angels …
Carry my soul to the bosom of Heaven!
Just God, to you I abandon myself!
Mephistopheles hastens Faust away, and a choir of angels proclaim that Marguerite is saved, at which point the opera ends. Faust’s fate, though, is ambiguous; he and Mephistopheles having simply left the prison.
Most people when questioned about the plot of (Gounod’s) Faust would say that after Marguerite’s redemption, Faust was dragged down to Hell, Mephistopheles invoking the contract between them. Although this is true in Marlowe’s play it is not the case in the opera. The libretto, written by Jules Barbier, gives the last word before the choir of angels to Mephistopheles, speaking to Faust:
Let us hasten! Let us hasten to leave this place.
Already the day is flooding the sky! Judged!!
(The last, referring to Marguerite)
The libretto was based loosely on Goethe’s Faust, Part I, where the final scene is:[2]
Mephistopheles: She is condemned!
A Voice (from above): She is redeemed!
Mephistopheles (to Faust): Come to me! (He vanishes with Faust)
The ‘Come to me!’ (in the original, ‘Her zu mir!’) seems to be unambiguous. The sense is, ‘Come here, you are mine now!’
So even though the libretto of the opera is not completely clear at the end, Faust and Mephistopheles simply leaving, the usual interpretation in the staging and in the minds of the public (and the apparent meaning at the end of Goethe’s Faust Part I) is that Faust is dragged kicking and screaming to Hell.
The parallels between this perceived legend of Faust and modern European life are almost too obvious to state. There is now, as never before, an almost universal obsession with youth. Bernard Shaw quipped ‘Youth is wasted on the young …’, and the multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry flourishes because women (and men) – having been granted much longer life-spans due to vast improvements in medicine – are determined to put the body-clock back, visually at least. The main purpose of this, as well as looking good among peers, is to attract members of the opposite sex. Apart from creams and other preparations to reduce or remove wrinkles, there are hair dyes to banish grey hair, dental treatment to repair or replace unsightly or missing teeth, cosmetic surgery to lift faces and improve breasts, remove bags from below the eyes and even bulk body-fat from elsewhere, and laser treatment for skin blemishes. It is also now possible, routinely, to replace worn-out hip and knee joints. All of this is available to anyone with an adequate bank-balance.
Faust’s anticipation of sensual delights is similarly mirrored in current life, where blatant Sex is used to sell almost everything. Either men are targeted because motor cars, personal hygiene products, after-shave lotions, deodorants, clothes, hair treatments or holiday destinations imply the attention of young, attractive women; or women are encouraged to use perfumes, creams and hair-treatments or buy clothes etc because they will attract rich, good-looking, high-status males. Added to which the sexual drive of men, blunted by old age, can now be restored with a small blue pill, and hormone replacement therapy can, to some extent, do the same for women.
But all this temporary rejuvenation simply puts off the inevitable; just like Faust, at the end of our allotted period, we are all taken by the grim reaper. In the end death, and/or Hell, can only be delayed.
On a more intellectual level, if we consider that in the staging of Gounod’s Faust, Faust is usually portrayed as a learned scholar, then referring back to Goethe, Faust says at the beginning of Part I,
Well, that’s Philosophy I’ve read,
And Law and Medicine, and I fear
Theology too, from A to Z;
Hard studies all, that have cost me dear.
And so I sit, poor silly man,
No wiser now than when I began.
Faust concludes that mere knowledge imparts no wisdom. The eternal questions – the meaning of life and the existence of God or an afterlife – are unanswered by scholarship. As an avowed ‘non-Christian’, these issues no doubt weighed heavily on Goethe himself, as they have vexed philosophers for more than two thousand years. In modern life, our formal knowledge of the World is almost immeasurably greater than it was in Goethe’s time, and yet anxiety, stress, unhappiness and dissatisfaction are endemic. Developments in medicine, engineering, manufacturing, even democracy, have provided modern Europeans with a standard of living of a quality undreamed of by Goethe, even with his servants and the other trappings of privileged life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Modern society seeks to mitigate anxieties in the population at large by the liberal application of ‘Bread and Circuses’, a term which although used mockingly by Juvenal in the first century AD, is surprisingly apposite today. To a thinking person, of course, that is not enough, although the provision of adequate food and entertainment does make the bearing of universal uncertainties easier. One manifestation of these anxieties is a clear polarization of beliefs, with Theists becoming more fundamental in their views, particularly in the USA, countered by proselytizing atheists like Richard Dawkins, preaching the truth of the blessed Charles Darwin. Others turn to so-called New Age ‘philosophies’ like astrology, tarot cards, crystals, numerology and other matters with Faustian-like undertones. It is notable, for example, that attendance at Stonehenge to watch the midsummer sunrise over the stones is greater than ever before, with thousands of people seeking truth through forgotten pagan ritual.
As a footnote, it is also worthwhile pointing to the cynical and mocking way in which Mephistopheles comments on human endeavours, in particular the ideals of love and honour. Cynicism about almost everything seems to be a way of life in modern Britain – perhaps with some justification. So Mephistopheles’ attitude also resonates with life in the present.
All of this points to the fact that the issues raised in Faust perplex and exercise people more today than ever before. The conclusion is that the Faust tradition is universal in its appeal, and is probably far more relevant to so-called civilized Europeans in the twenty-first century, than it was to the occupants of nineteenth-century Germany and France, or early seventeenth-century England.
Consideration of the ‘essential implications’ of the two parts of Goethe’s Faust is made difficult by the very strange nature of Faust, Part II. As previously noted, it was not published until after Goethe’s death in 1832 at the age of 83. It is not appropriate in a short essay to analyse when in his life Goethe wrote what bits of Faust, but two facts are apparent from existing scholarship: firstly, the writing occupied virtually the whole of his creative life; secondly, he had the entire structure of the work in mind quite early on.
The English translation of Faust, Part II used for this essay, quotes Emil Staiger, a Goethe student and critic, speaking of the book as, ‘A story-book full of wonders, wisdom and far-ranging fancy.’[3] In his introduction to part II, the translator, David Luke, commenting on the differences between parts I and II, says that the story (of part II) would make almost as much sense,
… if the hero’s name were not Faust but, say, Roland, or Rinaldo or
Walther von der Vogelweide …
This writer would hazard a guess that Faust, Part II, hardly figures in European consciousness at all, mainly because the mystical and epic nature of the writing make it very hard reading. In fact, in a very real sense, it verges on the unreadable. Faust, Part II, is a strange Odyssey. It has Faust and Mephistopheles on a journey meeting an emperor and his minions, and encountering a positive pantheon of classical Greek deities. These include Helen of Troy, with whom he has an ‘intellectual’ relationship, together with fauns, dryads, satyrs, griffins and sphinxes, a chorus of ants, some lemurs, a few early Greek philosophers and even some plants reciting poetry. And, of course, the ‘Her zu Mir’ at the end of part I turns out to have been ambiguous after all. Faust has not been taken to Hell by Mephistopheles, but is roaming around classical Greece.
Goethe, himself, writing in 1827 to Philippe Stapler who had translated part I into French, stated that Helena (the fragment of part II he proposed to publish in a collection of his works) could in no way be linked to Faust, Part I.[4]
Part I is a fairly straightforward, naturalistic story (saving Mephistopheles’ magic tricks). Faust, Part II, requires a major literary analysis to understand its message – if indeed it has a message. It does have some interesting ideas; for example the introduction of paper money and land reclamation from the sea. But these are hidden away in acres of textual oddities. As such, it is doubtful whether Faust, Part II, in any way enters the consciousness of contemporary Europeans, with the exception of a few very dedicated scholars of Goethe.
December 2009
[1]The translation used of the libretto to Gounod’s Faustis by Lea Frey, published on the Internet, www.aria-database.com
[2]From the Oxford World Classics, Faust Part I, translated by David Luke
[3]From the Oxford World Classics, Faust Part II, translated by David Luke
[4]From the Oxford World Classics, Faust Part II, ibid.
It is probably the case that most people, when asked if they are familiar with the story of Faust would think of Gounod’s opera. Students of German may well have studied Goethe’s Faust in the original language, and those studying English literature might have read Christopher Marlowe’s play, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. The majority though, will be familiar with Faust through the popular opera.
The legend of Faust seems to have emerged in the middle of the sixteenth century. The first story was published anonymously in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1587, and in 1604, a short version of Marlowe’s play went into print (ten years after his death), the full version being published ten years after that. Goethe’s version of Faust took most of his life to complete. Parts of Part I, written in his early ‘twenties and now known as Urfaust, were never published in his lifetime. Twenty years later he took up the project again, and finally published Faust, der Tragödie, erster Teil (Faust, The Tragedy, Part I), in 1808 when he was nearly sixty. The second part of the work, Faust, der Tragödie, zweiter Teil, was published after his death in 1832. Thus there exists the minor curiosity that both Marlowe’s and Goethe’s full versions of Faust were published posthumously (albeit in Goethe’s case according to his own wishes).
In considering the question of Faust in modern European consciousness therefore, we are presented with a problem: which Faust? The Faust of Gounod’s opera (based on Goethe’s Faust, Part I) is by far the best known, and considering the argument to be followed, will be summarized here.
Faust, an old man, rails against nature and the Creator[1]:
I see nothing! I know nothing! Nothing ...
But this God, what can he do for me?
Will he give back love, youth and faith?
Be damned, oh human delights …
Damned be happiness …
Damned science, prayer and faith …
Come to me, Satan! Come to me …
Satan in the form of Mephistopheles duly appears and offers Faust riches, glory, and power; however Faust craves:
… a treasure which contains all … Youth!
Mephistopheles agrees to provide this in exchange for:
Almost nothing … Here, I am at your service …
But, (down) there (là-bas), you will be at mine!
The duet that follows betrays Gounod’s view of what lies at the root of Faust’s desires. In Faust’s words:
For me pleasures … young maidens ... their caresses … their desires!
For me energy, powerful instincts …
And wild orgies of the heart and senses!
Ardent youth, to me your desires … your intoxication, your pleasures …
As the opera unfolds, Faust seduces Marguerite, an innocent young virgin, with the help of a box of jewels supplied by Mephistopheles. He then kills Marguerite’s brother, Valentin, who challenges him for dishonouring his sister, again with Mephistopheles’ assistance. In the final scene, Faust, having deserted Marguerite, now appears to have fallen in love with her and comes to free her from her prison cell where she is condemned to death for killing their new-born child and poisoning her mother. Marguerite is teetering on insanity, but although she recognizes Faust, having seen Mephistopheles she refuses to come with them. Mephistopheles urges them both to make haste otherwise it will be too late, but Marguerite appeals to Heaven for redemption:
My God, protect me ... Pure angels …
Carry my soul to the bosom of Heaven!
Just God, to you I abandon myself!
Mephistopheles hastens Faust away, and a choir of angels proclaim that Marguerite is saved, at which point the opera ends. Faust’s fate, though, is ambiguous; he and Mephistopheles having simply left the prison.
Most people when questioned about the plot of (Gounod’s) Faust would say that after Marguerite’s redemption, Faust was dragged down to Hell, Mephistopheles invoking the contract between them. Although this is true in Marlowe’s play it is not the case in the opera. The libretto, written by Jules Barbier, gives the last word before the choir of angels to Mephistopheles, speaking to Faust:
Let us hasten! Let us hasten to leave this place.
Already the day is flooding the sky! Judged!!
(The last, referring to Marguerite)
The libretto was based loosely on Goethe’s Faust, Part I, where the final scene is:[2]
Mephistopheles: She is condemned!
A Voice (from above): She is redeemed!
Mephistopheles (to Faust): Come to me! (He vanishes with Faust)
The ‘Come to me!’ (in the original, ‘Her zu mir!’) seems to be unambiguous. The sense is, ‘Come here, you are mine now!’
So even though the libretto of the opera is not completely clear at the end, Faust and Mephistopheles simply leaving, the usual interpretation in the staging and in the minds of the public (and the apparent meaning at the end of Goethe’s Faust Part I) is that Faust is dragged kicking and screaming to Hell.
The parallels between this perceived legend of Faust and modern European life are almost too obvious to state. There is now, as never before, an almost universal obsession with youth. Bernard Shaw quipped ‘Youth is wasted on the young …’, and the multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry flourishes because women (and men) – having been granted much longer life-spans due to vast improvements in medicine – are determined to put the body-clock back, visually at least. The main purpose of this, as well as looking good among peers, is to attract members of the opposite sex. Apart from creams and other preparations to reduce or remove wrinkles, there are hair dyes to banish grey hair, dental treatment to repair or replace unsightly or missing teeth, cosmetic surgery to lift faces and improve breasts, remove bags from below the eyes and even bulk body-fat from elsewhere, and laser treatment for skin blemishes. It is also now possible, routinely, to replace worn-out hip and knee joints. All of this is available to anyone with an adequate bank-balance.
Faust’s anticipation of sensual delights is similarly mirrored in current life, where blatant Sex is used to sell almost everything. Either men are targeted because motor cars, personal hygiene products, after-shave lotions, deodorants, clothes, hair treatments or holiday destinations imply the attention of young, attractive women; or women are encouraged to use perfumes, creams and hair-treatments or buy clothes etc because they will attract rich, good-looking, high-status males. Added to which the sexual drive of men, blunted by old age, can now be restored with a small blue pill, and hormone replacement therapy can, to some extent, do the same for women.
But all this temporary rejuvenation simply puts off the inevitable; just like Faust, at the end of our allotted period, we are all taken by the grim reaper. In the end death, and/or Hell, can only be delayed.
On a more intellectual level, if we consider that in the staging of Gounod’s Faust, Faust is usually portrayed as a learned scholar, then referring back to Goethe, Faust says at the beginning of Part I,
Well, that’s Philosophy I’ve read,
And Law and Medicine, and I fear
Theology too, from A to Z;
Hard studies all, that have cost me dear.
And so I sit, poor silly man,
No wiser now than when I began.
Faust concludes that mere knowledge imparts no wisdom. The eternal questions – the meaning of life and the existence of God or an afterlife – are unanswered by scholarship. As an avowed ‘non-Christian’, these issues no doubt weighed heavily on Goethe himself, as they have vexed philosophers for more than two thousand years. In modern life, our formal knowledge of the World is almost immeasurably greater than it was in Goethe’s time, and yet anxiety, stress, unhappiness and dissatisfaction are endemic. Developments in medicine, engineering, manufacturing, even democracy, have provided modern Europeans with a standard of living of a quality undreamed of by Goethe, even with his servants and the other trappings of privileged life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Modern society seeks to mitigate anxieties in the population at large by the liberal application of ‘Bread and Circuses’, a term which although used mockingly by Juvenal in the first century AD, is surprisingly apposite today. To a thinking person, of course, that is not enough, although the provision of adequate food and entertainment does make the bearing of universal uncertainties easier. One manifestation of these anxieties is a clear polarization of beliefs, with Theists becoming more fundamental in their views, particularly in the USA, countered by proselytizing atheists like Richard Dawkins, preaching the truth of the blessed Charles Darwin. Others turn to so-called New Age ‘philosophies’ like astrology, tarot cards, crystals, numerology and other matters with Faustian-like undertones. It is notable, for example, that attendance at Stonehenge to watch the midsummer sunrise over the stones is greater than ever before, with thousands of people seeking truth through forgotten pagan ritual.
As a footnote, it is also worthwhile pointing to the cynical and mocking way in which Mephistopheles comments on human endeavours, in particular the ideals of love and honour. Cynicism about almost everything seems to be a way of life in modern Britain – perhaps with some justification. So Mephistopheles’ attitude also resonates with life in the present.
All of this points to the fact that the issues raised in Faust perplex and exercise people more today than ever before. The conclusion is that the Faust tradition is universal in its appeal, and is probably far more relevant to so-called civilized Europeans in the twenty-first century, than it was to the occupants of nineteenth-century Germany and France, or early seventeenth-century England.
Consideration of the ‘essential implications’ of the two parts of Goethe’s Faust is made difficult by the very strange nature of Faust, Part II. As previously noted, it was not published until after Goethe’s death in 1832 at the age of 83. It is not appropriate in a short essay to analyse when in his life Goethe wrote what bits of Faust, but two facts are apparent from existing scholarship: firstly, the writing occupied virtually the whole of his creative life; secondly, he had the entire structure of the work in mind quite early on.
The English translation of Faust, Part II used for this essay, quotes Emil Staiger, a Goethe student and critic, speaking of the book as, ‘A story-book full of wonders, wisdom and far-ranging fancy.’[3] In his introduction to part II, the translator, David Luke, commenting on the differences between parts I and II, says that the story (of part II) would make almost as much sense,
… if the hero’s name were not Faust but, say, Roland, or Rinaldo or
Walther von der Vogelweide …
This writer would hazard a guess that Faust, Part II, hardly figures in European consciousness at all, mainly because the mystical and epic nature of the writing make it very hard reading. In fact, in a very real sense, it verges on the unreadable. Faust, Part II, is a strange Odyssey. It has Faust and Mephistopheles on a journey meeting an emperor and his minions, and encountering a positive pantheon of classical Greek deities. These include Helen of Troy, with whom he has an ‘intellectual’ relationship, together with fauns, dryads, satyrs, griffins and sphinxes, a chorus of ants, some lemurs, a few early Greek philosophers and even some plants reciting poetry. And, of course, the ‘Her zu Mir’ at the end of part I turns out to have been ambiguous after all. Faust has not been taken to Hell by Mephistopheles, but is roaming around classical Greece.
Goethe, himself, writing in 1827 to Philippe Stapler who had translated part I into French, stated that Helena (the fragment of part II he proposed to publish in a collection of his works) could in no way be linked to Faust, Part I.[4]
Part I is a fairly straightforward, naturalistic story (saving Mephistopheles’ magic tricks). Faust, Part II, requires a major literary analysis to understand its message – if indeed it has a message. It does have some interesting ideas; for example the introduction of paper money and land reclamation from the sea. But these are hidden away in acres of textual oddities. As such, it is doubtful whether Faust, Part II, in any way enters the consciousness of contemporary Europeans, with the exception of a few very dedicated scholars of Goethe.
December 2009
[1]The translation used of the libretto to Gounod’s Faustis by Lea Frey, published on the Internet, www.aria-database.com
[2]From the Oxford World Classics, Faust Part I, translated by David Luke
[3]From the Oxford World Classics, Faust Part II, translated by David Luke
[4]From the Oxford World Classics, Faust Part II, ibid.