[15] Jullien (p. 241) says "it was about this time that the neuralgia to which he had always been subject settled in the intestines...."
[16] He himself describes it as "a caprice written with the point of a needle, and demanding excessive delicacy of execution." Yet this is the man for whom the world can find only the one epithet of "extravagant"!
To MRS. ROSA NEWMARCH
"FAUST" IN MUSIC
The musical settings of Faust, in one form or another, now number, I believe, something like thirty or thirty-five. It is perhaps the most popular of all subjects with musicians, far outdistancing in favour the Hamlets and Othellos and Romeo-and-Juliets and all the other lay figures which composers are fond of using to show off their own garments. It cannot be said that they have added very much, on the whole, to our comprehension of the drama; indeed, with half-a-dozen exceptions the Faust-symphonies and Faust-operas and Faust-scenes have quite failed to justify their existence. One of the main difficulties in the way of the musician—even supposing him to have the brain capacity to rise to the height of the psychology of the thing—is the enormous range and wealth of material of the drama itself. The First Part of Goethe's work alone, or the Second Part, is quite sufficient to tax the constructive powers of any composer to the uttermost; but to reshape the whole of Faust in music is a desperate undertaking. Since Goethe's day we are bound to see the Faust picture through his eyes; any harking back to earlier forms of it is quite out of the question. And Goethe, while he has enormously extended and deepened the spiritual elements of the story, has by this very means set the musician a problem of discouraging difficulty. No musical version of the play, in the first place, can be adequate unless it embraces Goethe's Second Part as well as the First. Due opportunity, again, must be given for the exposition of all the essential, the seminal "motives" of the drama, and they are many indeed. The composer is thus on the horns of a dilemma. If he wants his work to stand in the same gallery with Goethe's, he has to run a line through Faust's soul long enough and sinuous enough to touch upon all its secret places; but any one who tries to do this soon perceives how hard it is to focus so vast a scene and to keep the picture within one frame of reasonable size. An opera or a symphony that should attempt to cover all the psychological ground of the drama would take at least ten or twelve hours in performance. Apparently the only rational course for the future composer who may think of setting the Faust subject is to take two or three evenings over it, after the manner of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung; and until this is done we shall have to rest satisfied with the more or less inadequate versions we have at present.