Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

The cosmic quality of the subject, one would think, should have attracted more of the first-rank men, considering how many of the second and third rank it has tempted to self-destruction. One wonders, for example, why it should have fallen to the lot of Gounod to give so many honest but uninstructed people their first, perhaps their only, idea of Faust—an experience something like getting one's first notions of Hamlet from the country booth. We can understand their taking the thing seriously, for I fancy we all took it seriously at one time—in the callow stage of our musical culture—and many quite respectable musicians do so still. Yet we have only to come back to it one day, after dropping acquaintance with it for many years, to see what a laughter-moving monstrosity the thing is. The book gets as near the inane at times as anything founded on Goethe could do, though the music has its good points, of course. In the overture and opening scene there really is some suggestion of the gravity and the spirituality of the problems of Faust's soul; but from the time Margaret and Mephistopheles appear upon the scene the thing becomes for the most part mere opera, and Faust just the ordinary amorist—l'homme moyen sensuel. The melodrama, quâ melodrama, is sometimes good of its kind; the Valentine scenes generally ring true, and now and then they become really impressive. There is plenty of lovely music, too, in the opera, which may suffice you if you are not very critical as to the poetic basis—if you do not attempt, that is, to get below the ear-tickling sounds and to see the characters as Goethe has drawn them. But once you begin to think of these matters you can only smile at Gounod and his fellow-criminals who concocted the libretto.

Look at the Gounod overture, for example. For a couple of minutes it is worthy of almost the loftiest subject or of the best man who has taken up the Faust theme; and then how woefully it fizzles out, drifting back into its native habitat of banality, where the air is more congenial to it—for all the world like a man who goes to an Ibsen play, sternly resolved to be a serious moralist for one evening at least, but at the end of the first act makes for the nearest music-hall or café chantant. One can see where it is all tending; Faust the philosopher has already, at this early stage of his career, become Faust the boulevardier. So with the opening scene, wherein we just catch the accent of Goethe for a breath or two, but never longer. And then that absurd devil Mephistopheles, with his stage strut, his stage idiom, his stage brain! "Are you afraid?" he asks Faust at his first red-fire appearance, when "Are you amused?" would be more appropriate. There is a touch of the genuine sardonic quality in his serenade; but on the whole he suggests not so much the spirit of denial as the spirit of the pantomime rally. Nor, till you quietly think about the structure of the libretto, do you realise how exceedingly funny it all is. In the drinking-scene it is Wagner who gets up to sing the song of the rat; Wagner! who by no process of shuffling of names can be got out of our heads as the pupil and companion of Faust. It is true he does not go very far with the ballad, Mephistopheles interrupting him after the first line or two—for which Gounod, remembering that Berlioz had set the same song once for all—was no doubt duly grateful to the devil. Then Mephistopheles sings his fatuous air about the Calf of Gold, and quarrels with Valentine—who, oddly enough, is also of the party—about his sister. So the opera goes on—very charming where it has least to do with the subject, but merely feeble or ludicrous when it comes near enough to Goethe to suggest a comparison. For Gounod, whose own religion was merely Catholicism sucré, not only lacked the brain to grasp the austere philosophy of a subject of this kind; his musical faculty was not deep enough nor strong enough to save him from aiming perpetually at drama and achieving only melodrama. Watch him, for example, in the scenes where he is trying to carry on a dramatic dialogue, and see to what straits he is put in the effort to make the orchestra do something expressive in between the actors' speeches. See the catchpenny trade he drives in those stale operatic formulas for whose poetic equivalent we have to go to the country booth; see him capering about with his fussy little runs and twiddles, and striking all kinds of pompous musical poses, that really signify nothing at all, and only remind us of the conventional up-down-right-left-cut-thrust of stage-fencing. And this banal thing, this cheap vulgarisation of Goethe, this blend of the pantomime, the novelette and the Christmas card, still represents Faust in the minds of nine musical amateurs out of ten! It is no more the real Faust than Sardou's Robespierre, for example, is the real Robespierre; in each case a portentous name has simply been tacked on to a piece of very ordinary melodrama. The most pleasing elements in Gounod's work—the really lovely, if not always profound, love-music—are precisely those that withdraw it furthest from Goethe; for here it is clearly not Faust speaking to Margaret, but any man to any woman, any Edwin to any Angelina. Gounod's Margaret alone suggests dimly the drama of Goethe; but that is because she is the easiest of all the characters to represent in music. In most of the settings of Faust, indeed, the portrait of Margaret carries a kind of conviction even when the other two characters have nothing more in common with Faust and Mephistopheles than the names. He must be a very inferior musician who could fail here. The essence of Margaret's character is simplicity, innocence, the absence of all complicating elements; and accordingly we find that all the settings of her have a strong family resemblance to each other. Schumann's Margaret is very German, Liszt's very German but at the same time quite cosmopolitan, Berlioz's curiously moyen-âge, Gounod's decidedly modern and town-bred, but all have the same fundamental qualities; none does violence to our conception of the real Margaret. Faust, however, has to be something more than the seducer of Margaret; we want to see some traces in his music of the weariness of life, the disgust with knowledge, that distinguish him at the beginning of the drama; we want to see him growing at once stronger and weaker as he develops, his character being purged of its dross, his soul's insight into the world of real things becoming prophetically clear just as he is bidden to leave it. Unless some elements at least of this picture are given us, the composer has no right to attach to his painting the title of Faust.

One wonders, again, why a musician like Boïto should ever have thought himself fit company for Marlowe and Goethe. Here is a poet—one can cheerfully pay a tribute to his general culture if not to his musicianship—with a semi-musical gift that rarely rises above the mediocre and generally dips a point or two below it, who not only fancies he can throw new light on Faust's soul through his music, but serenely undertakes a reconstruction of the drama that Goethe gave him. Boïto made such a really good libretto for Verdi out of Othello that it is rather surprising what an abject mess he has made of Faust. His hash of the great drama is really deplorable. His superior culture and his finer literary palate put him above the commonplace Gounod conception of the play as a melodramatic story of a man, a maid, and a devil. He knows there is a "problem," a "world-view," in it that really makes it what it is. But as soon as he begins to set the play to music he seems to forget what the problem is, where it begins and where it ends. The result is that he is not content to write a piece of plain, straightforward music of the ordinary operatic type, but must needs drag in just enough of Goethe's great plan to make the whole thing preposterous. I say nothing of his musical deficiencies—of his incurable old-Italian-opera tricks of style, his lame, blind, and halt melody, the monotonous tenuity of his harmony, the odd jumble of Wagner and Rossini in his idiom, his notion that the terrible is adequately expressed in five-finger exercises, and the horrible by a reproduction of the noises made when the bow is drawn across all four strings of the violin at once. These are mere details, as is also the fact that his powers of dramatic characterisation are very limited, or that his choruses of angels would be more suitable to contadini, or that his Mephistopheles is transported bodily and mentally from the buffo stage. What is most awesome in Boïto's opera is the pseudo-philosophical scheme of the libretto. He begins with a Prologue in Heaven that is almost entirely superfluous, not one-fifth of it being concerned with Faust. The first half of the first Act might also be dispensed with entirely, for all it has to do with the problem of Faust's soul. The second half of this Act, and the first half of the next, are, in the main, essential to the drama, though there is no need for musical composers to retain, in the garden scene, the episodes between Mephistopheles and Martha, that are right enough in the play, but mar the more ideal atmosphere of music. The descent into the buffo is perilously easy here; and it is much better to omit all this, as Schumann does, and concentrate the whole of the light on Faust and Margaret.

Boïto's next scene, however—the Walpurgis night—is pure waste of time and space; there is a great deal too much of Mephistopheles and the chorus, and not half enough of Faust to let us grasp the bearing of the scene upon the evolution of his soul. The whole of the third Act helps to carry on the story; but the fourth Act—the Classical Walpurgis Night—becomes pure nonsense in Boïto's handling of it. Whatever meaning there may be in the Helena episode in Goethe's long allegory, there can be no sense at all in simply pushing her on the operatic stage in order to sing a duet with Faust, the pair having incontinently fallen in love at first sight—presumably behind the scenes. Finally, the Epilogue—the Death of Faust—ends the work only in an operatic, not a spiritual, sense; there being no spiritual connection between the earlier and the later Faust, no reason why he should die just then, no hint of the bearing of his death upon his life. And why in the name of common sense should Boïto have permitted himself to rewrite the final Act, the crowning pinnacle of the whole mighty structure that Goethe has so slowly, so painfully reared? In place of the great motives and profoundly moving scenes of the poetic drama—Faust's schemes for human happiness, the poor old couple and their little house on the shore, the conversation with the four gray women, the blinding and death of Faust, the coming of Mephistopheles with the Lemures to dig the grave, the pathetic death-scene, the transportation of the purified Faust into that diviner air where he meets the purified Margaret—instead of all this we have Faust back again in the old laboratory of the first Act, Mephistopheles holding out banal operatic temptations to him, after the manner of Gounod, and Faust clinging for salvation to the Bible and going straight off to heaven on his knees, all in the most approved fashion of the Stratford-on-Avon novelette. [17] Yet, bad as it is, Boïto's Mefistofele is not the worst that might be done with the drama. His musical faculties may be of the kind that move us to more laughter than is good for us; but he certainly had some understanding of the inner spirit as well as of the external action of Goethe's poem; and the very extent of his failure serves to show how difficult it is to mould the play to musical requirements. The difficulty lies not so much in finding appropriate musical episodes as in dealing with such a multiplicity of them as there is. The drama, indeed, is amazingly rich in musical "stuff"—as Wagner would have put it—of the first order; as Berlioz expressed it in connection with Gounod's Faust, "the librettists have passed over some admirably musical situations that it would have been necessary to invent if Goethe had not already done so."

There is a vast quantity of the poem, of course, that is as alien to the spirit of music as it is to that of literature. But there is a certain irreducible minimum that must be dealt with, if the musical setting is to aim at reproducing the spiritual problem of Goethe with anything like completeness. The Prelude and the Prologue in Heaven may, in case of need, be dispensed with; but almost all the First Part ought to be utilised, not following Goethe word for word, of course, but taking the pith of each scene. Here and there we come across sections that either defy musical treatment or are comparatively unimportant episodes in the poem. But the main psychological moments must all be dealt with; and the omission of any one of these cuts a piece out of the intellectual interest, breaks the subtle line of development, and makes all that comes after it seem insufficiently led up to. The First Part of Goethe's Faust, in fact, is in itself a masterpiece of construction, holding the balance most carefully and skilfully between dramatic action and philosophical reflection. Omit any of the steps by which the characters have been brought to the dramatic completeness in which we see them at the end of the First Part, and you break the spell that makes them real to us.

There is, then, in the First Part alone, more than enough to constitute the poetical material of at least two operas. Many composers have chosen to end their labours here, with the death of Margaret and the flight of Mephistopheles with Faust; and from the purely operatic point of view there is much to be said for such a course. The First Part does at least run on the lines that are common to a philosophical drama and an opera; whereas the Second Part deliberately flouts the musical sense at point after point. In the First Part the poetry marches hand-in-hand with the ethical conception; in the Second Part the poetry has often to be dug out of the jungle of prosaic diffuseness in which Goethe has hidden it. Nevertheless one great purpose runs like a fine, continuous thread through all the seemingly unrelated incidents of the drama; and this line at least must be followed by the musician, though he may disregard the excursions from its direct course which Goethe so often permits himself. The poet's purpose, of course, was not complete, could not possibly be complete, without the Second Part. From the very beginning we feel that the vast issues must end, full-orbed, in something like the remote, non-earthly atmosphere of the opening; and we keep in our memory the words of the Prologue in Heaven—

"A good man, through obscurest aspiration,

Has still an instinct of the one true way"—

waiting for the ultimate gleam that shall make the darkness of Faust's first perplexed flight quite clear to us. Plainly one-half only of the problem had been stated in the First Part; and though comparatively few people read the Second Part, and few of those who have read it once read it twice, it is really the rounding-off of the philosophical conception here that gives the First Part its proper meaning. The human striving of the earlier poem demanded the later episodes, both as poetical completion and ethical solution. Without the Second Part, the First Part is a broken cadence, a discord only half resolved. Goethe himself, we are told, "compared the Prologue in Heaven to the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni, in which a certain musical phrase occurs which is not repeated until the finale." A musical setting can be adequate only if it really deals with the central spiritual forces of Faust, not only as they affect the protagonist up to the death of Margaret, but in the crowded after-years. Life was wider than art to Goethe; and the vastness and unwieldiness of the scheme of the play are mostly due to his attempt to embrace so much of life in it. The trouble with the average musical setting is that it fails to rise to the level of Goethe's own lofty humanism. The theatrical is there in plenty; but there is little that brings home to us the grave philosophy of the drama, little that speaks of that great, moving, human figure of the Second Part, beating his way painfully through the darkness to the light. Above all, one cannot spare the ethical elevation of that final scene, with its supremely pathetic picture of the man's defeat in the very moment of victory, and its mystical suggestion of this material defeat being in reality a spiritual triumph. Goethe, in fact, made the subject an essentially modern one—put into it the fever and the fret, the finer joys and finer despairs, the deepened philosophy and the more impassioned spiritual aspirations, of the generations that succeeded the great upheaval of the eighteenth century. In Marlowe's Faustus we feel that, powerful as the wings of the poet are, there still clings to them something of the grossness of the Middle Ages, and the grossness, only more superficially refined, of the Renaissance. The thick breath of materiality hangs like a cloud over Marlowe's drama. Faustus himself has in him much of the coarseness of tissue of the Elizabethan age. On the purely human side, especially in the later scenes, he does indeed touch and move us; but in the mainsprings of his being, in the limitations of his desire—