Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

The haughty Light, which now disputes the space,

And claims of Mother Night her ancient place."

He is the element of destruction that is the other half of being; not a mere tempting devil, the crude beguiler of the theological fancy, but simply the evil side of Faust becoming self-conscious. See, for example, in the eleventh scene of the First Part, and again in the fourteenth scene, how he probes to the very depth of Faust's soul, dragging into the light the true motives that sway him, which Faust himself is incompetent to analyse. His taunt in the seventeenth scene, again, "Thou, full of sensual, super-sensual desire," is a stroke of which Marlowe was incapable.

There are one or two scenes in the Second Part which lend themselves to music, but have been curiously neglected—it being strange, for example, that no musician of the first rank has set the scene of Faust's discovery of ideal beauty (Act i., Scene 7). But on the whole the Second Part is uncongenial to music, until we come to the gravely passionate human element at the end. Even to poetry Goethe's plan is somewhat unpropitious, as Schiller pointed out to him. "A source of anxiety to me," he wrote in 1797, "is that Faust, according to your design, seems to require such a great amount of material, if the idea is finally to appear complete; and I find no poetical hoop which can encircle such a cumulative mass.... For example, Faust must necessarily, to my thinking, be conducted into the active life of the world, and whatever part of it you may choose out of the great whole, the very nature of it seems to require too much particularity and diffuseness." If the "poetical hoop" was so hard to find, a musical hoop to contain such wildly-mixed material is beyond the power of man to cast. All the musician can do is to make sure of the final scenes (from Act vii. Scene 4 onwards); though even then—and this is the perpetual dilemma—one feels the need of some connecting link between the Faust whose life is drawing so near to the end, and the Faust whom we saw being torn away by Mephistopheles from Margaret and the prison. As Schiller said, Faust must go "into the active life of the world" before that stupendous cadence can have its true significance; yet most of the intermediate scenes into which Goethe has put him can never be caught up into the being of music. As one looks at the poem itself, one admits despairingly that it would be impossible to build the first four Acts into any operatic structure. But one broad purpose of spiritual development runs through even this desert of apparently endless aridity; and surely this might be treated by the musician, if not in operatic, at least in symphonic form. That is, between the stage of Faust's life that ends with the death of Margaret and the awakening of Faust to a new joy in earth and a resolution to seek the highest good, and the stage where his own death puts the seal on the drama, we might have a symphonic interlude that would make the transition less abrupt for us. The comparative vagueness of the music in this form would match the increased indefiniteness of the poetical handling; while the more positive operatic form could be resumed in the Fifth Act, where the closeness of the association with actual life demands the continuous use of words. It is not an ideal device, perhaps, but it is the only adequate one. Only in some such manner as this can we hope to get the real Faust translated into music. As it is, the composers who have grasped the philosophy of the work have been restricted to a canvas far too small for the whole subject, while those who have not laid stress on the philosophy have simply not dealt with the Faust drama at all.

Men like Wagner and Rubinstein, again, who have really had the thinker's appreciation of the deeper currents of the theme, and have tried to express these in the single-movement form, have been woefully hampered by the limited space in which they have been compelled to work. Wagner, of course, never meant his Faust Overture to be a complete treatment of the subject; it was intended merely as one section of a large Faust Symphony. The general excellence and the one defect of the work inspire us with regret that the scheme as a whole was never carried out. Its one shortcoming is that it deals only with the melancholy, brooding, world-weary Faust of the opening of Goethe's poem, the egoistic Faust on whom the larger world-issues have not yet dawned. We should like to have had Wagner's treatment of the final and complete Faust, taken out of himself, touched with sublimer sorrows and compassions, pouring out his soul upon the greater interests of humanity. As it is, however, we have in the Faust Overture the veritable Faust of the opening of Goethe's poem. No attempt is made at the portraiture of Margaret—the beautiful theme in the middle section simply representing the "ever-womanly" floating before Faust's eye in vague suggestion—nor is there any Mephistopheles in the work. But in regard to the special task Wagner seems to have set himself, the translation into music of the first scene of Goethe's First Part, nothing more perfect could well be imagined. There are few more convincing pieces of musical portraiture than this great grey head, with the look of the weary Titan in the eyes, that looms out in heroic proportions from Wagner's score.

One of the least known of the settings of Faust—or at any rate of the fine settings of it—is that of Henri Hugo Pierson. [18] Though he was an Englishman, his music is practically unknown in England, for which his residence in Germany is no doubt mainly responsible. It is a pity such a man could not have found in his own country the conditions under which his talents could thrive and expand; for when one realises how much strength and originality there is in his music, one feels that had he worked in England he might have helped to found a native school, and so brought our musical Renaissance to birth at any rate a generation earlier than it has come. His music is always that of a musician who is at the same time poet and thinker. The very plan of his Faust is original. As its title indicates, it deals only with the Second Part of Goethe's play. This in itself is a slight fault, for it brings before us that tremendous drama of regeneration without having prepared us for it by the previous drama of struggle and error. Starting with Ariel and the Chorus of Fairies singing round the sleeping Faust, Pierson takes us through the scene in the Emperor's Castle, the calling up of the apparitions of Paris and Helena, and the attempt of Faust to seize the Grecian beauty—all from Act i. From the second Act we have Wagner and the birth of the Homunculus, and the journey of Faust, Mephistopheles, and the Homunculus through the air. From the third Act we have the scene before the Palace of Menelaus (Helen and the Chorus of captive Trojan women), the coming of Faust as a knight of the Middle Ages, his dialogue with Helena, the appearance and death of Euphorion; from the fourth Act, the battle between the Emperor and his enemies; from the fifth Act, the song of Lynceus the warder, the entry of the four Grey Women—Want, Guilt, Care, and Need—and the blinding of Faust; the digging of the grave by the Lemures, the death of Faust, the choruses of the spirits and the anchorites, the chorus of the younger seraphs and angels ascending with the spirit of Faust, the scene in the empyrean, and the final "Chorus Mysticus"—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss.

The scheme, it will be seen at once, is not an ideal one. It achieves comprehensiveness at the expense of organic unity. It keeps too strictly to the letter and the order of Goethe's scenes; episodes like the battle, that are of the very slightest significance, are needlessly included; other and more essential episodes are so lightly dwelt upon that their full value can hardly be brought out; and others are omitted altogether. As a mere piece of architecture the thing is extremely imperfect. Too much use, again, is made of the melodrama—i.e. the union of the reciting voice with the orchestra—one of the least justifiable and most trying forms of art ever invented. But with all its faults of structure it is a notable work; the music redeems all its errors. The opening scene, with Ariel and the spirits, is exquisitely fresh and sunny; the death of Euphorion and the death of Faust are both very moving, and there are some fine choruses in the work, notably the "Heilige Poesie." Pierson re-creates for us the philosophic atmosphere of the Second Part of Faust, and gives us the same impression of the largeness of the issues at work; which is no small achievement. It is a pity one of our Festival Committees could not be prevailed upon to let us hear the score, or at any rate a portion of it.

Unduly neglected, again, is Henry Litolff's setting of certain scenes from Goethe (op. 103). Like Pierson, he adopts occasionally the unpleasant form of declamation with orchestral accompaniment. This spoils an otherwise fine treatment of the first scene (in Faust's study). It is really a symphonic poem with a vocal element here and there; and paradoxically enough, though Faust is restricted to declamation, the Earth-Spirit sings his part to a melodic and very expressive quasi recitativo. The movement has the prevailing fault of all Litolff's writing—a certain slackness and want of resource in the development; but the ideas themselves are often most striking. The first scene concludes with a fine setting of the Easter Hymn. The second scene, before the City Gate, is exceedingly fresh and charming; while the seventh, the scene in the Cathedral (No. 20 of Goethe's First Part) is a masterly piece of work—finer even, perhaps, than Schumann's version of the same scene. If Goethe's drama has moved many of the second-rate musicians only to show how very second-rate they are, it has at all events stimulated others to efforts that at times put them very nearly in the ranks of the first-rate.

Rubinstein's orchestral poem Faust—which the composer styles simply "Ein musikalisches Charakterbild"—is not altogether easy to understand, in its literary intentions, in the absence of a guide. It is in one movement only, and contains apparently no allusion to Mephistopheles, nor, as far as can be gathered beyond doubt from the music itself, to Margaret—for the suave melodies that are interposed as a contrast to the more passionate and more reflective utterances of Faust are not distinctively feminine in nature. They may have nothing at all to do with Margaret, or they may represent Faust's attempt to resolve his philosophic doubts by a contemplation of the simpler and more constant elements of human nature—just as Wagner, in his Faust Overture, does not so much limn an actual Margaret as suggest the consolation which the thought of womanly love can bring to the soul of Faust. Rubinstein's work, though not quite on the same plane as Wagner's, is yet exceedingly sincere. What it lacks is sufficient definiteness to make us refer it to Faust and to Faust only. It is clearly a strenuous picture of a lofty and noble soul, striving in its own way to read "the riddle of the painful earth," and mournfully acknowledging, at the last, that its only portion is defeat and disillusion. But this is a psychological frame that might be made to fit a score of pictures; and one misses, in Rubinstein's piece, the conclusive sense of congruence with Faust as we know him in Goethe's poem. There is nothing in it to clash with the poet's conception; the emotional atmosphere is the same in both; but in spite of the title the musician has put upon his work, it is less a study of individual character than a description of a type. Rubinstein's Faust is the least definite and the most symbolical of them all.

Rubinstein's tone-poem and every other purely orchestral setting of the subject, however, pale before the magnificence of Liszt's Faust Symphony. Liszt writes three movements—entitled respectively "Faust," "Margaret," "Mephistopheles"—and then sums up the whole work in a choral setting of Goethe's final lines, "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss," etc. Here the larger scale on which the picture is painted permits Liszt both a breadth and an intimacy of psychology which are impossible in the one-movement overtures. In the long first movement (taking about twenty-five minutes in performance), we really do feel that Faust is being analysed with something of the same elaboration and the same insight as in Goethe's poem. The handling is a trifle loose here and there, owing to Liszt repeating his material from time to time in obedience to literary rather than to musical necessities; but apart from this the "Faust" movement is extraordinarily fine character-drawing, and certainly the only instrumental Faust study that strikes one as being complete. In the "Margaret" movement he incorporates very suggestively a reference here and there to the phrases of the "Faust," thus not only sketching Margaret herself but giving the love-scenes in a form of the highest concentration. This section is surpassingly beautiful throughout; in face of this divine piece of music alone the present neglect of Liszt's work in England is something inexplicable. Almost the whole Margaret is there, with her curious blend of sweetness, timidity, and passion; while Faust's interpositions are exceedingly noble. All that one misses in Liszt, I think, is the tragic Margaret of the scene in the Cathedral and the prayer to the Mater Dolorosa. The "Mephistopheles" section is particularly ingenious. It consists, for the most part, of a kind of burlesque upon the subjects of the "Faust," which are here passed, as it were, through a continuous fire of irony and ridicule. This is a far more effective way of depicting "the spirit of denial" than making him mouth a farrago of pantomime bombast, in the manner of Boïto. The being who exists, for the purposes of the drama, only in antagonism to Faust, whose main activity consists only in endeavouring to frustrate every good impulse of Faust's soul, is really best dealt with, in music, not as a positive individuality, but as the embodiment of negation—a malicious, saturnine parody of all the good that has gone to the making of Faust. The "Mephistopheles" is not only a piece of diabolically clever music, but the best picture we have of a character that in the hands of the average musician becomes either stupid, or vulgar, or both. As we listen to Liszt's music, we feel that we really have the Mephistopheles of Goethe's drama.