The Mephistopheles of Berlioz's Faust is interesting in another way. Berlioz, of course, played fast and loose in the most serene way with the drama as a whole, accepting, rejecting, or altering it just as it suited his musical scheme. He blandly avows, for example, that he takes Faust, in one scene, into Hungary, simply because he wants to insert in the score his arrangement of a celebrated Hungarian march! Moral criticism would be wasted on one so naked and unashamed as this—though perhaps after all it is only pedantry that would regard most of Berlioz's alterations of Goethe's drama as very serious perversions of the main Faust legend. So long as the central problems of the character are seen and stated, it matters very little through what incidents the composer chooses to bring them home to us. And Berlioz really has a very strong grip upon the inner meaning of the legend. His success, indeed, is somewhat surprising when we consider how he approached the work. He had been greatly impressed, in his youth, by Gérard de Nerval's translation of Goethe's poem; but instead of attempting a continuous setting of the work at this time (1829), he aimed only at setting eight disconnected scenes. These were (1) "The Easter Scene"; (2) "The Peasants' Dance"; (3) "The Chorus of Sylphs"; (4) "The Song of the Rat"; (5) "The Song of the Flea"; (6) "The Ballad of the King of Thule"; (7) "Margaret's Romance and the Soldiers' Chorus"; (8) "Mephistopheles' Serenade." Faust, therefore, had practically no part in this selection; and it was not till seventeen years later that Berlioz brought out his complete "dramatic legend." It looks as if his early interest in the work were more pictorial than philosophical, for the two songs of Margaret alone suggest the deeper emotional currents of the drama. Mephistopheles, however, seems to have captivated his young Romantic imagination from the first, and, in the ironic serenade to Margaret, the character as he conceived it is already fully sketched. Berlioz's devil is, perhaps, the only operatic Mephistopheles that carries anything like conviction; he never, even for a moment, suggests the inanely grotesque figure of the pantomime. Of malicious, saturnine devilry there is plenty in him; no one, except Liszt, could compete with Berlioz on this ground. But there is more than this in the character. In such scenes as that on the banks of the Elbe, where he lulls Faust to sleep, there is a real suggestion of power, of dominion over ordinary things, that takes Mephistopheles out of the category of the merely theatrical and puts him in that of the philosophical.
Nor, in sheer character-drawing, can any other operatic Faust and Margaret compare with the figures of Berlioz; and when we consider the piecemeal manner in which the work was built up, it is astonishing how just, how sure, how incisive this portraiture is. It may not be precisely Goethe; but it is a magnificent translation of Goethe into French. Faust, of course, is the Romantic Faust, with his passionate intimacy with nature. We miss in Berlioz what we get in Schumann, for example—the close following of Goethe's philosophical plan. Berlioz is not greatly interested in Faust's schemes for the regeneration of mankind; his own culture had not brought him into contact with Louis Blanc and Proudhon and Saint-Simon. But of its kind it is all amazingly fine. No other Margaret, except Liszt's and perhaps Schumann's, can compare with Berlioz's for pure pathos—the sensuous simplicity of soul that wrings the heart with compassion. Altogether, though the opera of Berlioz deals only with the more primordial passions of the drama, and ends in a manner rather too suggestive of a Christmas card conceived in a nightmare, it is more subtle, more profound, than almost any other work of the same order.
Only one setting surpasses it—that of Schumann; not because it achieves a finer individual portraiture than Berlioz's work, but because, on the whole, it stirs us more deeply in precisely the way we are stirred by Goethe's poem. Schumann's plan is peculiar and original. Whereas most other composers who have employed the operatic or cantata form have drawn largely on Goethe's First Part and almost ignored the Second, it is from the Second Part that two-thirds of Schumann's work are taken. Out of the First Part we have only the garden scene, Margaret before the image of the Mater Dolorosa, and the scene in the cathedral. Faust, therefore, does not so far appear at all, except in the tiny garden scene; and the sole structural fault of the work is that something of the earlier Faust should have been shown to us, before he appears, in the next section, as the refined and vigorous humanist of Goethe's Second Part. Setting this defect aside, however, the remainder of the work gives us the quintessence of Goethe's drama. We have first the scene, at the opening of Goethe's Second Part, where Ariel and his fellow-spirits sing round the sleeping Faust; then Faust's return to mental health and energy, and his resolve to devote himself henceforth to the highest activities of human life. Upon this scene there follows the visit of the four grey-haired women—Want, Guilt, Need, and Care—the blinding of Faust by the breath of Care, the last outburst of his passionate zeal for life and freedom, and his death. The remainder of the work is devoted to a textual setting, line for line, of the final scene of Goethe's poem—the hermits, the choruses of angels, the three women, the penitent (formerly Margaret), the Mater Gloriosa, and the "Chorus Mysticus."
Schumann's scheme is thus in the highest degree philosophical. It austerely disregards the conventional elements that enter into the usual operatic Faust, and concentrates itself on the essential spiritual factors of the poem. Mephistopheles appears only for a moment in the garden duet, and again in Faust's death-scene, so that there is no attempt at full portraiture of him. Schumann's Margaret really suggests the Margaret of Goethe. The same mediæval atmosphere seems to environ her, both in the garden and in the cathedral. She is naïve in the scene with Faust as Goethe's Margaret is naïve; and in the scene where she bends before the Mater Dolorosa, and again when the evil spirit, in the cathedral, harries her with his taunts, everything is set in the right key and the right colour. In the portrait of Faust it is the thinker, the philosopher, that is uppermost throughout. All through Schumann's Second Part, indeed, we feel this constant pre-occupation of the musician with the great human elements of the drama; while in the exquisite, subtilised mysticism of the Third Part these elements glow with a purer and rarer light. The work is uneven in its musical inspiration; but on the whole we can say that Schumann's is the real German Faust, the Faust of Goethe. Writing in his eightieth year, the old poet pointed out one of the main reasons for the enduring interest in his work: "The commendation which the work has received, far and near, may perhaps be owing to this quality—that it permanently preserves the period of a development of a human soul, which is tormented by all that afflicts mankind, shaken also by all that disturbs it, repelled by all that it finds repellent, and made happy by all that which it desires. The author is at present far removed from such conditions: the world, likewise, has to some extent other struggles to undergo: nevertheless, the state of men, in joy and sorrow, remains very much the same; and the latest born will still find cause to acquaint himself with what has been enjoyed and suffered before him, in order to adapt himself to that which awaits him." It is this grave note, this width of outlook upon man and the world, that we have in Schumann's work in fuller quantity and richer quality than in any other setting of Faust. His is really the spirit of the Faust conceived by the great poet—full of a passionate reflection upon life, an uplifted, philosophical sense of tragedy, a mellow sympathy with and pity for the troubled heart of man. From first to last he has made his emotions out of the deeper, not out of the more superficial, passions of the play.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] The reader may need to be reminded that the published score of Mefistofele is an abbreviation of the opera as it was originally given. The opening scene of the first Act and the Walpurgis Night scene in the second have been cut down (see Mazzucato's article on Boïto in "Grove's Dictionary"). "The grand scene at the Emperor's Palace," says Signor Mazzucato, is "entirely abandoned." "A strikingly original intermezzo sinfonico ... stood between the fourth and fifth Acts; it was meant to illustrate the battle of the Emperor against the pseudo-Emperor, supported by the infernal legions led by Faust and Mephistopheles—the incident which in Goethe's poem leads to the last period of Faust's life. The three themes—that is, the Fanfare of the Emperor, the Fanfare of the pseudo-Emperor, and the Fanfare infernale—were beautiful in conception and interwoven in a masterly manner, and the scene was brought to a close by Mephistopheles leading off with 'Te Deum laudamus' after the victory." As to the beautiful conception and the masterly interweaving I am inclined to be sceptical; but in any case the inclusion of this scene simply puts Boïto in a worse light than ever. The whole episode is practically without significance as far as regards Faust's spiritual evolution. So far as music is concerned, it merely gives the opportunity for a clap-trap battle-piece.
[18] Henry Hugh Pearson was born at Oxford in 1815. He settled in Germany, where he found a more congenial musical atmosphere than was to be had at that time in England. After writing for a little while under the pseudonym of "Edgar Mansfeldt," he reverted to his own name, but metamorphosed it into Henri Hugo Pierson. His "Music to the Second Part of Goethe's Faust" was brought out at Hamburg in 1854. Pierson died in 1873.
To GRANVILLE BANTOCK