If anyone wanted to know what it was like to blow your mind with a piece of music, they could do worse than listen to the closing movement of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony – and its great chorus of human voices proclaiming that the Eternal Feminine will lead us on upwards. The closing passage of Goethe’s Faust.
In Mahler’s own words: “Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It was his “gift to the nation … a great joy-bringer”.
Mahler was a Catholic. Goethe was a sort of pagan, but a distinctly Protestant pagan. His drama led up to an explosion of emotion as the 100-year-old Faust, after decades of being in league with the Devil, is nonetheless redeemed by a heavenly choir of women, including the teenager he seduced and ruined in the first part of the play. Since most of the women in the choir are Catholic saints, it seems fair that Mahler should have made his chorus an unashamedly Catholic affair.
The Eighth Symphony premiered in Munich on 12 September 1910, some 80 years after the second part of Goethe’s great work was published. This extraordinary explosion of emotion and sound was by no means the only musical response to the greatest work of German literature.
Goethe spent more than 60 years writing his masterpiece. He began when he was a student in Strasbourg, and he was only able to finish it after his 81st birthday. What started as a reconstruction of the old Faust legend – the Renaissance man who, in exchange for knowledge and youth sold his soul to the Devil – developed into something very different. This was partly because Goethe introduced an entirely new element into the legend – Faust’s seduction of the teenager Gretchen, her unwanted pregnancy, the murder of her child, and her redemption. German law was especially strict in its treatment of women who either aborted their babies or killed them after birth. Gretchen’s pathetic case was an extreme example of a “sin” which might be thought to be beyond redemption. The Devil, at the end of Faust Part One, thinks he can take her soul too but he is frustrated at the very last minute. She calls on God to redeem her, and he does.
But some of us first became aware of the musical legacy of Faust as children. In the Tintin story Les Bijoux de La Castafiore (The Castafiore Emerald) the opera diva Bianca Castafiore loves singing the Jewel Song from Charles Gounod’s opera based on Faust Part One – in which the amazed teenage girl finds the cupboard in her little bedroom garret stuffed with priceless jewels – implanted by the Devil’s magic to seduce her.
Gounod’s 1859 opera is the most accessible operatic version of the Faust story and, perhaps for the very reason, that is the one that seems furthest from Goethe’s original conception. Gounod’s librettist, Jules Barbier, excised all Faust’s metaphysical angst, and made Marguerite, as Gretchen became, a soprano’s dream role, with some absolutely stunning solos, including the famous Jewel Song. Seduction, pregnancy, multiple murders, howling sorrow follows – what is there not to like, when set to lilting bel canto music?
It’s marvellous stuff, but a long way from Goethe. In Gounod, Faust is little more than a strutting cad, whereas in Goethe he personifies complicated modern humanity, searching for scientific truth and for an understanding of the universe, but aware of his own divided nature and his need for his Devil companion. In Gounod, the story becomes a simple Catholic tale of a bad man getting his comeuppance and being sent to hell, like Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera, while his wronged girl is saved by the angels.
The bombast of Berlioz’s 1845 Damnation of Faust is magnificent in its depiction of a human soul cascading towards perdition, but it also lacks any of the ambiguity of Goethe – who anticipated one of his keenest readers, Nietzsche, in realising that human beings reach a point in crisis where they are “beyond good and evil”. That’s a challenge which readers can mull over in their armchairs, perhaps, more easily than audiences can take in at a night at the opera.
Goethe’s Faust does not sell his soul to the Devil. He has a bet that the Devil can only possess him if he has tried to make time stand still, or has failed (to use William Blake’s phrase) to kiss the joy as it flies. By the time the story is done, and Faust is 100 years old, he has sort-of experienced not only the long 18th century – with its revolutions in science and politics, but the times which followed. He has foreseen the Industrial Revolution, the wreckage of the planet, and the green movement; he has foreseen the end of Christianity, but reworked its images – a fact which was not lost on Richard Wagner, whose giants in the Ring of the Nibelungs are really the industrial technocrats who will destroy the natural order with their smoke and chimneys, and whose Rhine Maidens, raw nature, will reclaim their world when humanity has done its worst. Nature will win – not us.
Seventy years before Charles Darwin, Goethe expounded a theory of evolution. What interested him as a scientist was not so much the mechanics of it – how we evolve – as the fact that impersonal nature could create the life-forms which eventually evolve in human consciousness.
Goethe described his great drama as “incommensurable” and to my mind the greatest musical expositions of Faust are the all-but incommensurable works of Franz Liszt, both in his Faust Symphony in three character pictures, and, most deeply and mysteriously, in the B-Minor Piano Sonata.
It was, in fact, Berlioz who turned Liszt’s attention to Faust as a suitable subject for composition, and it was the Hungarian composer who most fully understood the mind of Goethe, and the point of Faust. Liszt, like most thinking people in Europe in the decades after Goethe’s death in 1832, had been reading Faust. It is the book which defines the 19th century, because it is about intellectual and technological progress against spiritual loss; it is about love, damaged by men exploiting and damaging women; it is about how to have a new Europe, post Napoleon. It is about doubt and living with doubt, the archetypal 19th-century emotional theme. Liszt understood this all utterly.
His symphony depicts the three central characters of the drama – Faust himself, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. But I believe it is the B-Minor Piano Sonata which contains the greatest commentary on Faust.
Some have seen this as Liszt’s self-portrait; there is probably some truth in this. Liszt, like Faust, like Goethe, and like us – that is the point – is a divided soul. Mephistopheles is not the demon of medieval legend waiting to stick a pitchfork up our backsides. He is the darker, and more cynical, and more carnal side of our own nature. In one of the most unforgettable monologues of Goethe’s play, Faust realises that humanity is not just the observer of nature; we are part of nature. We are not like Kant’s so-reasonable Enlightenment Human looking on appearances. We are part of what we behold. We see, not only nature, but into our own psyche. (Not for nothing were Freud and Jung ardent Goetheans).
In the last year or so of a long endeavour – writing a book about Goethe and his Faustian Life – I played the Liszt B-Minor Sonata (interpreted by Stephen Hough, for me the greatest player of Liszt today) over and over again. Every time I hear the work it says something – infinitely poignant, exciting, heart-wrenching – which could not be said in words. That – so mysteriously – is also what happens every time you read Faust; since, as the aged Goethe reminded Eckermann (who noted down his immortal conversations) we walk in mysteries.