Faust and Mephistopheles. Portray by Anton Kaulbach, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I first found opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English trainer killed a few class durations by displaying the film Amadeus. The bits it contained of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni have been seductive sufficient to ship me to the closest outpost of the Wherehouse, a California record-store chain, the place the classical and opera part was an afterthought. After I evaluate it to the up to date infinity of Spotify, nevertheless, the restricted choice now appears a form of blessing: with so little to select from, it was unimaginable to really feel overwhelmed.
It was additionally a bonus to not have anybody telling me which operas have been nice and which have been passé. Not till a lot later, as an example, would I study that by the nineties, Gounod’s Faust was already a century previous its prime. It debuted in Paris in 1859 and rapidly grew to become a worldwide hit, particularly within the U.S., the place it was chosen to inaugurate the newly based Metropolitan Opera in 1883. However in time, Faust’s blockbuster standing made it a byword for middlebrow leisure, a bit like The Phantom of the Opera immediately. When Edith Wharton set the primary chapter of The Age of Innocence at a efficiency of Faust, it was a manner of critiquing the provincialism of 1870s New York from the vantage level of 1920. For example, Wharton pokes enjoyable at the truth that the opera, initially written in French, is sung in Italian, the language Individuals have been used to listening to within the opera home on the time.
The novel opens with the principle characters watching the passionate love duet on the finish of act 3, by which Marguerite, a virtuous younger girl, is seduced by Faust, a middle-aged scholar who has offered his soul to the satan. As he begs to “caress your magnificence,” she performs a recreation of “he loves me, he loves me not,” selecting petals off a flower. It’s a signal of Marguerite’s childlike innocence but in addition of her ambivalence: she has already fallen in love with Faust, however can’t make certain whether or not he actually loves her or is simply making an attempt to get her into mattress. She makes use of the sport to persuade herself that Faust’s love is real, and when she plucks the final petal with a triumphant “He loves me!” Faust instantly confirms it: “Sure, imagine this flower … He loves you! Do you perceive that elegant, candy phrase?”
Wharton’s opera scene is the proper opening to a novel about how old school individuals lived lives as passionate as our personal, regardless of and even due to their Victorian constraints. Watching Faust, Newland Archer takes a complacent satisfaction in the concept the younger girl he’s engaged to marry, Might Welland, is simply too harmless to know the erotic rapture of Gounod’s music. “She doesn’t even guess what it’s all about,” Wharton writes. “And he contemplated her absorbed younger face with a thrill of possessorship by which satisfaction in his personal masculine initiation was mingled with a young reverence for her abysmal purity.” However it’s this very purity that can lead him to lose curiosity in Might and fall in love along with her cousin, the Countess Olenska, whose scandalous previous has taught her the that means of “that elegant, candy phrase.”
I didn’t know any of this once I purchased a recording of Faust, on two CDs, with Nicolai Gedda as Faust, Joan Sutherland as Marguerite, and Nicolai Ghiaurov as Mephistopheles. When it got here to like and seduction, at fifteen I used to be as inexperienced as Might Welland. Nonetheless, as I listened and adopted alongside within the libretto, I feel I understood what was happening in Gounod’s music. In actual fact, adolescence might have been the proper time to come across it, since actually Faust is in regards to the energy of adolescent emotion.
When the satan Mephistopheles seems to Faust in act 1 and says he’ll grant any want in alternate for his soul, Faust turns down provides of cash, glory, and energy. What he desires, he says, is “a treasure that comprises all of them: I would like youth.” Youth means intercourse, in fact—“younger mistresses … their caresses and needs”—however it’s also a manner of being alive, a extra enthusiastic kind of participation in life. Within the opera’s opening scene, Faust hears women and men on their approach to work within the fields on the first light, content material with their lot and praising God, and he despairs as a result of he feels fully indifferent from them.
The primary phrase he sings within the opera is rien, “nothing,” and he suffers from the form of nihilism that immediately we might name despair—the sensation that nothing issues or is value doing. In asking Mephistopheles for youth, he’s actually asking the satan to banish this sense, and to return him to a time of life outlined by “the power of highly effective instincts.”
The duet on the finish of act 3 marks the purpose when his want comes true. After seeing Marguerite from afar, and after she rebuffs his preliminary advances, Faust is now sure she returns his love. Gounod’s music tells us that reciprocated ardour is probably the most completely involving expertise of which human beings are succesful. The 2 voices linger over the phrase eternelle, displaying us that in love, time disappears.
In the identical yr Faust premiered, Richard Wagner accomplished the rating of his personal opera about holy and unholy love, Tristan und Isolde. Of their well-known duet, Wagner’s lovers additionally sing that they’re ewig, ewig ein, eternally one. In each operas, the rapturous music prefigures, and stands in for, an erotic union that may’t be depicted on stage.
The nice distinction is that, for Wagner, intercourse is simply as holy as love, of which it’s the pure and obligatory emblem. His love-music immediately imitates the rhythm of intercourse, constructing to an unmistakably orgasmic climax. However for Gounod and his librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, who tailored the story from Goethe’s epic poem, intercourse is a betrayal of affection, the triumph of the flesh over the spirit.
All through their duet, Marguerite makes clear—verbally and musically—that she desires to have intercourse as a lot as Faust does. However she is scared of the attainable penalties—illegitimate being pregnant and social shame—which might fall solely on her. The sexual dynamics of the scene are difficult: Marguerite is telling Faust that he may get her to comply with intercourse, however that she hopes he gained’t, as a result of she would remorse it afterward. “Depart, I tremble, alas! I’m afraid! / Don’t break the center of Marguerite!” she begs. And the duet ends with him agreeing to honor her needs: the facility of her “divine purity,” he says, “triumphs over my will.” He leaves her, promising to return within the morning.
At this second Mephistophele immediately seems. Mocking Faust for his failure to get Marguerite into mattress—“Professor, you have to be despatched again to highschool,” he jibes—the satan tells him to attend and hearken to what she is going to sing when she thinks she’s alone. What follows is an aria of such unabashed need—Marguerite sings of “trembling” and “palpitating,” ready for Faust to return—that he betrays his promise and rushes again to her. As the 2 fall into mattress, we hear the derisive laughter of Mephistopheles. All this discuss of eternity is only a manner of dressing up our organic urges; in the event you put a person and girl collectively, they’ll find yourself doing the identical factor as any pair of animals. The results show to be simply as dire as Marguerite feared: she will get pregnant, Faust abandons her, and within the final act we discover her in jail for infanticide, having misplaced her sanity.
Like Violetta and Alfredo in La traviata and Don Giovanni and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s opera, Faust and Marguerite helped me start to know issues about love and intercourse that have been nonetheless distant from my expertise. In some ways, in fact, these works have been merchandise of an alien tradition: nobody in my world related intercourse with sin, as Marguerite does. However for that very cause, opera had extra to show me in regards to the riskiness and perversity of need than did Madonna and George Michael, who offered transgression on the radio. Thirty years later, I’m nonetheless perpetually stunned by the boldness of an artwork usually considered, by individuals who don’t hearken to it, as old school.
Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and editor. His most up-to-date assortment of poems is The Discarded Life, printed by Crimson Hen Press.
