Gounod, Charles

Charles Gounod – Faust

(b. Paris, 17 June 1818 – d. Saint-Cloud, 18 October 1893)

Opera in five acts (1856-58)
on a libretto after Goethe by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré

Preface
In sheer number of performances the world over, Faust is by far the most popular French opera ever written. By the end of the twentieth century it had been presented in forty-five countries in twenty-four different languages. Before the Salle Garnier had given way to the Bastille as the home of the Paris Opéra, Faust had crossed its boards nearly three thousand times, making it far and away the most frequently performed work in those hallowed precincts. And in New York it opened the opera season every year for decades – a point that figured largely in that timeless portrait of American society in the Gilded Age, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. For most music lovers the name of Gounod, if not associated with his Ave Maria after Bach or The Funeral March of a Marionette so beloved of Alfred Hitchcock, is synonymous with Faust: none of his other operas, despite their at times superior merits, remotely approached its ubiquitous place in the world’s repertoire, and it has wholly eclipsed the sacred oratorios in which he invested so many hopes and so much effort in the latter part of his life. Gounod’s place in history, for better or worse, stands or falls with Faust.

As with all romantic operas that have found supreme popularity with the public (as witness the works of Puccini and Tchaikovsky), Faust has come under fire from scholarly quarters. German critics and historians in particular bewail its remoteness, or dumbing down, of Goethe’s original poem, and have declined to refer to it by its original title ever since its first Dresden performance of 1861 (in the German-speaking countries it is called, to avoid offense, Margarethe). Indeed, there is some justification for this German custom, for Faust the opera makes no pretense at plumbing the depths of the human condition or lucubrating on the meaning of life or the nature of evil: it is, purely and simply, a love story, with Marguerite (Gretchen) its main protagonist and with Faust in the role otherwise played by such callous operatic lovers as Alfredo or Pinkerton. Unlike Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, Mahler, and other musical interpreters of the Faust material, Gounod evinced no interest in Faust’s salvation or his harrowing moral trajectory. It is Gretchen’s story that gripped him from first to last.

And grip him it did. In 1838, at the age of twenty, Gounod was overwhelmed by Goethe’s poem (in the outstanding French translation by Gerard de Nerval); and when he lived in Italy from 1839 to 1842, as a recipient of the Prix du Rome, the high-strung and emotional young man is said to have carried a copy of it in his pocket at all times and to have produced copious notes for possible future compositions (including some for a setting of the Walpurgis Night). At this time, aided by the careful tutelage of Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny Hensel, he fell much under the sway of German music, especially the Bach revival. His gratitude toward Fanny, and his emotional response to the mysteries of German art altogether, knew no bounds, and were duly reported back to Felix, who later greeted Gounod in Berlin with the words, “Ah, c’est vous le fou dont ma soeur m’a parlé!” (“Ah, so you’re the madman my sister told me about!”). …

Read preface / Vorwort > HERE