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Faust in several instantiations
So I had this Goethe-shaped hole in, well, my literacy in general, but in particular in my experience of Faust, despite having seen the Gounod opera a couple of times at this point and having read other Faust treatments (about which more later). ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selenak pointed me to this translation for stage, abridged but which does have both parts. It took me a while to get into it (not its fault, I'm pretty sure, but mine; reading paper books has been all over the place for me, sometimes really quick and sometimes really slow), but once I got hooked, I was riveted.
This translation plays around with rhyme but doesn't end-rhyme every couplet, choosing instead to sometimes play with internal rhyme. I suspect that this is a little less accurate in terms of meaning and in sheer sound, but it's never boring to read. And it's really funny, especially Mephistopheles -- his sardonic wit practically leaps off the page. (He really does steal the show.) He makes fun of everything!
Here's a bit where Mephistopheles is making fun of academia (I picked this mostly at random; every page or two he makes me smile, sometimes even when he's saying something completely horrible but it's still funny) :
There's a bit where Mephisto counsels the Emperor to print money! That way all his money problems will be solved and everyone will be happy! (As you might expect, it doesn't turn out so well for him, later on.) And then there's one part where Mephisto is talking about the dread "Mothers," and it just stands out so much because for one moment he's not joking around, and that does more than pages of horrific text could have done to make the horror of them stand out.
I can see why the Gounod opera chose to take the Margareta episode and focus on that; it definitely is a much more self-contained -- and heartbreaking -- episode than the entire sprawling text. The whole Margareta thing is even more heartbreaking in the play in some ways; Siebel isn't there (well, he is, but as a minor character in a scene before Margareta even shows up), but Valentin is just as awful :( And as it turns out, in Goethe Margareta also poisons her mother (Faust gives Margareta what she thinks is a sleeping potion for her mother, so that they can make love) so she has that going on too :(
And with all that, the focus of play and opera seems different (apart from the opera also being much less witty, though Mephistopheles does have his moments, depending on who's playing him) -- for me, the opera is a little hollow; the message of the opera to me seems to be that gosh, Marguerite goes through so much awfulness but it's okay because she is saved at the end. Which I guess yay for salvation, but surely she might have been saved without having to go through all that? I got the sense that Goethe was interested in a somewhat different focus: can she be saved, despite all the devil (and other people) can do to judge, sentence, and condemn her? And the answer, Goethe says unequivocably, is yes.
I then went back and looked at my Marlowe and Sayers (yes! Dorothy Sayers wrote a play about Faust! It is even online here ! I happened to find it in a used bookstore many years ago, totally randomly) and it's super interesting to me to see the progression in the way Faust and his fate and God are treated. Marlowe, of course, is very clear on Faust being damned. Faust accepts the deal with Mephistopheles to be damned in exchange for twenty-four years of Mephisto's services; he gets his twenty-four years in the bargain; and then he's done. It's all very straightforward. (Interestingly, I don't think God shows up at all, though there's a Good Angel.)
One can see Goethe rebelling against this conception of Faust, and (I presume) against the whole idea of damnation in general; why would God damn His own creation? What would even be the point? (See also: 30-40 years later, Joseph Smith as representative of the American Second Great Awakening, being all "dude, this whole original sin deal, WHAT EVEN, I am NOT okay with this" -- the point being that this was a Thing that people were thinking about.) And so Goethe's Faust, who does all kinds of terrible awful things (okay, yeah, I'm not okay with what he does to Margareta, and then there's a terrible part where he's complicit in bashing in the heads of the old couple Baucis and Philemon), is redeemed at the end, because damnation is something that fundamentally doesn't make any sense.
And then, there's Sayers. Sayers is definitely familiar with both versions (she even cites both in her intro to her play). Given her scholastically devout 20th-C Christianity (she would have been the most devout and certainly the most theologically inclined of all three of these authors), it seems to me that one of her major goals in writing her Faust play ("The Devil to Pay") was to, I think, chart a path for her Faust that would springboard off of Marlowe and Goethe but give Faust a more twentieth-century-emotionally-fulfilling conclusion. (Whether it's also more theologically correct -- well, I assume so, as this is Sayers we're talking about, but I leave that exercise to those who are more theologically inclined than I.) (She is also more explicitly concerned with the problem of evil than Goethe, who clearly is interested in it but treats it more implicitly.)
Sayers' Faust -- in a way that quite frankly is more than a bit authorial-fiat-to-get-the-characters-to-do-what-I-want -- asks for, and receives from Mephistopheles, "primal innocence," which means his soul is, well, no longer an adult human soul, but more like a baby's or an animal's in terms of being able to understand and carry out higher-level socioemotional-moral responses. This... complicates matters once the twenty-four years are up and Mephistopheles claims his due. Faust is restored to his old intellect/soul to make the decision: should he accept the primal soul and wander in limbo like that forever, or go to hell with Mephistopheles but retain the knowledge of God and love? As someone who is closer to Sayers in both chronological time and in religious outlook than to Goethe or Marlowe, I found her Faust/Faust's fate the most affecting and viscerally moving, but YMMV, and certainly her play is not as witty as Goethe's :)
selenak pointed me to this translation for stage, abridged but which does have both parts. It took me a while to get into it (not its fault, I'm pretty sure, but mine; reading paper books has been all over the place for me, sometimes really quick and sometimes really slow), but once I got hooked, I was riveted.This translation plays around with rhyme but doesn't end-rhyme every couplet, choosing instead to sometimes play with internal rhyme. I suspect that this is a little less accurate in terms of meaning and in sheer sound, but it's never boring to read. And it's really funny, especially Mephistopheles -- his sardonic wit practically leaps off the page. (He really does steal the show.) He makes fun of everything!
Here's a bit where Mephistopheles is making fun of academia (I picked this mostly at random; every page or two he makes me smile, sometimes even when he's saying something completely horrible but it's still funny) :
And the fur of [Faust's] academic gown
Still hangs on the back of the door;
It reminds me of all the high-blown
Nonsense I once fed
Into the poor credulous head
Of a student I used to know;
No doubt he's spewing it all back out
To others even now.
I'm sorely tempted to dress up, to be
The trumped-up, puffed-up professor again,
Convinced of his infallibility.
The professors know
How to always be in the right;
The Devil gave up that particular fight
A long, long time ago.
There's a bit where Mephisto counsels the Emperor to print money! That way all his money problems will be solved and everyone will be happy! (As you might expect, it doesn't turn out so well for him, later on.) And then there's one part where Mephisto is talking about the dread "Mothers," and it just stands out so much because for one moment he's not joking around, and that does more than pages of horrific text could have done to make the horror of them stand out.
I can see why the Gounod opera chose to take the Margareta episode and focus on that; it definitely is a much more self-contained -- and heartbreaking -- episode than the entire sprawling text. The whole Margareta thing is even more heartbreaking in the play in some ways; Siebel isn't there (well, he is, but as a minor character in a scene before Margareta even shows up), but Valentin is just as awful :( And as it turns out, in Goethe Margareta also poisons her mother (Faust gives Margareta what she thinks is a sleeping potion for her mother, so that they can make love) so she has that going on too :(
And with all that, the focus of play and opera seems different (apart from the opera also being much less witty, though Mephistopheles does have his moments, depending on who's playing him) -- for me, the opera is a little hollow; the message of the opera to me seems to be that gosh, Marguerite goes through so much awfulness but it's okay because she is saved at the end. Which I guess yay for salvation, but surely she might have been saved without having to go through all that? I got the sense that Goethe was interested in a somewhat different focus: can she be saved, despite all the devil (and other people) can do to judge, sentence, and condemn her? And the answer, Goethe says unequivocably, is yes.
I then went back and looked at my Marlowe and Sayers (yes! Dorothy Sayers wrote a play about Faust! It is even online here ! I happened to find it in a used bookstore many years ago, totally randomly) and it's super interesting to me to see the progression in the way Faust and his fate and God are treated. Marlowe, of course, is very clear on Faust being damned. Faust accepts the deal with Mephistopheles to be damned in exchange for twenty-four years of Mephisto's services; he gets his twenty-four years in the bargain; and then he's done. It's all very straightforward. (Interestingly, I don't think God shows up at all, though there's a Good Angel.)
One can see Goethe rebelling against this conception of Faust, and (I presume) against the whole idea of damnation in general; why would God damn His own creation? What would even be the point? (See also: 30-40 years later, Joseph Smith as representative of the American Second Great Awakening, being all "dude, this whole original sin deal, WHAT EVEN, I am NOT okay with this" -- the point being that this was a Thing that people were thinking about.) And so Goethe's Faust, who does all kinds of terrible awful things (okay, yeah, I'm not okay with what he does to Margareta, and then there's a terrible part where he's complicit in bashing in the heads of the old couple Baucis and Philemon), is redeemed at the end, because damnation is something that fundamentally doesn't make any sense.
And then, there's Sayers. Sayers is definitely familiar with both versions (she even cites both in her intro to her play). Given her scholastically devout 20th-C Christianity (she would have been the most devout and certainly the most theologically inclined of all three of these authors), it seems to me that one of her major goals in writing her Faust play ("The Devil to Pay") was to, I think, chart a path for her Faust that would springboard off of Marlowe and Goethe but give Faust a more twentieth-century-emotionally-fulfilling conclusion. (Whether it's also more theologically correct -- well, I assume so, as this is Sayers we're talking about, but I leave that exercise to those who are more theologically inclined than I.) (She is also more explicitly concerned with the problem of evil than Goethe, who clearly is interested in it but treats it more implicitly.)
Sayers' Faust -- in a way that quite frankly is more than a bit authorial-fiat-to-get-the-characters-to-do-what-I-want -- asks for, and receives from Mephistopheles, "primal innocence," which means his soul is, well, no longer an adult human soul, but more like a baby's or an animal's in terms of being able to understand and carry out higher-level socioemotional-moral responses. This... complicates matters once the twenty-four years are up and Mephistopheles claims his due. Faust is restored to his old intellect/soul to make the decision: should he accept the primal soul and wander in limbo like that forever, or go to hell with Mephistopheles but retain the knowledge of God and love? As someone who is closer to Sayers in both chronological time and in religious outlook than to Goethe or Marlowe, I found her Faust/Faust's fate the most affecting and viscerally moving, but YMMV, and certainly her play is not as witty as Goethe's :)
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Here's Samuel Ramey singing "Son lo Spirito," and a translation:
https://youtu.be/-PZS_L6mH1M
https://opera-cat.dreamwidth.org/4925.html
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Man, Samuel Ramey, he is amazing :D ...let me get back to you ;)
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He wouldn't have been able to get it on the stage if it featured God, I think - it would have been viewed as blasphemous and it wouldn't have been legal to stage (and might have caused him further, more personal trouble...)
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Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen…
Re: rhyme - you can tell a professional playwright crafted this English version, because this is something actors can actually recite and have fun with. I first saw it on stage in Stratford, that’s how I know about it. In the German original, Goethe is very playful with the various modes and speech and rhyme he employs, too. For example, when Faust and Mephisto visit the Classical Walpurgis Night, and then Helen shows up, all Greek mythological characters speek in Greek hexameters. (While Faust and Mephisto are still in couplets or blank verse.) When with Faust, Helen adopts the rhyming couplets he uses, but once she’s gone, he adopts her Greek hexameters and remains in that mode for the rest of the play.
More geeking out on Faust the play and language: a young Goethe wrote the first draft of Faust, Part I, in prose. Incomplete, but the majority of the scenes are there. This is the version usually referred to as “Urfaust” which is where all the “Ur-“ designations come from. He never published it, but he read it to Carl August and company, and a lady-in-waiting secretly made notes and transcribed the rest from memory verbatim in the same night. (BTW, among other things, her transcription shows Goethe’s Hessian dialect and pronounciation.) Goethe then started to versify what he had but stopped because that was the decade where he became a fulltime cabinet secretary to Carl August. After which he ran away to Italy for two years. He had his various unfinished plays in the luggage, and the Faust 1 fragment got an overhaul and near complete versification, but wasn’t yet finished, plus he knew then he needed to write Part II. (He already wrote Act 3 from Part II, the one with Helen.) After his return to Weimar, he published “Faust, A Fragment”, which is much of Part I, and wrote other things.
Then his relationship with Schiller turned from
enemies to loversguarded hostility to friendship, and Schiller was a fan of the Faust fragment, and through writing about it in their letters and talking about it, Goethe was inspired to go back, and give part I the final overhaul. (And there was much rejoicing among German readers.) Now, the one prose scene which survived in prose, as a much younger Goethe, who’d been all raw talent, had first written it, was the one between Faust and Mephistopheles after Faust has found out what happened to Gretchen. (“Trüber Tag. Feld.”) And because the entire rest of the play is in verse, leaving it in Sturm-und-Drang prose contributes to its emotional power and horror.Part II took even more time to complete. It wasn’t finished until two years before Goethe’s death, in 1830, almost sixty years after he first started to work on Faust, which is why the complete work is in more than one sense a Lebenswerk. He’d gotten first interested in then subject as a child when seeing a play with puppets about Faust in Frankfurt, and it had never let him go. The Gretchen part of it owes its existence to an early Frankfurt impression, too; there had been a young woman, Susanna Margareta Brand, executed for infanticide when he was a student.
Faust before Goethe: first, there was a Renaissance Volksbuch von Doctor Faustus, which was also Marlowe’s source as far as I know. Marlowe’s play made it to the continent but changed into a morality play which in turn spawned the puppet play kid!Goethe saw.
The passage you quote of Mephistopheles making fun of academia is also alluding to a scene in part I which got cut in the translation where a new student who doesn’t yet know which subjects he’ll take wants councelling by Dr. Faust, who is busy changing clothes to go on the journey with Mephisto, and Mephisto poses as Faust to give the students his guidance councellor speech, which is a hilarious satire on (not just) German universities and their introduction courses. I mourned its cut, though I can see why for a stage version it was left out, as it’s pretty self contained.
Printing money satire: in Stratford I heard someone doubt this is in the original, but it so is. Goethe: playwright with working experience as minister in a dukedom where “how do we make/keep Weimar solvent?” Is an ongoing question!
Mephisto in general: best fictional devil ever. No offense to Marlowe’s guy or Milton’s.
The Sayers play sounds interesting! Goethe, born into the century of the Enlightenment and being referred to as “the old pagan” by a half admiring, half resentful 19th century readership in his old age, definitely didn’t have her theological background or priorities.
Lastly, a few links to subtitled-in-English scenes now you’ve read the play:
Opening scene between the director, the clown and the poet: https://youtu.be/ElpPvrxHACI
Prologue in heaven: https://youtu.be/Mcowjpu8qI0
Faust’s first scene: https://youtu.be/-IZOcjJTsSY
Faust and Gretchen, Gretchen alone, Faust and Mephisto: https://youtu.be/oih5UQtACJU
Final scene with Gretchen, Faust, Mephisto: https://youtu.be/0pOALpUAMOk
Re: Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen…
eeeee thank you for the added history, I always love this!
Re: rhyme - you can tell a professional playwright crafted this English version, because this is something actors can actually recite and have fun with. I first saw it on stage in Stratford, that’s how I know about it.
Oh, I'm so jealous! I would LOVE to see this version!
In the German original, Goethe is very playful with the various modes and speech and rhyme he employs, too. For example, when Faust and Mephisto visit the Classical Walpurgis Night, and then Helen shows up, all Greek mythological characters speek in Greek hexameters. (While Faust and Mephisto are still in couplets or blank verse.) When with Faust, Helen adopts the rhyming couplets he uses, but once she’s gone, he adopts her Greek hexameters and remains in that mode for the rest of the play.
This is really cool.
Mephisto poses as Faust to give the students his guidance councellor speech, which is a hilarious satire on (not just) German universities and their introduction courses. I mourned its cut, though I can see why for a stage version it was left out, as it’s pretty self contained.
Oh man, this sounds hilarious. I'll have to look this up, even in a subpar translation. :D
Printing money satire: in Stratford I heard someone doubt this is in the original, but it so is. Goethe: playwright with working experience as minister in a dukedom where “how do we make/keep Weimar solvent?” Is an ongoing question!
Heh, I didn't doubt it -- but I suppose I just took it for granted that writers at that time were interested in all kinds of things, I hadn't thought about Goethe's working experience!
Mephisto in general: best fictional devil ever. No offense to Marlowe’s guy or Milton’s.
YUP. No argument here.
I really like the Sayers play! I think it's worth checking out, even if her Mephistopheles is not the best fictional devil ;)
eeeee I've watched the first two scenes, they are awesome (Mephistopheles in particular is amazing!) -- I'm going to watch the others soon but I want to get to reading group before bed :)
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