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Gounod first made the acquaintance of Goethe’s Faust in 1841 while he was in Rome with the Prix de Rome. He was so taken with it that he carried the book that he carried it around in his pocket — several friends mentioned that they never saw him without it. He began to make notes on music for it. He was determined some day to write an opera on the subject. Back in Paris, he saw a play on the subject, Faust et Marguerite, by Michel Carré. Later he met Jules Barbier who confessed that he would like to adapt the story for an opera. It just so happened that Leon Carvalho, the director of the Théâtre-Lyrique, was looking for a Faust opera. The project was born, work started, and Carré was brought into the plans. When the opera was well underway, a new Faust by Dennery was announced. Carvalho, afraid of the competition, postponed the opening for a year.
When the rehearsal period did start, it was chaotic. Mme Carvalho, wife of the director, was given the role of Marguerite, even though Gounod had some reservations about her voice. In the event, she did the part very well and scored a personal triumph, but she kept changing the music to show off her vocal prowess. About the rehearsals Gounod wrote:
Performance is very much hampered at the moment by production problems. People can think only of their arms, their legs, and nobody sings or tries out phrases any more. The orchestra saws away.…It will all come right at the final rehearsals and at the first night.
The tenor lost his voice just before the opening and had to be replaced. Fearing the Vatican would be offended, the Minister of Fine Arts demanded the removal of the church scene. However, Gounod was a friend of the Papal nuncio, and the scene was left in. Barbier was so aware of the differences between the final version of the libretto and Goethe’s great play, that he feared critical scorn and grew lean and haggard. Faust finally opened on March 19, 1859 but Barbier was not there. He was in bed with nervous prostration. Sure enough, the critics were reserved at first, but soon the audiences appeared in record numbers.
There are major differences between Gounod’s version and Goethe’s. A cosmic drama became a romance on a human scale, without the philosophical issues raised in the original. In the opera Faust desired youth and pleasure, in Goethe, wisdom. Marguerite is in only one section of Goethe’s version, but she is one of the main characters in the opera. In fact, for many years, Germans produced Faust under the title Margarete. They considered the story had been so trivialized that it was an insult to German Art. However, under either title, the opera has been a great success in Germany.
The original version had spoken dialogue but, for performance in Strasbourg, Gounod replaced it with recitative. In 1869 Faust was taken into the répertoire of the Paris Opera where, by 1935, it had received over 2,000 performances. It soon spread throughout the world and was given so often at the Metropolitan Opera in New York that the theatre became known as the Faustspielhaus (Faust Theatre).
As is usual, many directors have experimented with other interpretations and settings. In a recent version in Munich, Germany, set in the 1940s, Méphistophélès was a dancing devil, Marguerite was a bobby-soxer, and the rejuvenated Faust a dude with slicked-back hair. Méphistophélès lost his powers little by little until, at the end, he appeared in a wheelchair, took Marguerite onto his lap and ascended with her to heaven. Even the devil was saved!
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