Faust in Performance: Peter Stein's Production of Goethe's Faust, Parts 1 and 2

So in this narrow house of boarded space
Creation's fullest circle go to pace,
And walk with leisured speed your spell
From Heaven through the World to Hell.

--Faust, ll. 239-42; trans. Walter Arndt

From its earliest publication as a fragment in 1790, Goethe's Faust has challenged the theater. Consisting initially of short, quite disjointed scenes--from Faust alone in his study, reflecting on the limits of human existence and the inadequacies of academic learning, through the sequence involving Gretchen, the innocent young woman whom he seduces, abandons, and ultimately destroys--the play defied eighteenth-century theatrical conventions. Much of the material added for the completion of part 1, published in 1808, emphasizes spectacle and social satire, as in the "Prologue in Heaven," the Easter walk scene ("Outside the City Gate"), and the "Walpurgis Night." To the tragedy of the learned doctor who enters into a contract with the devil, Goethe added the familiar tradition of theater as a metaphor for the world. The author himself seemed to agree that his Faust could be read only as a poem, never performed as a drama. In 1829, when the premiere of part 1, subdivided into acts and significantly cut, was presented in the Weimar Theater to honor the poet on his eightieth birthday, Goethe chose not to attend.

During the next century Faust gradually conquered the stage. Faust's seduction of Gretchen particularly appealed to audiences familiar with the tradition of bourgeois tragedy. This popularity is reflected in the various operatic versions, by Berlioz, Louis Spohr, Charles Gounod, Arrigo Boito, Ferruccio Busoni, and others, where Gretchen assumes an importance equal to that of Faust and Mephistopheles; in Liszt's Faust Symphony each of the three movements is named for one of these central characters.

"What is the central Idea in Faust?" the Jena historian Heinrich Luden asked Goethe during a conversation in 1806, two years before part 1 was published. The response was, in effect, "How should I know? I only wrote the play." But Goethe added that if some general formulation were needed, the statement by the Theater Director at the end of the "Prelude in the Theater"(my epigraph) would probably do, with its striking emphasis on the symbolic space of the theater--in the apparent allusion to the famous lines in Henry V concerning "this wooden O"--rather than on the tragic action or plot involving Faust. In part 2--mostly composed more than two decades after Goethe wrote this statement, completed only shortly before his death in 1832, and published posthumously--Goethe develops this all-encompassing metaphor further than in any other drama ever written.

From the beginning this portion of Faust seemed to defy performance. It is thus ironic that the most distinctive productions of Goethe's play during the twentieth century, in particular those since the Second World War, represent part 2 as the site of Faust's central challenge and the main source of dramatic interest. This holds true above all for the most recent, by Peter Stein, which is also the most ambitious, lavish, and expensive Faust ever attempted. This production, which presents both parts uncut, deserves to be celebrated as the inaugural theater event of the new millennium.

Isolated and partial attempts to stage part 2 were made, always with drastic cuts and revisions, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but those efforts were generally viewed as proof that the work exceeds the limits of the theater. The central challenge resides in Goethe's shift of emphasis away from character in part 1 toward universal social and mythological concerns; Faust and even Mephistopheles are made to serve larger, more comprehensive symbolic themes, for which their characters are at most convenient vehicles or masks or mediating agents. Many critics and performers have been unwilling to accept such a shift of emphasis. Some of the most powerful and...