Music in Goethe’s Faust; Goethe’s Faust in Music ed. by Lorraine Byrne Bodley (review)

A naked woman lies with her face hidden in her hands. A tattooed, bald-headed man rests his hand on her buttocks, with eyes closed and what may be a satisfied smile, from which wisps of smoke emerge. It is an arresting cover image, taken from a production of Gounod’s Faust directed by Àlex Ollé for the Dutch National Opera in 2014, which signals the distance between nineteenth- and twenty-first century conceptions of morality as expressed through art in responses to Goethe’s drama. It thereby neatly summarizes the purpose of this collection of essays, one of several volumes dedicated to the topic of Faust in music but unusual and welcome in its attention to productions as well as works.

The editor Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s expertise in Goethe is evident in her introduction, which neatly summarizes Faust and its appeal for musical adaptation. She concludes: ‘when tracing the musical afterlives of Faust across the centuries, it is important to see how Goethe’s text operates within its cultural context, how each setting responds to or exploits a myth, explicitly or implicitly, and participates in its culture’s discourse on the significance of Goethe’s text in general. Such criticism is not merely historicist, responding to specific historical and cultural contingencies informing each retelling of Goethe’s Faust, but rather a reassertion of a universal and transcendental value reaffirmed in each appearance’ (p. 20). Interestingly, the chapters in this volume are rarely both historicist and universalist but tend towards one or the other. It is a perhaps a tension within adaptation studies more broadly rather than something specific to Goethe’s Faust that the two critical strands cannot be reconciled.

Byrne Bodley also provides the first chapter of Part I (unlike Goethe’s drama, there are four not two parts), on content and context. She contradicts traditional readings of Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ as not complying with Goethe’s musical intent, to argue that ‘the dramatic context for the Lied is musically animated in Schubert’s setting’ (p. 37). Goethe biographer Nicholas Boyle’s subsequent chapter is on Goethe’s Faust as ‘a myth of modernity’, by which he means that it is an explicitly post-Christian work. Two changes enabled Goethe to make this happen: first, the inclusion of the Gretchen story, which inspired him to start writing the play in the early 1770s; second, transforming Faust’s agreement with the Devil from a pact or contract to a wager, through which Goethe figured out how to complete the drama. Seen in this light, Boyle argues, the decision to allow ‘Faust to go to Heaven—is little more than a flourish, and not even original to him’ (p. 45). Boyle’s deft reading of Faust as modern man concludes that this ‘is not just a morality play for the eighteenth century—it is a tragedy, perhaps the tragedy, of modernity’ (p. 60). It is a provocative idea and one interesting to see occasionally picked up in other chapters.

Musical adaptation is returned to by Martin Swales, who tries to gauge the ways in which Goethe’s Faust can be considered a musical work: is it to do with the amount of musical numbers involved (almost a fifth of Part I and a quarter of Part II)? Is it the potential for comparisons to musical forms, such as the Singspiel? Or is it simply that Faust has been set to music so many times it is habitually thought of in musical terms? Swales points out that despite the many musical numbers Faust has hardly any of his own. Treating Faust as a man of words rather than notes, he argues, allows Goethe to contrast Faust with other characters—notably Gretchen, who without the same education as her lover has to resort to that age-old vehicle for interior discourse, song, to articulate her feelings. According to...