Overview
Introduction
Wagner never evinced any great interest in Goethe and very little in his Faust -- his Seven Pieces for Faust, sketched in 1831 and completed the following year (as Goethe was giving up the ghost in Weimar), probably owe more to the circumstance that his sister, Rosalie, was well-received as Gretchen in the Leipzig Theater production of Faust, Part I, than to the play. Part II of the tragedy, with its heaven dominated by "das Ewig-Weibliche" and Gretchen transmuted as part of a redemptive scheme in which Faust's soul is rescued -- notions in accord with Wagner's burgeoning sensibilities -- was yet to be published. Likewise, Wagner's Faust Overture, composed during his penurious stay in Paris in 1840, owes as much to homesickness, disgust with French theater conventions, and a wish to cast himself as an avatar of German high culture as to the play itself. Already acknowledged as Germany's greatest poet, Goethe could only loom as a rival to the tremendously ambitious but groping youngster -- just turning 19 in 1832 -- with but two piano sonatas, a labored Fantasy for piano, and several clumsy overtures to his credit, or to the gauche bohemian completing Rienzi in a Parisian debtors' prison. The seven pieces Wagner set from Faust are eminently tailored to stage performances, providing a Soldiers' Chorus; a stiffly tame conspectus of frolicking peasants (Bauer unter der Linde); Brander's Song of the Rat and Mephistopheles' Song of the Flea, both with choral refrains; Mephistopheles' mocking "serenade" ("Was machst du mir/Von Liebchens Tür..."); a lackluster Gretchen am Spinnrade; and a melodrama against which Gretchen declaims her prayer to the Virgin ("Ach neige, du Schmerzenreiche..."). The last, if the least successful, is the most interesting. This sort of recitation was in vogue through the nineteenth century -- Liszt composed five -- and as late as 1897 Richard Strauss wrote a melodrama around Tennyson's "Enoch Arden." Likely reflecting Rosalie's rendering of Gretchen's prayer, the trite hysteria of Wagner's melodrama, the most extensive (less than three minutes) of these very brief pieces, underscores a relish wallowing in the misery of the seduced, abandoned, pregnant girl found again in Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust (1844-1853). Wagner's choral writing is pure Liedertafel -- rife with lame bonhomie -- while his Brander and Mephistopheles are bluff, hearty fellows cutting small figures even in the low dive of Auerbach's Cellar. But for a piquant, pungent, truly Faustian rendering of these scenes one turns to the young Berlioz's Opus 1, the Huit Scènes de Faust (1828-1829).
