7 - The Damnation of Faust: the perils of heroism in music

Summary

BERLIOZ AND GOETHE, MUSIC AND WORDS: THE POLEMICAL BACKGROUND

The idea of a Faust in music has always appeared as ludicrous to some as the idea of Faust in a ballet appeared to Berlioz, who thought it more preposterous than a history of Rome in madrigals. When in the face of such prejudice he produced a musical drama based on the first part of Goethe's Faust, in 1846, cries of sacrilege from German critics provoked him to defend himself in a preface. He had been accused – ‘often with bitterness’, he reports – of ‘mutilating a monument’. More even than bitterness, the word ‘mutilation’ betrays so visceral a response as to arouse not only scepticism about its pertinence, but curiosity about its cause. Not that language of this kind is unusual in the history of music criticism. Classical critics regularly denounced operas for emasculating the virile actions and passions of spoken drama. Lately a new twist to the tradition has come from another German critic, Hermann Hofer, who in an analysis of great perspicacity and goodwill towards the ‘modern’ Berlioz has interpreted the hero of La Damnation de Faust as an anti-Faust – intellectually barren, politically ineffectual and sexually impotent. Extreme though it may sound, such a view pushes to its logical conclusion a standard response to Berlioz's work from the first. In effect we find Berlioz charged, in France as elsewhere, with castrating both the text and the hero of Goethe's classic.