Favourite operas from Mozart to Mascagni : their plots, history and music . ly two count as literature—those of ChristopherMarlowe and Goethe. Goethes is the incomparablecreation. The spell of the ancient apologue laidhold of him before he was well out of his teens.** The marionette fable of Faust, he says, mur-mured with many voices in my soul. I, too, hadwandered into every department of knowledge, andhad returned early enough satisfied with the vanityof science. And life, too, I had tried under variousaspects, and always came back sorrowing and un-satisfied. The first part of his great work
Favourite operas from Mozart to Mascagni : their plots, history and music . ly two count as literature—those of ChristopherMarlowe and Goethe. Goethes is the incomparablecreation. The spell of the ancient apologue laidhold of him before he was well out of his teens.** The marionette fable of Faust, he says, mur-mured with many voices in my soul. I, too, hadwandered into every department of knowledge, andhad returned early enough satisfied with the vanityof science. And life, too, I had tried under variousaspects, and always came back sorrowing and un-satisfied. The first part of his great work waspublished in 1808, the second in 1831. From it the Faust of Gounod, a work equally great in itsown way, is essentially derived. A French statistician has proved that morecomposers have been inspired by Goethes mastercreation than by any other secular piece of literaturewhatsoever. He gives a list of no fewer than nine-teen operas WTitten on the subject, beginning withthe 1810 setting of Spohr (a ** conscientious work, now forgotten), and ending with the Faust of 28. While old Mammon leads the ball Act II. Sc. 1 THE LIBRETTO Lassen, produced at Weimar in 1876. To thesemight be added Berliozs fantastic La Damnation deFatLst, Schumanns mystic symphonic work, Liszts Faust symphony, and a Faust overture writtenby Wagner in 1849. It is said that Beethoventhought of crowning his career by a ** Faust —andwhat a Faust that would have been I Rossini, too,had hoped to measure himself with Goethe, andAlexandre Dumas was to have written the opera-goers, however, there is but one Faust,and it is that which figures in the Frenchmans listas by * Charles Gounod, Paris, 1859. THE LIBRETTO No composer could hope to deal with the entire Faust legend as it is enshrined in Goethes vast and complex conception. One composer will fix on this, another will fix on that, according as his genius and his personal fancy dictate. Gounod and his librettists fixed on the single episode of Gretc
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectoperas, bookyear1910
