A Lecture presented on April 20, 2008 as part of "Faust at Notre Dame"
Mark Beudert, Director of Opera, University of Notre Dame
Scott Pratt, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon
Introduction
Imagine a room in Paris in late 1858—perhaps it is Advent. A no-longer-young composer sits at his desk. His glorious days as a prodigy are two decades past. Although he has made a name for himself in the musical life of Paris, it is merely as a composer of religious music influenced by centuries-old traditions. He has attempted to make a name for himself in the fashionable world of opera, but his ventures had but modest success. He has struggled to bring to life a project that, in his words, had “been in his gut for 10 years,” a new opera that would bring him the fame he knew he deserved. But every attempt has failed. Tonight, he has decided, will be his last. Without a stunning success like those of his youth, there was no point in going on.
A glass of clear liquid sits on the desk. He writes in his journal: “Nothing! In vain I have examined, in my ardent and lonely vigil, nature and God. Not one voice is heard in reply.” Church bells in the distance interrupt. He realizes that morning is coming and people are gathering for early Mass. He imagines the choir singing “Praise to God, who has given us youth, and Nature, and work!” He writes: “But this God, what can he do for me? Will He restore my love, youth and faith? Be damned, sensual pleasures--and the chains which force me to grovel before them! Damned be all that lures us, vain hope of love or of success! Damned be science, and faith! At last, damned be this endurance of suffering!” He writes: “Come to me, Satan! Come to me!”
Imagine a knock at the door. The composer opens the door and his fate is changed forever.
Imagine now that it is March 19th, 1859 at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris; the orchestra sounds the first chord of his new opera, Faust. The initial performance is a noticeable success with great expectations. A year later, an expanded version opens in Strasbourg. Soon, long-running productions open in Belgium, England, Italy, and America, first in New York in Italian and later the same month in Philadelphia in German. Finally, within a short decade, the artistic and financial summit of art is reached when the “definitive” version of Faust premieres again in Paris, this time at the grand Théâtre Impérial de l´Opéra. Gounod becomes an international success, and his opera remains so popular that Bernard Shaw later complained that a professional critic had “to spend about ten years of every twelve of his life listening to Faust.”
The power and attraction of the opera was difficult to explain. Initial critics were upset less about the adaptation of Goethe’s monumental work than Gounod’s “incomprehensible” and “unmelodious” music. To those, however, more ready to join Dr. Faust in his rooms one cold night, desperate in the face of failure, loss of faith, and the prospect of death, the power of Faust was found in the aesthetic experience, unbound from attempts to judge the opera by abstract standards external to the performance. With the critics we might ask what bargain was struck to bring about this success?
It is tempting to explain the success of Faust in terms of some occult “Faustian bargain” made by the composer in the face of desperation. It is more likely that the success of the opera is explained by the desire that we all share for a bargain that will bring us success and fame. We discover, during our lives of intermittent triumphs and frequent failures, that success begins when we reach our limits and transcend them, whether by a bargain with the devil, dumb luck, our own lame efforts, or by the grace of God. The Faust we see and hear tonight shows two ways in which limits are reached and two ways in which they are transcended.
The first way, Faust’s way, was to embrace evil, to coerce and deceive in order to bring about limited pleasures, leaving death and betrayal in their wake. You might stop me—we’re all 21st century people—and ask if Faust’s way is really so bad. It is a tough world, after all. Successes and pleasures always come at a price. Faust does find love along the way, and that is a triumph not an evil. But finding love is Faust’s beginning, not his end. His desires, in the end, cost him all hope, even the hope that lasts “only an hour”—his ability to change and choose a new purpose. So long as satisfying desire was enough, Faust did not notice what he had traded away. But when he falls in love, he finds that he has lost the power to change his loyalty from his own greed and lust to the love he shared with Marguerite. His fate is settled. In the face of his own limits, he reaches out to Mephistopheles to satisfy his desires. When he discovers that real meaning is found in Marguerite, it is too late.
The second way to reach beyond our limits is to choose the way of Marguerite. Coerced from her life of toil and responsibility, she is tempted by jewels and sex, struggles with the loss of faith, even kills her own child and finally dies for it. But even in the midst of a failed life, she clings to a hope for salvation by seeing again defining moments of love. Despite the evil she has made possible—the death of her brother and child—her failures were her own, but her love of Faust and of God was true. She is brought by circumstance to accept responsibility for the evil she caused, but in accepting it she is able to maintain her faith and hope for salvation.
Their journey is framed by the first word for the opera: rien—“nothing”. The opera is the experience of accepting that starting point and seeking meaning in spite of it. The key organizing scenes are the opening scene in Faust’s study (Gounod’s Act I), the Garden Scene (his Act III, our Act I scene iii), the scene in the Church (Act IV/Act II scene i), and in the final trio (Act V/Act II scene ii). As we go on this journey, we see that both evil and good are close at hand and, if Gounod is to be believed, come or stay away depending upon the decisions we each make, again and again.
The opening scene brings with it a paradox. People sometimes wonder why Gounod offers a title character that is not, on the surface, a powerful presence. Even were Gounod’s original intentions to be honored, and the Walpurgisnacht scene (with Faust’s showpiece Chant Bachique) restored, it would be difficult for our so-called “hero” to dominate the opera. The climatic notes, as one experienced tenor put it, are just not “high” enough. And yet, this may be a key to understanding the whole.
Faust, from the moment of his bargain forward, renounces the power of hope, and becomes an instrument and a passive participant in his own life—drawn by desire, captivated by love, anxious for pleasure, but always already damned. Faust’s descent from greatness marks the trajectory of damnation, while those who struggle against him find hope. Marguerite, despite her failures, asks for forgiveness and receives grace. Marguerite’s failure, loss, atonement and redemption mark the trajectory of hope.
These trajectories intersect in the heart of the opera, the remarkable Garden Scene. Faust’s aria praises not Marguerite but the forces of nature which shaped her. Her following scena praises not Faust but her romantic ideal of love unto death. They intersect in the only two bars of music where they sing together: Eternelle. This profound union changes only one of them. In the passage that follows, Faust’s words of love are still about Nature; Marguerite’s, however, are for Faust. Her ability to love another person awakens in her the strength to surmount her loss of innocence, the death of her brother, and her seeming abandonment by God. Faust’s inability to love leads to his final impotence in the face of damnation.
Our research into the Church Scene, where Marguerite and the Devil struggle, has enabled us to realize the composer’s original philosophical intent. Gounod, in his Memoirs explained the process of composition: “The dramatic order observed by Goethe exacts that the scene of Valentine’s death preceded the scene of the church, and it thus that I also conceived my work. However, certain considerations of stage setting have inverted this order, and to-day at the Grand Opera, it is Valentine’s death that ends the fourth act. It is found to be of advantage to end an act with musical masses instead of with two characters.” Our production restores the original order, placing Marguerite’s struggle with the Devil after the death of her brother when she is at her most vulnerable.
The journey ends in the abyss of the Prison. Marguerite resists Faust’s efforts to save her, knowing well that her actions have brought her to this place. They both hear the dominating voice of Evil. Faust’s response is to fade into an inarticulate silence. Marguerite summons from the depths of despair the strength to appeal for forgiveness. Mephistopheles “calls the question,” but he is thwarted, at least as far as Marguerite is concerned. Salvation is granted; the illusion of rien is replaced with the reality of Christ est resuscité—Christ has risen.
In the course of the Faust project at Notre Dame, there has been and will be more talk about the meaning of the Faust tale in its various forms. You will see Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and so may consider the tale as one set out to chart the transition from the Medieval to the Modern world—a transition of which we are a product. To be taken up in Marlowe is to be taken up into an allegorical tale in which the world is seen changing. Tonight, however, your experience will take a different shape. The work of Opera Notre Dame, using the resources provided by Charles Gounod, will examine the question of the human relationship with God and establish the circumstances for the lived experience of desire and failure, pleasure and death. It will afford us all with an opportunity to choose how we will transcend our limits, our failures and our loss of faith in our own quest for meaning.
Opera and the Liberal Arts
At first glance, the study of opera through and in performance would seem to be a unusual endeavor in a liberal arts institution, especially one as committed to undergraduate study as Notre Dame. This type of study is usually done in a conservatory setting, where the curriculum focuses only on the craft of performance. Yet the case for including opera as a part of a liberal arts program is not difficult to make.
The tradition of liberal arts education began in Medieval Catholic universities as way to systematize learning that took people beyond the economic necessities of life. There were seven fields of study in two categories called the trivium and quadrivium. The first, the trivium, included grammar, rhetoric and logic and the latter, the quadrivium, included geometry, mathematics, music and astronomy. By the 16th century, the liberal arts had expanded to include the visual arts as well which were thought to make a further contribution to the preparation of people for a well-lived life. Opera, though developed as a form of art in the 17th century, emerged in a context framed by the liberal arts and, in its synthesis of rhetoric, music and visual arts would clearly stand close to the heart of a traditional liberal arts education. Of course, the meaning of the liberal arts has changed and even at Notre Dame, a university founded on this tradition, one might still wonder how an art form that requires so much preparation for performance and appears so far from the mainstream of American education should nevertheless find a place.
The answer, in large part, begins in the reasons for a liberal arts education. While much education necessarily answers to the demands of daily economic need, the founders of the University movement in Europe recognized the need for people to find more in their lives than satisfying economic needs. In those first days of the university, its purpose was to provide educational foundations for, as the term ‘liberal’ (from ‘liber’) implies, free people who would lead the church and its community beyond the bare necessities to a life that would glorify God even as it provided human beings with a way to better their lives on earth. From the perspective of a modern liberal arts university, the purpose of education is not to set the stage for wealth, but to set the stage for human beings to have meaningful experience. Wealth and opportunity were not viewed as a condition for a meaningful life but rather a product of a meaningful life. Indeed, in the present world characterized by a unsteady economy, a shortage of good jobs and the need to pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend college, the core of a liberal education threatens to be lost. In the midst of this struggle to educate students to be competitive, flexible and successful, the arts—especially challenging arts forms like opera—may seem like an anachronism, holdovers from a Renaissance long past.
In fact, the argument for opera and the argument for the liberal arts have not changed. Both remain part of a particular educational tradition and a response to the realities of dark times. The liberal arts seek to provide students with the resources to go beyond the mundane and narrow world. By studying a wide range of fields, some in a summary way, some in depth, students find new resources with which to make sense of their lives and purposes. Knowledge, in this sort of education, is not something to be memorized, but rather something that intervenes in daily experience, forces questions and the recognition of the incomplete character of our lives. Even as it destabilizes us, such learning also offers the resources with which to reconnect things in a way that makes them meaningful, gives them purpose, and provides the means for us to go on—not in the same way as before, but in new and richer ways.
Works of art do the same sort of thing but with a heightened and more intense character. Aesthetic experience is a process by which experience is upset, our usual course of action blocked, so that we have to step back and take stock. Such experience is not passive—as anyone knows who has been disturbed by a play or a painting or a poem. The disruption of the encounter with art sets in motion an effort to restore balance and order by engaging the art, challenging it, trying it on in different ways, resisting it so that by degrees the experience goes from one fraught with tensions of one sort or another to a kind of harmony or resolution. This resolution, however, is not a return to the starting point of the experience; it is a new experience that marks the end of something and a new beginning.
This sort of experience is relevant to both the audience and the performer. The study of performance in the modern world too often begins and ends with techne, the craft of the art. The need for competence is undeniable, but its acquiring is a more complex process than that focused in the teachers’ studio, or in technical classes in support of studio work: standard repertoire classes, instruction in lyric diction, etc. Music lives in performance alone: a collaboration between composer, performer, and audience. Each collaborator comes from a specific cultural, historical, economic, political, and spiritual context, the study of which enriches the act of performance.
There are a variety of aesthetic theories that capture different aspects of the project of art. Some focus on the emotions that are associated with art. Others focus on the nature of the art object. Still others focus on art as a cultural practice where its outcomes are framed by institutions and societal standards. In fact, all of these approaches identify aspects of the experience of art. Aesthetic experience in its broadest sense is a process of meaning making that brings together emotion, personal history, the so-called object, the efforts of artists, the framing of culture, and the values that set expectations and which are destabilized and transformed in the course of the experience. The ideal of aesthetic experience is therefore not found in isolation—either in art separated from the rest of experience or in the confines of technical training—but in a context where they are all present and cultivated. There is no better context than a liberal arts university and no better art form than opera to make the experience of art a reality.
Opera Notre Dame’s Faust.
The act of performance can compared with that of hosting a meal for good friends. Both take the same care and planning, and the fulfillment lies in the experience itself. We began our process by choosing the menu: Gounod’s opera. It was not an obvious choice; this work seems to violate much of the philosophy of Opera Notre Dame’s choice of repertoire. The “standard” version of Faust known worldwide over the last century resembles Meyerbeer’s ideal of 19th century French grand opera: heroic subjects, expensive production values, technically advanced principal roles, a large and complex chorus, and an extensive ballet. In addition, it is a work that can call forth comparisons with listeners’ favorite artists or productions from the past.
These considerations kept us from Gounod for most of the 2006-07 academic year, during which we examined a number of other versions of the Faust story. Berlioz’ Le damnation de Faust is rather static in nature, and the performing forces called for are huge, including an orchestra that calls for “8 or 10” harps! Boito’s Mefistofele (based on Goethe’s Parts 1 and 2 ) and Busoni’s Doktor Faustus, influenced by Marlowe’s play, have similar challenges. Both older operas (including one by Spohr dating from less than 10 years after Goethe’s play was published), and contemporary works (Dusalin’s Faustus, the last night) were examined, but proved inappropriate. Seriously considered was Le petit Faust by “Hervé” (Florimond Ronger), a contemporary of Gounod’s. This parody operetta was extremely popular during the 19th century both in Europe and America, but is almost totally forgotten today. We managed to find a partial set of performance materials in the archives of a large American publishing firm but they were in no condition to be used, and we decided that the piece was not suitable enough to warrant a new performance edition.
We began our preparation a year ago with an inquiry into Gounod’s process of composition. The work at its premiere was a much different experience than it became over the next decade; in fact, it was seen by contemporary audiences as a reaction against Meyerbeer. More concentrated in scale, lacking the elaborate ballet Gounod wrote years later, it was an opera parlé, a sung work of elevated tone with spoken dialogue. These factors, plus a sequence of scenes that modeled Goethe, enhanced the human dimensions of the story.
We collected performance material for the 1859 version from a variety of sources. These included a vocal score and scenic designs from the original production, a copy of the supporting dialogue to this score, a copy of the original libretto which predated it, and details of the process of composition and revision. We also consulted Goethe’s play, and translations from the 20th and 21st centuries, the former for textual authenticity, the latter for a contemporary feel for the drama and the characters. Working from these materials, the performers in the opera workshop, the conductor and the stage director carefully edited the score, reconstructed the dialogue in English and prepared the final version that will be performed tonight.
The entire curriculum of Opera Notre Dame for the academic year 2007-08 has been put in the service of preparing this production. Many of the leading singers have been working directly on the music since August; this type of deep preparation is the best way to fully internalize the physical actions of singing, in such a way as to enable developing voices to successfully fulfill complex technical issues. Our study has also taken advantage of a liberal arts approach. Our preparation included, both directly and through the campus-wide Faust Project, an examination of the philosophical, psychological, and historical foundations of each phrase of music. By combining technical training and a broad reflection on the work and context, both Opera Notre Dame and the larger Notre Dame community fulfilled the promise of studying opera in performance in a liberal arts context: the complete realization of a transformative aesthetic experience. In making this understanding possible, Notre Dame finds that it supports a process described by Gounod himself:
“The theatre-going public is a sort of dynamometer. It has nothing to do with the question of whether the play is in good taste or not. Its sole duty is to gauge what constitutes the true essence of every dramatic work—the strength of passion and the degree of emotion it expresses; its rendering, in fact, of the feelings which sway all human souls, individually and collectively. The consequence is, that author and audience become unconscious instruments in their mutual artistic education. The public is the author’s criterion and measure of truth; the author serves his public as an exhibitor of the elements and conditions of the beautiful.”
It is easy to imagine that opera performances begin when the orchestra plays the first chord and end when orchestra plays the final chord. In fact, an opera performance has roots that extend back in this case more than one hundred and fifty years. The performance is continuous with months of rehearsal, set design and construction, and with the expectations brought to the hall by the listeners—you—who will also perform tonight as the third participant in a complex dialogue between singers and orchestra.
Some of you will want to import a set of expectations about what Gounod ought to sound like and what should be included to ensure that this is an authentic production. We ask that you be careful of such standards. In the end, opera is an experience—like the experience of standing before a Picasso or hearing a poem of Whitman or Tennyson. The experience is the intersection of what artists have made and the audience brings. Musical experience is a more difficult case than painting or poetry because it is temporal and fragile. A performance cannot be taken as if it is a painting on a wall, available for many viewings, but rather must be taken as it is made.
We cannot present you with a copy of some abstract and perfect version of Faust; such a thing does not exist in the realm of human experience. Instead it is our goal to present conditions that will produce an experience that will make you leave the theatre tonight changed a little or a lot. Gounod’s original vision was one with “simplicity which attains to the highest consummation of art” (Saint-Saens). Opera Notre Dame’s production, which began in the spirit of reconstructing of the composer’s original version, creates, as in every performance, something new, dependent upon Gounod, the performers, and you: a vision of the human relationship with God in the context of our different world.