Portrait of the Artist as Doktor Faust
by Sergio Morabito
The Future of Opera
Ferruccio Busoni’s unfinished Faust opera is a fascinating work. It confronts
the listener with a unique style of drama. There is no plot or drama in the
strict sense, and the story has no clearly defined beginning or ending. While
the opera’s fragmentary form is in a way reminiscent of Verdi’s Il Trovatore,
it is not at all indebted to the conventions of “melodrama”: On the contrary,
the work represents what is perhaps one of the most radical questionings
of operatic tradition. Compared with Doktor Faust,
the operas of Busoni’s contemporary Alban Berg come across as dramaturgically
straightforward, following the dictates of 19th-century “narrative theater,”
even if they employ a more audacious tonal language. Seen as a concept of
musical theater, Lulu really isn’t far removed from La Traviata. Busoni,
by contrast, reinvents opera. He imagines it as a subjective, open form,
one that tends to dissolve dramaturgical conventions and favor stream of
consciousness. One of the reasons Busoni reverts to the traditional Faust puppet
play is that its format has nothing to do with an organic dramatic idea based
on conflict or the logical development of a narrative. Instead, it offers
a loose framing device within which Busoni is free to pursue whatever direction
he chooses. Busoni’s modernist subjectivity is stamped equally on the thematic
content of the libretto and the musical substance of the score. For example, the meaning of Easter, referenced in the Symphonic
Introduction and Second Prologue, refers to Busoni’s own birth on an Easter
Sunday: “Day of my childhood,” sings Faust. The choral cries of “Pax!” (“Peace!”)
in the Symphonic Introduction convey Busoni’s desire for peace during the
years of the First World War. Faust’s entrance as a traveling magician into
the Ducal Court of Parma is reminiscent of Busoni’s international tours as
an acclaimed piano virtuoso, which incidentally extended as far as the American
West, even to San Francisco. In the Wittenberg Tavern scene, Busoni portrays himself through
Faust as a master amid a circle of his student-disciples. Busoni led a master
class in composition beginning in 1921 at the Berlin Academy of Arts. Moreover,
this scene gives us a freeze-frame of the increasing radicalization of Weimar
politics: Faust founders in his attempts to assume a moderate, undogmatic
position between Protestantism and Catholicism, much as the Italo-German
Busoni himself failed to be recognized by the self-appointed guardians of
national German culture as reconciling the Mediterranean and German aspects
of musical life. Last but not least, the alchemical “masterwork” that Faust
doubts he can complete is a metaphor for the opera itself. For the musical substance of his opera, Busoni drew on 24 independent,
self-sufficient compositions (works for piano and orchestra, chamber music,
and songs). The process whereby he did so remains unique to this day. There
is arguably not one single measure of the entire score that doesn’t arise
from previously existing and already formulated material. And this isn’t
a matter of the time-honored pastiche principle (to which we owe such marvelous
operas as Handel’s Agrippina or Donizetti’s La Favorite, both of which recycle
pre-existing music almost from start to finish). Busoni’s technique in fact
represents a rebuttal of this traditional pastiche practice, which rested
on the concept that specific musical features have the ability to depict
a range of clearly defined emotional states of mind and to preserve their
codified “meaning” in different contexts.
In his Notes for a Preface to the Score of Doktor Faust
and the Future of Opera (1922), Busoni refutes this assumption: “Music —
wherever and in whatever form it occurs — in the final analysis remains music
and nothing else; it enters a special category only when it is presented
in a particular context implied by a title, a description, or an underlying
text to which it is set. (…) There is no “church music” in itself, but only
absolute music, which either sets an ecclesiastical text or is performed
in a church. If you change the text, the music also changes. Take away the text, and what remains
— illusory though it be — is a symphonic movement.” In other words, there
is no longer an authoritative semantics of music! Busoni defines music first
and foremost as an autonomous language, which exists apart from such functionality
and which eludes all attempts to be translated into a conceptual language.
Music is a language of the Unknown, which we can, to be sure, approach through
the act of interpretation, but whose “meaning” remains ineradicably resistant,
impossible to set in stone. With the above quote we get closer to Busoni’s theory of adaptation,
which anticipates the most radical modernism. According to this theory, every
musical notation already represents the transcription of an unattainable
musical thought that exists in itself: “The instant that pen is set to paper,
the [musical] thought loses its original form.” The act of composition entails
degrees of approximation toward this ideal of “autonomous music,” which continues
to elude such formulations. Thus all composed music implies, according to
Busoni’s understanding, an invitation to be interpreted afresh, again and
again. That applies both to his own work and to the work of others. Indeed,
it erases any definite demarcation between them. Busoni developed this theory
from the very compositional method which allowed him — in his guise as the
hyphenated “Bach-Busoni” — for example to enlist Bach’s arrangement of the
old Lutheran chorale “Christ lag in Todesbanden” in the service of the cantabile
motive of the Duchess’s seduction by Faust, using the tenor line from Bach’s
version in scarcely altered form. This chorale is used again in the final
scene. All of the autobiographical or self-referential elements in the
score so far mentioned are hardly noticeable from a mere reading or hearing
of the opera itself. For instance, the Symphonic Intermezzo which is heard
after the Parma Scene represents nothing more than an abbreviated version
of Busoni’s Sarabande. But even though Busoni already had conceived this
orchestral piece as a study for the opera, neither the libretto nor the score
gives the slightest hint of how this music should be understood in the context
of the opera’s story line. Busoni avoids any narrative connection of the
kind, which is typical in the symphonic interludes from operatic tradition
(e.g., Siegfried’s Rhine Journey or the symphonic intermezzo from Manon).
Busoni’s “autonomous music” indeed represents nothing other than itself.
It contains no meaning, but is the meaning in question. As pure music, the
Symphonic Intermezzo represents a decisive achievement in the compositional
development of Busoni. As such, it holds a privileged position in his Faust
opera. In a certain sense, Busoni’s technique has a predecessor in Hector
Berlioz (greatly admired by Busoni) who in the forward to his own version
of Faust — La Damnation de Faust — provocatively suggests that the only reason
he sets the opening scene in Hungary was because of his wish to include his
“Hungarian March” in the score. Berlioz frankly allows himself this capricious
disregard of all that could be called “dramatic necessity” in the non-operatic
realm of the concert hall, for which his “dramatic legend” was after all
conceived. Busoni’s Faust opera, on the other hand, clearly aims for a fundamentally
revolutionary new concept of “opera.”
The Staging
The music of Busoni’s score spans his compositional
development from his experimental period in the first decade of the 20th
century up through his conception of what he called the “young classicism,”
a sort of reconciliation between tradition and the avant-garde. The score
originated through a process of continual creative dialogue with Bach, Mozart,
and Berlioz. It succeeds in integrating a variegated stylistic spectrum ranging
from doggerel-like ballads to symphonic meditation. The score must count
among the few truly canonical opera works of the 20th century. So why does
Doktor Faust
— despite the lofty opinion it already enjoys among musicians — remain a
comparatively seldom-performed opera? One possible reason lies in its dramaturgy:
the associative structure of the scenes, along with the aesthetic and philosophical
questionings pursued by Busoni, represent a consistent challenge for audiences
and performers alike. The need to present a concrete theatrical realization of the way
Busoni reflects on his own artistic process led us to depict Faust as a conceptual
visual artist. He is the radical “anti-bourgeois” par excellence who attempts
to sabotage the ethic of consumerism in art (the same attitude might also
be said to characterize Busoni’s aristocratic disdain for the bourgeois art
consumer). Faust is the artist who declines to produce separate “works” but
rather declares himself-indeed his “life”-as the work of art itself. Our
staging aims to make clear that even the seduction of the Duchess is a result
of Faust’s artistic creativity. We locate the “place of action” in the very
space in which Faust works, lives, and dies — the place in which “his evil
spirits are at play” as the text puts it, where the present is overshadowed
again and again by either memory, daydreams, or obsession.
Busoni and Goethe
Busoni’s treatment
of the Faust myth exemplifies a complex reaction to Goethe. He had rejected
the notion of setting Goethe’s drama to music and decided instead to use
the so-called Puppet Play of Doctor Faust — compiled in 1846 by the German
literary scholar Karl Simrock — as his primary source. Busoni tried to eradicate
any trace of his own version’s reliance on Goethe’s work. One prominent example
concerns the murder of the soldier, who in the original version of Busoni’s
libretto is still described as “Gretchen’s brother.” Thus, when a critic
made a disparaging comparison to the corresponding scene in Part One of Goethe’s
Faust, Busoni immediately began referring to the soldier merely as “the girl’s
brother.” But Busoni obviously remained indebted to Goethe simply by this
reference to a girl whose love for Faust had plunged her into ruin and whose
brother wants to exact revenge. It was Goethe who had linked, in Part I of
his drama, the old Faust tragedy with a contemporary true-crime case of a
young mother (Gretchen) killing her child. For Busoni, this motif gains a
pivotal meaning. In the earliest sources, to be sure, one encounters a son
of Faust: the result of a union with the apparition of Helen of Troy. This
son of Faust appears in Part 2 of Goethe’s drama as Euphorion: the result
of the union of the Middle Ages (Faust) with classical antiquity (Helen),
and represents the embodiment of romantic poetry. Part One of Goethe’s Faust focuses on the relation between the
protagonist and Gretchen, while in Part Two the focus is on his relationship
with Helen. These two female figures certainly still play a role in Busoni’s
Doktor Faust,
but appear to be marginalized compared to a third lover of Faust’s, the Duchess
of Parma. Gretchen is reduced to the anonymous “girl” in the Prologue, while
Helen is amply conjured in references by both Mephisto and Faust but remains
intangible, a phantom which “flees into nothingness.” Indeed Busoni himself
was well aware of this point: “But the Duchess allows me to embark on my
own course of thoughts, thus setting aside the puppet play. ‘The child’ becomes
a symbol which suggests the possibility for an almost conciliatory solution”
(letter to Gisella Selden-Goth, May 14, 1920). It is Busoni who chooses to
have the Duchess fall in love with Faust at first sight. She “is ravished
on her very wedding night” by him and subsequently gives birth to a child
(after Faust abandons her). The child dies in ambiguous circumstances. This
“creature born of pure impulse” is meant, in Busoni’s own words, as the starting
point for “the individual’s continued existence on a spiritual plane, for
the survival of the ‘Will’ as Faust refers to himself in the end.” In the
planned (but uncompleted) final scene of the opera, Faust was meant to “bequeath”
his life to the child and, “in the place where the dead child lay, a naked,
adolescent youth” was meant to rise up, carrying “a flowering branch in his
right hand” and venturing forth “with upraised arms over the snow, into the
night.” By means of this art nouveau-like symbolism Busoni projects his hope
for redemption of the undeveloped, future promise of his own ground-breaking
“Faustian” striving. It’s possible to describe Busoni’s concept of the Duchess of Parma
as an attempt to merge Gretchen with Helen, the human and mythical lovers
of Faust. And perhaps the final scene’s winter night aims to project the
allegorical significance of the youth Euphorion onto the small, cold corpse
of Gretchen’s murdered baby.
Credo
Busoni develops the scene in which Faust
signs the pact with the devil in a highly peculiar way. The pact in itself
represents a kind of formal acknowledgment for the services Mephistopheles
has already rendered by murdering Faust’s creditors instantaneously when
Faust asks him to, thus backing up his claim to be “as quick as the thoughts
of man.” Busoni accompanies the signing of the pact with an offstage choral
singing of the Credo at Easter. Goethe certainly had developed the theme
of Easter, and Berlioz had already given it ravishing musical expression,
but with precisely the reverse function. In Goethe’s scene titled “Night,”
the Easter message “Christ is risen” is proclaimed by the chorus of angels
and thereby deters the doubt-ridden Faust from suicide: however, it’s not
his faith which saves him, but his human emotion prompted by memories of
his childhood and youth: “Tears stream forth, and again the earth has me!”
Busoni develops the situation in a completely different manner.
The appearance of the “Credo” actually seems to suggest to Mephistopheles
the text of the contract that he prepares to draw up. The chorus’s initial
homophonic simplicity then expands musically into an irresistible, Palestrina-like
polyphonic sweetness of three female voices doubled by solo strings. This
is the musical background against which Faust stammers, “Where is my Will?
What has become of my pride?” and which causes him to behave like a child
who abandons himself defenselessly to his terror before threats of divine
punishment. Mephistopheles chimes in with the fierce “Dies irae” accents of
the chorus when he proclaims, “Faust, be a man, for you gave your word. Honor
it!” The very moment Faust is forced to sign the pact, he still seeks to
hold on to his old beliefs: “There is no mercy, no salvation, no heaven and
no terrors of hell: I defy the hereafter!” But just as Faust hands the signed
contract “with trembling hands” over to Mephisto, the brass quotes a sequential
phrase from the first Credo music sung by the chorus. Then the full strength
of the double-chorus “Gloria” supports Mephisto in his moment of triumph
as (according to Busoni’s stage direction) he gloats over his helpless victim.
This is the demon as priest, the devil as a soul-catcher for God. The way Busoni dramatizes the Credo is hardly meant to illustrate
the gap separating Faust from the community of the faithful. On the contrary:
it underlines the renegade’s subordination to and chastisement by theological
authority. Busoni basically dramatizes Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity’s
“slave morality” through musical means in this scene. It’s not a defiant
protest against God which Faust’s signing of the pact connotes, but rather
the complete capitulation of his “Will” to regressive fear. To paraphrase
Goethe’s line and apply it to Busoni’s Faust, one might even say: “Tears
stream forth, and again heaven has him.”
So Let the Work be Ended?
Busoni was not able to
complete his opera. Yet it would be misleading to resort to the cliché “death
took the pen from his hand.” For an entire year before his death, the unfinished
score lay untouched. Rather than pointing to his state of severely failing
health, it’s possible to infer internal psychological reasons for this. The
central issue concerns two places in the libretto which Busoni seemed incapable
of composing. The first involves Mephisto’s conjuring of the apparition of
Helen from the ashes of the dead child. Even if Faust’s painful yearning
for her already resounds in the Symphonia, ultimately her figure eludes not
only Faust’s grasp but also Busoni’s musical powers of expression. “As he
at last reaches out to hold her, her form vanishes into nothingness”: so
runs the final stage direction for the Helen pantomime scene, which remained
uncomposed. The score picks up again with the words “Mankind is not equal
to perfection.” Faust’s desire remains unfulfilled and is converted to resignation.
Remarkably, as if to clinch the validity of this salient parallel, the musical
interruption in the break between the two sections is imperceptible. Helen
remains a figment conjured by Mephisto — as in our production, with no attempt
at scenic or musical embodiment. The second portion of the libretto, which Busoni left uncomposed,
is the ending of the final monologue: the momentous “completion of his work”
in which the dying Faust is meant to restore his dead child to life. Here
too it’s difficult to overlook the presence of the deeper irony of this circumstance.
Busoni abandons his Faust to the most extreme doubt and alienation from God
just as he is bowing at the foot of the Cross holding the dead child. The
final words which Busoni composed are not (contrary to what was long assumed)
the lines “O, pray, pray! Where can I find the words? They dance through
my head like magic formulas.” Instead, they are the following two sentences
as discovered by Anthony Beaumont: “O pray, let me pray! I want to look up
to you as in the past.” The score comes to a halt before the word “Damnation!”
Subsequently, after announcing his rejection of God and the devil, Faust
was meant to “arise, with new strength” and to accomplish his own resurrection.
It’s precisely at the point where Faust/Busoni intended to break free of
the confines of the pre-Goethe Faust tradition, which culminate in Faust’s
damnation through the “completion of his work,” that his music failed him.
For the creative team, this seemed too significant to allow resorting
to the stylistically and methodologically questionable attempts at finishing
the score exemplified by Jarnach (from 1925) and Beaumont (from 1984). Busoni’s
Doktor Faust
will be staged in San Francisco for the first time in exactly the fragmentary
form that its composer left behind. Likewise, for the first time in the context
of a staged performance we present Busoni’s score without cuts.
A Pagan Death
On July 27, 1924, Busoni died in his
home at Viktoria-Luise Platz. He was buried on July 30, in an official funeral
ceremony arranged by the Akademie der Künste, at which Max Dessoir and Busoni’s
arch-enemy Adolf Weissmann read the eulogies. For Weill, Galston, Jarnach,
Petri, and Zadora, Busoni’s death came as liberation. For over four months
they had suffered through their teacher and friend’s physical pain and struggle
to maintain his mental faculties. The master had died, but the battles between
his students had just begun: as Busoni’s sons, Zadora, and Galston carried
the coffin, Galston recorded that Weill pulled him aside and “told me under
an oath of absolute secrecy the last thing that was known for certain about
the tragic destiny of Doktor Faust. Petri, Jarnach and Weill had searched through the house and checked everything (desk and shelves): Doktor Faust
is incomplete!” The illusion of the perfect opera had been shattered. Weill
and Jarnach found a few “irrelevant” sketches and a list of remarks for the
last scene dated from the end of 1922. “What is certain: — the master of sound and marvelous spirit of
great harmonies was not granted a magnificent death. For the last two difficult
years, there were always ugly fights around him, with him, him against everything,
everything around him, fighting and brawling. Jealousy, resentment, and edginess
shattered the air until his very last hour. As Weill said: “That was a pagan
death”… Busoni will continue to be a subject of controversy because jealousy
and the thrill of power will continue to fight over the Nachlass of his goods
and works, and their “proper” management. Oh people, people, people… .” Excerpted from Tamara Levitz’s Teaching New Classicality: Ferruccio
Busoni’s Master Class in Composition, Frankfurt, 1996. Quotes from the 1924
Diary of Gottfried Galston, who was Busoni’s student.
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