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Doktor Faust
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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