Schumann Tackles the Faust Legend

Recently, I saw the forces of the São Carlos Opera perform the rarely-done Scenes from Goethe's Faust by Robert Schumann. I got oddly nostalgic. It was good to finally hear this work, since I remember discussing it in my term paper for an Opera course in college (my discussion was rather abstract, since Pomona college had no recording of the work). My paper addressed Romantic treatments of Goethe's famed Faust, probably the most revered and influential play of the era. It's a strange rambling play, rarely seen outside of Germany. Alongside the familiar story of Faust selling his soul to the devil, there are spirits, demons,  a charming and intelligent devil (Mephistopheles), and an uber-victimized woman (Gretchen) who strangles her illegitimate child, but is redeemed in the end. The big theme of Faust's rejecting traditional religion, falling into depravity, then being resurrected via his curiosity and creative spirit resonated with the romantics, for whom "secular humanism" was the new religion. This led to many musical treatments of the play, which was finished in 1829, just a decade before Schumann started writing this piece. Other treatments were the Faust Overture by Wagner (1840), the oratorio The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz (1846), the Faust Symphony by Liszt (1857), the opera Faust by Gounod (1859), and the finale of Mahler's Eighth Symphony (1910). Berlioz and Mahler were most successful, I think, in capturing the revolutionary spirit of the play, but it's pretty obvious how much Faust influenced the thinking of these Romantic composers for almost a century.

What about the Schumann version? Schumann is mostly known for his wild and wonderful early piano works (eg Kreisleriana, Carnaval) . These captured the Romantic ideals of experimentation and iconoclasm. But he also composed excellent solo songs, four symphonies (the fourth is my favorite), as well as several big choral works, including this one and the mythological Paradise and the Peri,  an exotic Persian legend composed in the appropriating way the Romantics had with Asian cultures. 

Scenes from Goethe's Faust took a while to compose (1844-1853), and may or may not have been intended to be heard in one unified performance. The ending section was composed during Schumann's prime in his mid-thirties, right when he was starting his four symphonies. The (rather dull) overture came last, in 1853, three years before his death at age 46. By this time his psychiatric illness had led to one suicide attempt and frequent bouts of reclusiveness, probably due to worsening of bipolar disorder. This condition led to less inspired music later in his career. Overall, the earlier music from this work (the setting Part 2 of Faust) is the most successful. The later overture not so much--it's fairly wooden and pedestrian in both themes and structure. Thus, the entire piece echoes Schumann's career, in which his earliest music is his best. As a side note, it's possible that the brilliantly wild mood fluctuations heard in his earlier piano works may have stemmed, in part, from the early phases his disorder. 

This piece, set for large orchestra, double chorus, children's chorus, and 7 soloists,  is not a comprehensive setting of Faust, but instead sets several famous scenes from Goethe's play: Gretchen in the garden, and the temptation of Faust in the cathedral. The final redemption of Faust includes the famous Chorus Mysticus in which he ascends to the heavens, led by the "eternal feminine" (ewig weibliche) that Goethe felt drove Man's creativity. I found most of Schumann's music a bit tame and formulaic, rather like Mendelssohn's late choral works. The ending Chorus Mysticus ("what is transitory is just a parable; what is beyond us, here is made visible...") which is soft and otherworldly in Mahler's Eighth Symphony, here is an overly academic fugue whose subject is two descending leaps of major fifths forming an octave (eg D-G-A-D), meaning lots of clunky repeating octaves. I guess such a fugue communicates timelessness, but it doesn't express the spirit of the play's conclusion in the way Mahler's setting does. The rest of the piece was generally uninteresting, disappointing since Schumann was capable of writing excellent songs in Dichterliebe (A Poet's Life) and Frauenliebe und-Leben (A Woman's Life and Love). Here Schumann did not accomplish this kind of lyricism and individuality. 

I think Scenes from Goethe's Faust is mostly valuable as a historical artifact of the Romantic era--a mirror of the way the Romantics saw themselves and their society. While famous in its time, Faust is problematic for a modern audience. Even if I can't really get behind the objectification of women implicit here ("the eternal Feminine leads us onwards"), hearing the work helped me to get inside the inspiration and minds of the genius composers of another era.