A Book of Operas: Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their MusicKrehbiel, Henry Edward
History
A Book of Operas: Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music
Krehbiel, Henry Edward
Operas -- Stories, plots, etc.
And now to tell how the work was fitted to the uses of the lyric
theatre. Nothing can be plainer to persons familiar with the work in
its original form than that no amount of ingenuity can ever give the
scenes of the "Dramatic Legend" continuity or coherency. Boito, in
his opera, was unwilling to content himself with the episode of the
amour between Faust and Marguerite; he wanted to bring out the
fundamental ethical idea of the poet, and he went so far as to
attempt the Prologue in Heaven, the Classical Sabbath, and the death
of Faust with the contest for his soul. Berlioz had no scruples of
any kind. He chose his scenes from Goethe's poem, changed them at
will, and interpolated an incident simply to account for the
Hungarian march. Connection with each other the scenes have not, and
some of the best music belongs wholly in the realm of the ideal. At
the outset Berlioz conceived Faust alone on a vast field in Hungary
in spring. He comments on the beauties of nature and praises the
benison of solitude. His ruminations are interrupted by a dance of
peasants and the passage of an army to the music of the Rakoczy
march. This scene M. Gunsbourg changes to a picture of a mediaeval
interior in which Faust soliloquizes, and a view through the window
of a castle with a sally-port. Under the windows the peasants dance,
and out of the huge gateway come the soldiery and march off to
battle. At the climax of the music which drove the people of Pesth
wild at its first performance, so that Berlioz confessed that he
himself shuddered and felt the hair bristling on his head--when in a
long crescendo fugued fragments of the march theme keep reappearing,
interrupted by drum-beats like distant cannonading, Gunsbourg's
battalions halt, and there is a solemn benediction of the standards.
Then, to the peroration, the soldiers run, not as if eager to get
into battle, but as if in inglorious retreat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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