Faust - The devil in Vienna

There are works that - like Méphistophélès himself - cannot die. Charles Gounod's Faust, premiered in 1859, is undoubtedly one of them. It is not just an opera: it is a legend in silk robes, a mirror that the 19th century holds up to itself - and Vienna, of course, did not escape this spell.

When Gounod composed his Faust, he dreamed less of philosophy than of sensuality. He knew Goethe, but he loved the tears of Margarethe more than the damnation of the scholar. He wrote a French opera of tender intimacy and unexpected piety - cathedral music in which the devil dances in three-four time.
The premiere on March 19, 1859 at the Théâtre-Lyrique was chaotic: unfinished decorations, a sick tenor, a feverish conductor. But gradually the fragrance of this work - half angel, half human - conquered the hearts of Parisians. One critic wrote: "This is the opera that makes you smile."

Gounod performed his "Golden Calf" for the first time in the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. A singer fainted with emotion - a famous anecdote: Gounod thought the devil had struck her down in his initial shock. A few weeks later, the garden duo made the whole of Paris melt away. Offenbach mocked: "Gounod, that's me - but after the confession!"

Ten years later, Faust moved into the Paris Opera - and stayed. It was this work that opened the new Opéra Garnier in 1875. The success was overwhelming, almost suspicious. The strict ones, Saint-Saëns and Fauré, found the work too sweet, too pleasing. But the public could not get enough of it: for a century, Faust was the most frequently performed opera in Paris.
From there, it conquered America: on October 22, 1883, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York opened with Faust. The press ran the headline: "The Devil opens the Met!" The tenor Italo Campanini, the soprano Christine Nilsson and the great Victor Maurel (later Verdi's Iago) made the evening unforgettable. Since then, Faust has been inextricably linked with the history of the Met: it was the first opera of the house, the last in the old building on Broadway and always a season opener - the devil as the patron saint of the house.

Vienna received Gounod's Faust with polite reserve. The French charm was appreciated, but not the scent of incense. When the opera was performed at the Court Opera in 1862, critics praised the melodies but lamented the lack of philosophical depth. Gounod's Faust was not Goethe's Faust - he preserved the shadows, but not the abyss.
And it was precisely this that irritated Gustav Mahler when he took over the direction of the house in 1897. Mahler revered Goethe, feared God and distrusted Gounod. For him, French opera was too pleasing, too sentimental. He refused to perform Faust or Massenet's Werther: "They are," he said, "sugar-coated versions of Goethe". He loved the Goethe of Faust II, the cosmic, desperate one, the one he himself dreamed of setting to music - a dream that only came true in the shattered pages of his Eighth Symphony, where one believes one hears the lonely call of a late Faust.
And yet Mahler was no stranger to the figure of the scholar. It appeared again and again in his letters: He saw himself as someone torn between life and the ideal, between Alma and the absolute. Perhaps he despised Gounod's Faust because he recognized himself too clearly in it.

The Viennese history of Faust does not end with Mahler. in 1906, Felix Weingartner brought out a new production of the work - a social event. Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, the great Wagner singer, sang Margarethe with a purity that disarmed even the skeptics.
And then there was the anecdote from the 1960s: Hilde Güden, in the dungeon scene, slipped on her dress and fell into hiding, shouting, "I'm not finished yet!" The audience thought it was a brilliant directorial idea and applauded enthusiastically.
Or the evening when a black cat trotted out of the wings during the incantation scene and sat down gracefully next to Mephisto. The next day, a newspaper wrote: "The real devil is a Viennese tomcat."

Every opera house has its own Faust. In Paris, he was the elegant demon; in Vienna, a cultivated rarity that was pulled out like an old wine; in New York, the eternal landlord of the Met. But Gounod's work set the standard everywhere: evil in waltz time, sensuality in choral garb, hellish fanfares like organ sounds from a cathedral.
The grotesque was never absent either. In London, a tenor forgot his sword - Mephisto handed him his cane without further ado, which the singer drove into the ground with a flourish at the end of the scene. It got stuck and stuck up like a cross for the whole of the next scene. In Paris, a counterweight once fell into the pit of hell: Margarethe almost actually went down.
And yet all of this is part of Faust: this dangerous zone between play and truth, between ecstasy and falling.

For a conductor, Faust is both a temptation and a test. Behind its apparent lightness lies an edifice of delicate balances. Everything depends on the breath - that of the singing, but also that of the space. The music must breathe like a living being: An orchestra that is too loud smothers Margarethe, one that is too tame betrays the drama.
The greatest difficulty lies in the alternation of transparency and fervor: an organ prelude, a delicate waltz, then suddenly the outburst of the Golden Calf or the cathedral scene. The tempi slip out of the hand as if they did not want to bend to any logic. Conducting Faust means embracing the contradictions: To unite prayer and theater, dance and damnation.
But what drunkenness! Hardly any opera gives the conductor this feeling of constantly hovering between heaven and earth. The conductor becomes an alchemist, balancing light and shadow, carrying the singers and setting them free at the same time. When the orchestra breathes the garden duet, one senses that Gounod has found the ideal that every conductor seeks: the moment when music ceases to be conducted and simply flies.

Perhaps in this triumph lies the irony of the devil himself: Faust, a work of doubt and damnation, has found its eternity in lightness and grace. And it is precisely this tension that Vienna loves - the city that knows better than any other that there is no beauty without an abyss.
So when the curtain rises and the student choir sounds or Margarethe's garden blossoms, you can hear Mahler's voice behind the strings, mocking and fascinated..