#the damnation of faust

[weirdlookindog]

Faust aux enfers (1903)

[couldtheycatchkira]

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

i’m sorry WHY is this so funny

[shredsandpatches]

I keep meaning to do another set of these only with academic tweets, but I think the academic tweets would be funnier with pics of the Marlowe version and I am too lazy to make screencaps (the vast majority of images out there are gifs and idk how to paste things on gifs).

Anyway, here's one that definitely works better in the Goetheverse.

[tomoleary]

Georges Dola “Damnation De Faust” Original Poster-Théatre-Opera (1893)

Source

[uglyabominationinthusiast]

Now I'm not saying yall would fall for the first faustian deal yall were offered.. but I am saying if the devil offered you the power to be a sick ass wizard in exchange for your soul or some shit, I think 99% of tumblr would instantly take the deal... just saying.

[doyouknowthisopera]

[skeleton-richard]

For @shredsandpatches, the amazing John Relyea, who has played multiple opera incarnations of Mephistopheles, dressed as Mephistopheles from Frau Faust by Kore Yamazaki!

[opera-ghosts]

OTD in Music History: Nineteen-year-old Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869) makes the first of what will become many contributions to the musical press when he publishes a letter in “Le Corsaire” in 1823, defending French opera against what he sees as “incursions” from Italian opera within the Parisian musical scene. (Berlioz contended that “all of [Giacchino] Rossini’s [1792 – 1868] operas put together” cannot withstand comparison with “even a few bars” of the works of Christoph Willibald Gluck [1714 – 1787] or Gaspare Spontini [1774 – 1851]. History has not endorsed this view.)

The son of a provincial French doctor, Berlioz attended a Parisian medical college before defying his family’s wishes and becoming a musician. He briefly moderated his style to win the famous "Prix de Rome" in 1830, but, as he later attested, he “learned very little” during his years at the Paris Conservatoire and he ultimately charted “his own course.” For many years, opinion remained sharply divided between those who hailed him as an original genius, and those who argued that his music lacked both form and coherence.

Berlioz completed three operas. The first, “Benvenuto Cellini” (1838) was a flop. The second, a huge epic entitled “Les Troyens” (“The Trojans,” 1858), was never staged in its entirety during his lifetime -- today some consider it to be one of the greatest operatic masterpieces of all time, while some hardly consider it at all. The third, “Béatrice et Bénédict” (1863), was actually a success at its premiere… but it has never truly entered the standard operatic repertoire.

Later in his career, Berlioz increasingly turned to conducting (he was one of the first “modern” conductors), and, to support himself, he also wrote voluminous amounts of criticism (he is generally regarded as one of the greatest music critics in history). His “Treatise on Instrumentation” (1844) was and remains a landmark work.

PICTURED: A lovely cabinet photo of Berlioz, published in Paris in the 1890s.

[franzliszt-official]

Good afternoon/evening Mr Liszt :) I was listening to Symphonie fantastique and I was wondering if Totentanz was inspired by it?

Good morning my dear pupil.

I suppose listening to the Songe d'une nuit de sabbat sparked this doubt. Although our very strong friendship certainly has had some effect on the both of us - "Hamlet" he used to call me, Hector a fervent atheist with the strongest mystical experiences I have ever encountered - I'd suppose the clearest bond between our musical choices would be his idea to include the Hungarian march in La damnation de Faust, with all that the Ràkòczi March meant for me and all Hungarians abroad.

In the Symphonie Fantastique he included the gregorian canon for the Dies irae, which outdates us all by many centuries and has always been a stable for all students of music. Such a coincidence is incidental. The Dies irae has been the basis for my "Dance of the Dead", Totentanz, as a self-explaining motive, and for some other compositions of mine such as one of the Mephisto-Walzer. The Totentanz, though its name nevertheless would suggest the such, has not been inspired by a chorea macabæorum, but by the medieval fresco called Triumph of Death located in the Monumental Cemetery in the Square of Miracles in Pisa. Its subject is the topos of three bodies found in the woods, that of a peasant, of a noble and a clergyman, all equal in death, and the struggle between forces of Good and Evil to capture the souls of the dead and condemn them either to Eternal Death or to be saved.

I enclose pictorial representation and video re-enactment from 17:50 onward

[apenitentialprayer]

A Christian Tragedy

Is Doctor Faustus a “Christian tragedy”? The very phrase is a contradiction in terms, as has often been pointed out, since tragedy cannot constrict itself within the parameters of a Christian story that is, in Dante’s terms, a divine comedy. Despite the contradictions, however, Richard Sewall argues that the term “is permissible and, I think, useful, to indicate the new dimensions and tensions introduced into human life by Christianity and which perforce entered into the Elizabethan tragic synthesis.” Sewall calls to his aid W.H. Auden’s distinction between Greek “tragedy of necessity” and the Christian “tragedy of possibility”: at the end of a Greek tragedy we say, “What a pity it had to be this way,” whereas at the end of a Christian tragedy we say “What a pity it had to be this way when it might have been otherwise.” [...] Faustus is caught between his knowledge that grace is truly offered to the penitent and his own conviction that he cannot repent.

David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (“Faustus’ Tragedy”)

[shredsandpatches]

BRANDER MY MAN. He gets to show up for five minutes just to beat Mephistopheles in a bass throwdown and walk away with the scene (at least in the Berlioz version -- it's not framed as a throwdown exactly but while the flea song is great the rat song is even better)

i love looking too deeply into joke characters. it's like a court jester jingled onto the stage and started performing and i stood up in my seat and wailed audibly

[shredsandpatches]

I've read a couple of things recently that have pointed out that all RSC productions of Doctor Faustus since like the 1960s have framed the Helen of Troy scene as a depiction of whatever counts as sexually transgressive for the time/place, so Helen has been represented as a beautiful cis woman but, like, with full frontal nudity; a reanimated corpse; an empty wig and dress which get used as props for a wank session; a man in a dress; and a creepily young-looking girl (played by an adult actress) who is then implied to actually just be a real, normal person who gets murdered in a fit of insanity (?)

Anyway I kinda think this is off the mark not so much because ~good taste or whatever (although pretty much any assumptions regarding what actually counts as transgressive or taboo will probably go to some pretty gross places--if Faustus wants to shag a man in a dress, more power to him) but because I'm not sure how well the scene works if it doesn't also seduce the audience (you can pull a reveal on them later if it suits, but I tend to think the arc of the play as a whole works better if we get closer to Faustus over the course of it, rather than further away, and if his ultimate fate feels somehow unjust on a gut level even if we understand the theological reasoning). And while it's common to read Faustus' embrace of Helen as the thing that seals his damnation, I don't think it is, I think looking for one point where it becomes too late for Faustus is misguided and that it only works if it's either always too late or never too late for him. All the tension of the play hinges on that paradox.

That said, depending on how your lead actors play the central relationship and how quickly you escalate the sexual tension, you can always pull the "it was Mephistopheles all along" variant, which is always a crowd-pleaser.

(It's me, I'm the crowd)

[elfynshucks]

the hungarian march?

restored my will to live

[opera-ghosts]

La Damnation de Faust: "Su queste rose (Voici des roses) " · Hector Berlioz · Mattia Battistini The composer Hector Berlioz, born 220 years ago today.

[shredsandpatches]

The stadium:

if nobody got me i know Hector Berlioz got me

"Pandemonium" always seemed excessive to me. Like. All of them?