#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

[elfynshucks]

the hungarian march?

restored my will to live

[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)

[starcurtain]

hihi sorry to rant in your inbox but i hate when people use aven's line about jade that says her kindness comes with a price to make their relationship seem worse than it is. while the ipc is. well. the ipc i dont thinl it would benefit her to harm him like theyre both stonehearts AND hes her subordinate. personally i think the price he mentions is like, testing him like she did in her social media post with the ores. it certainly would be less incongruous with her want to guide those that come after her..

I think that people really struggle with Jade. They took one look at her dommy mommy appearance and her status as one of the top three in the Stonehearts and they just want her to be unrepentant evil soooo bad.

Don't get me wrong, she is definitely a master manipulator and she definitely has a specific personal goal she's working toward using the IPC as her vehicle to do so. Her overall idea of creating an endless vortex of desires that can't ever be sufficiently met is very Voracity-coded and not really the kind of idea a very well-adjusted person would be espousing. We have no idea how loyal she really is to the IPC's goal of aiding Preservation against Destruction in the War of the Aeons.

But she's also, over and over again, been painted as having "True Neutral" moral alignment in-game. She's literally xxxHolic's Ichihara Yuuko with a bad case of capitalism: She always demands a price, but never asks more than is fair.

It's literally Fullmetal Alchemist's first law of alchemy: Human kind can not gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost.

All of Jade's exchanges are equivalent and none of her customers enter into a bargain without understanding the price they are paying. In fact, she won't even let Firefly try to make a deal at all without doing her research in advance to truly realize the extent of what she is asking for. Jade is inherently an honest businesswoman.

The issue is that greed is all-encompassing. The ability to have any wish granted is a temptation that virtually no one can escape in the end.

Therefore, I think the best way to understand Jade is as the Honkai Star Rail equivalent of Mephistopheles. In the legend of Faust, the eponymous Dr. Faust longs for more in his life--he is endlessly pursuing knowledge and power, but has hit the limits of his own ability. He meets the devil, Mephistopheles, who agrees to enter into a pact with him: Mephistopheles will fulfill all Faust's wishes while Faust is still alive, but then Faust's soul will belong to the devil when he dies. The deal is fairly presented. The terms are not unclear: If Faust agrees to the bargain, he knows what will happen to his soul in the end.

Mephistopheles doesn't trick him or force his hand when it comes to this bargain. Faust could say no. He could resist. But he doesn't. He agrees, because human greed and pride are simply that overpowering. He thinks he's smarter than the devil; unlike the thousands of others who have come before and suffered damnation for their deals with the devil, Faust thinks he is different, better than others, more deserving... The actual temptation doesn't come from the devil. It comes from human hubris.

Like Mephistopheles, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Jade merely presents the choice--it's humanity's endless desire that leads to the downfall.

It's a snake and an apple and a contract for a reasonnnnnn, Jade haters.

So, I don't think that Jade represents any danger to anyone who can resist temptation. Firefly walks away from Jade's exchange entirely unscathed. Trailblazer isn't pressed into surrender.

But Aventurine?

To be honest, I think his relationship with her is a bit more complicated.

Aventurine likes Jade. She did him a solid when he was at his lowest in life. His character stories make it clear that he views her as, essentially, someone "safe" in the IPC, unlike other Stonehearts.

But... I do agree that Aventurine approaches Jade more cautiously than he approaches others. And I think that probably stems from a couple of different factors:

Jade has positioned herself as Aventurine's "pseudo-mother," and Aventurine responds to her as if she, indeed, a mother figure he has to obey. He is more respectful of her than anyone else we see him interact with in the game--Diamond and Opal get called by name, but Jade is always "Ma'am." Which is very close to "Mama;" this is not an accidentttttt. When Jade disrupts his banter with Topaz, Aventurine immediately does as he is told, hands over his room card, and simmers down. Even in joking social media posts, when Jade asks Aventurine to do something (judge the uncut jade stones she sent him), he does it even when she rejects his high demand for profit sharing.

But:

2. Jade actually failed Aventurine's moral litmus test. From the beginning of his adulthood flashbacks, we see Aventurine explicitly troubled by the fact that his human dignity was denied and that a market value was assigned to his existence. And not even a high value. He was sold for pennies. It's the ultimate mortification, and we can tell it is still bothering him to this day because even "future" Aventurine brings up the sting of that bone-deep insult during Aventurine's long walk through Penacony. In response to the indignity, Kakavasha gave his original master a moral test: Kakavasha says that he'll go willingly into the hellscape of the death maze if his master will give him 30 copper Tanba, just half his market value. His master refuses, demonstrating that he does not view Kakavasha as a human being, worthy of any respect. By refusing this tiny, insignificant request, the master exhibits his utter moral depravity, from which there is no return. In response, Kakavasha ultimately kills him and takes the 30 copper coins he asked for (nothing more, nothing less) from his corpse.

When Kakavasha meets Jade, he then makes the exact same demand: He wants 30 copper coins and exactly 30 copper coins. At this point, it is very clear that--to Kakavasha--the coins are emblematic of his value as a human being. (I promise you, somewhere in his apartment right now are the 30 bloody coins he took from his master's cold corpse.) His freedom, his dignity, his worth... All of these things hinge on being able to acquire the original 60 Tanba coins. Thus, those who refuse his requests for the coins also symbolically refuse his request for basic respect, his request to be seen as an equal human being who deserves to not be reduced to mere pennies on a bill of sale.

And Jade refuses this request. She treats the demand for Tanbas like a paltry sum and instead ignores the specificity of the request to give a general "We'll give you riches beyond your imagine, more than you could have ever thought to want." But that isn't what he asked for. She stepped over the request he actually made in order to supplant her ideas, on her terms. Kakavasha made the tiniest, most easily completed request in the world, and in failing to actually just respect what he personally wished for, Jade demonstrated that she ultimately will not really respect him.

Just like his slave master, Aventurine represents a value on a page to Jade. For this reason, even if she extends pseudo-maternal behavior to Aventurine and he laps it up like a starved kitten drinks up milk, we see that he remains more cautious toward her than he does to any other female character in the game. Aventurine comes across as more comfortable talking to Acheron than he sounds when he talks to Jade... Because in failing the most basic and seemingly meaningless test, Jade revealed exactly to what extent Kakavasha can--and cannot--trust her.

Does Jade actually mean Aventurine any harm? No, I really don't think so, and you're right, those who claim that she does are really over-exaggerating Jade's negative traits, mostly because they've almost universally got a strong anti-IPC agenda and hate everything from the IPC except Aventurine on principle. Everything in Jade's character stories points to her honestly wanting to develop the hidden talents of others, to "polish" rough cut stones into true gems, and to see her fledglings thrive. Kakavasha is someone she picked up out of the dirt and dusted off. If he excels, that means her faith was well-placed, her judgment was correct, and her team as a whole excels.

It's exactly like a business owner who takes great pride in producing a fantastic product. Only when the product succeeds can the business itself succeed.

But business owners see their products as objects, not equals.

Jade is a fairly neutral figure and I think she wants to see Aventurine grow and achieve greatness. But at the end of the day, their relationship is very predicated on the notion of investment (Jade puts up the original capital to make Aventurine great, and he repays her faith in him by generating wealth for the IPC). It is clear she just can't be trusted to value Aventurine as a person above a means of profit--and Aventurine knows (and accepts) that too.

[shredsandpatches]

You have made a deal with the Devil. It's really more of an informal thing. He insists on making you go to the bar and watch him sing karaoke. He helps you hook up with a hot local girl and then cockblocks you before you get to finish. Then he steals your soul because he's jealous.

Opera Halloween Gothic

Is that how these go? Oh well, anyway:

You are a bunch of witches. You're not sure why there's a whole chorus of you given that there are only three in the original source material.

You are a witch. You sing the Czech-opera equivalent of "Poor Unfortunate Souls" while dressed in a very cool costume. Extra points if your IRL name is either Dolora Zajick or Jamie Barton.

You are a witch. You want to eat children. The Met decides to offer the creepiest-looking production of this as a children's holiday opera. To be fair, you don't actually eat the children.

You may or may not be a witch. You casually summon Satan because you must speak with him privately.

You have made a deal with the Devil. You bring an unsuspecting guy to a creepy place literally called the Wolf's Glen to engage in black magic.

You have made a deal with the Devil. Things are going to suck for you eventually. Just you wait.

You have made a deal with the Devil. You manage to get out of it thanks to a heavenly chorus singing perhaps the best choral music in the history of opera.

You have made a deal with the Devil. You are in a graveyard. Oh dammit, now you have to win back your soul by playing cards?

You are the Devil. You get the best music. Everyone both loves and hates you. There's roughly a 60% chance you're being played by Samuel Ramey.

You are not the Devil and you technically haven't made a deal with the Devil (yet), but the Devil has brought you to a ruined abbey and started saying a bunch of weird shit. Wait, why are the nuns rising from the grave like zombies??? And why are they...dancing a ballet??? Is this a conjuring or a French grand opera? (Spoiler: it's both.)

You are not the Devil or a witch, but people swear you can shapeshift and scare people to death. Also everyone says you're a witch. In reality they're probably just being racist.

You are a British governess. You find out there may be ghosts trying to possess the children. You ignore this. This will go splendidly.

You are a ghost. Your granddaughter's boyfriend scared you to death while trying to learn your mad card game skills. Why do sopranos like your granddaughter love worthless tenors? (You will be haunted by this question forever.)

You are a ghost. Why can't your son just hurry up and avenge your death by fratricide. Also why is your son a baritone when the character is Ultimate Tenor.

You are not a ghost, but you have seen ghosts. This bodes spectacularly for your Gothic Star-Crossed Romance TM.

You are a trouser role. When pressed for a disguise you decide to dress up as a girl. The audience loses all hope.

You are wearing a see-through veil or hat or something to disguise yourself. Do not take it off because other characters are unable to know your identity until the exact moment you take it off.

You are a Guy in Love TM but you cannot recognize your significant other in even the shoddiest of disguises.

You are in a Mozart comedy. Clothes-swapping is the perfect way to make sure nobody recognizes you. As if people cannot look at the face.

You are at a masquerade/costume party. There is no way this could either a) cause confusion or b) go horribly wrong.

Feel free to add!