The musical settings of Faust, in one form or another, now number, I believe, something like thirty or thirty-five. It is perhaps the most popular of all subjects with musicians, far outdistancing in favour the Hamlets and Othellos and Romeo-and-Juliets and all the other lay figures which composers are fond of using to show off their own garments. It cannot be said that they have added very much, on the whole, to our comprehension of the drama; indeed, with half-a-dozen exceptions the Faust-symphonies and Faust-operas and Faust-scenes have quite failed to justify their existence. One of the main difficulties in the way of the musician—even supposing him to have the brain capacity to rise to the height of the psychology of the thing—is the enormous range and wealth of material of the drama itself. The First Part of Goethe's work alone, or the Second Part, is quite sufficient to tax the constructive powers of any composer to the uttermost; but to reshape the whole of Faust in music is a desperate undertaking. Since Goethe's day we are bound to see the Faust picture through his eyes; any harking back to earlier forms of it is quite out of the question. And Goethe, while he has enormously extended and deepened the spiritual elements of the story, has by this very means set the musician a problem of discouraging difficulty. No musical version of the play, in the first place, can be adequate unless it embraces Goethe's Second Part as well as the First. Due opportunity, again, must be given for the exposition of all the essential, the seminal "motives" of the drama, and they are many indeed. The composer is thus on the horns of a dilemma. If he wants his work to stand in the same gallery with Goethe's, he has to run a line through Faust's soul long enough and sinuous enough to touch upon all its secret places; but any one who tries to do this soon perceives how hard it is to focus so vast a scene and to keep the picture within one frame of reasonable size. An opera or a symphony that should attempt to cover all the psychological ground of the drama would take at least ten or twelve hours in performance. Apparently the only rational course for the future composer who may think of setting the Faust subject is to take two or three evenings over it, after the manner of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung; and until this is done we shall have to rest satisfied with the more or less inadequate versions we have at present.

The cosmic quality of the subject, one would think, should have attracted more of the first-rank men, considering how many of the second and third rank it has tempted to self-destruction. One wonders, for example, why it should have fallen to the lot of Gounod to give so many honest but uninstructed people their first, perhaps their only, idea of Faust—an experience something like getting one's first notions of Hamlet from the country booth. We can understand their taking the thing seriously, for I fancy we all took it seriously at one time—in the callow stage of our musical culture—and many quite respectable musicians do so still. Yet we have only to come back to it one day, after dropping acquaintance with it for many years, to see what a laughter-moving monstrosity the thing is. The book gets as near the inane at times as anything founded on Goethe could do, though the music has its good points, of course. In the overture and opening scene there really is some suggestion of the gravity and the spirituality of the problems of Faust's soul; but from the time Margaret and Mephistopheles appear upon the scene the thing becomes for the most part mere opera, and Faust just the ordinary amorist—l'homme moyen sensuel. The melodrama, qu melodrama, is sometimes good of its kind; the Valentine scenes generally ring true, and now and then they become really impressive. There is plenty of lovely music, too, in the opera, which may suffice you if you are not very critical as to the poetic basis—if you do not attempt, that is, to get below the ear-tickling sounds and to see the characters as Goethe has drawn them. But once you begin to think of these matters you can only smile at Gounod and his fellow-criminals who concocted the libretto.

Look at the Gounod overture, for example. For a couple of minutes it is worthy of almost the loftiest subject or of the best man who has taken up the Faust theme; and then how woefully it fizzles out, drifting back into its native habitat of banality, where the air is more congenial to it—for all the world like a man who goes to an Ibsen play, sternly resolved to be a serious moralist for one evening at least, but at the end of the first act makes for the nearest music-hall or cafÉ chantant. One can see where it is all tending; Faust the philosopher has already, at this early stage of his career, become Faust the boulevardier. So with the opening scene, wherein we just catch the accent of Goethe for a breath or two, but never longer. And then that absurd devil Mephistopheles, with his stage strut, his stage idiom, his stage brain! "Are you afraid?" he asks Faust at his first red-fire appearance, when "Are you amused?" would be more appropriate. There is a touch of the genuine sardonic quality in his serenade; but on the whole he suggests not so much the spirit of denial as the spirit of the pantomime rally. Nor, till you quietly think about the structure of the libretto, do you realise how exceedingly funny it all is. In the drinking-scene it is Wagner who gets up to sing the song of the rat; Wagner! who by no process of shuffling of names can be got out of our heads as the pupil and companion of Faust. It is true he does not go very far with the ballad, Mephistopheles interrupting him after the first line or two—for which Gounod, remembering that Berlioz had set the same song once for all—was no doubt duly grateful to the devil. Then Mephistopheles sings his fatuous air about the Calf of Gold, and quarrels with Valentine—who, oddly enough, is also of the party—about his sister. So the opera goes on—very charming where it has least to do with the subject, but merely feeble or ludicrous when it comes near enough to Goethe to suggest a comparison. For Gounod, whose own religion was merely Catholicism sucrÉ, not only lacked the brain to grasp the austere philosophy of a subject of this kind; his musical faculty was not deep enough nor strong enough to save him from aiming perpetually at drama and achieving only melodrama. Watch him, for example, in the scenes where he is trying to carry on a dramatic dialogue, and see to what straits he is put in the effort to make the orchestra do something expressive in between the actors' speeches. See the catchpenny trade he drives in those stale operatic formulas for whose poetic equivalent we have to go to the country booth; see him capering about with his fussy little runs and twiddles, and striking all kinds of pompous musical poses, that really signify nothing at all, and only remind us of the conventional up-down-right-left-cut-thrust of stage-fencing. And this banal thing, this cheap vulgarisation of Goethe, this blend of the pantomime, the novelette and the Christmas card, still represents Faust in the minds of nine musical amateurs out of ten! It is no more the real Faust than Sardou's Robespierre, for example, is the real Robespierre; in each case a portentous name has simply been tacked on to a piece of very ordinary melodrama. The most pleasing elements in Gounod's work—the really lovely, if not always profound, love-music—are precisely those that withdraw it furthest from Goethe; for here it is clearly not Faust speaking to Margaret, but any man to any woman, any Edwin to any Angelina. Gounod's Margaret alone suggests dimly the drama of Goethe; but that is because she is the easiest of all the characters to represent in music. In most of the settings of Faust, indeed, the portrait of Margaret carries a kind of conviction even when the other two characters have nothing more in common with Faust and Mephistopheles than the names. He must be a very inferior musician who could fail here. The essence of Margaret's character is simplicity, innocence, the absence of all complicating elements; and accordingly we find that all the settings of her have a strong family resemblance to each other. Schumann's Margaret is very German, Liszt's very German but at the same time quite cosmopolitan, Berlioz's curiously moyen-Âge, Gounod's decidedly modern and town-bred, but all have the same fundamental qualities; none does violence to our conception of the real Margaret. Faust, however, has to be something more than the seducer of Margaret; we want to see some traces in his music of the weariness of life, the disgust with knowledge, that distinguish him at the beginning of the drama; we want to see him growing at once stronger and weaker as he develops, his character being purged of its dross, his soul's insight into the world of real things becoming prophetically clear just as he is bidden to leave it. Unless some elements at least of this picture are given us, the composer has no right to attach to his painting the title of Faust.

One wonders, again, why a musician like BoÏto should ever have thought himself fit company for Marlowe and Goethe. Here is a poet—one can cheerfully pay a tribute to his general culture if not to his musicianship—with a semi-musical gift that rarely rises above the mediocre and generally dips a point or two below it, who not only fancies he can throw new light on Faust's soul through his music, but serenely undertakes a reconstruction of the drama that Goethe gave him. BoÏto made such a really good libretto for Verdi out of Othello that it is rather surprising what an abject mess he has made of Faust. His hash of the great drama is really deplorable. His superior culture and his finer literary palate put him above the commonplace Gounod conception of the play as a melodramatic story of a man, a maid, and a devil. He knows there is a "problem," a "world-view," in it that really makes it what it is. But as soon as he begins to set the play to music he seems to forget what the problem is, where it begins and where it ends. The result is that he is not content to write a piece of plain, straightforward music of the ordinary operatic type, but must needs drag in just enough of Goethe's great plan to make the whole thing preposterous. I say nothing of his musical deficiencies—of his incurable old-Italian-opera tricks of style, his lame, blind, and halt melody, the monotonous tenuity of his harmony, the odd jumble of Wagner and Rossini in his idiom, his notion that the terrible is adequately expressed in five-finger exercises, and the horrible by a reproduction of the noises made when the bow is drawn across all four strings of the violin at once. These are mere details, as is also the fact that his powers of dramatic characterisation are very limited, or that his choruses of angels would be more suitable to contadini, or that his Mephistopheles is transported bodily and mentally from the buffo stage. What is most awesome in BoÏto's opera is the pseudo-philosophical scheme of the libretto. He begins with a Prologue in Heaven that is almost entirely superfluous, not one-fifth of it being concerned with Faust. The first half of the first Act might also be dispensed with entirely, for all it has to do with the problem of Faust's soul. The second half of this Act, and the first half of the next, are, in the main, essential to the drama, though there is no need for musical composers to retain, in the garden scene, the episodes between Mephistopheles and Martha, that are right enough in the play, but mar the more ideal atmosphere of music. The descent into the buffo is perilously easy here; and it is much better to omit all this, as Schumann does, and concentrate the whole of the light on Faust and Margaret.

BoÏto's next scene, however—the Walpurgis night—is pure waste of time and space; there is a great deal too much of Mephistopheles and the chorus, and not half enough of Faust to let us grasp the bearing of the scene upon the evolution of his soul. The whole of the third Act helps to carry on the story; but the fourth Act—the Classical Walpurgis Night—becomes pure nonsense in BoÏto's handling of it. Whatever meaning there may be in the Helena episode in Goethe's long allegory, there can be no sense at all in simply pushing her on the operatic stage in order to sing a duet with Faust, the pair having incontinently fallen in love at first sight—presumably behind the scenes. Finally, the Epilogue—the Death of Faust—ends the work only in an operatic, not a spiritual, sense; there being no spiritual connection between the earlier and the later Faust, no reason why he should die just then, no hint of the bearing of his death upon his life. And why in the name of common sense should BoÏto have permitted himself to rewrite the final Act, the crowning pinnacle of the whole mighty structure that Goethe has so slowly, so painfully reared? In place of the great motives and profoundly moving scenes of the poetic drama—Faust's schemes for human happiness, the poor old couple and their little house on the shore, the conversation with the four gray women, the blinding and death of Faust, the coming of Mephistopheles with the Lemures to dig the grave, the pathetic death-scene, the transportation of the purified Faust into that diviner air where he meets the purified Margaret—instead of all this we have Faust back again in the old laboratory of the first Act, Mephistopheles holding out banal operatic temptations to him, after the manner of Gounod, and Faust clinging for salvation to the Bible and going straight off to heaven on his knees, all in the most approved fashion of the Stratford-on-Avon novelette. [17] Yet, bad as it is, BoÏto's Mefistofele is not the worst that might be done with the drama. His musical faculties may be of the kind that move us to more laughter than is good for us; but he certainly had some understanding of the inner spirit as well as of the external action of Goethe's poem; and the very extent of his failure serves to show how difficult it is to mould the play to musical requirements. The difficulty lies not so much in finding appropriate musical episodes as in dealing with such a multiplicity of them as there is. The drama, indeed, is amazingly rich in musical "stuff"—as Wagner would have put it—of the first order; as Berlioz expressed it in connection with Gounod's Faust, "the librettists have passed over some admirably musical situations that it would have been necessary to invent if Goethe had not already done so."

There is a vast quantity of the poem, of course, that is as alien to the spirit of music as it is to that of literature. But there is a certain irreducible minimum that must be dealt with, if the musical setting is to aim at reproducing the spiritual problem of Goethe with anything like completeness. The Prelude and the Prologue in Heaven may, in case of need, be dispensed with; but almost all the First Part ought to be utilised, not following Goethe word for word, of course, but taking the pith of each scene. Here and there we come across sections that either defy musical treatment or are comparatively unimportant episodes in the poem. But the main psychological moments must all be dealt with; and the omission of any one of these cuts a piece out of the intellectual interest, breaks the subtle line of development, and makes all that comes after it seem insufficiently led up to. The First Part of Goethe's Faust, in fact, is in itself a masterpiece of construction, holding the balance most carefully and skilfully between dramatic action and philosophical reflection. Omit any of the steps by which the characters have been brought to the dramatic completeness in which we see them at the end of the First Part, and you break the spell that makes them real to us.

There is, then, in the First Part alone, more than enough to constitute the poetical material of at least two operas. Many composers have chosen to end their labours here, with the death of Margaret and the flight of Mephistopheles with Faust; and from the purely operatic point of view there is much to be said for such a course. The First Part does at least run on the lines that are common to a philosophical drama and an opera; whereas the Second Part deliberately flouts the musical sense at point after point. In the First Part the poetry marches hand-in-hand with the ethical conception; in the Second Part the poetry has often to be dug out of the jungle of prosaic diffuseness in which Goethe has hidden it. Nevertheless one great purpose runs like a fine, continuous thread through all the seemingly unrelated incidents of the drama; and this line at least must be followed by the musician, though he may disregard the excursions from its direct course which Goethe so often permits himself. The poet's purpose, of course, was not complete, could not possibly be complete, without the Second Part. From the very beginning we feel that the vast issues must end, full-orbed, in something like the remote, non-earthly atmosphere of the opening; and we keep in our memory the words of the Prologue in Heaven—

waiting for the ultimate gleam that shall make the darkness of Faust's first perplexed flight quite clear to us. Plainly one-half only of the problem had been stated in the First Part; and though comparatively few people read the Second Part, and few of those who have read it once read it twice, it is really the rounding-off of the philosophical conception here that gives the First Part its proper meaning. The human striving of the earlier poem demanded the later episodes, both as poetical completion and ethical solution. Without the Second Part, the First Part is a broken cadence, a discord only half resolved. Goethe himself, we are told, "compared the Prologue in Heaven to the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni, in which a certain musical phrase occurs which is not repeated until the finale." A musical setting can be adequate only if it really deals with the central spiritual forces of Faust, not only as they affect the protagonist up to the death of Margaret, but in the crowded after-years. Life was wider than art to Goethe; and the vastness and unwieldiness of the scheme of the play are mostly due to his attempt to embrace so much of life in it. The trouble with the average musical setting is that it fails to rise to the level of Goethe's own lofty humanism. The theatrical is there in plenty; but there is little that brings home to us the grave philosophy of the drama, little that speaks of that great, moving, human figure of the Second Part, beating his way painfully through the darkness to the light. Above all, one cannot spare the ethical elevation of that final scene, with its supremely pathetic picture of the man's defeat in the very moment of victory, and its mystical suggestion of this material defeat being in reality a spiritual triumph. Goethe, in fact, made the subject an essentially modern one—put into it the fever and the fret, the finer joys and finer despairs, the deepened philosophy and the more impassioned spiritual aspirations, of the generations that succeeded the great upheaval of the eighteenth century. In Marlowe's Faustus we feel that, powerful as the wings of the poet are, there still clings to them something of the grossness of the Middle Ages, and the grossness, only more superficially refined, of the Renaissance. The thick breath of materiality hangs like a cloud over Marlowe's drama. Faustus himself has in him much of the coarseness of tissue of the Elizabethan age. On the purely human side, especially in the later scenes, he does indeed touch and move us; but in the mainsprings of his being, in the limitations of his desire—

how immeasurably does he fall short of the philosophic Faust of Goethe—

The mere magic-working Mephistopheles of Marlowe, again, takes on, in the modern poet, something of the terrifying grandeur of one of the essential forces of the universe. How subtle is Goethe's insight into him, and how one longs to get something of that subtlety in his music—

He is the element of destruction that is the other half of being; not a mere tempting devil, the crude beguiler of the theological fancy, but simply the evil side of Faust becoming self-conscious. See, for example, in the eleventh scene of the First Part, and again in the fourteenth scene, how he probes to the very depth of Faust's soul, dragging into the light the true motives that sway him, which Faust himself is incompetent to analyse. His taunt in the seventeenth scene, again, "Thou, full of sensual, super-sensual desire," is a stroke of which Marlowe was incapable.

There are one or two scenes in the Second Part which lend themselves to music, but have been curiously neglected—it being strange, for example, that no musician of the first rank has set the scene of Faust's discovery of ideal beauty (Act i., Scene 7). But on the whole the Second Part is uncongenial to music, until we come to the gravely passionate human element at the end. Even to poetry Goethe's plan is somewhat unpropitious, as Schiller pointed out to him. "A source of anxiety to me," he wrote in 1797, "is that Faust, according to your design, seems to require such a great amount of material, if the idea is finally to appear complete; and I find no poetical hoop which can encircle such a cumulative mass.... For example, Faust must necessarily, to my thinking, be conducted into the active life of the world, and whatever part of it you may choose out of the great whole, the very nature of it seems to require too much particularity and diffuseness." If the "poetical hoop" was so hard to find, a musical hoop to contain such wildly-mixed material is beyond the power of man to cast. All the musician can do is to make sure of the final scenes (from Act vii. Scene 4 onwards); though even then—and this is the perpetual dilemma—one feels the need of some connecting link between the Faust whose life is drawing so near to the end, and the Faust whom we saw being torn away by Mephistopheles from Margaret and the prison. As Schiller said, Faust must go "into the active life of the world" before that stupendous cadence can have its true significance; yet most of the intermediate scenes into which Goethe has put him can never be caught up into the being of music. As one looks at the poem itself, one admits despairingly that it would be impossible to build the first four Acts into any operatic structure. But one broad purpose of spiritual development runs through even this desert of apparently endless aridity; and surely this might be treated by the musician, if not in operatic, at least in symphonic form. That is, between the stage of Faust's life that ends with the death of Margaret and the awakening of Faust to a new joy in earth and a resolution to seek the highest good, and the stage where his own death puts the seal on the drama, we might have a symphonic interlude that would make the transition less abrupt for us. The comparative vagueness of the music in this form would match the increased indefiniteness of the poetical handling; while the more positive operatic form could be resumed in the Fifth Act, where the closeness of the association with actual life demands the continuous use of words. It is not an ideal device, perhaps, but it is the only adequate one. Only in some such manner as this can we hope to get the real Faust translated into music. As it is, the composers who have grasped the philosophy of the work have been restricted to a canvas far too small for the whole subject, while those who have not laid stress on the philosophy have simply not dealt with the Faust drama at all.

Men like Wagner and Rubinstein, again, who have really had the thinker's appreciation of the deeper currents of the theme, and have tried to express these in the single-movement form, have been woefully hampered by the limited space in which they have been compelled to work. Wagner, of course, never meant his Faust Overture to be a complete treatment of the subject; it was intended merely as one section of a large Faust Symphony. The general excellence and the one defect of the work inspire us with regret that the scheme as a whole was never carried out. Its one shortcoming is that it deals only with the melancholy, brooding, world-weary Faust of the opening of Goethe's poem, the egoistic Faust on whom the larger world-issues have not yet dawned. We should like to have had Wagner's treatment of the final and complete Faust, taken out of himself, touched with sublimer sorrows and compassions, pouring out his soul upon the greater interests of humanity. As it is, however, we have in the Faust Overture the veritable Faust of the opening of Goethe's poem. No attempt is made at the portraiture of Margaret—the beautiful theme in the middle section simply representing the "ever-womanly" floating before Faust's eye in vague suggestion—nor is there any Mephistopheles in the work. But in regard to the special task Wagner seems to have set himself, the translation into music of the first scene of Goethe's First Part, nothing more perfect could well be imagined. There are few more convincing pieces of musical portraiture than this great grey head, with the look of the weary Titan in the eyes, that looms out in heroic proportions from Wagner's score.

One of the least known of the settings of Faust—or at any rate of the fine settings of it—is that of Henri Hugo Pierson. [18] Though he was an Englishman, his music is practically unknown in England, for which his residence in Germany is no doubt mainly responsible. It is a pity such a man could not have found in his own country the conditions under which his talents could thrive and expand; for when one realises how much strength and originality there is in his music, one feels that had he worked in England he might have helped to found a native school, and so brought our musical Renaissance to birth at any rate a generation earlier than it has come. His music is always that of a musician who is at the same time poet and thinker. The very plan of his Faust is original. As its title indicates, it deals only with the Second Part of Goethe's play. This in itself is a slight fault, for it brings before us that tremendous drama of regeneration without having prepared us for it by the previous drama of struggle and error. Starting with Ariel and the Chorus of Fairies singing round the sleeping Faust, Pierson takes us through the scene in the Emperor's Castle, the calling up of the apparitions of Paris and Helena, and the attempt of Faust to seize the Grecian beauty—all from Act i. From the second Act we have Wagner and the birth of the Homunculus, and the journey of Faust, Mephistopheles, and the Homunculus through the air. From the third Act we have the scene before the Palace of Menelaus (Helen and the Chorus of captive Trojan women), the coming of Faust as a knight of the Middle Ages, his dialogue with Helena, the appearance and death of Euphorion; from the fourth Act, the battle between the Emperor and his enemies; from the fifth Act, the song of Lynceus the warder, the entry of the four Grey Women—Want, Guilt, Care, and Need—and the blinding of Faust; the digging of the grave by the Lemures, the death of Faust, the choruses of the spirits and the anchorites, the chorus of the younger seraphs and angels ascending with the spirit of Faust, the scene in the empyrean, and the final "Chorus Mysticus"—Alles VergÄngliche ist nur ein Gleichniss.

The scheme, it will be seen at once, is not an ideal one. It achieves comprehensiveness at the expense of organic unity. It keeps too strictly to the letter and the order of Goethe's scenes; episodes like the battle, that are of the very slightest significance, are needlessly included; other and more essential episodes are so lightly dwelt upon that their full value can hardly be brought out; and others are omitted altogether. As a mere piece of architecture the thing is extremely imperfect. Too much use, again, is made of the melodrama—i.e. the union of the reciting voice with the orchestra—one of the least justifiable and most trying forms of art ever invented. But with all its faults of structure it is a notable work; the music redeems all its errors. The opening scene, with Ariel and the spirits, is exquisitely fresh and sunny; the death of Euphorion and the death of Faust are both very moving, and there are some fine choruses in the work, notably the "Heilige Poesie." Pierson re-creates for us the philosophic atmosphere of the Second Part of Faust, and gives us the same impression of the largeness of the issues at work; which is no small achievement. It is a pity one of our Festival Committees could not be prevailed upon to let us hear the score, or at any rate a portion of it.

Unduly neglected, again, is Henry Litolff's setting of certain scenes from Goethe (op. 103). Like Pierson, he adopts occasionally the unpleasant form of declamation with orchestral accompaniment. This spoils an otherwise fine treatment of the first scene (in Faust's study). It is really a symphonic poem with a vocal element here and there; and paradoxically enough, though Faust is restricted to declamation, the Earth-Spirit sings his part to a melodic and very expressive quasi recitativo. The movement has the prevailing fault of all Litolff's writing—a certain slackness and want of resource in the development; but the ideas themselves are often most striking. The first scene concludes with a fine setting of the Easter Hymn. The second scene, before the City Gate, is exceedingly fresh and charming; while the seventh, the scene in the Cathedral (No. 20 of Goethe's First Part) is a masterly piece of work—finer even, perhaps, than Schumann's version of the same scene. If Goethe's drama has moved many of the second-rate musicians only to show how very second-rate they are, it has at all events stimulated others to efforts that at times put them very nearly in the ranks of the first-rate.

Rubinstein's orchestral poem Faust—which the composer styles simply "Ein musikalisches Charakterbild"—is not altogether easy to understand, in its literary intentions, in the absence of a guide. It is in one movement only, and contains apparently no allusion to Mephistopheles, nor, as far as can be gathered beyond doubt from the music itself, to Margaret—for the suave melodies that are interposed as a contrast to the more passionate and more reflective utterances of Faust are not distinctively feminine in nature. They may have nothing at all to do with Margaret, or they may represent Faust's attempt to resolve his philosophic doubts by a contemplation of the simpler and more constant elements of human nature—just as Wagner, in his Faust Overture, does not so much limn an actual Margaret as suggest the consolation which the thought of womanly love can bring to the soul of Faust. Rubinstein's work, though not quite on the same plane as Wagner's, is yet exceedingly sincere. What it lacks is sufficient definiteness to make us refer it to Faust and to Faust only. It is clearly a strenuous picture of a lofty and noble soul, striving in its own way to read "the riddle of the painful earth," and mournfully acknowledging, at the last, that its only portion is defeat and disillusion. But this is a psychological frame that might be made to fit a score of pictures; and one misses, in Rubinstein's piece, the conclusive sense of congruence with Faust as we know him in Goethe's poem. There is nothing in it to clash with the poet's conception; the emotional atmosphere is the same in both; but in spite of the title the musician has put upon his work, it is less a study of individual character than a description of a type. Rubinstein's Faust is the least definite and the most symbolical of them all.

Rubinstein's tone-poem and every other purely orchestral setting of the subject, however, pale before the magnificence of Liszt's Faust Symphony. Liszt writes three movements—entitled respectively "Faust," "Margaret," "Mephistopheles"—and then sums up the whole work in a choral setting of Goethe's final lines, "Alles VergÄngliche ist nur ein Gleichniss," etc. Here the larger scale on which the picture is painted permits Liszt both a breadth and an intimacy of psychology which are impossible in the one-movement overtures. In the long first movement (taking about twenty-five minutes in performance), we really do feel that Faust is being analysed with something of the same elaboration and the same insight as in Goethe's poem. The handling is a trifle loose here and there, owing to Liszt repeating his material from time to time in obedience to literary rather than to musical necessities; but apart from this the "Faust" movement is extraordinarily fine character-drawing, and certainly the only instrumental Faust study that strikes one as being complete. In the "Margaret" movement he incorporates very suggestively a reference here and there to the phrases of the "Faust," thus not only sketching Margaret herself but giving the love-scenes in a form of the highest concentration. This section is surpassingly beautiful throughout; in face of this divine piece of music alone the present neglect of Liszt's work in England is something inexplicable. Almost the whole Margaret is there, with her curious blend of sweetness, timidity, and passion; while Faust's interpositions are exceedingly noble. All that one misses in Liszt, I think, is the tragic Margaret of the scene in the Cathedral and the prayer to the Mater Dolorosa. The "Mephistopheles" section is particularly ingenious. It consists, for the most part, of a kind of burlesque upon the subjects of the "Faust," which are here passed, as it were, through a continuous fire of irony and ridicule. This is a far more effective way of depicting "the spirit of denial" than making him mouth a farrago of pantomime bombast, in the manner of BoÏto. The being who exists, for the purposes of the drama, only in antagonism to Faust, whose main activity consists only in endeavouring to frustrate every good impulse of Faust's soul, is really best dealt with, in music, not as a positive individuality, but as the embodiment of negation—a malicious, saturnine parody of all the good that has gone to the making of Faust. The "Mephistopheles" is not only a piece of diabolically clever music, but the best picture we have of a character that in the hands of the average musician becomes either stupid, or vulgar, or both. As we listen to Liszt's music, we feel that we really have the Mephistopheles of Goethe's drama.

The Mephistopheles of Berlioz's Faust is interesting in another way. Berlioz, of course, played fast and loose in the most serene way with the drama as a whole, accepting, rejecting, or altering it just as it suited his musical scheme. He blandly avows, for example, that he takes Faust, in one scene, into Hungary, simply because he wants to insert in the score his arrangement of a celebrated Hungarian march! Moral criticism would be wasted on one so naked and unashamed as this—though perhaps after all it is only pedantry that would regard most of Berlioz's alterations of Goethe's drama as very serious perversions of the main Faust legend. So long as the central problems of the character are seen and stated, it matters very little through what incidents the composer chooses to bring them home to us. And Berlioz really has a very strong grip upon the inner meaning of the legend. His success, indeed, is somewhat surprising when we consider how he approached the work. He had been greatly impressed, in his youth, by GÉrard de Nerval's translation of Goethe's poem; but instead of attempting a continuous setting of the work at this time (1829), he aimed only at setting eight disconnected scenes. These were (1) "The Easter Scene"; (2) "The Peasants' Dance"; (3) "The Chorus of Sylphs"; (4) "The Song of the Rat"; (5) "The Song of the Flea"; (6) "The Ballad of the King of Thule"; (7) "Margaret's Romance and the Soldiers' Chorus"; (8) "Mephistopheles' Serenade." Faust, therefore, had practically no part in this selection; and it was not till seventeen years later that Berlioz brought out his complete "dramatic legend." It looks as if his early interest in the work were more pictorial than philosophical, for the two songs of Margaret alone suggest the deeper emotional currents of the drama. Mephistopheles, however, seems to have captivated his young Romantic imagination from the first, and, in the ironic serenade to Margaret, the character as he conceived it is already fully sketched. Berlioz's devil is, perhaps, the only operatic Mephistopheles that carries anything like conviction; he never, even for a moment, suggests the inanely grotesque figure of the pantomime. Of malicious, saturnine devilry there is plenty in him; no one, except Liszt, could compete with Berlioz on this ground. But there is more than this in the character. In such scenes as that on the banks of the Elbe, where he lulls Faust to sleep, there is a real suggestion of power, of dominion over ordinary things, that takes Mephistopheles out of the category of the merely theatrical and puts him in that of the philosophical.

Nor, in sheer character-drawing, can any other operatic Faust and Margaret compare with the figures of Berlioz; and when we consider the piecemeal manner in which the work was built up, it is astonishing how just, how sure, how incisive this portraiture is. It may not be precisely Goethe; but it is a magnificent translation of Goethe into French. Faust, of course, is the Romantic Faust, with his passionate intimacy with nature. We miss in Berlioz what we get in Schumann, for example—the close following of Goethe's philosophical plan. Berlioz is not greatly interested in Faust's schemes for the regeneration of mankind; his own culture had not brought him into contact with Louis Blanc and Proudhon and Saint-Simon. But of its kind it is all amazingly fine. No other Margaret, except Liszt's and perhaps Schumann's, can compare with Berlioz's for pure pathos—the sensuous simplicity of soul that wrings the heart with compassion. Altogether, though the opera of Berlioz deals only with the more primordial passions of the drama, and ends in a manner rather too suggestive of a Christmas card conceived in a nightmare, it is more subtle, more profound, than almost any other work of the same order.

Only one setting surpasses it—that of Schumann; not because it achieves a finer individual portraiture than Berlioz's work, but because, on the whole, it stirs us more deeply in precisely the way we are stirred by Goethe's poem. Schumann's plan is peculiar and original. Whereas most other composers who have employed the operatic or cantata form have drawn largely on Goethe's First Part and almost ignored the Second, it is from the Second Part that two-thirds of Schumann's work are taken. Out of the First Part we have only the garden scene, Margaret before the image of the Mater Dolorosa, and the scene in the cathedral. Faust, therefore, does not so far appear at all, except in the tiny garden scene; and the sole structural fault of the work is that something of the earlier Faust should have been shown to us, before he appears, in the next section, as the refined and vigorous humanist of Goethe's Second Part. Setting this defect aside, however, the remainder of the work gives us the quintessence of Goethe's drama. We have first the scene, at the opening of Goethe's Second Part, where Ariel and his fellow-spirits sing round the sleeping Faust; then Faust's return to mental health and energy, and his resolve to devote himself henceforth to the highest activities of human life. Upon this scene there follows the visit of the four grey-haired women—Want, Guilt, Need, and Care—the blinding of Faust by the breath of Care, the last outburst of his passionate zeal for life and freedom, and his death. The remainder of the work is devoted to a textual setting, line for line, of the final scene of Goethe's poem—the hermits, the choruses of angels, the three women, the penitent (formerly Margaret), the Mater Gloriosa, and the "Chorus Mysticus."

Schumann's scheme is thus in the highest degree philosophical. It austerely disregards the conventional elements that enter into the usual operatic Faust, and concentrates itself on the essential spiritual factors of the poem. Mephistopheles appears only for a moment in the garden duet, and again in Faust's death-scene, so that there is no attempt at full portraiture of him. Schumann's Margaret really suggests the Margaret of Goethe. The same mediÆval atmosphere seems to environ her, both in the garden and in the cathedral. She is naÏve in the scene with Faust as Goethe's Margaret is naÏve; and in the scene where she bends before the Mater Dolorosa, and again when the evil spirit, in the cathedral, harries her with his taunts, everything is set in the right key and the right colour. In the portrait of Faust it is the thinker, the philosopher, that is uppermost throughout. All through Schumann's Second Part, indeed, we feel this constant pre-occupation of the musician with the great human elements of the drama; while in the exquisite, subtilised mysticism of the Third Part these elements glow with a purer and rarer light. The work is uneven in its musical inspiration; but on the whole we can say that Schumann's is the real German Faust, the Faust of Goethe. Writing in his eightieth year, the old poet pointed out one of the main reasons for the enduring interest in his work: "The commendation which the work has received, far and near, may perhaps be owing to this quality—that it permanently preserves the period of a development of a human soul, which is tormented by all that afflicts mankind, shaken also by all that disturbs it, repelled by all that it finds repellent, and made happy by all that which it desires. The author is at present far removed from such conditions: the world, likewise, has to some extent other struggles to undergo: nevertheless, the state of men, in joy and sorrow, remains very much the same; and the latest born will still find cause to acquaint himself with what has been enjoyed and suffered before him, in order to adapt himself to that which awaits him." It is this grave note, this width of outlook upon man and the world, that we have in Schumann's work in fuller quantity and richer quality than in any other setting of Faust. His is really the spirit of the Faust conceived by the great poet—full of a passionate reflection upon life, an uplifted, philosophical sense of tragedy, a mellow sympathy with and pity for the troubled heart of man. From first to last he has made his emotions out of the deeper, not out of the more superficial, passions of the play.