FAUST: Orchestral and Choral Music

There is a whole lot of music based on FAUST. Here are four orchestral/choral examples from both the 19th and 20th C's.

Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony (1854-57)

Franz Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814)


Hector Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust (1845-46) (sometimes performed in staged opera versions)

Alfred Schnittke's Faust Cantata (1982-83)

Liberty's Children, Republican Siblings

France Sustaining America: Allegory of the Siege of Yorktown, Louis Edouard Rioult, late 18th C. (?)

Enlightened Fathers?

Voltaire, Rousseau and Franklin, late 18th C. French print

Do you remember the acrimony directed at an unsupportive France by segments of the American public during our last invasion of Iraq? "We saved their butts in WWII!" was met with "Yeah- well they saved ours in 1776- so there's not much of a debt." OK- so now I'm going to speak in stereotypes- so take this entry with a grain of salt- no get the whole shaker.

The stereotypes go like this...

The French despise our provincialism and our lack of international imagination, our religiousness and our monoglottism and yet--- they love American culture, cowboys and line-dancing, Hollywood films (Jerry Lewis especially- go figure!) and McDonalds. Americans find the French stuck up, too reliant on beauracracy, too ready to retreat from war and yet--- they fall silent before French cuisine, swoon over images of Paris and feel sophisticated when they can say they own something "made in France". The French and the American resemble family members- locked in a confusing relationship of love and hate, admiration and anger. It's absurd to take this too seriously- but there's some truth hiding in the generalizations.

Our "founding fathers" admired the French philosophes, indeed spent time among them in the last glow of the ancien regime. The French looked to the American experiment as the manifestation of the ideas of republicanism restored. Benjamin Franklin brought his young grandson to be blessed by Voltaire with a laying on of hands. Thomas Jefferson and his family members (both black and white) spent time in Paris. Lafayette came to New England to fight against the British (as Professor Martin said- more or less to stick it to the Anglo-German George III than for anything else) however, he became a major celebrity after the war and toured the US as a hero for years and years.

American-French relations are complicated, but deeply connected through the ideas of their founding mythologies- dense symbolic and philosophical systems forged of neoclassicism and the enlightenment. America and France are the children of that adored, yet nebulous grande dame: LADY LIBERTY! France and America share a symbolic, philosophical ancestry... and there are a lot of powder-wigs involved.

Enlightened Bodies III: Of Blood and Wax

The life of Anna Maria Grosholtz Tussaud (1761-1850) reads like an incredible novel. The woman who essentially invented the modern traveling exhibition was also witness to the passage of France from the high flown, party-life of the Ancien Regime to the Terror of the Revolution, from the Napoleonic wars to the glitter and bourgeois consumer paradise of Victorian Britain- what a life! Madame Tussaud wasn't only a brilliant artist she was an ingenious business woman and creative entrepreneur.

Some of the very people she was asked to immortalize in wax were those she had been friends with before the Revolution and who had died during the Terror. Bringing their severed heads to her workshop she had to work quickly to create wax replicas of their famous faces before decay set in.

A new book about it all (written with the impeccable care of a great historian and the aplomb of a popular novelist) is Kate Berridge's bio Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax. I read it over the winter break and couldn't put it down.

Reading Questions, 2 (Faust)

First, please note the updated (shorter) page assignment on the on-line syllabus (http://diva.sfsu.edu/users/Benjamin.Martin/courses/14103).

Second, remember to write a response to one of these questions to turn in on Wednesday evening.
................

1. What is Faust's situation as the story begins? He seems to be very "enlightened," but not very happy about it. Why is that?

2. What stops him from killing himself (that's what the crystal bowl is for, p. 119)? What effect does the little world of village life on Easter have on him?

3. Read carefully Mephisto's self description (159ff). What forces in modern life are like him, which "would do evil..., and yet creates the good"?

4. Read carefully Faust's impatient explanation of what he really wants from Mephisto ("Do you not hear...," 189). What is it, really, that he is willing to sell his soul for? Money, power, sex? Or something more.... How can we characterize this thing he wants?

5. Why is Faust attracted to Margaret? Isn't she sort of small time for someone with his new Devil-given powers?

6. Make sure you follow the story Gretchen's friend Lieschen tells her. Similarly, what is Gretchen's brother Valentine so angry about? What kind of community is this little village world, after all?

7. Gretchen goes to church in her hour of need; what kind of experience does she have there? (pp. 355ff)

8. Why won't Gretchen let Faust save her? What does this suggest about the differences between the two of them?

9. Optional (regarding pp. 431-469): Faust has decided to turn his enormous energies on a kind of massive civil engineering project, hemming in the sea and building a new port, new cities, etc. Why is he so obsessed with getting the last piece of land from the old couple (Baucis and Philemon)?

10. Faust dies in a moment of ecstasy and satisfaction with his work (p. 469). What is it that makes him satisfied? What is the moment that he wishes would stay...?

Enlightened Bodies II: Sensuous Shells & Promiscuous Picnics

Rococo interior at Frederick the Great's Palace of San Souci, Potsdam.

Frederick was an accomplished pianist and flautist and would give frequent concerts for his courtiers and visiting dignitaries.

The Swing, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, oil on canvas, 1767, The Wallace Collection, London.

Gives new meaning to the phrase Petticoat Junction!!

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Embarking (or Arriving) for the Isle of Cythera, oil on canvas, 1717, Louvre

Cythera was the legendary birthplace of the goddess Venus. Watteau is known for his images of pastoral lovemaking, of mythological figures moving in luxurious landscapes and for his portraits of characters out of the commedia dell' arte.

German Rococo palace interior

18th C. Rococo ormolu clock

Hello everyone! I just wanted to post a few more 18th C./French Rev./Enlightenment things before we speed ahead, pass by Napoleon and spend time with the Romantics so... on to a few words about Rococo!

Does this style give anybody else optical heart-burn? I mean it's like someone went completely berserk with the frosting tube and the gold spray paint!

Rococo is an art style that follows the 17th century Baroque and retains many of the elaborate and grand motifs of the earlier epoch. When you see Rococo you'll probably associate it with French aristocracy- people with too much time and too much money living in a hermetically sealed environment devoted to pure pleasure. Rococo may be derived from the French word for shells (coquilles). Rococo was supplanted by the more austere and geometrically delineated Neo-classical style which largely did away with all the frou-frou details in celebration of classical coolness and imagined Republican virtues.

French Revolution on Film: Danton & La Nuit de Varennes

Two excellent films set during the French Revolution are DANTON (1983) and LA NUIT DE VARENNES (1982). Danton is available on DVD through Netflix etc. La Nuit is very difficult to come by. The VHS is a collector's item and although French TV often shows it, America TV rarely does. There are a few clips on Youtube. The famed memoirist and rake Casanova (played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a key figure in the narrative. Both films are excellent presentations of Ancien Regime and Revolutionary cultural experiences. Danton focuses on the tumultuous relationship between the title figure and Robespierre, while La Nuit shows the danger and despair faced by the aristocracy as King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are taken captive in their attempted flight from France.

Party Like It's 1794

I'm not sure how true to the facts these two images are, but if the Festival of the Supreme Being was anything like the fanatically detail-oriented Robespierre laid out in his "party plans" it must have been a sight to behold.

An idealized image of the French family paying homage to Nature and Liberty, both personified as classical goddesses (Demeter/Ceres & Athena/Minerva perhaps). The Supreme Being in the shape of an all-seeing eye in a triangle shines above . Notice the ancient symbols: cornucopia (horn of plenty), the phrygian cap (symbol of freed slaves), stone tablets (probably inscribed with "the rights of man" but certainly inspired by the ten commandments), the sheaves of grain.

For more info try these

• 
  THE CULT & FESTIVAL OF THE SUPREME BEING
• 
  THE CULT OF REASON (a precursor movement)

• REVOLUTIONARY FESTIVALS & HOLIDAYS