Berlioz's Damnation of Faust, the Ride to the Abyss
In 1846 Berlioz sends Faust to hell: the story of the «dramatic legend» with its Hungarian March, the ride to the abyss and the invented tongue of demons.
Unlike Goethe and Gounod, Hector Berlioz does not save Faust. In his «dramatic legend» La Damnation de Faust the doctor signs the pact to save Marguerite and plunges into hell, carried off by Mephistopheles in a night ride. The work was first performed in concert form on 6 December 1846 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, before a half-empty hall. Berlioz came out of it heavily in debt, but the score is today regarded as one of his masterpieces.
A Youthful Passion for Goethe
Berlioz read Goethe's Faust in 1828, in the French translation by Gérard de Nerval, and was dazzled by it. The following year he published at his own expense the Huit scènes de Faust, eight pieces inspired by the poem, which he also sent to Goethe. According to the sources, the poet asked the musician Carl Friedrich Zelter for an opinion, Zelter replied with contempt, and Berlioz received no answer.
Almost twenty years later the composer took up that material again and expanded it into a large work for soloists, chorus and orchestra. He did not conceive it for the stage: he called it a dramatic legend, a hybrid genre between oratorio and opera, in which the listener's imagination must build the places the music evokes. Over time this ambiguity has allowed very different concert performances and theatrical productions.
Geographical Licence and the Hungarian March
Berlioz took many liberties with the poem. He opens the story on the plains of Hungary, so that he could include his orchestration of the Rákóczi March, a Hungarian patriotic tune that had stirred enthusiasm at one of his concerts in Pest in 1846. In the preface he defended this choice with ease, recalling that Goethe too had moved his character through different places.
Other famous pages are the dance of the sylphs, a feather-light musical spell with which Mephistopheles lulls Faust to sleep on the banks of the Elbe, and the minuet of the will-o'-the-wisps, in which the spirits of the night whirl around Marguerite's house. Here the devil is above all an illusionist, who commands the elements and invisible creatures.
The Ride to the Abyss and the Pandaemonium
The most striking scene is the Course à l'abîme. Faust and Mephistopheles gallop on two black horses while the orchestra reproduces the pounding of hooves and ghostly figures appear along the road. A group of peasants prays before a cross, winged monsters brush past the riders, and finally the ground opens beneath them.
In the Pandaemonium that follows, the chorus of the damned and the demons sings in a language invented by Berlioz, a sequence of meaningless syllables meant to suggest the speech of hell. It is one of the first examples of an infernal idiom built specifically for music. Immediately afterwards, a short heavenly epilogue welcomes Marguerite's soul.
The Damnation of Faust received its first staged performance only in 1893 in Monte Carlo, twenty-four years after the composer's death. Since then directors and conductors have kept grappling with a work that, by refusing a happy ending, gives back to the myth all its darkness. Here the pact is not redeemed: the price Faust pays is final, as in the chapbook of 1587.