Gounod's Faust: Mephistopheles on the Nineteenth-Century Stage
From the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1859 to the Paris Opéra: the story of Gounod's Faust, the opera that made Mephistopheles a favourite of European audiences.
For much of the nineteenth century, when a European thought of the devil in the theatre, he thought of Mephistopheles in a red cloak singing on the stage of Charles Gounod's Faust. The opera opened on 19 March 1859 at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris to an initially modest success, but within a few decades it became one of the most performed works in the world. Its appeal came from the meeting between the German legend of the diabolical pact and the sentimental, religious sensibility of Second Empire France.
From Legend to Goethe, from Goethe to Paris
The figure of Faust is rooted in a historical character, a wandering astrologer and necromancer who lived in Germany in the early decades of the sixteenth century, about whom little is known for certain. In 1587 the publisher Johann Spies printed in Frankfurt the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, the first chapbook about the doctor who sells his soul to the devil. Christopher Marlowe drew a tragedy from it, and in 1808 Goethe published the first part of his Faust.
Gounod did not work directly on Goethe as a whole. The librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré relied above all on the episode of Marguerite, already adapted by Carré in the play Faust et Marguerite of 1850. The result is a story centred on love, seduction and guilt, rather than on the philosophical problem of knowledge.
An Elegant and Ironic Devil
Gounod's Mephistopheles is a mocking gentleman who appears in old Faust's study, shows him a vision of Marguerite and restores his youth in exchange for his soul. In the fair scene he raises a song in praise of the golden calf, the biblical symbol of idolatry, and with a gesture makes wine flow from a cask. Before the cross formed by the soldiers' sword hilts, however, he retreats powerless.
This double nature, seductive yet defeated by the sacred, is the theological heart of the opera. The devil can tempt and deceive, but he does not have the last word. It is a reassuring image for the bourgeois audience of the time, who could enjoy the thrill of evil without calling the moral order into question. Gounod, who in his youth had considered the priesthood, knew this religious language well.
Walpurgis Night and the Final Apotheosis
As early as 1860 the spoken dialogue had been replaced by recitatives; in 1869, for the Paris Opéra, Gounod added the Walpurgis Night ballet. In German folk tradition, the night between 30 April and 1 May was when witches gathered on the Brocken, the summit of the Harz mountains; Goethe had made it a famous scene of his poem. Gounod turns it into an evocation of the courtesans of antiquity.
The finale overturns the logic of the pact. Marguerite, in prison for killing her own child, refuses to flee with Faust and entrusts herself to God. A voice from above declares her saved, and a chorus of angels accompanies her soul while Mephistopheles is left defeated. It is the same idea of redemption that Goethe entrusts to the famous ending of the second part of the poem.
Gounod's Faust is not the deepest interpretation of the myth, but it is the one that made it familiar to millions of spectators. After it, the operatic devil had for decades the face, the bass voice and the ironic smile that Gounod had given him. Even today many popular images of the devil owe something to that character.