Frontcover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations Used in the Notes -- Introduction. Rhapsody and Rebuke: Goethe's Faust in Music -- Part I Goethe's Faust: Content and Context -- 1 The Redress of Goethe's Faust in Music History -- 2 Wagering on Modernity: Goethe's Eighteenth-Century Faust -- 3 Reflectivity, Music and the Modern Condition: Thoughts on Goethe's Faust -- 4 Music and Metaphorical Thinking in Goethe's Faust: The Example of Harmony -- 5 Faust: The Instrumentalisation of an Icon -- Part II Legacies: Goethe's Faust in the Nineteenth Century -- 6 Faust's Schubert: Schubert's Faust -- 7 The Musical Novel as Master-genre: Schumann's Szenen aus Goethes Faust -- 8 The Psychology of Schumann's Faust: Developing the Human Soul -- 9 A Life with Goethe: Wagner's Engagement with Faust in Music and in Words -- 10 Wagner's Ninth: Reading Beethoven with Faust -- 11 Linking Christian and Faustian Utopias: Mahler's Setting of the Schlußszene in his Eighth Symphony -- Part III Topographies: Stagings and Critical Reception -- 12 Operatic Translation and Adaptation: Gounod's Faust, with a Tribute to Ken Russell -- 13 'Adapters, Falsifiers and Profiteers': Staging La Damnation de Faust in Monte Carlo and Paris, 1893-1903 -- 14 Faust in the Trenches: Busoni's Doktor Faust -- Part IV New Directions: Recent Productions and Appropriations -- 15 As Goethe Intended? Max Reinhardt's Faust Productions and the Aesthetics of Incidental Music in the Early Twentieth Century -- 16 Music and the Rebirth of Faust in the GDR -- 17 Music, Text and Stage: Peter Stein's Production of Goethe's Faust -- 18 'Devilishly good': Rudolf Volz's Rock Opera Faust and 'Event Culture' -- Select Bibligraphy -- Index

The best translation of Faust available, this volume provides the original German text and its English counterpart on facing pages. Walter Kaufmann's translation conveys the poetic beauty and rhythm as well as the complex depth of Goethe's language. Includes Part One and selections from Part Two.

A brief analysis of the development, style, and protagonists of Faust is included with Goethe's classic tale about a troubled man who sells his soul to the devil.

Faust stories are found across the ages and the arts. From its earliest to most recent expressions, the Faust figure continues to capture our imagination, dealing with problems and themes that are still relevant for a twenty-first century audience. Of the many variations on the Faust-myth, Goethe's remains especially provocative and laden with meaning and is the work most responsible for determining the subsequent character of the Faust archetype. His Faust reflects an individual who asserts, yet wrestles unrelentingly with the futility of faith, the bankruptcy of knowledge, and the loss of meaning. One of the greatest texts of both German and world literature, Faust, Parts I and II, confronts us with pressing questions about rebellion and suffering, faith and its loss, reality and simulation, order and chaos, weakness and power, technology and human improvement. This monograph offers a new interpretation of Goethe's famous play, emphasising its continuing significance today.

Readers today are especially thrilled by the prospect of good news. Drought and global warming, civil war and famine, poverty and economic inequity—yes, bad news abounds. This book by Dr. Stephen Wilkerson, on the other hand, is about hope and optimism for the future. The recorded history of our world is largely one of a sometimes worthy patriarchal striving. It has, however, all too often been tarnished, marred, and horribly disfigured by the hatreds, intolerance, and destruction that have accompanied it. And the good news? There is another way, poignantly and persuasively outlined nearly two hundred years ago by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, involving the Divine Feminine. Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, involves an immensely intelligent but profoundly narcissistic man, who cruelly and selfishly exploits and ultimately ruins the life of an innocent maiden. In the legend on which Goethe’s great work is based, Faust understandably winds up in Hell, just as he does in virtually every version of this well-known wager with the Devil. But in Goethe’s interpretation, the deeply flawed protagonist is received into Heaven by the Mother of God Herself. How and why can this be? Mankind’s long history of heroic accomplishment has never been sufficiently tempered by a sense of global community and cooperation that mitigate the horror and devastation that ever seem to march along beside a single-minded struggle to achieve and prevail. And how may this missing unity be brought about? Alchemy as understood in this book has nothing to do with an early and misguided chemistry and everything to do with the sort of individual transformation necessary for a better, more gracious, more inclusive world. The millennial patterns of blind violence and repression can only be ameliorated by a thoughtful and genuine embrace of open-minded reception of difference and heart-felt valuation of a larger, borderless world in which all grow together rather than further apart. Such is the promise of the final words in Goethe’s Faust: “The Divine Feminine leads us forward.”