Charles Gounod, from youth to old age, was always a conundrum of devout Catholicism and eroticism. The priesthood attracted him as an impressionable young man; after winning the Prix de Rome at age 21 and spending three years abroad in Italy, Germany, and Austria, he eventually entered the seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris. It is fortunate for opera lovers that Gounod was driven out of the monastery in 1848, perhaps less due to the French Revolution and more due to his own aversion to a life of celibacy. Indeed, Fanny Mendelssohn described Gounod as “hyper-romantic and passionate” when meeting him in Rome in 1840 (around the time the composer was reading Goethe’s Faust, Part One for the first time). Edmond Got, a great comic actor of the day, named him a “flirtatious monk,” so “exuberant and shamelessly pushy” that he was known among his friends for his endless cheek-kissing. It comes as no surprise that the religious themes of Faust, Gounod’s greatest success, are more than equaled by the opera’s heavy doses of nihilism and lust.
While Goethe’s original tragedy includes a wager between God and Satan over Faust’s damnation, God is nowhere to be found onstage in Gounod’s opera. Instead, Méphistophélès, Satan’s representative on Earth, steals every scene in which he appears. Alternately cunning, charming, hilarious, and menacing, he is as straightforwardly evil as one can expect from a demon from Hell. Some have argued that Méphistophélès’s malevolence stems from Faust, whose soul, full of desperation and a lust for youthful pleasures, is already damned when he summons Satan. Gounod’s opera presents Faust’s character in a slightly more positive light, as we sometimes witness the doctor clashing with Méphistophélès. His conscience causes him to repeatedly hesitate in his quest to seduce the innocent Marguerite, only to be spurred on by his demonic companion.
In any case, the two are inextricably linked, and their legend is even based on a shred of fact. The tale of Faust originates from the anonymously-published Faustbuch of 1587, which references a real historical person, the German alchemist, astronomer and magician Johann Georg Faust, who lived c. 1466 – c. 1541. The name “Mephistopheles,” originally “Mephostopheles,” was ostensibly created by this anonymous author, combining the Greek words for “not” and “loving” with a Greek spelling of “Faust” or “light” (phōs) in between.
“Le veau d’or,” Méphistophélès’s raucous Act II aria, references a story from a very different book. According to the narrative laid out in the Old Testament (first mentioned in Exodus 32), as Moses was receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, Aaron and the impatient Israelites fashioned the idol of a golden calf, worshipping it with feasts and dance. Though the biblical story ends with Moses’s destruction of the idol and the punishment of the Israelites for worshipping a false god, Méphistophélès offers a revisionist perspective in his aria, singing that the golden calf is “forever standing” (“Le veau d'or est toujours debout!”). He proclaims the monstrous idol victor over God, and taunts the soldiers with references to the futility of human wars. The final line “Satan leads the dance” is darkly foreshadowing of events to come.
One of the most famous moments of any Gounod opera is the Church Scene of Act IV, where Marguerite, impregnated and abandoned by Faust, attempts to pray in a darkened cathedral. Her prayer is born of the crushing remorse from the sin she has committed, but she is swiftly set upon by Méphistophélès and his chorus of demons, who torment her from the darkness with proclamations of her damnation. Even the sound of the organ and a chorus of priests and worshippers is torture to her ears. Apart from creating a scene that struck terror into audiences and influenced the horror themes of subsequent works of opera and musical theatre, we get the sense that Gounod was able to impart the shame he felt as a devout Catholic with amorous tendencies in Marguerite’s expressions of guilt for her tryst with Faust. (Though happily married, Gounod was also romantically linked to two singers – Pauline Viardot and Georgina Weldon.) Through the music of this scene, he may have even relived the disappointing four years he spent as chapel master of the Church of the Missions Étrangères in Paris, performing on a decrepit organ and leading a small and equally poor chorus.
We next hear the organ in the finale, when a chorus of angels announces Marguerite’s salvation. It is perhaps most telling that the same music of this apotheosis, with lofty scales that surge up and down as the orchestra lifts Marguerite towards heaven, is used both during her ascension and as Faust rushes into her bedroom to complete his lustful act at the end of Act III. There is joy in both moments, although the use of this music earlier in the opera is tinged with dissonance, as morality is sacrificed for erotic pleasure. The purity of the music in the opera’s apotheosis lays bare Gounod’s fascination with the subject matter, as we witness his deep commitment both to religious devotion and romantic love.
by Artistic and Education Coordinator Geoffrey Larson
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