The egghead's "Gioconda".(Ferruccio Busoni's 'Doktor Faust')(Critical Essay)

The composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was of mixed Italian-German parentage, but his life and career was spent largely in Berlin. In his lifetime, he was famous throughout Europe and the United States as a formidable technician of the piano and one of the great virtuosos in piano history. Like many other virtuosos of his time (and especially his idol Franz Liszt), Busoni created portmanteau piano pieces, many of which, especially under the rubric "Bach-Busoni," exist in recitals to this day. Busoni was renowned as a pianist, but he wished to be known as a composer. His compositional oeuvre, however, is spotty. Aside from the portmanteau works, it includes several operas and an outsized piano concerto, which in its romantic pretensions is risible but enormous fun, combining Lisztian rodomontade and a final choral uplift. His one-act parody opera, Arlecchino, however, with its debt to the commedia dell'arte (the Italian side of Busoni), is a gem of wit and benevolent satire.

Busoni strove for a great compositional statement, and after waffling through several ideas for a grand opera settled on the German obsession: Faust. He knew he was entering on a crowded field, peopled musically by Gounod, Berlioz and even Liszt (whose symphonic treatment of the subject probably came closest musically to the towering example of Goethe). Busoni staked his claim by insisting that his version did not follow Goethe, but harked back to the medieval puppet plays that were the genesis of the idea. Indeed, the very disjointed and episodic treatment he devised (he was his own librettist) seems to support that contention, as does the fact that, in his treatment, Faust, not Mephistopheles, takes the central position in controlling his destiny, with the devil becoming simply Faust's wily lackey. Busoni's Faust, moreover, is not heroic, but a coward and a manipulator who has already seduced and abandoned someone before meeting Mephisto.

Busoni emphasized the centrality of Faust by writing the role for a baritone--no featherheaded tenors here!--and transforming the devil into a character tenor with a fearsomely high tessitura. There is little doubt that Busoni looked to Liszt, whose conception of Mephisto was made up, not of his own themes, but of distortions of the themes of others.

Faust was on Busoni's mind as early as 1906, and he began serious work on it in 1910, completing the libretto in 1914. He died in 1924, leaving the ending unfinished, and his pupil Phillip Jarnach completed it for the premiere in Dresden in 1925. From that time on, Doktor Faust has been the darling of the intelligentsia. In part, this is owing to the fact that Busoni was highly esteemed as a scholar and thinker, but it is also because he created a work that deliberately left behind the boulevard delights of Gounod and the romantic flamboyance of Berlioz to confront the genius of Goethe himself--even if he disclaimed its parentage. Similarly, in a operatic world increasingly dominated by "popular" works such as those of Puccini and the veristic composers, Doktor Faust represented the continuation of the "uplifted" German tradition, in direct contradistinction from the grandiose works of Wagner, whose music and philosophy Busoni detested.

Other important German philosophical operas of the early twentieth century--Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina and Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler--have never achieved the level of popularity that Doktor Faust has (though I consider both of them stronger works), and the only other German twentieth century opera to challenge its status is The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Busoni's pupil Kurt Weill. In the current Grove Dictionary of Opera, Antony Beaumont, who himself has provided an ending for the opera, claims it is "widely accepted as one of the outstanding operas of the twentieth century."

That claim, outside the fevered academic circles, is difficult to justify. The episodic nature of the libretto is a serious hindrance: almost a third of it is over before the bargain with the devil is struck, and a big chunk of it concerns Faust's relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Parma--he runs off with the latter on her wedding day--two stick figures of little interest. Busoni's finest dramatic inspiration was to set the climactic scene in a deserted street in winter. Faust finally accepts his end, puts down his dead child, and dies, bequeathing his unshakeable eternal will to the corpse. Out of it rises a young man (presumably the Future). Mephisto, in disguise as a Night Watchman (throughout the opera he appears in various disguises), comes up to the dead Faust and speaks (not sings) the famous final line of the opera: "Sollte dieser Mann verungluckt sein?"--"Has this man met with a misfortune?"

The fact that the last line is spoken is telling, since the central failure of the opera is its musicalization. With strong and effective music, the libretto could succeed, but Busoni's talents were of a far more restricted order. The best music lies in the passages up to the sealing of Faust's bargain; after that, the inspiration thins, becoming ever more threadbare. The last scene is as unsatisfying musically as that of another unfinished opera of the 1920s, Puccini's Turandot. It is interesting that, despite his denials, Busoni cannot escape the clutches of Goethe in his retelling of the story. Faust's soliloquy in the second scene ("Traum der Jugend") brings his character close to the Faust of the second part of Goethe's poem. Here, however, the musical underpinning is weak, and the great statement cannot carry the emotional weight that, for ...