A Faust for our times?

The learned Doctor Faustus standing inside his magical circle, addressing a small winged devil, from a 1628 edition of Christopher Marlowe's play. The Council's Faust symposium offered context for P.O.R.T.'s production of Gounod's opera in July and included, along with lectures and a reception, a performance element: dramatic readings from Goethe's play by actor Michael Howard and a recital of Fault-inspired songs by Maine's Emering Artists, directed by Ellen Chickering.

PERHAPS THE MOST INTERESTING THING about Goethe's play Faust is that, outside of the German-speaking world, so few people read it today. How did this come about? How did a work that dominated high Western culture for more than 150 years lose its centrality? For generations, to have read and absorbed Goethe was one of the hallmarks of an educated person. Faust, which he worked on for 60 years, was the masterpiece which earned him a place alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere - the great writers of the West.

This decline was one of the subjects treated at the Council's one-day symposium on July 13 entitled Faust: The Myth, the Memory, the Music, held in conjunction with the Portland Opera Repertory Theatre's production of Gounod's Faust. The audience learned that the myth is still very much alive, the music compelling, but the "memory" fading.

How different it was in an earlier New England! In 1837, Longfellow became the first American professor to lecture on Goethe's Faust (among his Harvard students was Thoreau). Emerson and Margaret Fuller championed Goethe as one of the great men of the age. From Bowdoin College, the scientist Parker - Cleaveland corresponded with him in Weimar (among Goethe's many accomplishments, he was a mineralogist). It was the great man's "wholeness" that awed his contemporaries (he lived until 1832). As a statesman, scientist, public official, theater producer, landscape gardener, artist, he made even Jefferson seem an underachiever. On top of that, he wrote the most famous play, the most widely read novel (The Sorrows of Young Werther), and some of the best lyric poetry of his age.

Even in early 20th-century America, this aura survived, especially among German-speaking immigrants. Just as Hawthorne and Longfellow schools dot the Maine townscape, Goethe and Schiller gave their names to public schools across the Midwest.

Most of that aura is diminished. It is amusing to learn that one problem Longfellow had in teaching Goethe at Harvard was that the German was regarded as "immoral," because of his unconventional personal life and his religious skepticism. Today, on the contrary Goethe seems marmoreal, an establishment figure, tucked away in the dusty pantheon of the unread. Only his frisky Italian Journey comes across well in English, in Auden's translation.

In trying to recover Goethe's importance, it helps to distance his Faust from Gounod's (in fact he regretted that Mozart did not live to write an opera on the subject). Goethe's play, in its final form, is a product of the Age of Napoleon - an age when a "world-historical" man could aspire to dominate the world-stage, or anything else he wanted. The 1859 opera is a product of the Age of Louis Napoleon - as its blend of heavy-handed religiosity and erotic ballet (the famous Walpurgisnacht interlude, cut from the Portland production) suggests.

Gounod could write glorious melodies, and his sentimental opera holds its place in the "Top 25," if not the top ten. But, as the symposium learned from composer Elliott Schwartz, an impressive array of other compositions were inspired by the Faust legend, from Schubert's "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel" (one of the classics of the art-song repertory) to a rock opera being produced this year in Germany. Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Boito, Busoni - all drew on Goethe's play.

Similarly, the play inspired painters and illustrators, as art historian Clifton Olds explained. From Delacroix's romantic drawings in 1828 through Rockwell Kent's mid-2Oth-century book illustrations, the characters of Faust have been made visual in a myriad of ways. (It could even be argued that the current fad for goatees among 20-something American males has a touch of the Mephistophelean.) Filmmakers followed in the artists' steps. Charles Calhoun showed clips from Richard Burton's 1967 production of Marlowe's Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (with its high camp walk-on by Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy) and from F.W. Murnau's 1926 Expressionist silent film based on the original legend.

It was the persistence of this legend that emerged as the chief theme of the day. It starts in late medieval Germany, when a learned man might also be an alchemist or a necromancer. It thrives in the unsettled world of the early Renaissance, when even the Emperor Rudolf II dabbles in black arts in his castle at Prague. It gets written down in a 1587 German chapbook and translated into English. Marlowe takes up the story in his great play of the 1590s (where he perfects blank verse for use on the English stage). Itinerant actors carry the story back to the Rhineland, where it turns into a puppet show for market towns. The young Goethe sees such a show in Strasbourg in the 1770s, and the rest is literary history. The legend takes many forms, from the high seriousness of Thomas Mann's 1947 novel Doktor Faustus to the Keanu Reeves 1997 movie Devil's Advocate in which a hot-shot young lawyer finds he's working for Lucifer.

If the "Faustian bargain" has become a Hollywood cliché, Faust himself endures (along with Hamlet, Don Juan, Don Quixote) as one of the archetypal figures of the West. Marlowe's Faust makes a literal pact with the devil - 24 years of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, as it were - and is damned for it. Goethe's Faust, on the other hand, negotiates a better deal (he'll go to Hell only if life presents an experience that totally satisfies him), and in the very end is saved (Goethe not believing in Hell, anyway). It is the modern experience of satiety, of already having consumed everything in reach, that perhaps now robs Goethe's play of its edge.

But Mephistopheles takes on new life. This was suggested by the clips from István Szabó's 1981 film Mephisto, based on the Klaus Mann novel about how the most famous of German actors sold his soul to the Nazis. There was no oath signed in blood, just one compromise, one small rationalization, one quiet betrayal after another. Today, the venue is not a scholar's study, full of dried bats and newts' tongues and astrological devices. It might be, rather, a corporate suite (like the one in Ethan Hawke's wonderful film of Hamlet), or anywhere else Mephisto is whispering in our ear. The legend lives because the temptation doesn't die.