Vera Micznik: „Text/Music and Discursive/Narrative Elucidations in Schumann’s and Mahler’s Settings of the End of Faust“ 

As it is known, unlike Faust I, Faust II, in five acts, takes Faust into five imaginary historical periods and places, from Greek antiquity to contemporary times, culminating after Faust’s death with the rescue of his immortal remains in a quasi-Christian celestial realm. With its esoteric subject matter, the novelty of a plot constructed from five disjoint stories rather than as a coherent whole conveys an ambiguity of meaning that puzzled literary critics ever since its publication until today. This paper will explore the problematic reception in the critical literature of Faust II, especially of the final scene, and the consequences for the assessments of two of the few musical works it engendered: the renderings of the “Closing Scene” of Faust II (Bergschluchten) in the last section (no. 7) of Robert Schumann’s “Szenen aus Goethes Faust” (1848–49), which he named “Fausts Verklärung” (Faust’s Transfiguration), and in the second movement of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1906) which uses the same text. First, I will outline the history of reception of Goethe’s Faust II as a literary text, with the problems of its aesthetic value raised by nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical discourse around Goethe and Faust. Second, I will discuss aspects of these two musical adaptations of the same texts considering the multivalent possibilities of interpretation they suggest, and of the choices of musical representations the two composers made during their respective circumstances. Obviously, the distance in time of 60 years between the musical settings, and the stylistic differences between Schumann and Mahler contribute to the differences. Yet, in Schumann’s music, the ambiguous nature of Goethe’s Faust II text (in the last scene discussed here) and its problematic literary interpretation does not come across as strongly as in Mahler. On the other hand, Mahler’s more detached and modernistic musical language succeeds better in capturing some of Goethe’s hidden allegorical ambiguities of meaning, through subtle musical procedures that contest a straightforward reading of the text. However, his monumental finale musical setting suggests that he, like other composers, does not represent accurately the ambiguous allegory that closes Goethe’s philosophical text.