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Updated: June 26, 2025
Helen and Faust represent Classic and Romantic art gloriously wedded, Greek beauty and Germanic beauty gleaming under the same aureole, glorified in one embrace, and generating an ideal poesy, eclectic, new, and powerful." The contents of the last act, which shows us Faust's death and salvation, have been set forth in the explanation of Boito's philosophical purpose.
Thus much for the dramatic exposition. Boito's musical exposition rests on the employment of typical phrases, not in the manner of Wagner, indeed, but with the fundamental purpose of Wagner. A theme: which begins the prologue, ends the epilogue. The reader may label it as he pleases. Its significance is obvious from the circumstances of its employment.
Then follows a charming episode, another of Boito's interpolations, in which a band of Cypriotes bring flowers to Desdemona. Othello is won for the moment by the guileless charm of her manner, but his jealousy is revived by her assiduous pleading for Cassio. He thrusts her from him, and the handkerchief with which she offers to bind his brow is secured by Iago.
Between Spohr's "Faust," written in 1813 and performed in 1818, and Boito's "Mefistofele," produced in 1868, many French, German, English, Italian, Russian, and Polish Faust operas have come into existence, lived their little lives, and died.
The Germans are, therefore, not so wrong, after all, in calling the opera after the name of the heroine instead of that of the hero. In Boito's book the love story is but an incident.
The libretto, which is mainly based upon "The Merry Wives of Windsor," also makes some contributions upon "Henry IV.," particularly in the introduction of the monologue upon honor, and illustrates Boito's skill in adaptation as well as his remarkable powers in condensation. In the arrangement of the comedy the five acts are reduced to three.
When 'Mefistofele' was originally produced in 1868, Verdi's genius was still in the chrysalis stage, and the novelty and force of Boito's music made 'Mefistofele, even in its fall for the first performance was a complete failure a rallying point for the Italian disciples of truth and sincerity in music.
And here they kneel, candle in hand, on the wet flags of this foetid and malodorous cave, gazing in rapture upon the blandly beaming idol, their sensibilities tickled by resplendent priests reciting full-mouthed Latin phrases, while the organ overhead plays wheezy extracts from "La Forza del Destino" or the Waltz out of Boito's "Mefistofele"... for sure, it must be a foretaste of Heaven!
Like Goethe's maiden, too, she is concerned about the religious beliefs of her lover, and Boito's Faust answers, like Goethe's Faust, that a sincere man dares protest neither belief nor unbelief in God. Nature, Love, Mystery, Life, God all are one, all to be experienced, not labelled with a name.
It is likely that had he had less reverence for his model and more of the stagecraft of his French predecessors his opera would have had a quicker and greater success than fell to its lot. Of necessity it has suffered by comparison with the opera of Barbier, Carre, and Gounod, though it was far from Boito's intentions that it should ever be subjected to such a comparison.
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