Faust

Legendary magician who sold his soul to the devil. The historical Georg (or Johann) Faust appears to have been a wandering scholar and conjurer in Germany at the start of the 16th century. Christopher Marlowe, J W Goethe, Heinrich Heine, and Thomas Mann all used the legend, and it inspired musical works by Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod, and Richard Wagner.

Earlier figures such as Simon Magus, a Middle Eastern practitioner of magic arts in the 1st century AD, contributed to the Faust legend.

Literature The first book on Faust, Historia von D Johann Fausten, appeared in Frankfurt in 1587. Numerous and increasingly embellished versions followed, surmounted by G R Widmann's Wahrshafftige Historien/True Stories of the fearful and abominable sins and vices practised by the black magician Faust. From this, J N Pftizer compiled an encyclopaedic version, of which six editions appeared between 1674 and 1726. The chief German edition of this period was published in 1712, under the authorship of ein Christlich Meynender ‘a Christian believer’.

From its German beginnings, the story appeared rapidly in foreign translation: Danish in 1588; during the following six years, English, French, Dutch, and Flemish; and Czech in 1611.

Drama Based on the English translation, poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe's play Tragical History of Dr Faustus was first performed in 1594 (published 1601-04). Various versions of Marlowe's tragedy were introduced to Germany by itinerant English actors, and puppet plays on the subject remained popular until the mid-18th century.

In 1759, German playwright Gotthold Lessing's dramatization appeared (now mostly destroyed), which for the first time adopted a more modern and tolerant spirit, superseding the stern, uncompromising attitude of earlier tradition.

German novelist and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the Gretchen tragedy (the love-affair, seduction, and death of an ordinary village girl) into his masterpiece Faust which he began composing 1770-71. It was first published as a Fragment in 1790, but an Urfaust copied by Luise von Gochhausen between 1776 and 1780 revealed that the work was in progress before his move to Weimar. The first complete part, containing the Gretchen incident, appeared in 1808; the second, leading to Faust's salvation, was completed in 1831.

Goethe's version is considered probably the greatest literary achievement on the subject of Faust; being acclaimed the ‘divine comedy’ of 18th-century humanism and, by Romantic poet and journalist Heinrich Heine, the ‘secular Bible’ of the Germans.

The legend was revisited in the 20th century by German novelist Thomas Mann in his Dr Faustus (1947), in which composer Adrian Leverkuhn's knowingly-contracted venereal infection grants him artistic strength, but ultimate mental and physical collapse.

Music Goethe's Faust has given rise to an important and extensive musical literature. A choral dramatic legend by French romantic composer Hector Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust, was performed in Paris in 1846. The text was taken from a translation by French writer Gérard de Nerval, also used in Mefistofele (Milan 1868) by Italian composer Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) and in French composer Charles Gounod's five-act opera Faust (Paris 1859). Goethe's work also inspired Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony and the Faust Overture by German composer Richard Wagner.

Faust

Play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, completed in two parts in 1808 and 1832. Mephistopheles attempts to win over the soul of the world-weary Faust but ultimately fails after helping Faust in the pursuit of good.