Doktor Faust

Opera by Ferruccio Busoni (libretto by composer) based on the Faust legend and Christopher Marlowe's play Dr Faustus (1589); it is not based on Goethe. The opera was left unfinished at Busoni's death; it was completed by Philipp Jarnach and first produced in Dresden, Germany, on 21 May 1925. The first production in Britain was at the London Coliseum on 25 April 1986, in a new edition by Antony Beaumont (first heard in Bologna, Italy, in 1985) in which the dying Faust transfers his soul to the corpse of a child.