Faust by Gounod, ons 17 aug 2016, Från (2016/2016), Regisserad av Reinhard von der Thannen, Alexander Fahima,, Dirigent Alejo Pérez, Großes Festspielhaus, Salzburg, Österrike

A cosmopolitan lyric-dramatic talent’ – that is what Eduard Hanslick, the most influential music critic of the nineteenth century, called the composer Charles Gounod, whose life, so full of changes, began in Paris, where he was born on 17 June 1818. Encouraged from early on by his mother, a highly gifted pianist, to pursue a musical career, his initial efforts as a composer were sacred works. It was the singer Pauline Viardot who pointed him in the direction of opera and for whom he composed Sapho, his first stage work (1851). Despite a lukewarm reception by the public, Gounod was persuaded that he was called to be an opera composer, and it was his setting of Faust that established his worldwide fame. The struggle of the eternal seeker with the powers of the cosmos were not what occupied the centre of Gounod’s interest, but rather that episode from Faust Part One that most readily lent itself to musical adaptation – specifically the ‘Gretchen tragedy’, which Goethe had already woven into his Urfaust, his very first treatment of the material, and which is based on the fate of a servant girl, Susanna Margarethe Brandt, condemned to death in 1772. That is the reason the opera was called Margarethe in the German-speaking world for a long period of time.