Goethe's Faust

• 1. Introduction

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  Goethe's Faust opens in Heaven, with the Devil making a bet with God. Satan wagers he can lead one righteous soul astray. God accepts. That soul belongs to a scholar named Heinrich Faust, a man who has devoted his life to learning everything that can be known. What drives a genius to sign away his soul? And what happens when the Devil discovers that even a damned man can be redeemed?

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe worked on this play for most of his adult life. The earliest drafts date to 1772, and the second part was not finished until 1831, just months before his death. The full work spans two plays, five acts in the second part alone, and enough thematic territory to encompass psychology, history, politics, mysticism, and philosophy. It is considered by many to be the greatest work of German literature.

• 2. From Fragment to Monument

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  The manuscript of Goethe's earliest draft, known as the Urfaust, is lost. A copy was discovered in 1886, revealing a work of twenty-two scenes with 1,441 lines of rhymed verse. Those early scenes showed how long Goethe had been wrestling with this material, returning to it across decades rather than writing it in a single sustained effort.

  The first version to reach the public appeared in print in 1790 as Faust, a Fragment. A more complete version of Part One followed in 1806, then in print in 1808 under the plain title Faust: A Tragedy. That original 1808 title page contained no reference to a first part. The designation "Part One" was only added retroactively by publishers when the sequel appeared in 1832, carrying its own title page reading Faust: The Tragedy's Second Part.

  Goethe finished writing Part Two in 1831. He did not live to see it published. It appeared posthumously the following year, and the effort it demanded had consumed the principal occupation of his final years.

• 3. The Pact and Its Wager

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  Faust first encounters Mephistopheles not as a demon but as a stray poodle that follows him home from a walk with his assistant Wagner. In Faust's study, the poodle transforms into a figure dressed as a travelling student who refuses to give his name. Mephistopheles cannot leave the study because a misshapen pentagram carved into Faust's doorway bars his exit. He escapes only by summoning rats to chew away the carving.

  When Mephistopheles returns the next morning, the terms are unusual. He does not simply purchase a soul. Instead, Faust proposes a wager: if Mephistopheles can deliver a moment of earthly transcendence so complete that Faust wishes it to last forever, then Faust will instantly die and serve the Devil in Hell. The contract is signed with a drop of Faust's own blood, after Mephistopheles refuses to accept Faust's word of honour alone.

  Part Two reveals how the wager concludes. Faust eventually reaches such a transcendental moment. He has technically lost the wager. But God, who had made his own bet with Mephistopheles in the Prologue, wins: the moment arose from righteous pursuits. Angels arrive in Act V to deliver the verdict in lines that Goethe placed at the very end: "He who strives on and lives to strive / Can earn redemption still."

• 4. Gretchen's Tragedy

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  Margaret, known throughout Part One by the diminutive Gretchen, is the human casualty at the centre of the first play. Goethe uses both forms of her name interchangeably. Faust meets her through Mephistopheles, who uses jewellery and the assistance of her neighbour Marthe Schwerdtlein to draw Gretchen into Faust's reach.

  The consequences unfold with escalating severity. Gretchen's mother dies from a sleeping potion that Gretchen herself administers so that Faust can visit her undetected. Her brother Valentin confronts Faust, challenges him, and is killed at the hands of both Faust and Mephistopheles. Gretchen discovers she is pregnant, gives birth, drowns the infant, and is convicted of murder.

  Faust attempts to rescue her from prison, but Gretchen refuses to flee. She chooses to remain and face her fate. Faust and Mephistopheles abandon the dungeon, and voices from Heaven announce that she will be saved: "Sie ist gerettet." That final word differs sharply from the Urfaust, where the equivalent line reads "Sie ist gerichtet" -- she is condemned. Goethe softened the verdict between his earliest draft and the published version.

• 5. Two Worlds, One Soul

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  Part One is described in the text itself as the "small world," unfolding in Faust's own local and temporal surroundings. Part Two operates in what Goethe called the "wide world" or macrocosmos. Rich in classical allusion, it sets aside the romantic story of Gretchen and instead sends Faust through a sequence of relatively isolated episodes, each exploring a different theme: psychology, history, politics, mysticism, philosophy.

  The piece runs to five acts. Faust wakes in a field of fairies at the beginning, signalling that Part Two inhabits a different register entirely. The soul that was the focus of Part One recedes. Social phenomena move to the foreground. Faust eventually goes to Heaven, not because he avoided sin, but because even his striving in error was oriented toward something genuine.

  The contrast between the two parts is built into their architecture. Part One asks what drives a man to make a pact with the Devil. Part Two asks what redemption looks like for someone who already has.

• 6. Translations and Controversies

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  In 1821, a partial English verse translation of Part One was published anonymously by the London publisher Thomas Boosey and Sons, with illustrations by the German engraver Moritz Retzsch. Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick attributed this translation to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in their 2007 Oxford University Press edition. Their evidence included a letter Goethe wrote on the 4th of September 1820 to his son August, stating that Coleridge was translating Faust. The attribution remains contested: Roger Paulin, William St. Clair, and Elinor Shaffer published a lengthy rebuttal, noting among other evidence that Coleridge repeatedly denied having ever translated the work.

  Coleridge's fellow Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley produced admired fragments. He published Part One, Scene II in The Liberal magazine in 1822. Mary Shelley included his "Scene I," which corresponds to the original "Prologue in Heaven," in the first edition of his Posthumous Poems in 1824.

  In 1828, at age twenty, Gérard de Nerval published a French translation. Bayard Taylor's English translation in the original metres, published in 1870-71, consistently remained in print for a century and is considered one of the finest. Boris Pasternak's Russian translation of Part One, completed in August 1950, prompted an attack in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir, accusing him of distorting Goethe's ideas and introducing an individualist flavour. Pasternak responded in a letter to Ariadna Efron, the exiled daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva, describing the attack as objecting that the gods, angels, witches, spirits, and the madness of poor Gretchen were rendered too well.

• 7. On Stage and Screen

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  Selected scenes from Part One had their premiere on the 24th of May 1819 at Castle Monbijou in Berlin. The complete Part One did not receive a full premiere until the 29th of January 1829 in Braunschweig. The world premiere of both parts in unabridged form did not take place until 1938, at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.

  The most extreme test of Faust's theatrical ambitions came in July 2000, when Peter Stein directed both parts in their complete version for Expo 2000 in Hanover. The production ran for 21 hours including intervals, with Christian Nickel and Bruno Ganz sharing the role of Faust as young and old, and Johann Adam Oest as Mephistopheles.

  In 1885, the Irish dramatist W. G. Wills adapted Part One for a London production at the Lyceum Theatre, with Henry Irving as Mephistopheles and Ellen Terry as Margaret. The 1960 film of Peter Gorski's production at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, with Gustaf Gründgens as Mephistopheles and Will Quadflieg as Faust, proved very successful. Composers from Beethoven to Gustav Mahler engaged with the text; Mahler's Symphony No. 8, completed in 1906, sets the final scene of Part Two in its lengthy second movement. Franz Schubert set a text from Part One in 1814 as "Gretchen am Spinnrade," which became his first setting of a Goethe text.