OW Music News

Mark Austin (Coll, 99-04) released the album Songs from Faust on 4 October 2024.  He writes:  

I have been drawn to German literature since my time at Winchester, which led to undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in modern languages at Cambridge, while spending the rest of my time making music. I then studied at the Royal Academy of Music, holding a Junior Fellowship. From the shorter texts and poems we covered at school it was certainly a step up to Goethe’s Faust. I’m not the only musician to find this vast and complex drama a source of inspiration. Composers of the nineteenth century described in their diaries how they literally carried it around with them, absorbing its heady mixture of love, tragedy, philosophy and, above all, the power of its poetry. Some of the greatest Lieder ever written draw on Faust verses that Goethe always intended for musical setting. In a few cases the result has been over a hundred published versions by both famous and forgotten composers. For this new album, I have scoured the repertoire to offer an overview of the best-known part of the drama (Part I) through some of its most interesting songs. Besides familiar masterpieces, the journey includes re-discovered rarities, as well as two solo piano pieces from an age when domestic music-making was a regular form of entertainment. The album also offers a chance to compare different settings of the same text. The singers Anna Cavaliero, Margo Arsane, Jolyon Loy and I were delighted to find that concert audiences warmly welcomed the opportunity to vote for their favourite setting, an activity which may suggest a new way to promote interest in song.   

Ironically, Goethe, whose influence on progressive composers was so pervasive it may easily be overlooked, had extremely conservative tastes. He did not approve of the relatively new form of through-composition (a poem set to music which developed from start to finish) rather than simply repeat the same music for each stanza. Most listeners would agree that the through-composed songs here successfully integrate poetry and music to produce something wondrous. Goethe was correct, though, that the seductive power of music would be seen to overtake language as the most emotionally direct form of expression, an attribute often harnessed in nineteenth-century novels. Besides the musical offering, I hope this album may lead music lovers to explore Goethe’s original text, and I recommend the excellent English translation by David Luke, published by Oxford World's Classics. The drama offers an extraordinary wealth of human experience that transcends the associations with medieval morality and magic which characterise most English-speakers’ image of Faust today. Those familiar with Goethe’s text will remember the memorable scene in which a black poodle transforms into Mephistopheles, hence the album cover image showing an animal whose inviting appeal, yet unfathomable eyes, seem to mirror the hold music has over us.