The story of “Faust” has tempted many composers.  Prince Radziwill tried it, and then Spohr set a version of the theme at once coarse and cruel, full of vulgar witchwork and love-making only fit for a chambermaid.  Since then Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz have treated the story orchestrally with more or less success.  Gounod’s treatment of the poem is by far the most intelligible, poetic, and dramatic ever attempted, and there is no opera since the days of Gluck with so little weak music, except Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”

In the introduction the restless gloom of the old philospher and the contrasted joys of youth engaged in rustic revelry outside are expressed with graphic force; and the Kirmes music in the next act is so quaint and original, as well as melodious, as to give the sense of delightful comedy.  When Marguerite enters on the scene, we have a waltz and chorus of such beauty and piquancy as would have done honor to Mozart.  Indeed, in the dramatic use of dance music Gounod hardly yields in skill and originality to Meyerbeer himself, though the latter composer specially distinguished himself in this direction.  The third and fourth acts develop all the tenderness and passion of Marguerite’s character, all the tragedy of her doom.

After Faust’s beautiful monologue in the garden come the song of the “King of Thule” and Marguerites delight at finding the jewels, which conjoined express the artless vanity of the child in a manner alike full of grace and pathos.  The quartet that follows is one of great beauty, the music of each character being thoroughly in keeping, while the admirable science of the composer blends all into thorough artistic unity.  It is hardly too much to assert that the love scene which closes this act has nothing to surpass it for fire, passion, and tenderness, seizing the mind of the hearer with absorbing force by its suggestion and imagery, while the almost cloying sweetness of the melody is such as Rossini and Schubert only could equal.  The full confession of the enamored pair contained in the brief adagio throbs with such rapture as to find its most suggestive parallel in the ardent words commencing “Gallop apace, ye fiery-looted steeds,” placed by Shakespeare in the mouth of the expectant Juliet.

Beauties succeed each other in swift and picturesque succession, fitting the dramatic order with a nicety which forces the highest praise of the critic.  The march and chorus marking the return of Valentine’s regiment beat with a fire and enthusiasm to which the tramp of victorious squadrons might well keep step.  The wicked music of Mephistopheles in the sarcastic serenade, the powerful duel trio, and Valentine’s curse are of the highest order of expression; while the church scene, where the fiend whispers his taunts in the ear of the disgraced Marguerite, as the gloomy musical hymn and peals of the organ menace her with an irreversible doom, is a weird and thrilling picture of despair, agony, and devilish exultation.