in which Gluck once found that he was the slave of his ballet master.  Gluck refused to introduce a chaconne into “Iphigenie en Aulide.”  “A chaconne?” cried the composer.  “When did the Greeks ever dance a chaconne?” “Didn’t they?” replied Vestris; “then so much the worse for the Greeks!” A quarrel ensued, and Gluck, becoming incensed, withdrew his opera and would have left Paris had not Marie Antoinette come to the rescue.  But Vestris got his chaconne.  In all likelihood Boito put the obertass into “Mefistofele” because he knew that musically and as a spectacle the Polish dance would be particularly effective in the joyous hurly-burly of the scene.  A secondary meaning of the Polish word is said to be “confusion,” and Boito doubtless had this in mind when he made his peasants sing with an orderly disorder which is delightful:—­

  Tutti vanno alla rinfusa
  Sulla musica confusa,

or, as one English translation has it:—­

  All is going to dire confusion
  With the music in collusion.

[Musical excerpt—­“Juhe, Juhe!  Tutti vanno alla rinfusa”]

Perhaps, too, Boito had inherited a love for the vigorous dance from his Polish mother.

Night falls, and Faust is returned to his laboratory.  The gray friar has followed him (like Goethe’s poodle) and slips into an alcove unobserved.  The philosopher turns to the Bible, which lies upon a lectern, and falls into a meditation, which is interrupted by a shriek.  He turns and sees the friar standing motionless and wordless before him.  He conjures the apparition with the seal of Solomon, and the friar, doffing cowl and gown, steps forward as a cavalier (an itinerant scholar in Goethe).  He introduces himself as a part of the power that, always thinking evil, as persistently accomplishes good—­the spirit of negation.  The speech ("Son lo Spirito che nega sempre”) is one of the striking numbers of Boito’s score, and the grim humor of its “No! “seems to have inspired the similar effect in Falstaff’s discourse on honor in Verdi’s opera.  The pair quickly come to an understanding on the terms already set forth.

Act II carries us first into the garden of Dame Martha, where we find Margherita strolling arm in arm with Faust, and Martha with Mefistofele.  The gossip is trying to seduce the devil into an avowal of love; Margherita and Faust are discussing their first meeting and the passion which they already feel for each other.  Boito’s Margherita has more of Goethe’s Gretchen than Gounod’s Marguerite.  Like the former, she wonders what a cavalier can find to admire in her simple self, and protests in embarrassment when Faust (or Enrico, as he calls himself) kisses her rough hand.  Like Goethe’s maiden, too, she is concerned about the religious beliefs of her lover, and Boito’s Faust answers, like Goethe’s Faust, that a sincere man dares protest neither belief nor unbelief in God.  Nature, Love, Mystery, Life, God—­all are one, all to be experienced, not labelled with a name.  Then he turns the talk on herself and her domestic surroundings, and presses the sleeping potion for her mother upon her.  The scene ends with the four people scurrying about in a double chase among the flowers, for which Boito found exquisitely dainty music.