Forma ideal purissima
  Della bellezza eterna! 
  Un uom ti si prosterna
    Innamorato al suolo
  Volgi ver me la cruna
  Di tua pupilla bruna,
  Vaga come la luna,
    Ardente come il sole.

“Here,” says Boito, “is a myth both beautiful and deep.  Helen and Faust represent Classic and Romantic art gloriously wedded, Greek beauty and Germanic beauty gleaming under the same aureole, glorified in one embrace, and generating an ideal poesy, eclectic, new, and powerful.”

The contents of the last act, which shows us Faust’s death and salvation, have been set forth in the explanation of Boito’s philosophical purpose.  An expository note may, however, profitably be added in the poet-composer’s own words:  “Goethe places around Faust at the beginning of the scene four ghostly figures, who utter strange and obscure words.  What Goethe has placed on the stage we place in the orchestra, submitting sounds instead of words, in order to render more incorporeal and impalpable the hallucinations that trouble Faust on the brink of death.”  The ghostly figures referred to by Boito are the four “Gray Women” of Goethe—­Want, Guilt, Care, and Necessity.  Boito thinks like a symphonist, and his purpose is profoundly poetical, but its appreciation asks more than the ordinary opera-goer is willing or able to give. {2}

Footnotes: 

{1} I like, at times, to hear the Ancient’s word,
      And have a care to be most civil: 
    It’s really kind of such a noble Lord
      So humnanly to gossip with the Devil. 
                       —­Bayard Taylor’s Translation.

{2} “Mefistofele” had its first performance in New York at the Academy of Music on November 24, 1880.  Mlle. Valleria was the Margherita and Elena, Miss Annie Louise Cary the Marta and Pantalis, Signor Campanini Faust, and Signor Novara Mefistofele.  Signor Arditi conducted.  The first representation of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera-house took place on December 5, 1883, when, with one exception, the cast was the same as at the first performance in London, at Her Majesty’s Theatre, on July 6, 1880—­namely, Nilsson as Margherita and Elena, Trebelli as Marta and Pantalis, Campanini as Faust and Mirabella as Mefistofele. (In London Nannetti enacted the demon.) Cleofonte Campanini, then maestro di cembalo at the Metropolitan Opera-house, conducted the performance.

CHAPTER VIII

“La damnation de Faust”

In an operatic form Berlioz’s “Damnation de Faust” had its first representation in New York at the Metropolitan Opera-house on December 7, 1906.  Despite its high imagination, its melodic charm, its vivid and varied colors, its frequent flights toward ideal realms, its accents of passion, its splendid picturesqueness, it presented itself as a “thing of shreds and patches.”  It was, indeed,