by Janet Tassel (January 2012)

I’m reading from the liner notes for my very old LP of Gounod’s opera, Faust. Here we are introduced to Faust himself:

“The curtain rises and we are in the study of Dr. Faustus, the learned alchemist, in a town in mediaeval Germany.  There he sits, the great scholar: an aged man, his back bowed by years of bending over books and parchments, his eyes, that should have delighted in beauty, worn and enfeebled by fruitless study.  It is the hour before dawn; the hour when most men see life stripped of its illusions. Faust looks back on the years and sees in them only a ghastly futility. He has learned, but he has never lived.”  more>>>