Ask Goethe whether you should put Faust on the stage: he will tell you flatly ‘No!’ He never supported efforts to do so, even though readers and theatre people urged him to stage the piece. When the actor Pius Alexander Wolff and Goethe's adlatus Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer planned a representation in Weimar around 1810, Goethe was angry, saying that if he had wanted, he could have staged it himself. Later he described his attitude towards it as ‘passive, if not suffering’. Finally he consented to draw sketches for some scenes in Part i and revise the stage version, adding lines here and there in order to stress the operatic character which Wolff had intended (FT 582–90). When, in 1829, Weimar and Leipzig rehearsed for a representation of a revised version of Part i, Goethe contributed a chorus for the ‘Study 2’ scene and a final chorus for the ‘Prison’ scene (FT 591 ff.), again to enhance the operatic character which he always had in mind. We think of the multitude of musical inlays in the text, but also of his remark that only Mozart could have set the play to music, and that after his death only Meyerbeer was capable of rendering its more terrifying aspects. He consented to train the actor LaRoche to portray Mephistopheles; indeed, LaRoche confessed that each gesture, each step, each grimace and each word came from Goethe.