The Unconscious in Faust

Just before his final monologue in Part II, Act V of Goethe's drama, the now blind Faust hears what he imagines to be the sounds of the construction of his urban utopia. Of course what he is actually hearing are the Lemures of Mephistopheles busily digging his grave. To add irony to the scene, Goethe turned (characteristically, for Faust) to a song form. While they work, the Lemures sing a paraphrase of the gravedigger's ditty from Hamlet. The song serves to mock Faust's life and predicament, but their words are seemingly inaudible to Faust beneath the din of their spades. Drawn to the musical implications of the scene (and to Faust's deafness toward it), Robert Schumann chose to set this grotesque and foreboding moment to music in Part II of his oratorio Szenen aus Goethes Faust. Its significance to the composer can be affirmed by the important motivic reference in the Lemures’ chorus that deliberately connects the passage to other key moments in the oratorio both before and after this scene (Example 8.1).

This very motif – a sequence of descending thirds or fourths – can be seen as embodying a problem that persists in the scholarly reception of Schumann's Szenen aus Goethes Faust. Nearly every investigation of the work mentions the motif – for it figures prominently in the overture and in many of the scenes, a few of which are shown in Example 8.2.

Furthermore, some commentators also point out the fact that the same thematic material is heard in Schumann's only opera, Genoveva. Yet precisely what the motif represents is a point on which there is little agreement. Anfried Edler associates the motif with fear, while Stephen Billington names it the ‘devotion’ motif. Eric Sams has suggested that the theme represents love, both happy and hopeless – except for the places where it represents Gretchen, and remorse, and Mephistopheles. The only unifying factor among these views is that the theme must represent or symbolize something. In this, the influence of Wagner and his concept of Leitmotif – a musical gesture with a deliberate and concrete association – can clearly be seen.