IN MANY WAYS, music and politics have always been in a relationship with one another, albeit not always a harmonious, or necessarily a balanced one. The potential(ly negative) influence of music on politics has especially interested thinkers throughout the ages. As early as the fifth century BCE, Plato warned “against innovations in music … counter to the established order,” since “the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.” Plato's student Aristotle follows suit, and discusses music and its role in the polis in his Politics, concluding that music has “a power of forming the character.” He highlights the connections between music and emotions, as well as the manipulative power music can exert: “rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and to the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.” As an effective means of communication that can cause “our souls [to] undergo a change,” music is always inextricably linked to society and its various concerns, and insofar as an individual's character is affected by music, and the individual is part of society, music has an undeniable effect on the political sphere of that society. Music thereby acts as a link between the private and the public spheres, between the personal and the political, which invariably inform and fertilize each other. Richard Taruskin even goes so far as to describe it as “a powerful form of persuasion that does work in the world, a serious art that possesses ethical force and exacts ethical responsibilities.”

One of the many hats donned by Goethe's Faust is that of Biblical translator and exegete. After his repudiation of scholarly learning, the chorus's strains of the ‘süßen Himmelslieder’ [sweet heavenly voices] halt his suicide attempt and reawaken his childhood Christian faith. Irritated by the growling poodle after his Easter walk, he turns to the opening verses of St John's Gospel in the first ‘Studierzimmer’ [study] scene and attempts to translate the ‘sacred original’ into German:

The result is a Sturm und Drang creative reworking and reinterpretation: ‘Im Anfang war die Tat!’ [In the beginning was the deed!] (l. 1237). This inadvertently exorcises the demon, effects Mephistopheles’ appearance – and abruptly concludes Faust's sole ‘scholarly labour’ and foray into translation.

One of the most translated works in world literature, Goethe's Faust, and especially Faust I, has spawned countless adaptations into different genres and media. An early hybrid and intermedial art form, opera is one of adaptation's earliest beneficiaries, and Gounod's Faust one of the most popular in the operatic repertoire. Mephisto's mocking of Faust moments after meeting Gretchen: ‘Ihr sprecht schon fast wie ein Franzos’ [‘you are almost talking like a Frenchman’] (l. 2645) was thus to prove prophetic.

Goethe's Faust as Intertext and in Translation

If culture is, as George Steiner proposes, ‘the translation and rewording of previous meaning’, and the text, in the words of Roland Barthes, a ‘tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’, then Goethe's Faust is an exemplar. Itself an adaptation of the Faust legend from the older chapbooks, it reworks other material, spinning a web of allusions and intertextual relations.

Any serious account of musical criticism or aesthetics in the nineteenth century has to confront Eduard Hanslick at some point. For more than forty years, he was the leading music critic in Vienna, one of Europe's cultural capitals, and his brief treatise on aesthetics, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, remains the central document in the history of the concept known as “absolute music,” the idea of music as a wholly self-referential art of pure form.

But music was about more than music in Hanslick's Vienna, as he himself well knew. It was a cultural battlefield that pitted defenders of the city's musical past—Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, or at least the Beethoven of the first eight symphonies—against the advocates of the “Music of the Future,” who considered Beethoven's Ninth the fountainhead for the new music of Wagner and Liszt. Both as a critic and as an aesthetician, Hanslick was on the front line of battle, leading a war of words against those who considered the forms of the past superseded and inadequate to the demands of the present. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen provided traditionalists with a philosophical argument by which to justify their rejection of the “Music of the Future” on the basis of something more than merely personal dislike of the new music or resistance to change in general.