Faust

The romantic movement that emerged in Germany also seduced the Comédie-Française. Very in vogue after the Revolution, its illustrious representatives are were performed in very free adaptations, an obligatory phase before entering the repertoire. Authors who have been forgotten today – Weiss, Jauffret, Patrat, Le Brun, Chénier and Laville de Mirmon – presented in their own names original works by Kotzebue (The Two Klingsbergs), Schiller (Mary Stuart, Intrigue and Love) or Lessing (Nathan the Wise). As for the most famous of them, Goethe, he could not have hoped for a more romantic adapter than Gérard de Nerval for the translation of his Faust. Indeed, it was in de Nerval’s version that the work entered the repertoire in 1999.

It wasn’t until the exceptional circumstances of the Occupation that a play by Goethe was staged at the Comédie-Française. Indeed, in 1942, the troupe of Molière had to welcome a company from the Munich Theatre that performed Iphigenia in Tauris in German.

It was especially from 1989 onwards that the German romantics returned to the stage of the Comédie-Française. Two plays, again by Goethe, were included in the repertoire: Torquato Tasso (directed by Bruno Bayen in 1989) and, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth, Faust (directed by Alexander Lang in 1999), a play initially influenced by the fairground theatre of Frankfurt and by far the most popular of Goethe’s plays in Germany, where performing the roles of Faust and Mephistopheles is a crowning moment in an actor’s career.

The myth of the eminent scholar making a pact with the devil, first dramatised by Christopher Marlowe in 1604, then by Lessing and Goethe, who greatly contributed to its popularity, continues to fascinate us today. The story of Faust has since been taken up frequently in theatre, literature and opera by Mahler, Alexander Pushkin, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Charles Gounod and Paul Valéry among others.