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Scenes from Goethe's Faust is a musical-theatrical work by composer Robert Schumann. The work has been described as the height of his accomplishments in the realm of dramatic music. The work was written between 1844 and 1853 and is scored for SATB chorus, boys' chorus, orchestra, and a number of solo parts which, even with doubling, require seven solo singers, although eight is the usual number for a performance. Schumann never saw all three parts of the work performed in the same concert, or published together. Eric Sams comments 'There is no coherence in the orchestration, which audibly dates from two different periods ', leading him to conclude that Schumann did not conceive the work as a whole, although late nineteenth-century ideas of performance mean that in the modern era the piece is predominantly heard with all three parts.
The Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) was a German musical association founded in 1861 by Franz Liszt and Franz Brendel, to embody the musical ideals of the New German School of music.
Wendelin Weißheimer was a 19th-century German composer, conductor, essayist, teacher and music writer. He studied with Franz Liszt and was in close contact with Richard Wagner, Hans von Bülow, Peter Cornelius, Louise Otto-Peters, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel and many other notable musicians.
References
- Westernhagen, Curt von. Wagner: A Biography. Cambridge University Press: New York, NY 1978.
- Culshaw, John. Wagner: The Man and His Music. Dutton: New York, NY 1978.
- Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music, 1996 ed. Chief editor Michael Kennedy.
- Everett, Derrick. Richard Wagner: Chronology at the Wayback Machine (archived February 23, 2008), 2004.
- Wagner, Irmgard. Where is Wagner's Faust? at the Wayback Machine (archived February 5, 2012), American Goethe Society 2004.
