Faustbook: A Narrative Poem in the Manner of Five Acts

A short presentation on the legend of Faustus and how Christopher Marlowe came to write his play, how Marlowe came to die and a recitation of Faustus dramatic death in the play.

Chorus speaks: We are outside a house in Württemberg, Anno Domini Fifteen-hundred and Ninety-two. Mummers herald the holiday.***Image is a Black Holetaken from the Hubble telescope.Music excerpt is Paganini’s Vieuxtemps Violin Concertos, Violin concerto No. 5 in A minor, Op 37 - II. Adagio.Viktoria Mullova withNeville Marriner, Academy St.Martin In The Fields

A scholar’s gloomy study with a desk cluttered with writings and surrounded by shelves of books***Music excerpt is Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248: Chorale No. 35, "Seid Froh Dieweil, Daß euer Heil"Sung by the Prima Choir

Main room of Faustus house, a large long table occupies the center, laden with food, many chairs about the table. Faustus in the center, seated, is flanked by students to his left and right, eating and drinking while Wagner bustles dishes in and out of the kitchen off-stage.***Music excerpt is Suite No. 2 in B Minor for Orchestra, 
BWV 1067: VII. Badinerie,Klaus Pohlers, Artist

We are in the scholar’s study again. Many candles are lit in many places around the room; and now on closer view by panning and close-ups, we see the instruments of necromancy: a glass globe containing boiling mercury, steaming crimson poisonous fumes trickling through a tube, distilling jewels into a bottle; piles of raw crystals; jars of fine colorful powders; a large mortar and pestle; and all the other alchemical paraphernalia, as well as walls and walls from floor to ceiling of precious ponderous books in unspoken languages.***Music excerpt is Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for Organ, BWV 565Klemens Schnorr, Artist

On New Year’s eve, Faustus sits in his gloomy study, pondering the sunset which he sees by its glorious inference upon the frosted panes of his mullioned windows, illuminating each glass square, gleaming traced patterns of sheaves of ice, like fern leaves impressed in amberous light, a gilt on each pane, glowing so richly that he is mesmerized to stare at them.Music excerpt is Sonata No. 1 for Solo Violin in G Minor, BWV 1001: I. Adagio

Again in Faustus’ study, which is lit now by light of a single candle that shines upon his face; the solitary image in the darkness***Image is a still frame from F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust.Music excerpt is Paganini: Caprice #24 In A Minor, Op. 1 from the album Paganini: 24 Caprices, Op. 1, Itzhak Perlman, violinistBy legend, because of his virtuosity and the expressive voice of his music, Paganini is exploited for a character in Madame Blavatsky's “The Ensouled Violin”, a short story included in the collection Nightmare Tales. The story recounts the popular rumors that the strings of Paganini's violin were made from human intestines and that he had murdered both his wife and mistress and imprisoned their souls in his violin.

In the marketplace: carts of goods, slaughtered livestock and vegetables such as stored for winter; stalls of freshly baked breads and cakes and other delights; and merry minstrels, mischievous magicians, conniving gamblers and whores—all wandering among the festive crowds of ordinary people and their children, who milling, idling and talking gaily, filled the town square in unexpected happiness.***Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - Troikafrom the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

A woods on a summery day, a mountain is above and beyond the horizon of the forest, distantly, a pearly cascade plunges from its peak and where it crashes a mist rises. ***Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - The Birth of Kijéfrom the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

A child’s room in the home of one who is well-to-do by standards of the sixteenth-century, probably an official of some dukedom whose wealth is acquired by taxes upon men who are mostly poor.***Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - The Birth of Kijéfrom the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

Returned to his study, it is the very cusp of day that all of this began, the risen day after New Year’s eve, and Faustus sees the dawn’s foreboding light stain the icy window panes, casting blood hue on everything....***The image is a capture from the classic silent film “Faust” byF. W. Murnau.Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - The Romance of Kijéfrom the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

All the lights within the theater and on the stage are suddenly extinguished. Space is void. Each one alone in it. All is silent, except for restless anxiety in the audience.The chorus speaks from the everywhere....The image above is “Faust’s Vision” by Luis Falero (1851–96), painted in 1880. It was a favorite subject of naughty fin de siècle postcards.

Stage lights rise on Faustus study.Ralph and Robin come running in and hide among the furniture. Immediately they are followed by several raw-skinned demons, midgets of reptilian humanoid form, with female breasts and thrashing snake-like tails, and horns on their heads. Sparks fly out of their anuses as they fart spluttering sulfurous gases.They search unsuccessfully for Ralph and Robin and soon depart in a disorganized retreat.***The image is Luis Ricardo Faléro’s “Departure of the Witches” (1878).Music excerpt is “That Old Black Magic”from the album Cocktails for Twoby Spike Jones, vintage World War II American Big Band music...with a twist.

Faustus, walking briskly, enters his study, where Mephistophiles is lying on an oriental chaise. Faustus is reading aloud from an opened royal missive. A silky ribbon, bestrewn its wax seal, trails conspicuously, flirtatiously.***The image is an etching of Charles V (Carlos of Spain), the Holy Roman Emperor during Faustus’s lifetime.Charles, a cosmopolitan emperor, famously said: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - from the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

Lights are doused. When they are restored, a massive chorus appears on stage, in the guise of the manifold appearance of all human society, to testify to the Emperor’s newfound philosophy.***Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - from the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

The chorus parts like a curtain: bowing, backwards walking, en masse they part and go off stage, left and right, revealing at the center stage the Holy Father in his private chambers in the Vatican, sitting at his toilet, attended by Cardinals.***The image is the Pre-Raphaelite painting, “In the Venusberg” by John Collier, 1901.Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - The Romance of Kijéfrom the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

Our Chorus of Mankind returns to the stage, now wearing bloody bandages and scorched rags; there is sound of a huge battle beyond them and shocks of shells exploding in midair, screams of women and the crying of babies.Faustus stands apart from the Chorus of Mankind, looking on it as it begins its address.***The image is an etching by Albrecht Durer of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.Music excerpt is Violin concerto No. 5 in A minor, Op 37 - II. Adagio by Paganini, from the album Paganini; Vieuxtemps Violin Concertosperformed by Viktoria Mullova (violinist) and Neville Marriner and the Academy St. Martin In The Fields.

As the sun sets on the Battlefield where corpses lay, the voice of Mephistophiles addresses them. From this grisly imagery our camera dives into the bright orb of the sun, our visualization stunned, and as we draw back from that blinding light, we see that we withdraw from gleam of chandeliers, to see the banquet hall again of Emperor Charles, as Mephistophiles on the stage front completes his speech. Behind him, a scene of frozen poses in the revelry for the victory that they celebrate; the Pope is here and even the estranged Charles; Faustus is seated next to one we learn is his sister and beside her renowned husband, victor of the Battle of the Damned, as it is famously called.***The photo is taken in aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden from theroof of its surviving cathedral.Music excerpt is Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 - The Romance of Kijéfrom the album Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

The stage is darkened and there appears in the center, in mid-air, an immense illuminated cross upon which the person of Christ is dying.Beneath it the Chorus of Mankind solemnly assembles, robed as for a church choir, prayerfully, with bowed heads and clasped hands; they begin to speak only after a silent prayer, lifting their heads so that their audiences may now see their faces clearly.**The image is the center of the late medieval triptych by Mathias Grunewald, the Isenheim Altarpiece .Music excerpt is Missa Solemnis by Beethoven, conductor Herbert van Karajan, Berliner Philharmoniker.

Cinematically, rising from the reflection of sky in the glassy stare of one who lay dead at the Battle of the Damned, to the panorama of its horrific extent of savage death, and thence to the air, to wheel and to fly rapidly away into majestic clouds.Then returned to Württemberg we make a slow descent with our cinematic eye; scenes of anarchy contend with peaceful normalcy (here a peasant’s farming, there a crowd is lynching some vagrant, etc.); city life is resuming like a dawn: Faustus is at home again***The image is Faustus giving his lessons, a still from the F.W. Murnau silent film, Faust.Music excerpts are:“Baïlèro” from Chants d'Auvergne, sung by by Te Kanawa Kiri; and Scarlatti’s “Piuttosto Presto Che Allegro (C Major)”, rendered by Bob James.

Again in Faustus study, the scene begins with Faustus addressing Mephistophiles who is costumed for a masquerade; he wears some women’s clothes and a powdered wig; daubs of rouge spot both his white-washed cheeks.***The image, a still frame from F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust, is the apparition of Helen of Troy, brought naked before Faustus, as conjured by Mephistophiles.Music excerpt is Hovhaness: Sonata For Harp & Guitar, Op. 374, "Spirit Of The Trees" - 2. Canon: Allegro performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp) and David Leisner (guitar).

A circular space is illuminated, displaying tessellation of vivid colors, like gems in leaded glass, like the sacred Window of the Rose, in which intricate and repeating designs, endlessly change; like a wheel it turns; like a kaleidoscope the turning alters the image and it possesses infinite variegation, yet there is natural order in its variety, and harmonious beauty in its appearance; the chorus speaks from the darkness beyond the stage.***The image is 
Window of the Rose at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.Music excerpt is Hovhaness: Sonata For Harp & Guitar, Op. 374, "Spirit Of The Trees" performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp) and David Leisner (guitar).

The circular space transforms, dissolving and reconfiguring. The image changes within the circle, as it resolves and transforms from the image of a mother and her child to a face—the full face of a young woman, whom we should recognize—and replaces the form of the mother and child entirely. Her face, half-shadowed, turns with the clarity realized, and her eyes divert.The chorus continues speaking.***Music excerpt is Hovhaness: Sonata For Harp & Guitar, Op. 374, "Spirit Of The Trees" performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp) and David Leisner (guitar).

By cinematic montage we witness the marvel of seasons, the alteration of time upon Faustus’ garden in a span of several changes, so that across it the magic flowers grow and die more magically, in the spring naturally and in the winter supernaturally. The pace of change is rapid, yet rather than ever wearing or withering, we sense that it thrives in riotous fecundity and novelty, even in the shrouding snow.Then, upon the appropriate musical cue, we plunge through the solid wall of the house to enter Faustus’ study.There we see the sorcerer, seeming younger than before, seated at his desk, facing the audience, and Helen is to his right and Alexander to his left; beneath the desk in the spacious well at Faustus’ feet we see a blond child playing with a pestle and a mortar and some scales.**Image by Turkish graphic designer, Coheper, who can be found online here.Music excerpt is Hovhaness: Garden of Adonis, Opus 127 performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp).

A spotlight is cast upon Helen holding her child in her arms, standing upon an orb poised above a crescent moon, within the bowl of it, so that the moon resembles golden horns cradling the Earth, and she above it, enthroned. About her head twelve star-points are arrayed in a halo, rotating. The orb-and-moon rises, lofting Helen and child, as the chorus speaks.***Image is a common motif of the Virgin Mary, this one by Albrecht Durer. It is identical to the motif of the Great Mother Goddess as related by Apulieus in his pagan Roman novel, The Golden Ass.Music excerpt is
 Hovhaness: Harp Concerto, Opus 267 performed by 
Yolanda Kondonassis (harp).

The spotlight disappears and with some intervening shuffle in the dark, the stage is made ready again; the lights swell, revealing Faustus’s study.Mephistophiles is stage center and recites the narrative of this scene while others – including a farcical version of himself – appear to act out what he narrates.***Music excerpt is Paganini: Caprice #24 In A Minor, Op. 1from the album Paganini: 24 Caprices, Op. 1Itzhak Perlman, Violinist.Image is a still from the 1979 remake of the silent classic movie Nosferatu by Werner Herzog.

The unseen chorus narrates stanzas as personal soliloquies. Voices alternate to speak them. Now a woman. Now a man. Or a child. Sometimes they combine to speak in unison.The first and the last stanzas are spoken with the whole chorus.When the stage empties, a gigantic movie screen is lowered; you can hear squeaky wheels of the pulleys as it is slowly let down; all lights go out and immediately in sepia-tinted cinema, dusty and scratched from its age, you see the scrolling title and credits for the travelogue of Faustus’ “Journey to Paradise”, starring Faustus and Alexander, produced and directed by Mephistophiles; Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet: Suite No. 2” is the dominant soundtrack; all speech appears in subtitles.***Music excerpt is a movement from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Suite No. 2as found on this album.

The film is broken, flaps in the projector, then someone stops it to make repairs. It is silent in the theater. When the cinema resumes, the narrative is unspoken and runs like ticker-tape in subtitles at the bottom of the film, accompanied by an orchestral score.The gauzy impressionistic lens is fixed upon the corpse of Darius. Over the brief interval of its presentation, the camera is fixed upon it as it metamorphoses in time-lapsed photography.***Music excerpt is “Juliet’s Funeral” from Prokofiev’s ballet of Romeo and Julietas found on this album.

The movie screen does not rise on the empty stage and a second feature starts, also titled, “Journey to Paradise.” An expensive high-quality production in sharply focused black and white, resembling the cinematography of German Expressionism before the war, or the film noir after the war, like The Third Man. No impressionistic gauze on this clear lens, this is high contrasts of harsh light and deep shadows, disjointed, oddly angled, enigmatic, imagistic. Again: Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” is the dominant soundtrack.In the establishing shot we see: the outside of Faustus house on an early spring morn—a dense white smoke plumes at its chimney in a chill air. Some students, whom we recognize, huddle outside his door, standing in the muddy track, and across the market square some other older men loiter at a tavern door, watching the house. Helen comes out of the house and walks away hurriedly. As she travels away, the camera turns to see the groups of these students and other men, arriving from other directions, enter the house. The camera looks toward the gravid clouds and the credits roll against the streak of falling rain: screenplay by Wagner; produced and directed by Mephistophiles; etc. Mephistophiles provides the voice-over.

The chorus turns in halves and leaves the stage quietly as stage lights rise on Faustus study. There, Ralph lounges in Faustus chair, before the great desk whereat the recent indecencies had been staged.The trash of the debauchery litters the room: Marguerite’s clothing and underwear spilling from the desktop, the clothing of several men who had violated her strewn below, and many toppled bottles, and the glitter of glass which seemed broken everywhere upon the floor.Robin enters, stepping through it anxiously.***The image is a page of Carl Jung’s Red Book, which was his private journal of meditation in which he recorded some of his most important discoveries about the nature of the unconscious.***The musical excerpt is a piano study by Philip Glass, composed for the movie, The Hours, depicting the life and suicide of Virginia Woolf, who wrote: “I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.”

Stage lights rise.As if upon a gigantic pallet, the whole stage rotates. It turns Faustus study to the back and brings around the other half to reveal this new scene: another time, another place.It is a plain in northern India, or so you may surmise, seeing elephants being bathed in a river distantly. We are closest to one tent in a large encampment. The flaps of the tent are open to the view of the audience, for it is hot and what wind the occupant wants wafts weakly. The colors and stanchions of Alexander the Great are displayed before the door of the tent.Inside the tent, Faustus is writing at a portable desk. He speaks aloud as he writes, as if to his diary. ***Music excerpts are portions of two suites byAlan Hovhaness: “And God Created Whales...” and “Celestial Fantasy,” both found on this album.

The tent glides on skids, is pushed aside quickly by the gibbering naked wise men when Faustus steps out of it; it is swerved around and off to the side so that the back of the stage opens, and at the moment a sinking sun illuminates a gorgeous scene of lush forest and a riverside in golden aural light. There, women are bathing their children who play. ***The music excerpt is Concerto in G “alla rusitica”, RV 151, by Antonio Vivaldi. ***The image of the society of Gymnosophists is taken from an medieval illuminated manuscript of the Romance of Alexander.

Beside the river, on which Faustus will begin his final journey, Dandames is seated beneath the great Bodhi tree.***The music excerpt is Bach’s “Jesu, Joy in Man’s Desiring,” played by Christopher Parking.The words of this hymn are by the poet Robert Bridges: Jeus, joy of man's desiring, Holy wisdom, love most bright; Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring Soar to uncreated light. Word of God, our flesh that fashioned, With the fire of life impassioned, Striving still to truth unknown, Soaring, dying round Thy throne. Through the way where hope is guiding, Hark, what peaceful music rings; Where the flock, in Thee confiding, Drink of joy from deathless springs. Theirs is beauty's fairest pleasure; Theirs is wisdom's holiest treasure. Thou dost ever lead Thine own In the love of joys unknown.***The image is the painting by Thomas Cole,“Expulsion from Eden.”The mysterious gate of Eden is a 
breach in a rock that shall never 
be found by a living man.

Torches light the tents of thousands. But beside the river where we are centered is but one lone tent, that of Faustus, who oversees the trip to Paradise, as he always wanted to do.All action occurs beside the river that dominates the sound of speech by its rushing noise.***Musical excerpt is Albinoni: Adagio In G Minor.The image is the medieval map to Eden, as it was “before God destroyed it with the Flood.”

We stand at the river, on which Faustus will take his final journey.In the beginning we are presented with clumsy illusion for the appearance of travel, confined to the limitations of a stage. Eventually the limits and boundaries of illusion will be defied. For the moment, as he travels, the scenery will change by the medium of a moving stagecraft, as in an old-fashioned vaudeville; scenery will glide behind him, as it were the bank of the river, while Faustus remains stationery to the center of the stage.***Musical excerpt is “The Hidden Treasure” by John Taverner, performed by the Chilingirian Quartet.

No stage contains the scene. We are beyond capacity of our theatre. An immense tall wall, looming even to the apex of the sky, a top unseen, smoothly finished, stands across from them along the opposite shore of the river where they stood. The river, or whatever body of water it may be, like moat to the Wall, went left and right without end, but immediately next to them it churned with the chaos of the violent roaring waterfall into the imponderable deep well of it below the cliff they had climbed. The shoreline where they stood and the one beyond the waterfall, the river, and the Wall: all stretched continuously where they turned both ways to look and distantly dissolved into the haze of infinity. Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

In a half-light a gloomy stage is flooded with water; it flows in a loud deluge, sheeting down the face of a backlit wall, and rushing underfoot to pour into the orchestra pit where it is swallowed in a maelstrom, sucked down by a sewer. The stage is strewn with large and small rocks, like erratics left upon a field scoured by a melted glacier; around which rocks the water guttering rips. In the center of the stage stands Mephistophiles. He speaks above the torrent, only audible because of the magnification of loud speakers surrounding the audience. Mephistophiles addresses the audience through a wireless microphone that he holds in his hand.***Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

A sudden change:There is no stage.We find ourselves upon an ocean shore, dunes to one side while to the other waves that crash and wash repeatedly.As we turn, we see Faustus body, on his belly, not moving. The wash sweeps up to swirl about his arm outstretched toward the dunes, and close-up we see that into his hand a curl of seaweed tangles in his limp fingers, coiling and foamed.From above and behind us we hear the Chorus narrate the scene.***Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

It is completely black within the cavern. At intervals, to your right or left, ahead or behind, spaces are lit where something may be seen; it should remind you of a carnival sideshow ride, a house of mechanical horrors through which you travel twisting corridors on rails, lurching in your little car, surrounded by noises of old unseen machinery, and suddenly entering into tableau vivant, vignettes revealed in vivid or moody spotlight, as the case may be, intended to shock and amaze or to affect with heartfelt distress.***Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

The room in which we find ourselves appears by gradual suggestion, as if the light materially causes the appearance of things to be. They grow solid as the light delineates them, finding edges and then filling surfaces with substance and color. It begins from a beam of sunlight that reveals a window, framed in the center of the stage, against a vaguely opaque wall of black.***Music excerpt is Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini, by Rachmoninoff, pianist Artur Rubinstein.

The camera tracks out the open window of Faustus’ study and shows us Faustus home. It is another winter; a new Christmas is to be celebrated. In Faustus’ garden grows his magic flowers in the snow.The Chorus speaks. ***Music excerpt is
Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini, by Rachmoninoff, pianist Artur Rubinstein.Image is a still frame from the silent movie of F. W. Murnau, Faustus.

Chorus introduces the scene; we are inside a tavern across from the home of Faustus. Ralph is speaking in a corner, near the hearth, surrounded by the former students of Faustus, all attending what he is saying. The tavern keeper is eavesdropping.Music excerpt is Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini, by Rachmoninoff, pianist Artur Rubinstein.Image is a still frame from the silent movie of Fritz Lang, Nosferatu

Beneath a tree in a summery woods beyond Württemberg; a creek is heard; the sun is setting off stage.A mountain is above and beyond the horizon of the forest, distantly, a pearly cascade plunges from its peak and where it crashes a mist rises.This is the very place whence the adventure began.***Music excerpt is Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini by Rachmoninoff, played by pianist Artur Rubinstein.