Le Petit Faust

On 28 April 1869, the curtain of the Folies-Dramatiques rose on this three-act opéra-bouffe by Hervé, barely two months after Gounod had revealed his new version of Faust on stage at the Paris Opéra (3 March). For their libretto Hector Crémieux and Adolphe Jaime left aside the metaphysical aspect of the myth, creating instead a moral satire. Their Marguerite, not as pure and innocent as the Germanic Gretchen, creates havoc at the boarding school to which she is brought by her brother Valentin. Dr Faust, an elderly professor, accepts her as a pupil, despite her being over school age, and she seduces him. Mephisto, the devil, offers him youth, good looks and riches in exchange, not for his soul, but for his powers of reasoning. In the end Marguerite and her rich and rejuvenated lover end up in Hell, condemned to be together forever. The zany extravagances of the libretto contributed to the triumph of Le Petit Faust, in which Valentin was sung by a trial (a light tenor), Faust by a comic tenor, Marguerite by a mezzo-soprano, and Mephisto by “une chanteuse légère”. But it owed its success above all to Hervé’s music, which actually quoted very sparingly from Gounod’s score, occasionally parodying the style and the situations with an its inventiveness that was greatly admired by the critics. Roqueplan, writing in Le Constitutionnel, praised the music as “abundant, melodic, full of wit, surprises, colour, refined or catchy rhythms, excellent ideas, and even emotion”. The Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris praised the “remarkable progress” in the composer’s manner, “shaking off his pretensions to seriousness, as well as his eccentric ramblings”. The “idyll” “Les quatre saisons”, sung by Mephisto, was even compared to Schubert’s lieder! But Hervé, not one to let himself be stifled by compliments, immediately launched into a self-parody with Faust passementier, which was performed at L’Eldorado in Paris on 4 June 1869.