Wilson’s Walpurgisnacht: a ‘Goetheabend’ at the Wigmore Hall 

To celebrate the publication of AN Wilson’s latest biography — Goethe: His Faustian Life (Bloomsbury, £25) — the Wigmore Hall held a concert on Friday. The first half consisted of Lieder inspired by Faust, performed by four fine young singers. After the interval, the audience was treated to a platform discussion, in which Wilson was joined by Neil MacGregor, the broadcaster and former director of the British Museum, and Professor Judith Wolfe, who understands German philosophy better than the Germans. Finally, Sir Stephen Hough brought the house down with a bravura performance of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor.

This Goetheabend turned out to be a capital idea. Two centuries ago Thomas Carlyle told the British public: “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” In this case the audience seemed to have taken his advice, although it is true  that one heard as much German spoken as English. But this was a deeply civilised occasion and it was gratifying that the German Ambassador, Miguel Berger, was present to see the esteem in which this great European man of letters is held here.

Wilson himself introduced the evening, laying on the self-deprecation: the music was the point, his book was ephemeral, but he was available to sign copies on sale during the interval. The songs were of mixed quality but all of them were at least interesting. Along with Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (sung with deep feeling by the mezzo Emily Sierra) were two of his lesser known incidental pieces from Faust. Berlioz was represented by the ballad “The King of Thule” and Gounod by the famous Jewel Song. Wagner’s two songs were forgettable but two humorous ditties from the scene in Auerbach’s wine cellar by Busoni and Musorgsky, about a rat and a flea respectively, were a delight. On a more serious note, the soprano Manon Ogden Parry evoked despair in Wolf’s “Gretchen before the Mater Dolorosa”, while the tenor Sebastian Hill gave us a luminous, little known song by Carl Loewe, who set the verses of Lynceus the watchman from Faust Part Two. It ends with these memorable lines — a lyrical, almost mystical valediction: 

“Oh, happy eyes,

may all that you’ve seen

remain as it was

for it was so beautiful!”

Despite the eminence of the participants, the three-way discussion was the least satisfactory part of the evening: partly because Neil MacGregor was almost inaudible, but mainly because it was cut short by Wilson, who was evidently worried that the audience might become impatient to hear more music. Judith Wolfe spoke eloquently about Goethe’s peculiar synthesis of pagan and Christian elements, which had been adumbrated in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s setting of Faust’s reply to Gretchen’s crucial question: “Do you believe in God?” As she explained, Goethe’s cosmology owes something to contemporary theological speculation that God’s love might be so all-embracing as to redeem the whole of humanity, meaning that nobody — not even Faust — deserved damnation. Wolfe evidently did not intend to imply that such universal redemption entailed moral relativism, but Wilson was more inclined to see Goethe as a harbinger of the Nietzschean world we supposedly now inhabit, “beyond good and evil”. MacGregor tried to lower the tone from philosophy and divinity to politics, asking what Faust could teach us about Germany and Europe. AN Wilson suggested that Professor Wolfe, having been born in Austria, represented the Holy Roman Empire, for which Goethe (who had witnessed the coronation of Joseph II in Frankfurt) felt deep affection. But he called a halt to the conversation just as it was in danger of breaching that very Anglo-German taboo: “Don’t mention the war!”

Fortunately Sir Stephen Hough was on hand to plunge the audience into the profundities of “the Abbé Liszt”, as Wilson referred to the composer. It was a performance full of daemonic dynamics and ethereal visions. How it symbolised the Faustian mythology was left unclear, but perhaps there were clues in the at times breathtaking contrasts between darkness and light, nightmare and nobility. Hough is a Liszt specialist and summons up this music from the depths as if possessed. It is hard to imagine that the Abbé himself could have played it better.

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