Votre Faust

[1] When Pousseur read Butor's exhortation to composers to rediscover music's representational power, he felt a resonance with his own growing doubts about the Darmstadt aesthetic with which he had been associated for nearly a decade.

[2] The opera was first performed in a concert version on 17 March 1968 in Buffalo, New York, and finally staged for the first time on 15 January 1969 at the Piccola Scala in Milan, in a production that lasted nearly three and a half hours.

[9] Shortly after the Milan performance, an hour-long documentary film was made for Belgian television, without the participation of either the stage directors or set designer of the La Scala production.

This film, titled Les voyages de Votre Faust and directed by Jean Antoine, includes the closing section of the opera, with all of the possible endings shown in succession, each with a number of the preceding scenes assembled in different sequences, to illustrate the changing contexts.

For example, in the opening scene of act 1, while the actor playing Henri mimes the action of "analysing" Webern's Second Cantata at the piano, an actual pianist, costumed identically, appears onstage to perform the music in parallel.

[20] The orchestra consists of just twelve instrumentalists, who often appear onstage and interact with the actors and singers: In addition to the live players, electronic music on tape is played back over loudspeakers in the hall.

The Theatre Director, a figure from Goethe's Faust I, introduces Henri as a writer of brilliant and provocative articles, who will explain some of the perplexities of modern music to the audience.

His complaint is accompanied by recorded fragments from Berio's Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) and Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, both electronic music compositions.

[22] An instrumental "re-overture" made from a set of "one hundred celestial notes", derived in turn from nine twelve-tone rows quoted from works by Boulez, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Webern, and Pousseur himself.

[40] The audiences at the premiere production in 1969 were at best bored and unengaged,[41] and at worst exhibited sleazy and vulgar ("squallido e volgare)" behaviour, rudely expressing their displeasure by shouting "basta!"

[42][10][43] The fiasco was provoked in part by the "complex clauses of the electoral law devised by the authors", involving amongst other things planting actors in the stalls, who would stand up and "vote" at the appointed times (presumably to obtain the results preferred by the producers), instead of letting the genuine audience members participate.

Claudio Sartori found the quotations "pointless", while the critic for La Stampa was noncommital, saying only that "Pousseur is a musician of proven dexterity, aligned with the most up-to-date ranks of the avant-garde".

[43] Luciano Berio, a colleague and friend of Pousseur, was wholly enthusiastic about "a score that I love deeply for innumerable reasons", but nevertheless admitted the production was a failure—a failure which he blamed partly on Butor's text, but more emphatically on the stage design and "what is normally defined as directing but in our case is revealed as a gratuitous succession of inconsistent poses perpetrated by a pair of naïve amateurs inexplicably dragged to Milan by M.

[10] The instrumentalists were described as "bravissimi" (talented) and the singers as "strenui" (stalwart),[44] and although Jean Topart in the role of Mondor was generally admired, the other actors' performances were scarcely mentioned.

One exception was made by Berio, who paid Roger Mollien a backhanded compliment: "The 'protagonist' Henri, ... is, in the words of Butor, a perfect cretin, equaled in this respect only by 'actor-director' Mollien trying to portray the part", who in the end, according to Berio, uttered only two coherent sentences: "C'est que nous n'avons pas encore abordé la question du livret" (We have not yet addressed the issue of the libretto), and "s'il y a eu un coupable dans l'affaire, c'est moi, tu le sais bien, Maggy" (If there has been a guilty man in this case it's me, you know that, Maggy).

[49] Another composer-colleague, Pierre Boulez, while recognizing the validity of some of its properties, was less enthusiastic than Berio about Pousseur's score: I am not convinced at all that these motifs, themes, or the intervallic symbology are necessarily so old-fashioned.

[50]From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the collage techniques of Votre Faust—especially in conjunction with contemporaneous statements by Pousseur about the "information age" in which we live, and the general acceptance of a collective network of creation—are seen as a "prescient commentary on what we have come to call 'postmodern pastiche,' in which different historical registers and styles are mingled in a single work".