Doktor Faust

Overview

Faust - a lonely scholar, despairing of life, who has so far failed to discover its highest meaning - is given a book on black magic from three mysterious students from Cracow. When Mephistopheles appears and proposes a pact with Faust, the two of them set off together on a (dream) journey. Doktor Faust remained a fragment at the time of the composer's death. Busoni died in 1924, unable to complete what he himself described as his "state masterpiece" - an opera to which he had a deep personal attachment. The missing scenes from the score were completed by his pupil, Philipp Jarnach, whom Busoni had become acquainted with during his period in exile in Zurich. In this form the opera was given its first performance in Dresden in 1925. Then in the 1980s the conductor Anthony Beaumont came across previously undiscovered sketches by Busoni and produced a new version of Doktor Faust. The current recording uses the Jarnach score.