Goethe's Faust, a work which has attracted the attention of composers since the late eighteenth century and played a vital role in the evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in the nineteenth century, hashad a seminal impact in musical realms. That Goethe's poetry has proved pivotal for the development of the nineteenth-century Lied has long been acknowledged. Less acknowledged is the seminal impact in musical realms of Goethe's Faust, a work which has attractedthe attention of composers since the late eighteenth century and played a vital role in the evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in the nineteenth century. While Goethe longed to have Faust set to musicand considered only Mozart and perhaps Meyerbeer as being equal to the task, by the end of his life he had abandoned hope that he would live to witness a musical setting of his text. Despite this, a floodtide of musical interpretations of Goethe's Faust came into existence from Beethoven to Schubert, Schumann to Wagner and Mahler, and Gounod to Berlioz; and a broad trajectory can be traced from Zelter's colourful description of the first setting ofGoethe's Faust to Alfred Schnittke's Faust opera (1993). This book explores the musical origins of Goethe's Faust and the musical dimensions of its legacy. It uncovers the musical furore caused by Goethe's Faust and considers why his polemical text has resonated so strongly with composers. Bringing together leading musicologists and Germanists, the book addresses a wide range of issues including reception history, the performative challenges of writing music for Faust, the impact of the legend on composers' conceptual thinking, and the ways in which it has been used by composers to engage with other contemporary intellectual concepts. Constituting the richest examination to date of the musicality of language and form in Goethe's Faust and its musical rendering from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, the book will appeal to music, literary and Goethe scholars and students alike. LORRAINE BYRNE BODLEY is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Maynooth University and President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. Contributors: Mark Austin, Lorraine Byrne Bodley, NicholasBoyle, John Michael Cooper, Siobhan Donovan, Osman Durrani, Mark Fitzgerald, John Guthrie, Heather Hadlock, Julian Horton, Ursula Kramer, Waltraud Meierhofer, Eftychia Papanikolaou, David Robb, Christopher Ruth, Glenn Stanley, Martin Swales, J. M. Tudor

In examining Schiller's often-neglected use of gesture, this study treats his dramas as written to be performed -- not merely read. Many aspects of the works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) have attracted attention. His work as a philosopher and pioneering thinker in poetics and aesthetics and as a historian have recently been the focus of much attention. But Schiller's dramas have always held the most interest, and they continue to be performed regularly both in German-speaking lands and around the world. Schiller is a dramatist of psychological conflict rather than of abstract ideas, and he had a unique grasp of how to use the stage to that end. This study of Schiller's use of gesture begins with a discussion of the origins of the gestures he employs, viewing them in relation to his medical writings, his literary influences, theories of the theater and acting, and Enlightenment thinking in general. The study then considers the use of gesture and related aspects of stagecraft in Schiller's nine completed dramas, highlighting elementsof continuity and development. It is concerned with the interpretation of gesture, often marginalized in studies of Schiller's works, and with the interrelationship between gesture and verbal text. It also considers Schiller's relationship to the theater of his day, and discusses the first performances of his plays as well as their more recent stage history in both Germany and Great Britain. Appearing in the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth, this study treats his dramas as plays written to be performed -- as works that reach their fullest potential in the theater. John Guthrie teaches modern German literature and language at the University of Cambridge, where he isfellow and director of studies at Murray Edwards College.