It does not mean, of course, that all his works were themselves fragmentary. His shorter poems have their own kind of integrity and perfection, and some of his longer works as well (Hermann and Dorothea, Iphigenia, Tasso) have a classical unity or something closely approaching it. But if we look for dramaturgical and logical integration in Faust we shall be disappointed. Little purpose is served by crediting a work with qualities which its author himself disclaims. Most of the ‘component parts’ are of great interest in themselves or have great comic or tragic force; as a whole it is a fascinatingly flawed masterpiece. It seems to have had for Goethe the special status of a kind of creative sideshow, to which (as he wrote to Schiller) the highest formal principles were not to be scrupulously applied. On the other hand, the fact that it remained, at each stage of its composition, close to his own life, documenting his current interests, an evolving and unfinished ‘confession’, a poetic extension of his organic growth so to speak, could not fail to give it a certain vitality, an endlessly stimulating variety and freshness. Faust is not so much a structure as a complex of structures, the drama not of one human problem but of a whole human development. Above all it is a generous and kaleidoscopic profusion of wit and poetry.

As a work for the theatre, even Part One was generally regarded during its author’s lifetime as unperformable, though it was widely read. Goethe himself seemed to think it unsuitable for the stage, though his recorded pronouncements on this point are ambiguous. A production in Weimar was planned in 1810 but came to nothing. There were amateur or private performances of excerpts from the text, but the first full-length production of Part One in Germany by a professional company was in 1829, in Goethe’s eightieth year and more than twenty years after its publication (strangely enough, a French premiere in Paris and even an English one in London, with accompanying fireworks, had been given a year or two earlier). The German première was at the Brunswick court theatre, produced by August Klingemann in an eight-act arrangement which was then quickly adopted in several other German cities. After this Part One continued to be performed, though always in adaptations which virtually reduced the text to the Gretchen tragedy. Gounod’s opera of 1859 (often more correctly known in Germany not as Faust but as Margarete) reflects this conception and gave still wider currency to it. It was not until the last quarter of the century that German producers began to offer completer versions of Part One and to combine it with Part Two. The latter, published just after Goethe’s death in 1832, had from the first been received with incomprehension, and only selected fractions of it had been performed; a few scenes were given in 1849 in honour of Goethe’s centenary, and even in the so-called première of 1854, in Hamburg, the greater part of the text was cut. Not until 1876, in Weimar, did Otto Devrient put on the first production of both Parts, on two successive evenings. This was the year of the opening of the Bayreuth Festival, and indeed the influence of Wagner’s unprecedently long operas, particularly the Ring tetralogy, is said to have encouraged producers to attempt full-scale multi-evening presentations of Faust. Dingelstedt of the Vienna Burgtheater planned to give one in Bayreuth itself, and in fact his successor Wilbrandt did so in Vienna in 1883; four-evening versions were given in 1877 in Hanover and in 1900 in Berlin. But theatrically speaking, neither Part One nor Part Two really came into its own until the twentieth century, in the hands of the great post-Naturalistic director Max Reinhardt. His 1909 production of Part One in Berlin was still a Faust-Gretchen version, but innovative by its use of the revolving stage; Part Two followed in 1911. In 1917 Reinhardt became, with Hofmannsthal and Strauss, a co-founder of the Salzburg Festival, and it was in his last years here, between 1933 and 1937, that he realized an extended and more integrated conception of Part One. His use of a vast, specially constructed ‘simultaneous’ stage in the Felsenreitschule was an achievement of genius, and his Faust productions became internationally famous. With the Second World War the Reinhardt era passed, and the Gustav Gründgens era began. Gründgens had first played the part of Mephistopheles (coveted by star actors even in Goethe’s day) in 1932, and his first productions of Parts One and Two were in 1941 and 1942 respectively. A newly conceived version followed in Düsseldorf in 1949, and this developed into his revolutionary and now legendary Hamburg productions of 1957 (Part One) and 1958 (Part Two). Gründgens, taking a hint from the Prelude on the Stage which he had previously always cut but now reread, abandoned all the traditional illusion-making paraphernalia of realism and presented everything—the heavens, the Imperial court, Greece—as nothing but the stage itself, the play as a play, with boards and a few simple properties, just as a troupe of wandering players might have done it. His conception and his own acting won international acclaim, with guest performances in the United States and the Soviet Union. Gründgens had Part One made into a film in 1961, simply as a record of his stage version and without any exploitation of the film medium as such.