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Philosophy, Theology And The Reading Of Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Vincent Brümmer
Vincent Brümmer
Affiliation:
Faculty of Theology, University of Utrecht, Heidelberglaan 2, 2508 TC Utrecht, Netherlands
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Extract

The French composer, Hector Berlioz, reacted as follows to the critics of his opera La Damnation de Faust: ‘I have already recounted how I … wrote the march on the Hungarian theme of Rákóczy in the course of one night. The passionate reception that this march received in Pest made me decide to include it in my Faust, and in doing so I took the liberty to use Hungary as the setting for the opening of the action, and had my hero, deep in reflection, see a Hungarian army passing across the plain. A German critic considered it most remarkable that I should portray Faust in such a manner. I do not see why I should not have done that, and I would, without hesitation, have let him travel to any place whatsoever if it had been to the benefit of the music I was writing. I had not set myself the task of blindly following Goethe's framework, and a character like Faust can be portrayed as making the most outlandish journeys without doing harm in anyway to the credibility of his person. When other German critics … attacked me even more strongly for the departures that my libretto made from the text and the structure of Goethe's Faust, … I wondered why these critics had not reproached me in any way for the libretto of my symphony, Roméo et Juliette, which only shows a slight resemblance to Shakespeare's immortal tragedy! Obviously because Shakespeare was not a German. Chauvinists! Fetishists! Imbeciles!

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 451 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Freely translated from the programme of the Dutch Opera Company production of Berlioz's opera (Amsterdam, 1989).Google Scholar

2 For these terms, see chapter 5 of my Wijsgerige Begripsanalyse, 3rd revised edn (Kampen, 1989).Google Scholar

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9 Quoted by Wiles, Maurice, The Making of Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, 1967), p. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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23 On the flight into descriptivism see Jeffner, Anders, Theology and Integration (Uppsala, 1987), pp. 37–8.Google Scholar See also Jeffner, , Kriterien christlicher Glaubenslehre (Gōttingen, 1977).Google Scholar

24 For the term ‘classical text’, see Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination, (London, 1981), chapter 3.Google Scholar

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