Heinrich Heine’s Faust Ballet Scenario, 1846–1948

Heinrich Heine’s 1846–47 scenario for a Faust ballet, Der Doktor Faust: ein Tanzpoem (Doctor Faust: A Ballet Poem), languished for eighty years before finding a musical setting by František Škvor and a production in Prague in 1926 that was true to its spirit. Another setting was made by a Viennese emigré, Henry Krips, in Australia during World War II. But it was only with the production of Abraxas, the version by Werner Egk, in postwar Germany, that the scenario fulfilled Heine’s prediction that it would “excite a furore beyond all our expectation, and even take a place in the annals of the drama.”