Faust et Hélène

Program notes

About the Work

Faust et Hélène is the piece with which Lili Boulanger, aged nineteen, won the Prix de Rome in 1913. The prize was France’s highest award for a young composer, with a list of winners that included Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Debussy, as well as her own father. No woman had ever taken the first prize. Her elder sister Nadia had tried several times without success, and Lili herself had entered in 1912 and had to withdraw because of illness.

The final round followed a fixed ritual. The competitors were shut away for about four weeks, each to set the same text as a cantata for three solo voices and orchestra. In 1913 the text was by Eugène Adenis, after the episode in the second part of Goethe’s Faust in which Faust calls up the shade of Helen of Troy. Boulanger’s setting won decisively. The jury praised its intelligence, feeling and orchestration, and Claude Debussy, reviewing it, wrote that she was only nineteen but that her command of technique made her seem much older. The Italian firm Ricordi offered her a publishing contract.

The cantata lasts about half an hour. Its language is that of late Romanticism: there are clear echoes of Wagner, and the influence of Debussy and of her mentor Fauré in the harmony and the orchestral colour. What is striking is how assured it sounds, and how far it goes beyond the requirements of an examination piece. Boulanger had less than five years left to live. She died in March 1918, at 24.

What to Listen For

The story is told in a single span. It begins with an orchestral prelude: Faust lies in troubled sleep, and Méphistophélès (baritone) sets spirits to watch over him. When Faust (tenor) wakes, he can think only of Helen, the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and demands that Méphistophélès bring her back from the dead. Méphistophélès complies.

Hélène (written for mezzo-soprano, sung here by a soprano) appears. At first she resists Faust: too many men have already died for her. The duet in which he wins her over is the centre of the work.

The ending is swift. Méphistophélès breaks in to say that Helen must return to the grave. The orchestra darkens as the ghosts of the Trojan War rise up, with Paris at their head, to claim her. Faust tries to fight for her, and is struck down.