Dead Composers, Living Audiences: The Situation of Classical Musi ...

But, like Faust, we languish in “vain desire.” Humanity has made life both longer and easier for many—but to what end? We cannot answer the question. Is it that a more comfortable, longer life has intrinsically more meaning? Faust’s dilemma is not that he knows he does not know. The dilemma is that he—and every one of us humans—is a torturous mixture of intellect and emotions that seem irreconcilable. Faust’s attainment of youth, and his consequent relationship with Gretchen (who was young enough to have been his granddaughter), cheats some young man out of a relationship that is rightly due only to the young men of her generation. Only they, and they alone, have the right to whisper in Gretchen’s ear.

Human beings have expended the most strenuous, burdensome effort so that we might retain for ourselves the conceit that, despite the chaos of everyday life, there are certain intellectual fortresses of our own construction that harbor pure, indisputable knowledge. This, we are sure, is the path to the mastery over our world—and perhaps even over death. But if we cannot attain mastery over death at the moment, we believe we can at least achieve a longer and more comfortable life while we work on the “long-term” goal—a utopian goal we are sure cannot elude us forever.

But Faust himself has given the lie to this optimism. He is the epitome of knowledge, he is the polymath, and he is deeply, profoundly unhappy. He has come to see, near the end of his life, that knowledge will not provide him protection against mortality—or even succor in his later years; he longs for youth and for love, for the stimulation of the passions, the emotions, and the sensuous rather than the intellectual. He sees that he has created for himself a false bastion against the ravages of age, and that the very knowledge he sought as refuge from the dirty messiness of everyday, plebian concerns has, at last, turned him out—like Adam and Eve after their transgression under the tree of knowledge—to face mortality.

So he seeks youth and passion—and wreaks havoc on innocent youth.

The energies released by this basic contradiction between rational thought and the emotional complications of our own mortality, as well as our anxieties about the meaning of our personal existence, manifest themselves in human activities of all sorts—especially the arts.