Returned to his study, it is the very cusp of day that all of this began, the risen day after New Year’s eve, and Faustus sees the dawn’s foreboding light stain the icy window panes, casting blood hue on everything....

***

The image is a capture from

the classic silent film “Faust” by

F. W. Murnau.

Music excerpt is

Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite,

Op. 60 - The Romance of Kijé

from the album

Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

All the lights within the theater and on the stage are suddenly extinguished. Space is void.

Each one alone in it. All is silent, except for restless anxiety in the audience.

The chorus speaks from the everywhere....

The image above is “Faust’s Vision” by Luis Falero (1851–96), painted in 1880. It was a favorite subject of naughty fin de siècle postcards.

Stage lights rise on Faustus study.

Ralph and Robin come running in and hide among the furniture.

Immediately they are followed by several raw-skinned demons, midgets of reptilian humanoid form, with female breasts and thrashing snake-like tails, and horns on their heads.

Sparks fly out of their anuses as they fart spluttering sulfurous gases.

They search unsuccessfully for Ralph and Robin and soon depart in a disorganized retreat.

***

The image is Luis Ricardo Faléro’s

“Departure of the Witches” (1878).

Music excerpt is

“That Old Black Magic”

from the album

Cocktails for Two

by Spike Jones,

vintage World War II

American Big Band music...

with a twist.

Faustus, walking briskly, enters his study, where Mephistophiles is lying on an oriental chaise. Faustus is reading aloud from an opened royal missive. A silky ribbon, bestrewn its wax seal, trails conspicuously, flirtatiously.

***

The image is

an etching of Charles V

(Carlos of Spain), the Holy Roman Emperor during Faustus’s lifetime.

Charles, a cosmopolitan emperor,

famously said:

“I speak Spanish to God,

Italian to women, French to men,

and German to my horse.”

Music excerpt is

Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite,

Op. 60 - from the album

Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

Lights are doused. When they are restored, a massive chorus appears on stage, in the guise of the manifold appearance of all human society, to testify to the Emperor’s newfound philosophy.

***

Music excerpt is

Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite,

Op. 60 - from the album

Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé

with conductor Lorin Maazel

& Orchestre National De L'ORTF

The chorus parts like a curtain: bowing, backwards walking, en masse they part and go off stage, left and right, revealing at the center stage the Holy Father in his private chambers in the Vatican, sitting at his toilet, attended by Cardinals.

***

The image is

the Pre-Raphaelite painting,

“In the Venusberg” by John Collier, 1901.

Music excerpt is

Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite,

Op. 60 - The Romance of Kijé

from the album

Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

Our Chorus of Mankind returns to the stage, now wearing bloody bandages and scorched rags; there is sound of a huge battle beyond them and shocks of shells exploding in midair, screams of women and the crying of babies.

Faustus stands apart from the Chorus of Mankind, looking on it as it begins its address.

***

The image is

an etching by Albrecht Durer

of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Music excerpt is

Violin concerto No. 5 in A minor,

Op 37 - II. Adagio by Paganini,

from the album

Paganini; Vieuxtemps Violin Concertos

performed by Viktoria Mullova (violinist)

and Neville Marriner and the Academy St. Martin In The Fields.

As the sun sets on the Battlefield where corpses lay, the voice of Mephistophiles addresses them. From this grisly imagery our camera dives into the bright orb of the sun, our visualization stunned, and as we draw back from that blinding light, we see that we withdraw from gleam of chandeliers, to see the banquet hall again of Emperor Charles, as Mephistophiles on the stage front completes his speech.

Behind him, a scene of frozen poses in the revelry for the victory that they celebrate; the Pope is here and even the estranged Charles; Faustus is seated next to one we learn is his sister and beside her renowned husband, victor of the Battle of the Damned, as it is famously called.

***

The photo is taken in aftermath of the

firebombing of Dresden from the

roof of its surviving cathedral.

Music excerpt is

Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite,

Op. 60 - The Romance of Kijé

from the album

Prokofiev: Classical Symphony, Love For 3 Oranges, Lieutenant Kijé

with conductor Lorin Maazel & Orchestre National De L'ORTF

The stage is darkened and there appears in the center, in mid-air, an immense illuminated cross upon which the person of Christ is dying.

Beneath it the Chorus of Mankind solemnly assembles, robed as for a church choir, prayerfully, with bowed heads and clasped hands; they begin to speak only after a silent prayer, lifting their heads so that their audiences may now see their faces clearly.

**

The image is the center

of the late medieval triptych by Mathias Grunewald, the Isenheim Altarpiece .

Music excerpt is

Missa Solemnis

by Beethoven, conductor Herbert van Karajan, Berliner Philharmoniker.

Cinematically, rising from the reflection of sky in the glassy stare of one who lay dead at the Battle of the Damned, to the panorama of its horrific extent of savage death, and thence to the air, to wheel and to fly rapidly away into majestic clouds.

Then returned to Württemberg we make a slow descent with our cinematic eye; scenes of anarchy contend with peaceful normalcy (here a peasant’s farming, there a crowd is lynching some vagrant, etc.); city life is resuming like a dawn: Faustus is at home again

***

The image is

Faustus giving his lessons,

a still from the F.W. Murnau silent film, Faust.

Music excerpts are:

“Baïlèro” from

Chants d'Auvergne,

sung by by Te Kanawa Kiri; and

Scarlatti’s “Piuttosto Presto Che

Allegro (C Major)”,

rendered by Bob James.