Again in Faustus study, the scene begins with Faustus addressing Mephistophiles who is costumed for a masquerade; he wears some women’s clothes and a powdered wig; daubs of rouge spot both his white-washed cheeks.

***

The image, a still frame from

F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust, is the apparition of Helen of Troy, brought naked before Faustus, as conjured by Mephistophiles.

Music excerpt is

Hovhaness: Sonata For Harp & Guitar, Op. 374, "Spirit Of The Trees" - 2. Canon: Allegro performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp) and David Leisner (guitar).

A circular space is illuminated, displaying tessellation of vivid colors, like gems in leaded glass, like the sacred Window of the Rose, in which intricate and repeating designs, endlessly change; like a wheel it turns; like a kaleidoscope the turning alters the image and it possesses infinite variegation, yet there is natural order in its variety, and harmonious beauty in its appearance; the chorus speaks from the darkness beyond the stage.

***

The image is 
Window of the Rose

at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Music excerpt is Hovhaness: Sonata For Harp & Guitar, Op. 374, "Spirit Of The Trees" performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp) and David Leisner (guitar).

The circular space transforms, dissolving and reconfiguring. The image changes within the circle, as it resolves and transforms from the image of a mother and her child to a face—the full face of a young woman, whom we should recognize—and replaces the form of the mother and child entirely.

Her face, half-shadowed, turns with the clarity realized, and her eyes divert.

The chorus continues speaking.

***

Music excerpt is

Hovhaness: Sonata For Harp & Guitar, Op. 374, "Spirit Of The Trees"

performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp) and David Leisner (guitar).

By cinematic montage we witness the marvel of seasons, the alteration of time upon Faustus’ garden in a span of several changes, so that across it the magic flowers grow and die more magically, in the spring naturally and in the winter supernaturally. The pace of change is rapid, yet rather than ever wearing or withering, we sense that it thrives in riotous fecundity and novelty, even in the shrouding snow.

Then, upon the appropriate musical cue, we plunge through the solid wall of the house to enter Faustus’ study.

There we see the sorcerer, seeming younger than before, seated at his desk, facing the audience, and Helen is to his right and Alexander to his left; beneath the desk in the spacious well at Faustus’ feet we see a blond child playing with a pestle and a mortar and some scales.

**

Image by Turkish graphic designer, Coheper, who can be found online here.

Music excerpt is Hovhaness: Garden of Adonis, Opus 127 performed by Yolanda Kondonassis (harp).

A spotlight is cast upon Helen holding her child in her arms, standing upon an orb poised above a crescent moon, within the bowl of it, so that the moon resembles golden horns cradling the Earth, and she above it, enthroned. About her head twelve star-points are arrayed in a halo, rotating. The orb-and-moon rises, lofting Helen and child, as the chorus speaks.

***

Image is a common motif

of the Virgin Mary,

this one by Albrecht Durer.

It is identical to the motif

of the Great Mother Goddess

as related by Apulieus

in his pagan Roman novel,

The Golden Ass.

Music excerpt is
 Hovhaness: Harp Concerto, Opus 267 performed by 
Yolanda Kondonassis (harp).

The spotlight disappears and with some intervening shuffle in the dark, the stage is made ready again; the lights swell, revealing Faustus’s study.

Mephistophiles is stage center and recites the narrative of this scene while others – including a farcical version of himself – appear to act out what he narrates.

***

Music excerpt is

Paganini: Caprice #24 In A Minor, Op. 1

from the album Paganini: 24 Caprices, Op. 1

Itzhak Perlman, Violinist.

Image is a still from the 1979 remake

of the silent classic movie Nosferatu

by Werner Herzog.

The unseen chorus narrates stanzas as personal soliloquies. Voices alternate to speak them. Now a woman. Now a man. Or a child. Sometimes they combine to speak in unison.

The first and the last stanzas are spoken with the whole chorus.

When the stage empties, a gigantic movie screen is lowered; you can hear squeaky wheels of the pulleys as it is slowly let down; all lights go out and immediately in sepia-tinted cinema, dusty and scratched from its age, you see the scrolling title and credits for the travelogue of Faustus’ “Journey to Paradise”, starring Faustus and Alexander, produced and directed by Mephistophiles; Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet: Suite No. 2” is the dominant soundtrack; all speech appears in subtitles.

***

Music excerpt is

a movement from

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Suite No. 2

as found on this album.

The film is broken, flaps in the projector, then someone stops it to make repairs. It is silent in the theater. When the cinema resumes, the narrative is unspoken and runs like ticker-tape in subtitles at the bottom of the film, accompanied by an orchestral score.

The gauzy impressionistic lens is fixed upon the corpse of Darius.

Over the brief interval of its presentation, the camera is fixed upon it as it metamorphoses in time-lapsed photography.

***

Music excerpt is

“Juliet’s Funeral” from

Prokofiev’s ballet of Romeo and Juliet

as found on this album.

The movie screen does not rise on the empty stage and a second feature starts, also titled, “Journey to Paradise.” An expensive high-quality production in sharply focused black and white, resembling the cinematography of German Expressionism before the war, or the film noir after the war, like The Third Man. No impressionistic gauze on this clear lens, this is high contrasts of harsh light and deep shadows, disjointed, oddly angled, enigmatic, imagistic. Again: Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” is the dominant soundtrack.

In the establishing shot we see: the outside of Faustus house on an early spring morn—a dense white smoke plumes at its chimney in a chill air. Some students, whom we recognize, huddle outside his door, standing in the muddy track, and across the market square some other older men loiter at a tavern door, watching the house.

Helen comes out of the house and walks away hurriedly. As she travels away, the camera turns to see the groups of these students and other men, arriving from other directions, enter the house.

The camera looks toward the gravid clouds and the credits roll against the streak of falling rain: screenplay by Wagner; produced and directed by Mephistophiles; etc.

Mephistophiles provides the voice-over.

The chorus turns in halves and leaves the stage quietly as stage lights rise on Faustus study.

There, Ralph lounges in Faustus chair, before the great desk whereat the recent indecencies had been staged.

The trash of the debauchery litters the room: Marguerite’s clothing and underwear spilling from the desktop, the clothing of several men who had violated her strewn below, and many toppled bottles, and the glitter of glass which seemed broken everywhere upon the floor.

Robin enters, stepping through it anxiously.

***

The image is a page

of Carl Jung’s Red Book,

which was his private journal of meditation in which

he recorded some of his

most important discoveries

about the nature of the unconscious.

***

The musical excerpt

is a piano study by Philip Glass, composed for the movie, The Hours, depicting the life and

suicide of Virginia Woolf,

who wrote: “I read the book of Job

last night, I don't think God

comes out well in it.”