Return To Sender Poem by gershon hepner

Rossini, Mozart, Mayerbeer were three
composers Goethe thought might well compose
“Faust” music. Shame he didn’t live to see
how Faust was damned by Hector Berlioz.

Another name on Goethe’s list
was someone who let Wagner in
his house and take his daughter, Liszt:
both men like Faust supported sin.

Inspired by the ballet music of Gounod’s “Faust, ” broadcast on KUSC on January 7,2010. Alan Chapman pointed out that Goethe expressed the view that Mozart, Rossini and Mayerbeer might all have written great music for it and strangely opined that the greatest music for “Faust” was Gounod’s famous and extremely popular opera, strangely forgetting about the infinitely more inspired “Damnation of Faust” by Berlioz.

When informed of the omission Alan Chapman wrote to me: Berlioz had company. I also omitted Liszt's Faust Symphony. Remembering that Liszt’s love life was as irregular as that of his son-in-law Wagner––he had three daughters with Countess Marie d'Agoult, who wrote novels under the name of Daniel who married his daughter Cosima––I wrote the second verse


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