FAUST

It was the setting of Goethe's Faust that brought world fame to the

composer born in Paris in 1818. He was particularly interested in the tragedy of the Gretchen, explains Reinhard von der Thannen, who staged the work for the 2016 Salzburg Festival: "Marguerite is a young woman who believes in love and who is encouraged by her encounter with Faust to break the conventions of social morality and religious faith that surround her. But it has no chance in a society in which different standards are applied to the behavior of men and women." Even though she appears in Gounod's opera as a male fantasy, "she is at the same time a strong female figure who acts on her own responsibility, even though she perishes from the incompatibility of the demands made on her."