In October 2025, the new Faust production by Andrea Pfaehler with Rafael Tavares as eurythmy director will celebrate its premiere at the Goetheanum.
It’s the most everyday thing there is. It’s always happening, and yet, every single time, it’s a mystery and a miracle: the presence of another human being—their strength, their vulnerability, their gaze, their emotions. Theater enhances this magic, reveals it, opens it up, and preserves it. “I’m interested in this interface, this point of contact between people and their whole backpack of experiences, feelings, thoughts, and actions,” says Andrea Pfaehler at the start of our conversation. A person’s present is their Now and, at the same time, everything within them, in terms of experiences and goals, past and future. What those who’ve had near-death experiences describe as a panorama of their lives happens unconsciously in every encounter. That’s the present of human beings!
There is the present of our past. Goethe takes us into it three times in Faust. First, the poet himself recounts how he felt when writing his great work: “You approach again, wavering figures, who once showed yourselves to my turbid gaze.”1 He’s referring to Faust, Helena, Gretchen, and Mephisto—figures who already appeared to Goethe as a child, indistinctly, through the veil of early intuition. Then the heavens open and lead us into the primal moment of creation, the present of the great past: “The sun sounds as in ancient times!”[243] And then, like a temple with three gates leading into the Holy of Holies, comes the third present of the past in Faust’s study. Books and parchments are stacked around him, an abundance of knowledge, the abundance of the past. In the first lines, he gives a list of his studies and says that instead of freeing him, they’ve bound him more than ever.
There is the present of the present. All that has become and all that has been experienced culminates in the instant, the blink of an eye, that is the Now. In everyday life, this most real moment in the flow of time, the Now, is always already over when it happens. In the theater, it’s different. Andrea Pfaehler describes how “on stage, in a play, you can stop time. With a movement, a breath between two lines, a glance at your counterpart on the stage, everything stands still—on the stage and in the audience. That is the silence of the moment in which our own lives begin to speak.”
The third present holds our desires and goals, our fears and hopes—it is the present of the future. “That is why I surrendered to magic,”[377] says Faust, declaring his liberation into the unknown. The fact that liberation often imposes new shackles is one of the many contradictions that life has in store when we surrender ourselves completely to it. Mephisto’s promise heralds the present of the future:
So minded, you may dare with fitness.
Engage yourself: these days you are to witness
Examples of my pleasing arts galore.
I’ll give you what no man has seen before. [1671 f.]
Three presents in every human being, in every moment. Rudolf Steiner called them: “moon,” that which has become; “sun,” that which is possible; and “gateway,” the presence of the present between them as a moment of possible liberation and freedom. What distinguishes Faust from us in this interplay of experience and expectation, of wounds and courageous departure, is probably his almost total absence of fear. When the Earth Spirit appears, he says, “I cannot bear you! Woe!” [485] But when he sees the Devil, when not evil itself but the source of evil reveals itself, he wants to know its name:
With gentry such as you, their nature
Is aptly gathered from the nomenclature, Whence all too clearly it transpires
When you are labeled Lord of Flies, corrupters, liars,
All right—who are you, then? [1331 f.]
When he’s in the witches’ kitchen and the highest or rather most hideous witch turns back the wheel of time with a potion and gives Faust his youth, he comments laconically:
Now, tell me what is here intended?
This mummery, this gesturing demented . . . . [2532 f.]
Faustian courage and Faustian freedom from fear enable the third present, the presence of the future. It is precisely this perspective, this view of what’s to come, that our age finds so difficult. The promise of an affluent society that fear and pain can be alleviated, has now become fragile with the crumbling belief in “progress.” In Andreas Reckwitz’s book Verlust [Loss], he describes how modern societies are experiencing an escalation of loss due to uncertainty in nature, culture, and soul. This makes the character of Faust all the more interesting: his world is falling apart—or, more precisely, we see him destroying it—but he does not lose courage. This weaving in Faust, spanning all three moments of time—past, present, and future—lifts the play out of time and turns it into myth.2
Faust 2025 at the Goetheanum
October 10-12th, October 18-19th, October 25-26th
- Production: Andrea Pfaehler
- Eurythmy: Rafael Tavares
- Co-direction: Isabelle Fortagne
- Dramaturgy: Wolfgang Held
- Music: Balz Aliesch
- Lighting: Thomas Stott / Dominique Lorenz
- Set design: Nils Frischknecht
- Costumes: Julia Strahl
Information and tickets faust.jetzt
Photo Xue Li
Footnotes
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust: A Tragedy, translated by Walter Arndt, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), “Dedication” [33 f.] Further quotations followed by the line number from the play in square brackets [ ]. Translations by Arndt, sometimes revised by the translator.
- Andreas Reckwitz, Verlust: Eine Soziologie des Verlusts in der Moderne [Loss: A sociology of loss in modern times] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024).
