Faust et Hélène & Faust :: Mein Brustkorb : Mein Helm
By Lili Boulanger
Two Fausts in one evening: Lili Boulanger's Helena cantata against a Werner Schwab play.
In 37 days
9 October 2026 · 19:30 Uhr
About Faust et Hélène & Faust :: Mein Brustkorb : Mein Helm
Boulanger set the Helena of Goethe's Faust II as a lyric episode in French, to a text by Eugène Adenis — the score that made her, at nineteen, the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition. Weimar plays it in Eberhard Kloke's 2023 transcription for small orchestra, and sets it against Werner Schwab's Faust :: Mein Brustkorb : Mein Helm, which takes the same material somewhere much later and much less reverent. Sung in French with German surtitles; 16 and over.
Performances
Also on stage here
Where
Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
Organiser
Deutsches Nationaltheater und Staatskapelle Weimar
Tickets
20,70 - 45,90 €
Facts checked against the organiser on 29 August 2026
Places and people
Historical figures
1749–1832 • writer • statesman • naturalist
The cantata is drawn from the Helena of Goethe's Faust II, sung in French to Eugène Adenis's verse.
Historical periods
Goethe's second Faust returns to the stage of his own town by way of a French cantata of 1913.
For roughly sixty years a duchy of a few thousand people held the centre of German literature, because its ruler kept inviting writers to live there and then gave them jobs. That is the whole mechanism, and it ran from Goethe's arrival in 1775 to his death in 1832.