_Valentine's_ curse are of the highest order of expression; while the
church scene, where the fiend whispers his taunts in the ear of the
disgraced _Marguerite_, as the gloomy musical hymn and peals of the
organ menace her with an irreversible doom, is a weird and thrilling
picture of despair, agony, and devilish exultation.

Gounod has been blamed for violating the reverence due to sacred things,
employing portions of the church service in this scene, instead of
writing music for it. But this is the last resort of critical hostility,
seeking a peg on which to hang objection. Meyerbeer's splendid
introduction of Luther's great hymn, "Ein' feste Burg," in "Les
Huguenots," called forth a similar criticism from his German assailants.
Some of the most dramatic effects in music have been created by this
species of musical quotation, so rich in its appeal to memory and
association. Who that has once heard can forget the thrilling power of
"La Marseillaise" in Schumann's setting of Heinrich Heine's poem of "The
Two Grenadiers"? The two French soldiers, weary and broken-hearted after
the Russian campaign, approach the German frontier. The veterans are
moved to tears as they think of their humiliated Emperor. Up speaks one
suffering with a deadly hurt to the other: "Friend, when I am dead,
bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and
my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side." Until this time
the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key. The
old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods
when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor's squadrons passing
over his grave, and the minor breaks into a weird setting of the
"Marseillaise" in the major key. Suddenly it closes with a few solemn
chords, and, instead of the smoke of battle and the march of the phantom
host, the imagination sees the lonely plain with its green mounds and
moldering crosses.

Readers will pardon this digression illustrating an artistic law, of
which Gounod has made such effective use in the church scene of his
"Faust" in heightening its tragic solemnity. The wild goblin symphony
in the fifth act has added some new effects to the gamut of deviltry in
music, and shows that Weber in the "Wolf's Glen" and Meyerbeer in the
"Cloisters of St. Rosalie" did not exhaust the somewhat limited field.
The whole of this part of the act, sadly mutilated and abridged often
in representation,