COMPOSER’S NOTES
I read Goethe’s Faust last spring. I was bowled over by the prison scene that ends Part I. I wrote the verse for Gretchen to Faust a little later, adapting some of Goethe’s lines and adding my own. To him, I owe “Tomorrow would have been my wedding day.” She asks him to bury them “My mother in the best place… My brother by her side, and then myself / A little way apart, but not too far.” The last line is such a masterstroke that I found a way to steal it twice.