Votre Faust

Votre Faust (Your Faust) is an opera (or, more precisely, a "variable fantasy in the style of an opera") in two acts by the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, for five actors, four singers, twelve instrumentalists, and tape. The text is by the French author Michel Butor. Originally written between 1960 and 1968, it was premiered on 15 January 1969 at the Piccola Scala () in Milan, and revised in 1981. Although about seven hours of performable material exists, the variable structure does not permit use of it all in a single version, and performances to date have been between three and three-and-a-half hours.

In 1960, the French author Michel Butor published an article with a title that may be translated as "Music, a Realist Art: Words and Music" (Butor 1960). When Pousseur read Butor's exhortation to composers to rediscover music's representational power, he felt a resonance with his own growing doubts about the Darmstadt aesthetic with which he had been associated for nearly a decade (Decroupet 2001; Salzman and Desi 2008, 153). On 29 September 1960 Pousseur wrote to Butor, asking to collaborate on a project and proposing the theme of Faust. Their first contact was some months later, when Pousseur was preparing the premiere of Répons at the Domaine musical in Paris, and in June of 1961 Butor came to Belgium to plan the details of the project with Pousseur. In 1962 they published a preliminary version of the libretto (Bosseur 1989, 57; Deliège 2003, 362; Butor and Pousseur 1962a; Butor and Pousseur 1962b; Butor and Pousseur 1962c; Butor and Pousseur 1962d). Work on the music proceeded slowly, over a period of time that included Pousseur's three-year residency at the University of Buffalo (Decroupet 2001). The opera was first performed in a concert version on 17 March 1968 in Buffalo, New York, and finally staged for the first time on 15 January 1969 at the Piccola Scala in Milan, in a production that lasted nearly three and a half hours (Lydon 1982, 278).

Shortly after the Milan performance, an hour-long documentary film was made for Belgian television, without the participation of either the stage directors or set designer of the La Scala production. This film, titled Les voyages de Votre Faust and directed by Jean Antoine, includes the closing section of the opera, with all of the possible endings shown in succession, each with a number of the preceding scenes assembled in different sequences, to illustrate the changing contexts (Bækkeund 1969, 117; Pousseur 1969, 286–87).

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