Doktor Faust

'Doktor Faust is one of my greatest works, greater than any single poem I have written'

So wrote Heinrich Heine almost exactly a century ago in a letter to his publisher, Julius Campe. He added: 'Doktor Faust is a ballet in form only, which has the greatest significance for those with the necessary perception to understand its worth.' Yet, incredibly it still has never been performed.

Heine's Doktor Faust is translated and edited here for the first time into English by Basil Ashmore, together with a letter from Heine to Richard Lumley, the manager of Her Majesty's Theatre, London, where he had hoped to see it staged as a ballet. It is an exciting, brilliant and dramatic interpretation of an age-old legend written by a genius on his 'matress-grave' in Paris in a terrible condition of life-in-death, where paralysis 'eats into my chest like an iron frost.'

Hellmuth Weissenborn's engravings bring a new interpretation of Heine and of the period.

Poemas, poesias