Faust Overture Faust Overture The Faust Overture is a concert overture by German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner originally composed it between 1839 and 1840, intending it to be the first movement of a "Faust Symphony" based on the play "Faust" by German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Realizing that he would not finish the planned symphony, Wagner revised the piece between 1843 and 1844, incorporating ideas from the other planned movements, and creating instead a single-movement concert overture. He made a final revision in 1855. The work is one of Wagner's few compositions intended for the concert hall, rather than the theatre.
Overture in D minor (Handel, arr. Elgar) first performance. Elgar's friend W. H. Reed wrote of Elgar's enthusiasm for Handel: '...he would speak of Handel with tears in his eyes... would rub his hands gleefully and look up to heaven at the thought of Handel's genius'. Elgar wrote to John E. West, music editor at Novello & Co., that he had known the overture since he was a little boy and always wanted it to be heard in a large form. Elgar's arrangement followed two orchestrations of works by another composer he admired: he transcribed J. S. Bach's "Fugue in C minor" in 1921 and the "Fantasia