Ah! je ris de me voir (Faust)

Gounod had wanted to set Goethe since the 1840s; the version he finally wrote, to a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, confines itself to the Marguerite episode of Part One. It opened at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris on 19 March 1859 with spoken dialogue. For the Opera in 1869 Gounod replaced the dialogue with recitative and added the ballet, and in that form the work became the most frequently performed opera in France and one of the most played anywhere before 1914. German theatres, objecting to the treatment of Goethe, long billed it as Margarethe.