The Complete Opera Book The Stories of the Operas, together with 400 of the Leading Airs and Motives in Musical Notation

Act II opens with the garden scene. _Faust_, rejuvenated, and under

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the name of _Henry_; _Margaret_, _Mefistofele_, and _Martha_ stroll here and there in couples, chatting and love-making. Thence _Mefistofele_ takes _Faust_ to the heights of the Brocken, where he witnesses the orgies of the Witches' Sabbath. The fiend is welcomed and saluted as their king. _Faust_, benumbed and stupefied, gazes into the murky sky, and experiences there a vision of _Margaret_, pale, sad, and fettered with chains.

In this act the garden scene is of entrancing grace. It contains _Faust's_ "Colma il tuo cor d'un palpito" (Flood thou thy heart with all the bliss), and the quartet of farewell, with which the scene ends, _Margaret_, with the gay and reckless laugh of ineffable bliss, exclaiming to _Faust_ that she loves him. The scene in the Brocken, besides the whirl of the witches' orgy, has a solo for _Mefistofele_, when the weird sisters present to him a glass globe, reflected in which he sees the earth. "Ecco il mondo" (Behold the earth).