Concert and recital arrangements of operas were highly popular in the nineteenth century. Without mechanical reproduction of music, it was by playing music oneself in the home or listening to traveling professional musicians playing such arrangements of "greatest hits" from the most popular operas that music-lovers everywhere could hear the music before one's local opera company got around to staging it. The Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate (1844 - 1908) prepared nine "concert fantasies" on popular operas. While by far the most popular one is his 1883 setting of exciting moments from Bizet's Carmen, the second-most popular French opera, Gounod's Faust, also became the basis of a Sarasate arrangement. Beginning with the requisite "devilish" harmonies and demonic double stops on the violin, the music soon settles down into a rather straightforward treatment of two or three of the famous tunes from the opera. For its dazzling conclusion, the music turns to the bustling waltz theme of the opera, subjecting it to a standard assortment of violinists' tricks. To his credit, Sarasate keeps these technical displays subordinated to the genuine musical interest of Gounod's original music. While not nearly as well-known as its Bizet-derived companion piece, the Concert Fantasy on Faust is one of the superior examples of its type of music and well worth a place in the violin repertory.

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