Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig

Faust's first stop in the world is a famous tavern in Leipzig where four students — Frosch, Brander, Siebel, Altmayer — are drinking, quarreling, and singing. The scene opens mid-argument: glasses are poured over heads, someone's ears are being split by a neighbor's shouting. The students are comfortable, crude, and happy in a way Faust cannot match. Mephistopheles and Faust enter, Mephistopheles pretending to be a travelling entertainer with a trick or two.

He offers the group the best wine they have ever had. He bores holes in the table, fits wooden pegs, and draws from them whatever wine each man wants — Rhine, Tokay, Spanish, champagne. The students drink in astonishment. Frosch, growing bold, spills his wine and it catches fire on the floor. The group panics. In the confusion they try to seize the strangers and find themselves grabbing each other's noses, convinced each nose is a bunch of grapes. For a moment they see a vineyard instead of a cellar. Mephistopheles speaks a disenchanting word and reality crashes back.

The students are confused and shaken, arguing about what just happened. Mephistopheles and Faust walk out. For Faust, the scene has demonstrated nothing useful. The tricks were amusing to watch, but the drunkards' cheerful stupidity is exactly what he has been fleeing. The first stop in his new life has shown him that the world below scholarship is not what he hoped experience would be.