After the huge success of his first album, Alles andre zählt net mehr (1972), Viennese Liedermacher Wolfgang Ambros was asked to provide a musical theatre piece for the 1973 Wiener Festwochen. His lyricist, Josef Prokopetz, suggested an adaptation of Faust, and this became the impetus to create Fäustling, a version of Goethe’s drama “scaled down” from German canonical Classicism to an early form of “Austropop,” a mixture of folk, rock and Schlager distinguished by its exclusive use of Austrian, and particularly Viennese, dialect rather than Standard German. The resulting work, though it has become relatively obscure, is nonetheless one of the foundational documents of the Austropop genre. This paper examines the specific strategies by which Fäustling cuts Faust down to size. In taking such a specifically German cultural and intellectual monument as its basis, and then modernizing and localizing it by means of dialect, rock-inflected music and a relatively realistic setting in the contemporary Viennese petit-bourgeois milieu, Fäustling both appropriates what Pierre Bourdieu would call the original work’s “cultural capital”; and by travestying it, distances itself from the original’s German cultural context to generate a new form of cultural capital as a declaration of independent, Austrian cultural identity.