Charles Gounod, Faust (1859)

This was the first opera that the Met produced in their inaugural season in 1883. That's fun fact. It was popular then, and it's popular now. It's basically the Faust story, similarly though not identically presented to La damnation de Faust. I do not have that much more to say about it, except that it really is pretty terrific: great music, great drama.

But let's speak for a minute of this production, and of the concept of "Eurotrash." The term really doesn't seem to have a set definition, but to my mind it's not synonymous with "Regietheater." I define Eurotrash--a term sometimes used affectionately--as an operatic production that takes place in an updated or wildly different setting than the original. This can be done well or poorly, such that if I call a production Eurotrash, it isn't meant as any sort of value judgment (by contrast, Regietheater presents productions with little or no relevance to the original opera, which usually involves shoehorning in transgressive sex and violence).

I have certainly seen and written here about productions that I would characterize as Eurotrash, but, you know, I've generally liked them. I think these things can be done very well, and when they are, they're a great deal of fun. But here's the first production I've ever seen that I would characterize as bad Eurotrash. Sorry. But there it is. I'm honestly surprised that the Met's quality control let this get through. It's this really incoherent concept where Faust is a nuclear physicist during World War II, and, I guess, he's involved with the creation of the atomic bomb. So in the beginning, he's kind of puttering around his lab, and there's an eyewash station that keeps cropping up for seemingly no good reason, throughout the show. The witches in the Walpurgisnacht section seem to be radiation victims. And there are weird touches that don't really seem to have to do with anything, like a weird giant soldier puppet that the soldiers parade around in act I like a giant skeleton that appears at the end of act III. So I really didn't like any of this, and even if it were done well, I just don't think it's a natural fit for the original story.

That's not to say, however, that I exactly disliked watching it. Another thing about the production is that it's not very thorough, and there were large stretches where you could easily just forget about the putative concept, and all was fine. FURTHERMORE, all the principal singers were fantastic. Jonas Kaufmann as Faust doesn't exactly have that much to do (one thing about the Faust story is that when you come right down to it, Faust really isn't that interesting as a character), but he does it with verve. Marguerite, on the other hand, while also not much of a character, has a lot more to do here than the version in Berlioz' opera, and Marina Poplavskaya is really terrific. Her "there was a king of Thule" aria (which, I realized, must come from Goethe himself, as the lyrics also appear in the Berlioz) is truly fantastic, and I'd definitely recommend searching it out even if you don't want to watch the whole thing. And then, of course, René Pape as a dapper, sinister Mephistopheles, and what can you say about that. He's predictably terrific, and I should note that in spite of my complaints about the production, it still includes some really terrific staging, a high point being when he's singing a song about the golden calf and making the people in the background kind of jerk along to his dance. Veryeffective in bringing across his Satanic power.

So yeah. I'd say this whole thing succeeds when the opera itself is able to rise above the production. And while it's a tribute to the opera's quality that it's able to do that so frequently, it really shouldn't have to, should it? The two ought to complement and elevate each other. Maybe sometime I'll see a production of this where that is the case.