[Met Performance] CID:299280

New Production

Faust
Metropolitan Opera House, Thu, February 1, 1990

Debut : Delores Ziegler, Harold Prince, Gillian Lynne




Faust (674)
Charles Gounod | Jules Barbier/Michel Carr?
Faust
Neil Shicoff

Marguerite
Carol Vaness

M?phistoph?l?s
James Morris

Valentin
Brian Schexnayder

Siebel
Delores Ziegler [Debut]

Marthe
Loretta Di Franco

Wagner
James Courtney


Conductor
Charles Dutoit


Production
Harold Prince [Debut]

Lighting Designer
Gil Wechsler

Choreographer
Gillian Lynne [Debut]





Faust received thirteen performances this season.

FUNDING:
Production gift of the Annie Laurie Aitken Charitable Trust
Additional funding from the estate of Anna Case Mackay, and the Metropolitan Opera Club

Review 1:

Tim Page in Newsday
An Original ?Faust? At the Met

Charles Gounod's "Faust" is one of the grand artistic totems of the late 19th Century ? as representative of its era as the Albert Memorial or the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Metropolitan Opera staged "Faust" on its very first open*ing night in 1883, and in the years since that inaugural season it has been performed by the company more than 400 times. In the late 20th Century, however, "Faust" has largely faded from the repertory, and the Met's Thursday night performance ? the world premiere of a new production by Harold Prince ? was the company's first since 1977.


There are legitimate reasons behind the opera's recent neglect, for "Faust" has numerous, glaring faults, most of them identified long ago. Jules Barbier's and Michel Cane's libretto is a tame, toothless reduction of one of the world's great literary masterpieces; it simplifies a complicated, metaphysical meditation into the sentimental parable of a good girl gone bad, redeemed at the scaffold by a genuine ?deus ex machina." Gounod's music is formal, and expertly made but, in the main, rather sexless and undramatic. Certainly, nothing in the opera has the power of the Goethe original.


So why did I enjoy myself so much on Thursday night? The score's familiarity certainly had something to do with it ? one slips into "Faust" as into a warm bath ? but so did the relative unfamiliarity of the stage action; it's been a long 13 years. More to the point, perhaps, the Met prepared its revival with considerable care, engaging an expert, sympathetic conductor and three strong soloists for the leading roles.


Despite some woolly vocalizing, James Morris was a splendid Mephistopheles ? urbane, vivid, sardonic, and alive. As Faust, Neil Shicoff sang lyrically, with sweetness and style. His voice is not particularly large, and forte passages in the upper registers occasionally sounded strained. But he sang Faust's arias with understated sensitivity and blended well into the ensembles.


Carol Vaness, fresh from her recent triumph as Fiordiligi in Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte," made a sumptuous but rather stiff Marguerite: Her "Jewel Song," in particular, was florid but charmless, yet she brought a gripping manic energy to the prison scene. There was worthy support from James Courtney, Loretta Di Franco, Delores Ziegler (a fresh, blithe Siebel in her Met debut) and Brian Schexnayder (who braved the role of Valentin despite recurring sinusitis)


Charles Dutoit's conducting could not have been much more effective. "Faust" is essentially a string of set pieces. Ensemble follows aria follows ensemble. Without betraying Gounod's structures, Dutoit managed to imbue the opera with some genuine sweep. Moreover, he understands Gounod's concept of the orchestra, which might be likened to that of a big cathedral organ, solos and ?tuttis" homogenized into one unified wash of sound.


I have mixed feelings about Prince's production, which mingles felicity and incongruity in more or less equal proportions. Faust's initial vision of the virginal Marguerite is here represented by sexy shadow play (imagine Rita Hayworth in silhouette, primping her hair). There is little point to the prosaic ballet interpolated to accompany the dolorous, dissonant prelude to the final scene. And, in the opera's final moments, Marguerite ascends to meet her executioner rather than the seraphim and cherubim specified by Gounod and Goethe ? an oddly existential way to conclude this most devotional of operas.


Still, there was much to admire: the pastel, rock-candy structures Prince uses as backdrops (which might have been designed by Wyndham Lewis); the delightfully stylized Garden Scene, with its blinking, glittering trees that grow and twist with the hyper- bbbbn kinetic energy of time-lapse photography; Faust's cavernous studio, which looks like a particularly desolate corner of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Some questions of conception aside, Prince has delivered a serious, original "Faust," and it is a pleasure to welcome the opera back to the repertory.



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