[Met Performance] CID:299400



Faust
Metropolitan Opera House, Tue, February 13, 1990




Faust (677)
Charles Gounod | Jules Barbier/Michel Carré
Faust
Allan Glassman

Marguerite
Ashley Putnam

Méphistophélès
James Morris

Valentin
Vernon Hartman

Siebel
Delores Ziegler

Marthe
Loretta Di Franco

Wagner
James Courtney


Conductor
Charles Dutoit







Review 1:

Review of Leighton Kerner in the Village Voice
Met: Who’s on Faust?

Harold Prince's first Met production — Gounod's “Faust” — is not the total disaster indicated by most reviews. Call it a half-disaster. Over the second half of the 19th century and the first half of this one, this richly tuneful, lusciously orchestrated, and elegantly constructed opera was firmly installed at the center of the repertory. It was the Met's inaugural production back in 1883, and performed there so often during the company's early decades that the theater at Broadway and 39th Street was nicknamed the Faustspielhaus. The work was for a long time the easiest refuge for anti-Wagnerians, and my guess is that it fell from popularity only with the explosion of the Verdi rediscovery that began on the Continent between the world wars.


The reputation of Gounod's best-known, and best, opera has thus been faded for some time. Its treatment of Goethe's “Faust”-Part One (focusing on the seduction and death of Margaret and her soul's salvation) never claimed profundity, but it worked smoothly in its revision as a grand opera, with the required recitatives and full-scale ballet. Many Gounod scholars believe it could work even better in its original opera comique form, with the lighter weight provided by spoken dialogue between the sung numbers, no recitatives, no extended ballet, and, little chance here, the unearthing of lost music.


But it's the standard, grand-opera version that held the stage all those years, and that version's viability has been proven, even in recent times, even at the Met. Peter Brook's Met debut in 1953 gave us a “Faust” transferred from its medieval milieu to Gounod's own era, and transferred with enough flair to cancel out some silly anachronisms. (The Paris Opera brought us a similarly updated Faust in 1976 brimful of anachronisms and devoid of flair.) The Met's next “Faust” (1965-77) was a correct-era version staged by Jean-Louis Barrault that matched the lovely music with lots of theater-poetry, particularly when it dealt with Marguerite's entrance into heaven. (Here she walked through an invisible prison wall toward a high, unadorned, increasingly bright cross.) Meanwhile, across Lincoln Center Plaza, New York City Opera has had since 1968 a Frank Corsaro interpretation that avoided such Victorian sentiment but brought to all the leading characters, except of course Mephistopheles, a modernly conceived psychology. Corsaro, for example, had Marguerite make a grim ascent to the executioner while the angel choirs welcomed her soul. (In case you forgot, the young woman had killed her and Faust's illegitimate baby).


Despite its overzealous cuts, Corsaro's “Faust” is still the best, the most dramatic, we have. Prince's plagiarizing and miscalculating of Corsaro's denouement is, in fact, not the worst thing about the new Met version. It's the famous director's poisoning the piece's romantic bloodstream.


(Corsaro’s psychological reinterpretation still had room for the essential sentiment. Only sentimentality was banished.) Prince went about “his” reinterpretation by either encouraging or allowing his designer, Rolf Langenfass, to depict the story’s German village as a collection of smeared shapes – perhaps a Mephisto’s-eye view of humanity but constantly opposed, nevertheless, to the style of the music. That, surely, is the top crime of an opera director or designer can commit.


What the new show came down to, when I heard it February 13. Was an uphill fight to sing and act a recognizable “Faust.” Ashley Putnam making her debut at the Met as Marguerite, and replacing on short notice the ailing Carol Vaness, projected the heroine's vulnerability in spite of all the clambering she had to do around piles of nuked antiquity. (At least a stand-in, or climb-in, was recruited to scale that impossible ladder to the headsman.) But although Putnam handled much of her music movingly — the story of Marguerite's dead sister, for instance — and accounted for the mixed emotions of the "King of Thule" ballad and the jewel-box scene, she lacked the power needed in the church confrontation and the final trio.


Two other substitutes, Allan Glassman as Faust and Vernon Hartman as Valentin, did honorably but not adequately by this opera's standards. Glassman acted intently and flung out some firm notes at the top of his range, yet style, texture, and command were in short supply. Then again, who else, these days, can sing the role properly? Hartman didn't do much with "Avant de quitter," but his death scene had much emotional power. The principal victim of Prince's work was James Morris, who sang Mephisto's big numbers with lots of bravado and eclat but had to appear debonair and dashing while moving around like a stevedore stuffed into a ballet dancer's tights and cape. Only Delores Ziegler's touching, spunky, and nicely sung Siébel turned in an effortlessly successful performance.


Not effortless, in view of the music, but very creditable was the chorus, perhaps in special tribute to the Met's extraordinary choral director, David Stivender, who. died February 9. And conductor Charles Dutoit somehow met Prince halfway by deromanticizing much of the orchestral score and going for gutsy attacks. At any rate, whatever succeeded — and many moments did in this “Faust” — had everything to do with individual talent fighting a production concept.



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