Mephistopheles, at it Again

Let’s start with the basic underlying story of Charles Gounod’s Faust, and this will give you absolutely no idea of the scope or impact of the Paris Opera experience in late 2024. None.

The old guy Faust doesn’t like being old and ugly and impotent, so the devil comes to the rescue in the usual way, restoring youth and good looks in exchange for whatever it is that the devil wants for eternity. Young Faust exploits his virility on lovely young Marguerite, but everything goes completely to hell, and that is a heavy lesson for the non-Christians among us.

This is one of those stories that has been used for dozens of literary and dramatic works, including several operas. There is supposed to have been an actual Dr. Faust back in the 1500’s, but I don’t think this happened to him, really, and I bet someone thought up the “deal with the devil” concept before then, so that particular German doctor isn’t very important.

Gounod (and Berlioz and Boito and others) ran with the story anyway. The only comparison I can make is with Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust, on New York’s 2008 video, which was hugely entertaining, and benefitted from the presence of John Relyea and Susan Graham and the most elaborate and gigantic stage sets in the world. Gounod’s story is not the same (to me), and also it delivers a more personally terrifying, earth-shattering shock to the senses, on the scale of a timeless Wagner epic.

A Match Made in Hell

The aging doctor, now young, is less enviable than pathetic, because in spite of his youth and vigor, he’s just not very good at pursuing Marguerite; he has a tough time tearing her away from a kid named Siebel.  (Maybe Marguerite somehow knows that Faust is actually three times her age or more; maybe the doctor knows that, and feels like a dope for spending so much time on a very young woman.) But his failures and frustrations with the lady raise the tension a lot, don’t they?

Because he’s a guy who, even with a narrower waistline and more energy, struggles to make any headway with the woman of his dreams (and that is, for some of us, another familiar tale).  And in this case, he has a time limit, only the one romantic interest, and Satan observing his every move. There’s a lot of pressure here, and he can’t perform.

So the devil helps him out with tricks like sabotaging little Siebel’s efforts, and generating a priceless box of fabulous jewelry which, in the fine 19th century tradition, makes a young woman go completely nuts with love and lust. (Marguerite, wake up! Go talk to Manon and Mimi, and see how far the fancy diamonds took those dizzy sopranos!)

So Faust succeeds, and Marguerite becomes pregnant, causing both of her guys to lose interest.  The devil tries to find another target for the hapless doctor, but that doesn’t work very well either.

They’ve got Marguerite up on a child-murder charge, and when Faust comes back to “help” her, she’s finally become wise to the old “box of jewels trick”, and decides to try her luck with the hangman and with God, instead of with this clown. And now it’s payoff time, so the devil takes Faust home with him, and Faust gets old again, forever.

Curtain.

What Can We Learn From These Troubling Events?

Thanks for this, Charles and librettists.  Several moral lessons are obvious. 

For the women: Stick with your devoted young fellow with the wilted flowers, not the old dope with the shiny, shiny necklace. (Kinda getting tired of saying this to you, opera ladies.)

For the men: When you get old and unattractive, don’t make a risky deal with the devil, but instead you should… Well, there’s actually no suggestion here about what you are supposed to do when you decline into powerlessness and irrelevance. The original Dr. Faust just died, like everyone else, I believe, so both options are sub-optimal, unfortunately.

For the devil: The implication, in all these “let’s make a deal” tales, is that the devil has an enduring interest in elderly men, bringing them home with him, for unstated reasons. This is troubling, but I struggle to formulate any self-enhancement guidance for someone like the devil. Just go to hell, I guess.

For Marguerite’s brother Valentin: Your sister is pregnant and sad, for god’s sake. Put the damned sword away, make some nutritious meals, and arrange for reliable childcare. Don’t call in any more doctors.

For Marthe and Wagner, the loyal BFFs: Sadly, there are not substantial roles, or even good songs, for these two characters, so I am not sure why they were on the stage. Both of you could take the night off; maybe go see Le Domino Noire, across town. It’s funnier.

Who is This Tobias Kratzer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Here come the standard gripes about updating a traditional opera to the present day. But not from me, and not for Faust. So, the opera is from 1859, and the story is as old as God, and our man Kratzer, from Germany, places his staging at approximately the present, maybe this very evening, outside the theater, here in Paris.

Certainly, it’s Paris, because we can see Faust and his devilish mentor flying over the skyscrapers of the La Défense business district, and down the Seine, with the Eiffel Tower and its spotlight in the background. (Okay, they don’t have broomsticks, but they really didn’t need to flap their arms; we get the idea.)

Not real enough? How about the extended scene, with a couple of nice solos, that takes place in a Paris Metro subway car, on the move? (Marguerite doesn’t like to listen to the devil sing, so she scrambles in her bag and pulls out her headphones, which helps.)

These are truly remarkable and compelling settings, and they are accomplished onstage using very realistic video, projected on the closed curtain. Videos aren’t unusual in a modern opera, but I have never watched an action scene this way, and I’m not sure where Alex Esposito and Amina Edris actually were at the moment I saw (and heard) them singing on the subway. (Maybe in the famously cavernous backstage, which I’ll talk about later.)

Video work is a big component in this production.  I’ve only seen live videos being used for part of the visuals in Foccroulle’s 2023 Cassandra, another present-day setting. They had the movie cameras rolling in New York’s absurd 2020 Agrippina, but I don’t think they were using them. In all cases, the effect is to tell you that this is present-day, this is very close to real life.

In Kratzer’s Faust, the cameras are also used to show the details of a scene that is too small, too distant, for me to see from Row 26, or from anywhere else.

Here, they use the vast stage for, as an example, both levels (and the outdoor porch) of a two-story apartment building, with the action taking place in a small upstairs bathroom, by the mirror. But you can see poor Marguerite’s anguish on her face, because the devil’s henchmen have snuck in, invisible, and set up close-in cameras on tripods right there in the room. The feed is projected for us, while she sings, onto an unused portion of the apartment’s outside wall, in real time. This works surprisingly well.

And then he just goes nuts, Mr. Kratzer does, and some of us were laughing. The poor girl goes in for a prenatal ultrasound, and we can see the scan, large on the wall, and things are moving in there.

Okay, first off, I don’t know what Gounod had in mind, back in the day, for this scene, but it wasn’t a Hewlett-Packard Sonos 5500 featuring color doppler.

Second, that is pretty damn sad, with the father gone, the girl humiliated and terrified, and the imaging tech trying to make everyone happy about the unwanted baby.

Third, fetal ultrasound in an opera? We thought they were stepping a little too far off the stage with the subway ticket machines and the turnstiles. Ambivalent snickering in the audience, in spite of the tragic story.

Fourth, um… this wasn’t a live shot, was it? So they deftly coordinated the technician’s handling of the probe, with a recorded ultrasound image? Yet Amina herself looked convincingly pregnant on the stage, even with her shirt pulled up. Some things will remain unexplained.

The point is, none of it was objectionable or silly.  The director set up a large-scale, realistic tragedy to match the gravity of this story, and for me, it came across pretty raw, pretty serious – more than one could expect from a traditional opera with an aging story.  You want hard-hitting emotions from an opera, and they don’t come across with a stronger punch than this.

A Few Notes About the Music

I had never heard Gounod’s music before, but after Faust, I’m now curious about his other big hit, Romeo and Juliet. Because the late 19th century French tragedy work is not familiar to me, and this is not my area of expertise in any way.  There’s more to learn, but here is what I noticed.

• Even by 1859, my favorite bel canto songs-and-chorus style is being supplanted. Rossini wound up his series of French-language operas 30 years earlier, and Offenbach stuck with comedy until 1880. So about all I have for comparison in this era in France is Berlioz, whom I haven’t thought about much. Anyway, Gounod is not composing like they did in the first half of the century; this is different.

• The songs are there, but I don’t think the orchestra is playing that music; they are playing rather complicated background, even counter-melodies, while the soloist runs it alone. The background is closely tied to the melody (unlike the complete disconnect that Strauss perfected 50 years later), yet it adds something else, because Gounod is setting up chords and riffs and ornaments – I think the orchestra may be doing more work than the singer, on some of these pieces.

• The solos and duets carry on in a less structured way than in earlier music. While you could go home singing a song from Donizetti opera, there’s not that much to hold on to in Gounod.  I found it easier to follow than the free-form random walks I’ve heard in Wagner and Puccini (and, of course, Strauss), but this guy’s not trying to nail down a tune for you.

• The exception is in the choruses; I would want to sing along with the “waltz” that the kids do in the first act, and – believe it or not – there’s a Soldier’s Chorus at the end that would hold its own against Verdi, no kidding.

• A religious man, here, is Gounod.  They say he wrote a lot for the church, and I believe it, because a fair amount of Faust sounds like a church service; there’s even an organ in the pit, if I’m not very much mistaken.

And that’s all I know about what Gounod was composing, and it’s tentative until I go see Romeo and Juliet, or until I can find any more of this man’s 12 operas.

Storming the Place

Opéra Bastille is a new venue, built to share the burden with the shockingly beautiful, but smaller, old Garnier. Bastille is not beautiful, but it is bigger and it mostly works okay.  They say it has wings that are as wide as the stage itself, and elevators that can reposition the entire stage, or the whole orchestra. Enviable.

It’s funny to read about the ongoing political controversies attendant to the challenging design and construction process for this place in the 1980s and ‘90s. I don’t have any political complaints, but I would humbly request a complete redesign and rebuild soon, just my opinion, and here’s why.

1. Where is the entrance? There’s a close-by Metro station, good, and there are French/English signs out there pointing you to the entrance, but this is not the entrance, and the guards will tell you that, in French, and wave you away.  Pretty hard to get in.

2. Why the small lobby? If it’s built for 2,700 people to sit, then you also need some space for all of them to come in, walk around, drink their evening espresso, and buy a souvenir coffee mug.  This place is just too little, especially in cool weather, when the lineup at the coat-check blocks everyone’s way out of the building.

3. What about my legs? Good lord, these are tiny seating spaces. If you get on a packed regional jet for a flight to Grand Rapids, and you see that there is neither space to painlessly place your knees, nor a way to shift your feet forward, you still relax in your discomfort because it’s only a 30-minute flight. At the Opéra Bastille, it feels just like that, except the show lasts 3 hours. At both intermissions, I happily unfolded like an emerging katydid nymph, and stretched into my newfound freedom. Wow, that’s a cramped little spot down there! 2,700 seats, sure, in a room built for about 1,800.

4. And the exit? Come on, there are thousands of us trying to press through this crowd and get out to the subway. Instead of locking half the doors and posting guards, why not simply open those doors, and then post guards? There’s no sense in this.

5. Good with the bathrooms!  There are enough, they are easy to find, and the lines are short! Great compromise, François Mitterrand, très bien! A lasting legacy!

So there we have it, and I left the show curious about Charles Gounod, though not thrilled. I’m certainly curious about what else this director has done; this is worth searching for. I would even go to Bastille again, but not for the venue – it’s just not that special, even with the egalitarian, socialist toilets.