1/ Myths & Legends Week continues w that most operagenic of legends, Faust. I mentioned some time ago, re TROYENS, that I do not find myself on Berlioz’s musical wavelength. If that’s to be overcome, it’ll be thru a Faust story - but the dramaturgy of this one is odd. Supposedly
https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1374479076556120069
2/ based on Goethe, yet it not only leaves out Pt II (as does Gounod as well) - it also dramatically changes the ending, as the title proclaims. Berlioz’s Faust does a lot of apostraphizing nature. In fact at the beginning IIRC he has a big ol’ apostrophize-nature number b4 he
3/ even realizes he needs to get back to his study and ring up the Devil. Later he seduces and abandons Marguerite, then is once again found apostrophizing Nature. Then Mephistopheles hits him w “Marguerite is about to be executed, no time to lose, sign here,” which Faust does,
4/ but turns out it’s not a “save Marguerite” contract, it’s a “Mephisto gets my soul” contract. Next scene, in “Pandæmnium,” Mephisto tells the other devils “He has freely signed,” whereas there wasn’t even a decent attempt at offer & acceptance, consideration, bargained-for
5/ legal detriment, etc. Weird. Say this for @MetOpera’s production tho: this work is most often given in concert form (as at the Met last year); if anyone cd realize a staged production, it wd be Robert Lepage. Indeed this may have been his audition for THE RING.
6/ NB I checked the dates last time this was on and I do believe DAMNATION was the 1st Faust opera, or at least the 1st of the Big 4 (this plus Gounod’s FAUST, Boïto’s MEFISTOFELE, & Busoni’s DOKTOR FAUST, the last being mega-weird a d based on tradnl German puppet-plays, not
7/ on Goethe, and being narratively similar to Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” tho with 20thc twists). So if Berlioz came first, does anyone want to argue that, Goethe notwithstanding, you cdn’t *yet* show on the opera stage a guy making a pact w the Devil and (spiritually) living
8/ to tell the tale?
9/ Ok, I like *this* Berlioz more than *other* Berlioz, and Lepage's production is genius. Sometimes I think Berlioz is the answer to, what wd have happened if there had been no Romantic movement in music, and if the Classical perion, marquee'd by Haydn and Mozart, had just moved
10/ into the 19thc w/o Beethoven or the "Schu's" ever happening? - Much in the libretto of DAMNATION DE FAUST that touches on Christianity is gibberish, and I wonder whether or not intentionally so.
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