Creeping confusion

The legend of Faust is perhaps the dominant one in post-Renaissance Europe, yet it resists satisfactory artistic realisation. The most celebrated versions of the legend, such as Marlowe’s and Goethe’s, seem to me to be utter messes aesthetically, retaining their status through the great passages they include rather than through any coherence. Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus is a very great novel with a fundamental structural flaw. Of the major musical treatments, Berlioz’s contains the largest amount of superb music; Boito’s Mefistofele is high-minded but a bit of a bore; Busoni’s obstinately refuses to rise to its key moments with sufficiently impressive music, so remains a regrettably fringe work; while Gounod is in the dog-house, though it isn’t hard to argue that as a whole his opera is more of a success than anyone else’s on the subject. But if asked to give a short list of the greatest operas there’s surely no one today who would include Gounod’s among them.

In Opera North’s new production by Ran Arthur Braun and Rob Kearley we have an attempt to take Gounod seriously — well, sort of — by bringing the action up to date and drastically altering its centres of interest. That strikes me as fine, given that it’s so hard to say what Faust’s or Faust’s centre of interest is: wanting eternal youth? Wanting to know more than it is fitting for a human being to know? Testing what kind of temptation one might be able to resist, supposing one were offered a period of sublime happiness, or genius, followed by an eternity of hell?

Faust begins, surely no one will deny, with an impressive prelude, so impressive that I’ve played it on record to many people and they haven’t had the least idea what it was.