The piece itself is completely mad: gorgeous, but mad. To grasp Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, which the MET staged tonight for the first time since 1906, imagine David Del Tredici injecting bits of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius into Chabrier’s L’Etoile: an insouciant operetta/ballet periodically stun-gunned by jolts of pure Catholic fear and trembling. And did I mention the Rákóczy March?
La Damnation de Faust has to be the most weightlessly whimsical treatment of Goethe’s legend ever composed. The famous bargain—I’d give my soul to know the world!—is omitted: and, with it, any dramatic urgency. Instead, Berlioz gives you an inventively scored miscellany of genre pieces. At the opera’s beginning, Faust, his face barely visible within a cotton-candy nest of beard, sings first of ennui, then of simple peasant happiness. Simple shepherds appear, singing and dancing happily. Next, Faust puzzles over why soldiers love war: cue a glittering version of the Rákóczy March, to which Nutcracker-costumed soldiers strut and scrape. Still glum, he returns to his study and contemplates suicide, when church bells chime: since he overhears a radiantly beautiful Easter chorale from the cathedral next door, he decides he’ll go on after all. But not so fast! In bounds Mephistophélès, in red leather bespoke with a sweeping feather in his cap: a Jersey rocker tailored by Toulouse Lautrec. I’ll make you young: let’s go drinking! exhorts the demon. So Faust, brushing off fifty years of age like Obama channeling Jay-Z , trails Mephistophélès to a bar in Leipzig, which prompts Berlioz not only to compose two boisterous tavern numbers but to use my new favorite cue line in all operatic literature, slurred by a plastered student to his fellow drunkards: “Hey! Let’s improvise a fugue!” And they do! You know now that this libretto—the work of Almire Gandonnière and Gérard de Nerval as well as the composer—is going to make Good News seem like Parsifal, but at that point you throw up your hands. Resistance is futile. “Hey! Let’s improvise a fugue!”
It helps, of course, that the score is ravishing: harmonically lavish, orchestrally fresh, contrapuntally vital and infinitely caressing of the voice. James Levine and the MET orchestra catch and render its every color, and the principal singers make the most of their music and make do with the rest of their rôles. Susan Graham’s aristocratic French and surging mezzo have never sounded better, even though her part, as written, is Lovesick Girl, no more; and Marcello Giordani’s ringing, Italianate Faust and John Relyea’s slender but characterful Mephistophélès are musically astute and vocally apt. And it’s healthy that the MET tries to stage a balky oddity like this once in a while, particularly if they have a fresh idea about how to do so.
Director Robert LePage’s fresh idea is that the piece is really more a ballet with vocal interludes than a dance-heavy opera: and so he’s staged La Damnation de Faust as a kind of double ballet in which the set performs as much kinesthetic interpretation of the story as the human beings do. So, via a veritable Grimmerie of technical wizardries, soldiers climb up through fields of virtual grasses, which part at their every step. Susan Graham sings “D’amour l’ardente flamme” against a wall on which her own face emotes at five times her size. And, in the production’s neatest trick, actual dancers ride on virtual horses as Faust and his demonic host gallop off to Hell. (More on the magic here.)
The only problem with all this is that any audience member in possession of either a television, a laptop, or a nephew with a Wii is much more familiar with the look of this sort of thing than they are with live performers: and LePage’s work with the live cast, perhaps inevitably, seems clumsier than his use of Holger Förterer’s and Boris Firquet’s video designs. The opening scene, in which Faust intones his long monologue against a silvery backdrop of wheeling flights of birds, is exquisite: and so are those virtual grasses on first view. But that latter is a long chorus, and so inevitably one’s attention drifts back to the dancers, who seem mostly concerned with not getting entangled in each other’s cables as they climb the same wall over and over. Because—unlike the MET’s other recent grid-like sets for Doctor Atomic and An American Tragedy—Carl Fillion’s wall of boxes takes up the entire stage, LePage seems to have no other choice but to have principals walk back and forth among them—left to right, right to left, box to box—unless they’re Mr. Relyea and Mr. Giordani, who must also hop, inelegantly, a small banister to get into the grid in the first place.
Conceptually, the American production this new Damnation most closely resembles is Frank Corsaro’s version for New York City Opera of Die Tote Stadt, which executed a comparably filmic approach with, alas, 1975 technology. It didn’t look nearly as beautiful as the MET’s mounting, but it worked better, partly because the projections weren’t the whole set and partly because Die Tote Stadt is a real opera. Its characters had something at stake: and its musical proportions owed more to the drama than to Berlioz’s momentary desire to write, say, a serenade about the King of Thule. You can’t blame LePage for what Berlioz didn’t give him. Still, I note that the most striking moment of Lepage’s production is also its most low-tech: as Berlioz’s choral angels coo and sigh, Susan Graham’s Marguerite, radiant in white, climbs a ladder, step by slow step, all the way from the floor of the MET stage to the heaven of its flies. LePage is next slated to stage a Ring cycle for the MET in ‘10-11: if it’s truly directed, as well as designed, it’ll be fascinating to see what he does with it.