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OPERA REVIEW
June 20, 2004
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By Robert Commanday
Busoni's Doktor Faust at the San Francisco Opera isn't half bad. In fact, as a work it's a bit more than half good, eventually better than I'd remembered. The cast's performance, seen Sunday, was excellent. The opera is another matter, and the production still another. Busoni seems to have written his way into the piece. That is to say, it's all the way to Part II (Act II) before his music gets off the tedious academic dime and begins to sound theatrical. Also, by that time, the story has finished trudging through the "set-up."
Furthermore, in the initial going, it was hard getting past the in-your-face harsh contemporaneity of Anna Viebrock's bleak industrial run-down warehouse setting and the rummage of a studio in the middle of it. Action was slow, Faust mostly abed, in an alcoholic stupor or drinking and despairing at his failures. (I suspect an undisclosed sponsor of the production is Jack Daniels. ) The director, Jossi Wieler, has interpreted this Faust as a "Radical anti-bourgeois" conceptual visual artist attempting to "sabotage the ethic of consumerism in art," a lazy slob who "declines to produce separate ‘works' but rather declares himself — indeed his ‘life" as the work of art itself. To be fair to the director/dramaturg team who dreamed this up, no words the libretto puts in this witless Faust's mouth suggest any scholarly or other wisdom.
Faust's "life/artwork" evolves slowly after three mysterious students bring him an ancient book for magic-making, and a shuffling old man with shopping bag who becomes Mephistopheles compels Faust to make the fatal deal. The music for this was a sort of symphonic continuity, lacking in the kind of contrast, definition in color and rhythm that sets dramatic character and pace. Busoni drew the musical material for this opera from his earlier compositions, and those forming the basis of the first part, were uniformly symphonic and polyphonic. This included some choral variations and an extended piece in D minor for the organ alone (with Mephistopheles' miming the performance of it, having opened a cupboard to reveal the instrument).
 Hope Briggs (Duchess) Jay Hunter Morris (Duke of Parma) The singers keep the opera alive through this musically sombre first part. Rodney Gilfry, a powerhouse baritone, gained fire in his voice through the opera in direct proportion to the character's consumption of "alcohol." Gilfry was athletic in the distorted actions the stage director Jossi Wieler puts him through, all over and around the desk and tables and Faust's bed, which is the center piece. Chris Merritt, as a suave Mephistopheles, sang brilliantly in a high wire tessitura, changing manner and appearance smoothly, moving about always in controlling postures. The story is based not on Goethe but on a 19th century reconstruction of Faust puppet plays, and it is set in the timelessness of now, contemporary costumes, a laptop, TV set, cell phones and the like. Faust's studio/home is a mess, paint peeling from the walls, tiles missing from the high ceiling where harsh fluorescent lights are occasionally turned up full for shock effect. Before the opera starts, Faust has already deflowered Gretchen (without Mephistopheles' help) but then becomes complicit in Mephistopheles' engineering the murder of his creditors and also of Gretchen's vengeance-seeking brother. The stage direction and dramaturgy, shared by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, go all out rubbing the viewer's nose in the rude contemporaneity. Lucifer's servants are variously a pizza deliveryman, UPS deliveryman, track-suited jogger. Faust is an angry "anti-everyone," miserable ne'er do well.
Music and opera come to life in Part (Act) II. When the fancy guests at the Duke and Duchess of Parma's wedding party go slumming, descending on Faust to be amused by the scruffy wizard's magic. He first moons them, then while seducing the Duchess in front of everyone, cuts up her evening gown . He later makes off with her on her wedding night. Hope Briggs, the Duchess, "working" the seduction scene sinuously and later, under a blanket, erotically, sang the high part finely, her voice resilient and true. Busoni drew his material for the music in Part II, not from symphonic compositions but from pieces he had previously written for dance, a divertimento for flute (accompanying the seduction ) lyrical and operatic as nothing before it had been, a toccata (as Mephistopheles, in priest's disguise, convinces the embittered Duke to marry another), a Sarabande, dark and strong (as a "Symphonic Intermezzo"). Busoni famously envisioned a coming modern aesthetic, and while he didn't find a truly new idiom, there is a sense of a modernity in the opera score. It can be heard in the polyphonic textures and ambiguous tonality of his Part I music and in the eclectic mixture of styles in Part II, with brisker rhythms, more clearly defined melodies, even tunefulness. In Part II also, the action picks up and the visual interest improves. The set takes on different elements, elaborate furniture for the party scene, tables and benches for the Wittenberg students' tavern carouse and dispute where Faust's downfall begins. (This is triggered by Mephistopheles' delivering to Faust the Duchess' dead infant, whom he has fathered).
The three mysterious students reappear and announce Faust's death at midnight, and events pile up and accelerate. His former assistant Wagner (Friedemann Röhlig, dark, strong bass), newly made rector, is celebrated by the students in Faust's own house, and Faust sees himself as depreciated and a failure. Phantoms appear and seat themselves in the chapel pews at the rear of the set, first Gretchen, then the Duchess, presenting Faust with the dead baby again, then Gretchen's brother. The night watchman (Mephistopheles in disguise) appears with flashing light to announce the hours approaching midnight, 10, 11, 12. In this closing scene, as Faust faces the collapse of his "Youthful dream" and finally, reality, Gilfry was magnificent, singing "Mankind cannot reach perfection. Let each step as best he can." This is his one big extended piece, closest to an aria, and he does it powerfully. At the last, he desperately seeks to pray, but Mephistopheles says, "So that you will know Him. He will not hear you." Busoni did not finish the work, leaving off the composition and dying a year later, perhaps blocked, as Schoenberg with Moses und Aron. Sketches were found and Anthony Beaumont wrote a completion, but the producers chose not to go with that, and just skipped the apparition of Helen of Troy. The ending, a blackout and silence after Mephistopheles, as the Night Watchman says, about Faust's dead body, "The fellow must have met with an accident," was a telling way to do it. The large cast was peopled by fine singers, all male save for Hope Briggs. Johannes Martin Kränzle, Gretchen's soldier brother (costumed anachronistically in a suit of armor) sang intensely, his voice sounding more wiry than when heard here before. The chorus was excellent, singing offstage and on, and in physically very active and elaborate staging, especially the male choristers as students in the Wittenberg tavern. The orchestra under Donald Runnicles gave a performance good in sonority and ensemble. Runnicles deserves credit for the fine musical performance but also, it should be noted, as music director, shares responsibility with general director Pamela Rosenberg for the decisions about production, who does it and how. The thought does occur that representing the aspirations of this Faust as artist, limited and pitiful as they are, as those of a contemporary, might be a pointedly sad commentary on our time.
(Robert P. Commanday, the senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
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Rodney Gilfry (Faust)