The Standard Repertoire: Gounod's Faust

Abysmal Purity

This is the fourth entry in a series of pieces about the operas of the standard repertoire. #1 was Eugene Onegin, #2 was La bohème, #3 was The Marriage of Figaro. You can see all my posts tagged “opera” for more.

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I could not bring myself to watch more than a few episodes of The Gilded Age, but since this season reportedly dramatizes the lead-up to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera, an Amateur TV tie-in for this series seemed appropriate.

The short version of the Opera Wars was summed up nicely by Edith Wharton in the opening paragraphs of The Age of Innocence:

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

Edith Wharton’s selection of Faust for her opening is no accident. No opera was more popular during the Gilded Age, in both New York and Paris. When the Metropolitan Opera finally opened, it was also with a performance of Faust, and Faust was performed there so often afterward that the Met was nicknamed the “Faustspielhaus” (a play on Festspielhaus, the opera house that hosts the Wagner-only Bayreuth festival in Germany). It was as popular then as La bohème is today, so popular that audiences got sick of it; Newland Archer’s weariness of endless Fausts mirrors his weariness of the social conventions of his conformist age — and it is after another performance of Faust that the victory of his conventional wife, May, over his unconventional lover, Ellen Olenska, is sealed.

As Wharton’s protagonist observes, the world of the Met’s Faust is fusty and artificial:

No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the Opera houses of
Paris and Vienna.  The foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth.  In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss
bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses.  Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses, and closely resembling the floral pen-wipers made by female parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far-off prodigies.

In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson, in white cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to M. Capoul's impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless incomprehension of his designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from the right wing.

"The darling!" thought Newland Archer, his glance flitting back to the young girl with the lilies-of-the-valley. "She doesn't even guess what it's all about." And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.

Faust stands in for convention, exhaustion, society, narrow-mindedness, old-fashioned-ness — and another, related thing: purity, and the despoilment thereof, which is the chief subject of Faust’s plot. And the associations with the Gilded Age seem a bit incongruous now, because Faust is not a classy opera — not classy in the slightest. If The Marriage of Figaro was the work of a master, Faust was the work of a showman with a canny sensibility for middlebrow taste. It’s all catchy tunes and gaudy theatrics, and for an opera ostensibly about the nature of evil, it has almost no interest in philosophizing or moralizing. It first circulated in a touring “comique” version closer to musical theatre, with spoken dialog. Later, Gounod fancied it up by making it sung-through, and finally, at the request of the Opéra de Paris in the late 1860s, added a ballet. For me, Faust’s closest modern counterpart is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera¹: lavish, florid, campy, staggeringly popular, and a bit silly. Even as early as Debussy’s time, enjoying Faust was a marker of unsophisticated taste, particularly since it was a simplification (or, less kindly, a vulgarization) of Goethe’s Faust, the ultra-serious masterpiece of German literature from which it was adapted.

As for the story: the legend of Faust, a learned professor who makes a pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge and/or other satisfactions, has been around since at least the 1500s. In earlier versions, Faust’s crime is similar to Eve’s: seeking forbidden, earthly knowledge and rejecting religious teachings. Gounod (via Goethe) gives us a more Enlightenment-friendly version: it’s not the pursuit of knowledge that makes Faust bad; it’s sex.

In Goethe’s version, Faust promises the Devil that he will serve him in the afterlife if — and only if — the Devil can grant him a single moment of pure, transcendent happiness, a moment when all ambition and striving dissolves in the desire to extend that single moment into eternity. Gounod’s version is much simpler (but less interesting): the aged Faust asks Mephistopheles to make him young again, so that he can once again enjoy sex with a young and beautiful woman. In particular, he wants Marguerite, an unsophisticated woman who is “chaste et pure.” With Mephistopheles’s help, he woos, seduces, and finally abandons her, leaving her pregnant and shunned by everyone. In the final scene, Marguerite is forgiven and ascends to heaven, while Faust is overcome with remorse.

Faust is a flamboyant opera, even by operatic standards. The character of Mephistopheles, in particular, is a great showcase for a charismatic comic singer, provided he’s not shy about chewing some scenery. This is the devil we’re familiar with from countless romantic adaptations, literary and otherwise: charming, sarcastic, fashionably (if gaudily) dressed, erudite, and seductive. The use of the cliché “diabolical laughter,” if Google Trends is to be believed, corresponds roughly with the popularity of Faust in its various incarnations, and the opera not only includes a number of scenes where Mephistopheles lets out a mua-ha-ha, it includes an entire aria built around it (see “Vous qui faites l’endormie” in the highlights at the bottom of this post). There’s also a lot of opportunity for Victorian-style stage effects: Faust’s sudden transformation from an old man into a young one, flowers that whither at the touch, a tavern sign barrel that suddenly starts spewing wine, etc. There are also scenes with opportunities for fun staging, like the “orgy scene” ballet where Faust enjoys the attentions of history’s greatest beauties (Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, etc) and a great scene, accompanied by creepy organ music, where Marguerite visits a church to pray only to encounter a choir of demons, plus Mephistopheles impersonating the voice of God, telling her she’s going to hell (also see the musical highlights below).

Oh, and there’s music. Faust has a lot of catchy tunes (some jaunty choruses, a drinking song, a famous waltz) and at least one truly great area, Marguerite’s “jewel song.”

The “jewel song” shows Marguerite at her moment of greatest happiness: she’s received a box full of jewelry from an unknown admirer and lets out a rapturous profusion of scales and trills while she adorns herself with jewels and admires herself in a mirror. It’s well in keeping with the themes of the opera that her moment of doom — the moment she loses the protections of innocence and virtue — corresponds to her new awareness of her own beauty, her own power to seduce, and her desire for Faust.

Faust is, of course, misogynistic in the old-fashioned way: women who are chaste et pure must be protected from the forces of evil, but if they allow themselves to Fall (enjoy sex out of wedlock) they are ruined. It says something about the morality of the time that Faust, when he gains access to all the powers of the devil and the ability to transgress any rule, any judgment, any constraint of moral law, chooses what is to us now a very ordinary and commonplace crime: the hit/quit. This behavior is still frowned on, of course, but for different reasons: we frown upon it because it’s selfish and dishonest, but in Faust his crime is despoiling a pure woman — thereby rendering her worthless. The worst person in Faust, by my standards, is not Faust or even Mephistopheles but Marguerite’s brother Valentin, who curses and shuns his sister for having gotten pregnant and, with his dying breath, tells her she’s going to hell.

Marguerite drowns her baby in a fit of madness and shame and, in the final act, is dying in prison. It occurs to me that this mirrors the scene in Rabbit, Run (which I wrote about back in the summer) where Rabbit’s wife Janet, herself suffering from abandonment after having refused to perform a certain sexual act, drinks herself into her own baby-drowning frenzy. I’m not sure if this is meant to be a direct reference or not, but I’m sure Freud would have something to say about baby-drowning as a go-to plot device for humiliated femininity.

After being the world’s most popular opera for decades, Faust’s popularity cratered after WWII and today, productions are much scarcer. Operabase tells me that not a single American opera company did Faust this season, which is really too bad. Because I have a general sympathy for what is campy, theatrical, and old-fashioned, despite all this I myself love Faust and think it’s great fun, and if American companies were to swap their performances of operatic mediocrities like La Cenerentola and Turandot with Faust, which is a masterpiece in its own, era-bound way, I would be delighted. It’s an opera that benefits from being performed a bit tongue-in-cheek, and directors these days mostly oblige. If you’re curious, medici.tv has two versions, including a pretty good production by David McVicar that dials up the camp, with some Fosse-inspired dance numbers.

Additional reading: “Faust and the Risk of Desire”, in the Paris Review, by Adam Kirsch.

Musical Highlights:

Il etait un roi de Thulé, followed by the “Jewel Song.” Marguerite sings a folk song about a King who dies of grief, then at around 6 minutes in discovers the box of jewelry. The "Jewel Song” proper starts at 7:20.

Avant de quittez ces lieux: Marguerite’s brother Valentin bids farewell to his homeland before going off to war in Act I. This one was also a popular hit; in later versions of the opera it shows up in the overture.

Le veau d’or: Mephistopheles entertains the drunken townfolk with a song about the Golden Calf.

Salut! Demeure chaste et pure: Faust contemplates the humble poverty of Marguerite’s home and the beauty of the woman who lives there.

Seigneur, daignez permettre: Marguerite goes to church to pray, but Mephistopheles and a chorus of demons tell her she’s going to hell.

Gloire imortelle: very catchy and rousing soldier’s chorus.

Vous qui faites l’endormie: Mephistopheles delivers a mocking serenade to the pregnant Marguerite, with diabolical laughter in between the verses.

1. Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera revolves around a production of Faust; Marguerite is the role for which the Phantom is training his protegée Christine Daaé. In Lloyd-Webber’s version, Christine and co. are instead preparing a fictional opera loosely similar to The Marriage of Figaro, perhaps because he and Harold Prince thought that Faust wasn’t familiar enough to audiences anymore to have any dramatic resonance.