Unfair to 'Faust'?
By CHARLES REID
In choosing to open their 1964-65 season with Gounod's silver-gilding of Goethe, the Wells management did no more than accede to a peren- nial craving; and to hell with superior people, like Brockway and Weinstock, who tell us that Gounodian melody is merely a yearning, cloying upsurge of 'ecstasy and prurience.' On the first night, old Faust hands settled down with an almost audible smacking of lips. They came away scratching their ears' uncertainly. To say that Glen Byam Shaw's is a new production laugh- ably understates the case. In collusion with Leonard Hancock (translator) and Colin Davis (conductor), he has jettisoned and innovated right and left, giving us what amounts to a basic reconception.
Things jettisoned, optatively or high-handedly, are the Prelude, Valentine's 'Even bravest heart,' Siebel's 'When all was young and fair,' Mar- guerite's Spinning Song and the Walpurgii Scene. Act 4 is startlingly simplified and rejigged. It begins with a salvaged scena, rarely done, it seems, even in France, in which Marguerite nar- rates Faust's desertion. She tells how they ,knelt hand in 'hand before the cradle; how she felt her lover's hand turn cold as ice; how, under Mephistopheles's domination, he abruptly rose
and left her. This insert fills a big motivational gap in the libretto as commonly sung. Into the bargain, it is absorbing music.
Instead of switching, as Gounod prescribed, from cottage precincts to the inside of a church, the entire act is played on the church steps, a rum pitch for Mephistopheles's Serenade which, like all such, should be sung under the girl's window. There are four other main departures from or additions to operatic text or custom. It is Mephistopheles, not Faust, who duels with Valentine. Yet Faust is the killer in the end; he stabs Valentine in the back. The whole of the Church Scene is transposed from the forepart of Act 4 to the end. Under the combined stresses of Mephistophelian taunts and liturgical har- mony, Marguerite visibly goes mad and knifes her baby. I can imagine how Patti wbuld have railed, rolled her eyes and flung up her hands if asked to enact so ghoulish and bloody-handed a curtain.
On the whole, she would have been right. Gounod's music, although first-rate of its sort, is too creme caramel for new-fangled horror treat- ments of this kind. There are other excesses. As everybody knows, Marguerite, while condemned to hang, is wafted to heaven before the hangman can noose her. That, considers Byam Shaw, is no reason why we should be spared the gallows. During the prelude to the Dungeon Scene, he, has a working party stagger across the stage with an outsize gibbet on their backs. Brutal overseers urge them on. The effect smacks at once, of The House of the Dead and the auto-da-le scene in Don Carlo. In compensation, the blue-, and-blond angels of the Apotheosis are posi- tively edible, wings and all. When, just before the final curtain, they came alive, I felt cheated.
Happily, there is no room left for analysis of the singing, which was excruciatingly unstylish on the first night. On the second night, things improved, although the Faust, Mr. Remedios, was still indefensibly singing falsetto notes above the stave. 1 counted five of them.
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