There’s a great deal to disapprove of in Gounod’s Faust. It breaks down a pillar of western literature and whisks up what remains into a flouncy French fancy. It turns the hero’s famous striving into mere lust — for a virginal heroine who is cursed by one and all (‘Marguerite! Sois maudite!’, runs the rather-too-catchy refrain), then saved, in a mawkish, tacked-on finale, by celestial powers. It has a ballet, set pieces, jolly choruses and all the unfashionable niceties that Parisian opera in the mid-19th century required.
To distinguish and distance it from Goethe’s play, the Germans used to call it Margarethe, which also reflects the fact that, despite all the Mephistophelian trappings, this is essentially a standard operatic narrative of a pure woman’s destruction and salvation. But David McVicar’s 2004 Royal Opera production seems to realise this: he wisely opts for an unapologetic, gleeful romp that revels in those trappings and emphasises the piece’s theatricality. Sometimes it goes too far, and all the extras — flooding the stage like attention-seeking street entertainers — can get tiresome. But its great achievement is that, without being preachy or portentous, it also brings a genuine darkness to the work — not least in a gruesome Walpurgis Night ballet.
It helps, of course, that the Royal Opera now casts the opera luxuriously, and here Bryn Terfel returned as Méphistophélès to lord over the whole thing magnificently — over-the-top, snarling and cynical, communicating the text with characteristic relish. Anna Netrebko had pulled out a month before the opening night — to no one’s great surprise — having apparently decided Marguerite wasn’t right for her. The Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva stepped in, singing with richness and lyricism, and acting movingly. Her Faust, Joseph Calleja, seemed a little out of sorts: the slight bleat in the voice was more troubling than usual, and the phrasing was occasionally lumpy and ungenerous.
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