Bryn Terfel lords it over ‘Faust’ magnificently

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.