The Damnation of Faust
Barbican
Rigoletto
ENO
Berlioz called La Damnation de Faust ‘an opera without decor or costumes’, which is what I quite often wish all operas were. But as David Cairns writes in his characteristically illuminating but tendentious programme notes, ‘It is an opera of the mind’s eye performed on an ideal stage of the imagination; we see it more vividly than any visual medium could depict it, except the cinema (which it at times anticipates).’ That last interesting thought apart, I wonder if my visual imagination is defective — I suspect that it is. Anyway, I don’t find, on the whole, that I do have vivid images during Damnation, and certainly not of a Hungarian plain, Auerbach’s cellar, and so forth. The ‘Ride to the Abyss’, on the other hand, is without question one of the most terrifying and visually evocative passages in the whole of music, but is in a different category from the rest of this uneven work.
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