Opera: Outrageous, but Good

The curtain goes up at the New York City Opera to reveal a familiar old figure in flowing medieval robes. It is Faust, and as usual he is pulling at his beard and pondering the mysteries of life. But there is something else. His study is not filled with the customary books. The room is no philosopher’s retreat, but the laboratory of a medical scientist. Two operating tables stand in the shadows, and on one of them lies a corpse. Stealthily, two grave robbers arrive with yet another body. As Faust takes the clammy wrist of the fresh cadaver in his hand and sings his first word, “Rien!” (Nothing), it becomes clear that Gounod’s famous Faust has been given an eerie new look.

Determined Spoiler. Faust is usually done as a Victorian morality play in which the Devil rightly gets his due. The New York City Opera’s new production at Lincoln Center is a chiller in which an obstinate Mephistopheles stands as a towering match for the Almighty. From the moment when he first springs to life in Faust’s laboratory, it is readily apparent that this is a Devil who bursts with the power of his own evil. He taunts God endlessly, even pulling an arrow brazenly from the chest of a statue of St. Sebastian to make wine flow from the wound. The new Faust might even be called Mephistopheles, so outrageous is it in its affront to operatic tradition. Yet it works because its theatrical departures are brilliantly conceived and its characters, for once, are almost believable.

The man responsible for the transformation is Stage Director Frank Corsaro, 43, who believes that operatic tradition is often nothing more than a catalogue of yesterday’s clichés. As he showed with his productions of La Traviata and Madama Butterfly, Corsaro is a determined spoiler when he confronts the creaking plots of traditional opera. If he wants to bring on familiar characters at unexpected moments, he does so. If he decides to invent minor characters, he does that too.

Corsaro has the broadest theatrical background of any American director now working in opera. He plays the self-doubting undertaker in the new Joanne Woodward movie, Rachel, Rachel. His play, A Piece of Blue Sky, was done on TV in 1960. On Broadway, he directed A Hatful of Rain and The Night of the Iguana. What all this experience has given him is the confidence to look at an opera as though nobody had ever staged it before.

Sneaky Monk. When City Opera General Director Julius Rudel asked Corsaro to stage Faust, he got a wild-eyed stare in return. “I loathed Faust,” Corsaro admits. “In fact, I’ve started off by basically disliking every opera that I’ve done so far. They all seemed like such old salami.” But as he began thinking about it, he became fascinated with the prospect of doing Faust as a grim Gothic tale in which sheer horror and grizzly humor intertwine. He decided to introduce Mephistopheles in different guises that would fit credibly into each scene. After materializing first as a cadaver, the Devil appears later as a gypsy fortuneteller, then Don Juan, then a soldier of fortune. Next, Corsaro threw out the lurid, last-act Walpurgisnacht scene, the ballet sequence that always draws laughs everywhere but in Paris. Finally, poor Marguerite dies on the gallows instead of escaping to heaven.

Corsaro also concluded early on that he was not going to be influenced by Gounod’s score, either. “It’s sweet, it has charm and grace, and it’s romantic —but it can bend any number of ways,” he explains. Fortunately, Soprano Beverly Sills (Marguerite), Tenor Michele Molese (Faust), Bass Norman Treigle (Mephistopheles) and Conductor Rudel were on hand to see that it did not bend too much. Some traditionalists felt that it was going too far to deprive Marguerite of her usual departure for heaven in full view of the audience. But Corsaro decided that angels, bells and harps would be too much of a fantasia for the modern viewer. Instead, Marguerite gains redemption by accepting the last rites from a priest just before the noose is placed over her head. It gives the ending a biting irony that fits in perfectly with Corsaro’s overall concept, and most of those present agreed with Soprano Sills that the director had justified his radical ideas. Said Sills: “If you can convince someone that an old chestnut like Faust is real drama then that’s living theater.”