DVD : Busoni - Doktor Faust [2006]

Rating: - A noble effort.
Along the years, there's been some argument in the musical press whether Busoni was a great composer or if he rather was, as Richard Strauss's own pun on himself, a first class second rate one. Well, this work, one of the most intriguing operas written during the 20th Century, is indeed a very serious argument towards establishing Busoni among the great composers. It has been slow in gaining recognition since its premiere in 1925, with all too infrequent performances, a kind of cult item that saw the stage, alongside Pfitzner's Palestrina and Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, only in solemn, festive occasions and mostly in the German-speaking orbit, the three works characterised as they are by an aura of deep philosophic content, in their different approaches dealing with the struggle of the creative artist in an hostile environment; of the three, Doktor Faust is by a notch becoming the better known, with gradually less infrequent performances during the last 15 years or so. London's first staging took place only in the 1980's and New York's the following decade, in a pioneering event at NYCO that the Met only followed in the 2000's.

The Zurich performance shown in this DVD is an all-round successful, certainly not a great one, though resting heavily on two pillars, the first being Hampson's tour-de-force portrayal of the title role and the other Jordan's work in the pit. The performing version used is the standard Jarnach (whose otherwise exemplary job in the missing bits has as much of Busoni as Alfano's for Turandot has of Puccini, that is, nothing) completion, yet in the supplementary material conductor Jordan explains in an interview why he opted to leave aside Beaumont's alternative in spite of its use of "new" original Busoni material that emerged in the 1980's. I have a few quibbles with the rather silly make-up of both the three Cracovian students as well as of the Wittenberg ones, and the production is rather unimaginative for a work so laden with the fantastic and esoteric, but those observations need not deter you from an otherwise fascinating glimpse of a remarkable work. Collectors that came to know the opera from DG's 3-LP set from the 1970's, with Fischer-Dieskau's phenomenal Faust will keep referring back to that set (it was for a time available in CD during the 1990's) for sheer enjoyment. I don't know Nagano's early 2000's Erato CD set, recorded concurrently with Chatelet performances that are rumoured to have been put onto video tape but never issued on VHS or DVD, but those younger ones with a feel for the off-the-beaten-track repertoire will do well in snatching this 2-DVD set from the racks of music shops (as I did at Barcelona's FNAC) as soon as they see it and get a feel of this fascinating, always intriguing music. That it is, in its condition of being a work left unfinished by its author, a somewhat uneven one is true, but so is also its roughly but radically different contemporary, Turandot.

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Rating: - Great performance; dull production
It has been a long wait for Busoni's 'opus ultimum' to appear on DVD and at long last here it is. Doktor Faust desperately needs to be seen as well as heard becuase, though un-Wagnerian in all other respects, it is a true 'Gesamtkunstwerk' uniting all the arts in an idealised vision of magical theatre.

Does this production satisfy expectations? Well, yes and no. The singing and playing are uniformly superb: Hampson, Kunde, Trattnigg are magnificent and the Chorus and Orchestra of Zurich Opera House under Philippe Jordan play and sing their collective socks off in this (literally) diabolically difficult music. Buy it for the performance of nothing else.

The production by Klaus Michael Gruber though is hugely disappointing: leaden, pedestrian, dull and - dare one say it? - Swiss. Anyone who remembers the legendary David Pountney ENO production from twenty years ago will be sorely disappointed by this. Where magic is called for, cheap effects predominate (or sometimes no effects at all). When Faust summons the six spirits, Busoni calls for flickering flames to hover in mid-air. What do we get? Half a dozen random objects, which look as though they were bought at a junk shop, lowered down on wires. Faust's magic show at the court of the Duke of Parma amounts to nothing more than a couple of people on chairs coming up through the floor. A dismembered torso in an upturned bath pops up in the final scene without explanation and the action at very end of the opera, where Faust supposedly transfers his soul to the dead child before expiring himself, is entirely incomprehensible in this production.

The camera work does it no favours. Evidently crucial stage features are often left frustratingly out of shot, close-ups of the performers are often in half shadow and the gaps between scenes are crudely edited (and in one case, unforgiveably, in the middle of a scene - where the whole thing momentarily stops mid-phrase). It's sloppy. And when will these companies please stop putting looped musical excerpts as background to the 'play' menu of opera DVDs? It is incredibly distracting and totally unmusical.

There are a couple of extras: a brief interview with the conductor and a much longer, and fantastically pretentious interview with Thomas Hampson, who free-associates in German to squeals of delight from the (largely female) audience.

So a curate's egg. Great performance; boring production. Buy it anyway as it's a masterpiece and it's the only one available on DVD.

Incidentally, they do the Jarnach ending, not the Beaumont. Less Busonian, but more theatrical - if only the director had seized the opportunity!