Busoni: Doktor Faust [Blu-ray]

I thought I would never get to see this modern classic as it is almost never performed. And for good reason; as Thomas Hampson says, it's unsingable. Still I loved the performance although I admit that I took it in small doses over a couple of days. It's a philosophical mess and pretentious (something only a turn of century German could have done) and far from lovely to hear. I have a recording so I've listened several times, and was prepared. The music is not atonal, but it is not melodic either; that said it provides wonderful opportunities for expressiveness. Just so long as you don't expect to leave whistling an aria, it's not a hard listen -- no worse than Wozzeck , for example (an opera I dearly love). Hampson is wonderful, both singing (although who could tell whether or not he was accurate) and great acting with face and body. The production is interesting and basically engaging. With all the faults of libretto and music it is an opera worth pursuing. I liked it despite its flaws as an opera. Glad I bought it, and I'll probably watch it again in a year or two.

I have had no prior exposure to Ferruccio Busoni's music. I have never seen this opera before. The experience was awesome. I was so amazed by the music and the performance that I watched it twice. The music itself is haunting with its rapid transitions between major and minor. The set was very modern but it "worked". Unlike many operas the women play a minor role and the opera succeeds, or fails, on the abilities of the two male leads. Gregory Kunde, playing the role of Mephistopheles, was particularly engaging. The image quality was excellent -- the colors had good saturation; the image was sharp throughout. The image choices by the video director enhanced the viewing experience. The sound (I listened to it with the dts-HD master audio setting) was encompassing with a good frequency range. Art Haus Musik has become a major source for operas in blu-ray. I have a number of their offerings and have been pleased with all of them. This is a direct contrast to the recent offerings by the Metropolitan Opera Company who have recorded a number of operas in high definition but has, to date, released only standard DVDs without the sound quality that can be obtained with Blu-ray. My experience with opera on blu-ray so far is that the sound is clearly better, the image marginally so.

I first discovered this masterpiece on a DGG CD and have longed for a decent video rendering. This is far better than I could have ever imagined with an outanding performance by Thomas Hampson. Hampson speaks excellent German and has really worked himself into the part. The rest of the cast are also very good and both the picture and sound are excellent. Treat yourself to a rare gem, it is most unlikely to appear again for a while and it is really a most wonderful opera deserving of wider popularity and more frequent performances. Strongly recommended.

Note: an expanded version of this review, with photos and musical examples, is available at my Schellsburg Web site (the link is in my profile).As musical innovators go, Busoni talked a great game. His little book from 1907, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, was very forward-thinking and influential, and as a teacher Busoni mentored many progressive musical thinkers from Varèse to Grainger to Weill. Busoni's own music, though, has struggled to overcome a reputation as conservative and bland -- neither as memorable as its great Romantic predecessors, nor as intriguingly original as its great modernist successors. Busoni has often been typecast into a kind of in-between stylistic ghetto analogous to that occupied by Janácek before his recent heyday. I myself carried this prejudice into my first encounter with Doktor Faust, whereupon I was delighted to discover that musically and dramatically it blows away any other major Busoni composition. It's still not at the level of Wozzeck, Oedipus Rex or Bluebeard's Castle, but given a sympathetic production it can hold its own with most other first-generation modernist operas.Although Busoni was Italian, he lived much of his life in German-speaking countries, and Doktor Faust is set in that language. Busoni worked on the opera from 1916 through his death in 1924, and never finished the text nor the music for the work's ending. In Busoni's libretto, which he adapted himself from mostly pre-Goethe sources, the character Gretchen is marginalized (and indeed isn't heard at all), whereas we do encounter the Duke and Dutchess of Parma, the latter getting seduced by the magician Faust. Some have criticized the libretto as rather shallow. And although there are two completed editions offered by two different musicians, there's still much conjecture about exactly what might have happened to the title character had Busoni been able to give him an authoritative denouement.Musically the opera reflects Busoni's late, modernist-influenced style, and much of the music specifically reminds me of early Hindemith (the nattering student debate that opens the Wittenberg tavern scene could have come out of  Cardillac ). The music accompanying the gift of the magic book by the three "students" is drawn from Busoni's Piano Sonatina No. 2 (where it's written without bar lines), and features some of the most dissonant, atonal chords in the composer's output. The opera calls for the large orchestra typical of its time, including triple woodwinds, mallet instruments and organ. The latter instrument is featured prominently in the first intermezzo, which is set in a church (whose organist might as well have been Charles Ives, for the very chromatic and assertive solo supplied by Busoni). Orchestral players, along with choristers, are often positioned offstage and otherwise spatially distributed in elaborate ways, and this production actually used four conductors in total (though only Philippe Jordan is visible). As for the voice types, Busoni makes the "obvious" choice of a baritone for the title character. But the use of a tenor in the role of Mephistopheles is a great innovation: instead of the stereotypically deep and "sinister" bass voice you hear in Boito or Gounod, Busoni's devil is a conniving "whiny" character, sounding not all that different from Wagner's Mime (though without the latter's incompetence).This production omits the spoken Prologue and Epilogue (though it still clocks in just under three hours). It also uses, controversially, the older Jarnach completion, rather than the newer Beaumont edition, which significantly changes the ending, both dramatically and musically. To hear what you're missing, you should buy  Kent Nagano's 1998 recording , which gives you the option of either conclusion. As an aside, I might mention Jossi Wieler's admired 2004 production for San Francisco Opera which dispensed with completions altogether, leaving the ending ambiguous. In his "bonus feature" interview, conductor Jordan reveals that he prefers the musically cumulative and "augmentative" effect of the Jarnach version. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, the ending is musically stunning in this production. Mephistopheles speaks the final line "Sollte dieser Mann etwa verunglückt sein?" ("Could it be that this man has had an accident?"). Then the opera ends on perhaps the most colorful E♭ minor chord (or is it D♯ minor?) ever scored, its changing timbres suggesting that whatever Faust's final attempts at good deeds, his ultimate end is non-redemptive.Any production of Doktor Faust revolves heavily around its two lead singers. Thomas Hampson has set the bar for the title role since 1999 and seems at home at Zurich, which turns out to be the base for his vocal coach Horst Günter. Though born and educated in America, Hampson is comfortable discussing the opera in German as evinced by his interview (the second of the two bonus tracks). As for Mephistopheles, tenor Gregory Kunde, another American, clearly relishes this rare opportunity to play a bad guy.The recorded sound is quite good. I was pleasantly surprised with the balance between voices and orchestra. The only engineering regret is that the orchestral sound is occasionally flat. In their defense the technical crew had to deal with offstage choruses and offstage musicians (voices are always coming out of nowhere, Busoni emphasizing the supernatural), not to mention the large orchestra. The live footage from 2007 also reveals the admirable discipline of European opera audiences who allow the most delicate of scene endings to be heard (North American audiences would be applauding as soon as the horizontal curtains started to close).In the history of musical adaptations of the Faust legend, Busoni's opera stands as an important bridge between the Romantic (in various senses!) endeavors of Berlioz, Gounod and Mahler (all followers of Goethe), and the less sentimental postmodern approaches of Schnittke, Pousseur, Dusapin and even Stan Brakhage in his Faust Film: An Opera. At present, this Jordan/Grüber production is the only video representation available of this important but seldom mounted 20th century opera. Hats off to Arthaus for bringing it to us.

Soldi ben spesi, ne valeva la pena averlo, ottima qualità in tutto, audio, video, messa in scena, cantanti, orchestra, ecc.