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SPOLETO: opera Faustus, The Last Night
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FESTIVAL REVIEW Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C. through June 10. www.spoletousa.org
Charleston, S.C. — There’s a strain of contemporary music that’s essentially dead in America, but still holds dominion in Europe.
The latest in what might be called “emotional French modernism” had its U.S. premiere here at the Spoleto Festival USA, the international-calibre arts jamboree that runs through June 10.
French composer Pascal Dusapin’s 2006 philosophy-meditation opera “Faustus, the Last Night” is a masterpiece, although not one for everyone. Several people in the audience noisily left the Sottile Theatre after more than an hour, not realizing it lasts just 90-minutes. Everybody else roared their approval for the performers and, joyously, for the tall, long-haired, black-clad Parisian composer.
The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut — whose playful sense of intellectual adventure and shrewd observations on human nature would have made him of a kindred spirit with Dusapin — might have called “Faustus” an opera “unstuck in time.”
Dusapin created a seamless, English-language libretto culled, one snippet at a time, from Marlowe’s morality tale and countless other sources including Shakespeare, Beckett and George W. Bush.
The opera has essentially no plot yet doesn’t suffer from a single slack moment. In David Herskovits’ clear production, the soul-selling Faust has already used up his earthly time. It’s now the last night, under a starry black sky. Our anti-hero is an everyman taken to perverse extremes. Sung by baritone John Hancock, he’s charming with a debonair voice and also a bully who demands to learn the secrets of creation. He’s ambitious to gain knowledge that, ultimately, won’t help him where he’s going. His life, in short, might have been a complete waste.
And he’s grown so close to his keeper of all these years, Mephistopheles — like a victim bonding with his kidnapper — that he’s given him a pet name, “Meph.” (That the devil is another low voice raises the likelihood that Dusapin intended the whole opera to unfold within the protagonist’s mind, a study in madness, although the director never touched the idea.)
Bass-baritone Stephen West, dressed in a Halloween devil suit — bright red satin with matching stockings — sang with Italianate lyricism, softening his character’s edges. He’s fed up with Faustus, like an underworld bureaucrat eager to find a new work assignment.
David Zinn created the costume of the year for high-flying soprano Heather Buck, as the blind angel who offers spiritual advice that goes unheeded. Buck’s voice is sweet and precise, and her diction remains clear no matter how florid (or twisted) the vocal line gets. Her costume? It was the Louvre’s “Winged Victory” come to life in soft gold hues, of giant feathers and body-hugging silks.
Two lesser characters never make sense, and that’s perhaps their function. Togod (an anagram of Godot, sung by another baritone, Daniel Mobbs) and Sly (a fellow transplanted from the prologue of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew,” sung by tenor Adam Klein) delivered their parts with assurance.
Musically, the first half-hour introduces the man-devil relationship as atonal, brutal, disorienting. But that psychic fog clears in a musically symbolic moment, with the orchestra — exactingly conducted by John Kennedy — rumbling way down low (bass clarinet and cellos) and piercingly high (piccolo). We get the core of the earth and the heavens, but no middle, no voices in a comforting human range. It’s a few minutes of scorching, transcendent beauty, which Dusapin returns to (slightly altered) at the end of the opera.
When Faustus says, “I do not remember who I am” and Togod answers the doomed man’s life-long quest for knowledge with a definitive, “There is nothing,” we hear Dusapin meeting expectations for a contemporary composer-poet-philosopher from Paris, where existentialism and proud intellectualism never went out of fashion.
When play-it-safe American opera companies program contemporary works, they tend to cling to familiar story lines (often from classic novels and movies) backed by familiar-sounding music that. for better and worse, might not be out of place in movie starring Tom Hanks. “Faustus” is the anthesis of that trend. Credit Spoleto Festival USA for discovering a knotty new classic, and for trusting its audience.
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