Faust, May 2025 | divamensch

I saw Gounod's Faust at Heartbeat Opera on May 23, 2025. Heartbeat is the company that did the wacky chamber arrangement of Salome I saw in February, with the eight clarinet players and two percussionists. I classified that as a fascinating experiment. I was intrigued to see their next show was an adaptation of Faust.

I read somewhere that the Germans were so put out by Gounod's opera, they felt it besmirched the honor of their beloved Goethe. Turns out Gounod based his opera on a French knock-off of Goethe, Faust et Marguerite by Michel Carré. My hunch is that Carré took a probing work of literature and made it into an exciting night at the theatre. Blasphemy.

Faust was the first opera performed at the Met. It was done 673 times in their first hundred years and only 79 times since 1990. Makes you wonder why it fell out of favor, while many other operas from around the same time have gotten consistently more stage time, more frequent new productions:

La Bohème, 1406 performances

Aida, 1208

La Traviata, 1055

Carmen, 1041

Tosca, 1021

Rigoletto, 943

Madama Butterfly, 918

Faust, 752

That's quite a drop from 918 to 752. All of these operas have gorgeous music, juicy drama, ample opportunities for the singers, and nothing too challenging for the audience. Carmen is the only other opera on the Top Eight that's not in Italian. My hunch is that Faust feels a little hokey and old timey compared to the other seven. It's also interesting to see how that list plays out in terms of composers - - the six Italian operas have three by Verdi and three by Puccini. Their work is chalk and cheese but clearly they both get butts in the seats.

Heartbeat has been around for ten years and they've established their brand doing standard rep operas in unusual chamber settings and arrangements. This chamber arrangement was done by Francisco Ladrón de Guevara, who told us in the program notes that he and Heartbeat artistic director had been friends since 7th grade! How cute is that.

I was happy (nay, relieved) to see that Ladrón de Guevara chose a more colorful and flexible ensemble for this show than had been used for Salome. Eight pieces total:

Violin/mandolin (this guy was also the conductor)

Flutes

Clarinets/saxophones

Trumpet

Harmonium

Piano

Cello

Bass/electric bass

I raised my eyebrows at a few pieces in that band (and that's how they were listed in the program, as The Band). Saxophone? We think of it as a jazz instrument but it's used quite a bit in classical music. It weaves its melancholy way through Massenet's Werther and Ravel's orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition.

Electric bass? This was one of the most exciting moments in the show. Director Sara Holdren gave the show a contemporary setting and wrote brand new dialogue in English (the music was still sung in French). Early in the show we see Marguerite at home, singing "The King of Thule" to herself. In the Heartbeat production she was listening to a Walkman and quietly singing along with "The King of Thule," which had a sparse pop music vibe with prominent use of the electric bass. The singer sang in a breathy, nonchalant pop style. It was a bold choice and totally delivered.

Harmonium? What even IS a harmonium? It's a pump organ. Here's what Ladrón de Guevara said about it:

"The chance to write for harmonium — once a ubiquitous household instrument, and used by the great arrangers Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, in their famous arrangements of Johann Strauss, Debussy, and Mahler — turned out to be incredibly fun and a great way to convey a new and unique idea for the piece."

The harmonium had a solo appearance in the first scene, when we see Faust as an old man in his study. Its distinctive wheeze was delightful and enthralling.

Let me talk about the singers. Orson Van Gay II played Faust. He has a medium sized, pleasant, somewhat wiry voice. His French wasn't awful but not great, either, far from idiomatic. He sang French with an Italian accent, which was how Franco Corelli and other Italian tenors sang in French. Clearly it didn't do them any harm, neither did it hurt the music. His high C in his first aria was totally secure and he held onto it for a nice long time.

Here he is tossing off nine high Cs in an aria from Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment. You can get a good sense of his rather generalized French.

Rachel Kobernick was Marguerite and much more my jam. Her French was very good and her voice was full, ripe, and expressive. She was completely committed to the production, as were all of the singers. She was more dramatically engaged than Van Gay, which might be part of the reason why I liked her more. Here she is singing Musetta's Waltz:

One funny thing I want to mention. At one point late in the show she raised her arms in an appeal to God or similar. When she raised her arms we could see one of those plastic little ports that people with diabetes sometimes have affixed to their skin. I hadn't seen that onstage before. It made me think of a story I heard about Stefan Zucker, an opera expert. He went to New Jersey sometime in the 70s to see a production of Aida. The soprano was an Italian making her American debut. She raised her arms in an appeal to God at the end of her first aria and when she did the audience gasped because she had hairy armpits. In the next performance she raised her arms and what they saw were two Band-Aids.

Here's my girl Leyla Gencer doing that aria in Verona back in 1963. We see neither hair nor Band-Aids under her arms. That girl was a pro.

Mephistopheles was played by John Taylor Ward. He had a nice voice and an elegant bearing. He knew how to work his costume. My favorite singer was Alex DeSocio as Marguerite's brother, Valentin. I wrote one word in my notes: DREAMBOAT. Nice looking and oh dear Lord what a gorgeous voice. Here he is singing the ultimate baritone dreamboat showpiece, the prince's "I love you" aria from Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades. The whole aria is stunning and worth listening to but if you have other things to do today I'd urge you to go to the money note at 3:33, the ascent to a high G. Swoon.

I don't think I've inserted a GIF in one of my reviews but this is a great time for one:

A few other highlights from the production: they used puppets here and there. Faust mentions the glories of nature (or similar) in his first big aria and the director had the silhouettes of two-dimensional hand puppets projected onto a scrim - - a bird, a bunny, a squirrel. It was both goofy and touching. There was another amazing scrim moment near the end of the show. Faust and Marguerite had a big love duet. They were placed in front of a large silk scrim that covered much of the stage. The surtitles were projected onto the scrim, that was a nice touch. Faust and Marguerite were lit so shadows of their profiles were projected onto the scrim within a circle of light - - but then we realized that it wasn't Faust's profile we were seeing, it was someone else, because even though the singer was standing still his shadow was moving towards Marguerite and wanting to kiss her. That was an unforgettable moment of theatrical magic.

The opera typically ends with Marguerite being redeemed and rising up to heaven. The music conveys this with not one but two key changes, a Manilow moment of supreme indulgence. Here are Renata Scotto, Alfredo Kraus and Nicolai Ghiaurov chewing up the scenery in the finale. Who knew that Kraus had such shapely legs? And no extra charge for the Japanese subtitles.

The way Scotto slowly crumbles to the floor overcome by religious ecstasy, that's acting, baby.

The Heartbeat production did things a little differently. For one thing there was no chorus - - the choral finale was sung by the lead singers (Siebel, Marthe, Faust, Valentin, Valentin's friend Wagner, and Mephistopheles) from offstage. Marguerite was in her prison cell, the prison walls disappeared, and she turned around and started slowly walking upstage. There were two panels at the back of the stage which split apart to reveal a row of ten or so spotlights in a vertical line shining directly at the audience. I saw so many hands go up to shield their eyes! I did not, I wanted to be bathed in the same luminous glory as Marguerite was.

But the show wasn't over yet. The panels closed and Marguerite walked to the left side of the stage, which was set up to be her back yard. She and her two gal pals (Siebel and Marthe) were apparently having a picnic. Marguerite had a baby nearby and she smiled over at Faust, who was visible only to her from behind a scrim (Faust himself was in hell at this point, paying his debt to Mephistopheles). There was no music or dialogue for this little staged postlude but we did hear crickets chirping. Again, theatrical magic.