DOKTOR FAUST'S LAB PARTNERS.(Brief Article)

JOHN W. FREEMAN introduces the team behind the Met's first-ever production of Busoni's opera

The idea that knowledge leads man into sin and error is as old as Adam and Eve. When Ferruccio Busoni finished the text for his last opera, Doktor Faust, the darkness of World War I had started to engulf Europe. Small wonder the composer was thinking in terms of the Dark Ages: he based his opera on a puppet play from the sixteenth century. Faust, like Don Juan, has a long history on the stage, and Gounod's Faust, one of several operas on the subject, has been a repertory staple. Busoni's version, however, is a rarity.

For its first performances of the work, the Metropolitan Opera is using a co-production first seen at the 1999 Salzburg Festival. The director, Peter Mussbach, is a Renaissance man well equipped to deal with an intellect as wide-ranging as Busoni's. During studies in voice, piano and stage direction, he also pursued interests in literature, philosophy, musicology and art history. Going on to study sociology and law, he also became a doctor of medicine, specializing in neurology. In pursuit of his other, nonmedical career, he studied conducting and began to work in the theater. Since 1973, he has staged and/or designed opera productions for several theaters in Germany, in Holland, in Belgium and at Salzburg.

Mussbach and his designer, Erich Wonder, took Busoni's word for it that Doktor Faust sprang from a puppet play. Busoni had quite specific beliefs about opera as a theatrical form. Uninterested in either Romanticism or verism, he declared that "A story in which characters sing while they are acting must be devised from the outset to be incredible, unreal and improbable." The idea of a love duet was anathema to him: "There is nothing worse to see and hear than a small man and a large lady raving together melodiously and holding each other's hands."

In a note for the 1999 Salzburg Festival program book, Mussbach starts with the idea that "Everyone has read about Faust and in daydreams has identified with him. Busoni's Faust is a prototypical one. The map of his journey is traced darkly and knows but few happy moments.... Faust's journey is an autistic one. We have to relate its story as we would a daydream ... a journey inside his head, not in the outside world." Mussbach sees the action of the opera as a fantasy of someone who has read various accounts of the Faust story and has identified with it.

For Busoni, the attraction of the Faust legend lay in its exploration of duality, which the composer saw as an essential characteristic of human character and artistic endeavor. Mephistopheles is ...