THE THINKING MAN'S THINKING MAN.(opera singer Thomas Hampson)

Thomas Hampson, who returns to the Met this month in Busoni's Doktor Faust, is an obsessive perfectionist with a restless intellect. He'll understand if you want to ask somebody else out for a beer.

The wags used to call the Metropolitan Opera the Faustspielhaus. It was Gounod's pretty, sentimental, essentially superficial ode to Goethe that opened the old house in 1883, and the tale of the rejuvenated philosopher and his devil dominated the repertory for many a mellifluous decade. The same protagonist popped in and out of the repertory periodically in the more gutsy guise devised by Boito. Now he's back in yet another incarnation--a subtler, more troubling, more intellectual incarnation courtesy of Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni. Virtually typecast as Doktor Faust is Thomas Hampson, the thinking person's baritone.

Hampson first undertook the daunting title role in Salzburg during the summer of 1999 in a celebrated -- some say revelatory -- production directed by Peter Mussbach, designed by Erich Wonder (sets) and Andrea Schmidt-Futterer (costumes). The same quasi-abstract conception now introduces Busoni's ultimate magnum opus to the Met.

The Salzburg premiere of Doktor Faust represented a triumph for Hampson. "Every production of Busoni's masterpiece stands or falls with the singer in the title role," wrote Jurg Stenzl in the Berliner Zeitung. "Thomas Hampson made memories of all other interpretations fade. His singing is fantastically beautiful, accurate, uncommonly expressive and remarkable for its textual clarity. This singer becomes Doktor Faust and Ferruccio Busoni at the same time, and he manages the feat with magnetic force." The American critic Glenn Loney summed it up in New York Theatre Wire: "Thomas Hampson holds the entire production together -- as Busoni obviously intended Faust should."

"I love the opera," Hampson declares. "It's dark, it's philosophical, it's psychological. It isn't the sort of experience that allows you to just walk in, sit back and let it happen. But if approached properly, it is extraordinarily rewarding." The vehicle that Hampson describes as "a forgotten pearl" seems to have been staged in New York only once before, in a version conducted by Christopher Keene and conceived by Frank Corsaro and Ronald Chase at New York City Opera in 1992. Mussbach's Doktor Faust is radically different. He has universalized the subject, refocusing the central conflict as the composer's own. He sees the narrative as a bleak internal voyage and explores Faust's dilemmas in essentially intellectual terms. The worldly hero and his otherworldly adversary, it could be argued in this context, are mirror images, one and the same.

"Can we call it Eurotrash? That's a delicate question," says Hampson. "If we must use that label, it's Eurotrash in the best sense." (Pressed for an example of Eurotrash in the worst sense, he winces, then cites the reportedly cluttered, hyper-arty, multimedia Cosi Fan Tutte staged by Hans Neuenfels in Salzburg last summer.)

Although Hampson found the Busoni opera a revelation, he admits that the inherent challenge proved all-consuming. "Faust possessed me for the last two months of the recreative process," he recalls, "and wonderfully so. It was a culmination of a lot of reading and writing and beliefs that I very much identify with. I wouldn't call myself a Faustian personality, but there's so much that can be learned here. It means so much to me in an ecumenical way and in a spiritual way."