La Damnation de Faust Aka "Where Will it All End?"

This just in: as of 12:45 pm today ,Palookaville time, Grand Opera was locked in a death struggle with Cirque du Soleil. As of 1245, it wasn't at all clear who would win.

Translation: today was the HD livecast of the Met's new Damnation of Faust (or “Folste,”as Susan Graham somewhat unaccountably insisted on calling him), as brought to you by Robert LePage, Mr. Cirque du Soleil himself, and if you've ever dreamed of seeing opera under water and up in the air, this is surely the place to start.

Granted, Berlioz needs a bit of a jump start here: Faust is a wonderful piece of music. But it' s not an opera: it's more in the line of an orchestral showpiece with voices. The music itself is lovely, but here is not much by way of character development or even engagement—some passing conversation between Faust and the devil, and one somewhat perfunctory trio, but nothing like the drama you get from Verdi or Mozart. So it invites (yields to) almost any kind of three-ring extravaganza.

When you utter the phrase “any kind of three-ring extravaganza,” the name of Robert Lepage just naturally leaps to mind. And the Met surely got what it bargained for here, what with the full deployment of just about every conceivable kind of tech toy, most of them not even invented as little as ten years ago. Whether the Met “got its money's worth” is another story. This his sort of thing does not come cheap. I am reminded of Nicholas Katzenbach, onetime General Counsel at IBM. “We have an unlimited budget for legal services,” he used to say, “and every year we exceed it.”

All this is dazzling to watch—so much so you barely have time to ask whether and to what extent it had anything to do with the performance. I'm sure I'm not quick enough to pick up on all the connections; still, I'd have to concede “probably some.” The question is not so much what you see today, but what they'll do for afters: what do they do for afters? As the inventors of the atomic bomb discovered, you give a boy a new toy and he is bound to play with it. What kind of production will we see next year that is even more loopy and absurd, even less tethered to anything in the composer's (dare one say the phrase?) original intention?

But hey, don't misunderstand he here, particularly James Levine's orchestra, and very particularly the first 20 minutes or so when Faust (Marcello Giordani) reflects back on his life, with the orchestra in conversation. Susan Graham, with the smallest of the three major roles, remains one of the most fully-realized voices on the stage today.John Relyea as Méphistophélès was good enough to keep up with them; he looked suitably menacing and I guess you'd have to be if you walked around his neighborhood with two red feathers in your cap.