Last year (see the posts of Jan. 12 and 27, 2018), I wrote a lookback article on La Forza del destino. It had to be a lookback piece because the production of Forza scheduled for the Met season of 2017-18 had been canceled. More recently (June 22 and July 6, 2018), my discussion of Don Giovanni had a Then-and-Now theme, but the Now aspect was represented not by live performance, but by audio and video recordings, which seemed to me more promising material for comparative discussion. Such choices are forced upon us with increasing frequency if we wish to find plausible representation for assessing the merits of opera’s canonical masterworks.

In the instance of Gounod’s Faust, the proximate excuse for writing about it at all is the release, on the Immortal Peformances label, of the 1937 Met broadcast of the work. This performance has had no previous circulation, and doesn’t even appear in Paul Jackson’s Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met, which has set the bar for inclusiveness—though more material keeps surfacing, as with the present issue. The ’37 Faust might appear redundant in prospect, since its three principals (Helen Jepson, Richard Crooks, Ezio Pinza) are also those of the broadcast of 1940, a mere three years along. But as I confirmed for myself in the Don Giovanni explorations, as splendid as Pinza was in 1942, he was more splendid yet in ’37, with just that extra touch of vibrancy and alacrity in this richest of Italian basso cantante voices. And I was willing to wager that the blandishing tenor of Crooks would sound that much fresher in ’37, as well.  So I had the Then of my Then-and-Now.

But after a half-hearted search through the descriptions (and a few clips) of recent CD and DVD performances, I realized that when it comes to Faust, there isn’t any Now now. It’s not in the Met’s repertory this season or rumored for the next, and I sometimes doubt that New York shall ever see it again—the Met’s record with it (an individual performance here and there aside) has been unrelievedly awful for nearly a half-century, and it’s beyond the resources of even the most intrepid and/or foolhardy of our many smaller enterprises. Its decline in popularity and critical standing has been the sharpest of any opera I can think of over the past century, particularly since WW2.^(I) Should we, then, I wondered, just let it slip quietly from view, as recent efforts and attitudes would indicate is the best course? No! Faust is a beautiful and powerful work, whose emotional charge (when adequately conveyed) keeps it relevant by definition, emotional experience being the first honest measure of operatic relevance. But in view of everything I’ve already written about Faust recordings^(II), I realized that in search of advocacy, I’d need to go backward, not forward, from 1937.