It also leaves Faust in the lurch, because—and here Méphistophélès miscalculated—after the Scene 1 vision of domestic virginity waiting to be ravished and the old philosopher’s ravings about young mistresses with their caresses and desires, it develops that the minute he is exposed to these same qualities in the flesh, he begins to sacralize everything about his intended target and to enact the old chivalrous romance. Mephisto has to bar his way to keep him in the garden, scheme and improvise to ruin his penitential return to Marguerite’s house, etc.—even when he’s under the spell of his evil spirit, this male pig thing is not really in Faust’s nature. None of his behavior is believable unless Marguerite persuades us, in voice and body, of her life predicament and coping strategies.

Although several of his tempi are quick for my taste and for the singers’ comfort (Pinza could surely have made good use of a little more room in “Le veau d’or), Pelletier understands this music well, and believes in its importance. As we so often hear on Met recordings from this time, the orchestra is more alert to the nature of dramatic events than we are now accustomed to. Maestro and band, however, are much better served by the 1940 recording than by this one.

This Faust is from the era of the work’s standing as a highly repeatable international-style opera, sustainable so long as the supply of appropriate voices was adequate. In terms of projecting the music through an understanding of something we’d call its native style, though, only Crooks could be said to be really in the frame, and all the male singers, including Crooks (Jepson and Olheim are better), display one form or another of linguistic inexactitude, offering a generous buffet of foreign-born choices as to the treatment of neutral or accented vowels, nasal diphthongs, and other peculiarities calculated to raise the blood pressure of any graduate of contemporary coaching programs. So I spent a few hours re-listening to some artifacts from the last age of French grand opera singing.

This little review of the troops entailed first returning to records I knew well in adolescence, beginning with what was then the only “complete” recording available (and, historically, the first to be electrically recorded), the 1931 Paris Opera version under Henri Büsser. Its outstanding features are the Faust of the heroic tenor César Vezzani, the Méphistophélès of Marcel Journet (still bringing it in his mid-60s), and its all-native ensemble, which gave us a whiff of ethnolinguistic authenticity amid the internationalized performances we were hearing and seeing. Next, back to the acoustic days and the series of sides recorded in 1910 by Caruso, Farrar, and a younger Journet, with an assist from Scotti, as restored by Ward Marston on Naxos, and—since that grouping does not include Farrar’s singing of her solo scene—to her 1904 German-language version from her Berlin days. Since I was listening for French or French-influenced performance practice, I did not check back in with the very first integral recording, the 1908 performance in German, starring Emmy Destinn and Karl Jörn and conducted by Bruno Seidler-Winkler. But I did re-hear, in its entirety, the 1912 Paris Opera edition under François Ruhlmann, restored and re-issued in 2005 on Marston’s own label, as Volume 6 in its treasurable collection of Pathé acoustical complete operas. The cast: Jeanne Campredon (Marguerite, and a singer otherwise unknown to me), Marguerite d’Elty (a soprano Siébel, ditto), Jeanne Goulancourt  (Marthe); Léon Beyle (Faust), André Gresse (Méphistophélès), Jean Noté (Valentin), and Pierre Dupré (Wagner). Except for Beyle, a tenor of the Opéra-Comique, these were all singers regularly identified with their roles at the Paris Opera.