A preliminary note: The full-length Porgy and Bess Roundtable of June10, produced by Joseph Horowitz’s Post Classical Ensemble, with a distinguished panel that includes yours truly, has now been posted, and is available to those of you who missed the original chat. You will find it here, and will then need the following password: 1O^%=0=Y. To skip some irrelevant warm-ups, start the video at 2:20. It’s well worth a look for anyone interested in the work and many of the issues, artistic and social, that crowd around it. And to today’s topic: 

While the musical and dramatic changes involved in reverting to the 1904 version of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, discussed last week, are significant, they pale in comparison to those necessitated by a return to the 1859 edition of Gounod’s Faust. The motivation for the revisions made in these two enduringly popular works were different. Puccini’s were undertaken to rescue his opera from the storm of criticism that attended its premiere—criticism that owed much to the operatic politics of the time, but which obviously hit on some of the composer’s own dissatisfactions with his work. Gounod’s had to do with re-shaping his already-successful opéra-dialogué, first performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris, to fit the presentational practicalities of other opera houses, first in Germany and the French provinces, then at La Scala, and finally at the Opéra itself (1869) in full grand opera form, complete with ballet. It amounts to a transformation from one music-theatre genre to another, though with much of the original music retained in the process.

Parts of the1859 Faust, notably the participation of Siébel and Wagner in the opening scene, have surfaced on previous recordings, and even in our familiar1869 version there have always been questions, in both staged and recorded productions, as to whether or not to include the “Spinning Wheel Scene,” and if so whether or not it should comprise Marguerite’s “Il ne revient pas,” Siébel’s “Si le bonheur,” either or both; as to which version, if any, of the Walpurgis scene to include, etc. In Sir Thomas Beecham’s 1947-48 recording with the RPO and singers of the Opéra Comique, Valentin’s “Avant de quitter ces lieux,” conceived in English (“Even Bravest Heart May Swell”) for Santley at the London premiere, was excised, as was once common practice in French houses apart from the Opéra. But the new recording emanating from the Centre du Musique Romantique Française at Venice’s Palazetto Bru Zane is the first to essay an inclusive return to 1859, with its stretches of spoken dialogue and mélodrame and its extensive additions, subtractions, and revisions of musical numbers. It also embraces the use of period  instruments. And while at first glance it seems odd to find this opera as No. 22 on the impressive list of French Romantic rarities that have to date been committed to disc by Bru Zane, as my readers will recall, I’ve considered Faust among the missing in action for some time now (see “MIA–Gounod’s Faust, 1/4/19).

I think it’s best to begin by listing and briefly characterizing this version’s departures from the familiar 1869 Faust, before evaluating the effects of each and of the performance itself. I’ll pass over the relatively minor changes that occur in the orchestrations of a few of the musical numbers common to both editions. I should add that the score I’ve used for comparisons is the full score published by Dover (1994, reissued 2013), which is a compendium drawn from three  sources (all much earlier, but undated) issued by Bote & Bock, Berlin; by Chappell & Co., London; and by Mapleson Music Publications, N. Y., together with some incidental apparatus provided by Dover’s editors. It is not the same as a full-blown critical edition, but is very useful all the same, including both Louis Schindelmeisser’s Dance Music for the Walpurgis episode (a curiosity, apparently used by some German companies for a time) and Gounod’s own ballet music; and Siébel’s brief intrusion into the Garden Scene (between the Quartet and Mephistopehélès’ Invocation), in which he comically interacts with Marthe and Mephistophélès.