It is also very hard to see how the 1859 version could be satisfactorily performed today. This isn’t to say that no one should try. But it would require finding performers who could act the dialogue and mélodrame passages in some persuasive cross between the 19th Century elocutionary shtick implied by the writing, and verbal and behavioral embodiments that seem plausible to us, then carry that into singing of full operatic range and calibre. It would need to be done in a relatively small theatre (for the acting to register), with a big stage and pit. Everyone would need to perform in theatrically sophisticated French, or else in a specially commissioned translation. So I suspect we are as well off with the theatre of mind’s-eye-and-ear, as we listen to the recording we have now been given.

But there is much here that can inform us about performance of the opera in any edition. The singers of the protagonist-couple roles have perhaps the least to gain by familiarity with 1859. Faust himself seems to me to glean almost nothing that isn’t already present in the later opera. Marguerite, too, undergoes no fundamental change, but at the least should be able to draw on the scene with Valentin at the Kermesse, on the re-entry into the transformed garden, and on the more detailed exchanges with Siébel after “Il ne revient pas” to deepen the texture of her work. A Méphistophélès, I’m sure, can locate a great deal in support of playing the character as a gentleman of ironic temperament, who moves with ease through all terrestrial situations save those in direct combat with God. The 1859 Garden Scene also heavily reinforces the notion of Mephisto as interlocutor with the audience, overhearing and commenting in asides. This element still dominates his interchanges with Marthe in 1869; how far a director and performer want to take it is a nice interpretive question. As for Valentin, he might find, in the roughness and very banality of his battle song, along with its glorification of Marguerite, a source for a harder aspect to his character, an even greater bitterness to his denunciation of her.

But it is those secondary characters—Wagner, Marthe, and to a lesser extent Siébel—who can feast on what they find in 1859. In performing the grand opera, we can’t add any lines, spoken or sung, to the fragments left to Wagner, but we can fashion a much more assertive presence for him, that of a Roaring Boy who stomps through the Kermesse urging everyone to drink, buddies up with Valentin, and bawls out the beginnings of his Song of the Rat. No reason he should be an anonymous comprimario. Marthe, left with much more to do in 1869, can nonetheless fill out aspects of her personality—her bossiness, the loneliness and susceptibility underneath the comic type that plays on the surface—that are already present or suggested in the standard version. And one dearly hopes that the singer of Siébel can see in the dialogue of the opening scene a truly dazed-by-first-love adolescent, and that this might give her something to work with more urgent than the Welcome-Wagon pranciness that so often attends “Faites-lui mes aveux,” and that strengthens the quite remarkable maturing the character shows later.