Gounod: Faust

Description

Charles Gounod (1818-1893)FaustFaust, the fourth of Gounod’s operas, was first staged at the Paris Théâtre Lyrique on 19th March 1859. Recitatives were later added, with a ballet to fulfil the requirements of the Paris Opéra, where the work was staged in this expanded form ten years later. The libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré is based on Carré’s three-act play Faust et Marguerite, itself derived from Gérard de Nerval’s translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust. Various cuts were made during rehearsals for the first performance, in which the role of Faust was eventually taken, at short notice, by Joseph-Théodore-Désiré Barbot, Marguerite by Caroline Carvalho and Méphistophélès by Emile Balanqué. Valentin’s second act Avant de quitter ces lieux, a French version of the English Even the bravest heart may swell, added for the London English production of 1864, is here omitted, and was derived by the composer from a melody heard in the Prelude. The Walpurgisnacht ballet scene, added for the Opéra, is also omitted, as it often is in stage performances.In his autobiography A Mingled Chime Sir Thomas Beecham gives an account of the lucky part that Gounod’s Faust played in his own career. Waiting for a chance to introduce an opera of his own to the impresario of a newly established touring opera company in 1902, he found himself called in to provide a piano accompaniment for a soprano who had not brought her music with her, auditioning for the part of Marguerite. He was able to accompany her from memory and when it turned out that he knew all the operas planned for the season and had accompanied the impresario himself in a series of favourite tenor arias, for which he offered increasing praise, he found himself engaged as second conductor for the tour. His services to opera in England were very considerable, from the days of the Beecham Symphony Orchestra before the war, to the foundation in 1915 of the Beecham Opera Company and in the 1930s an association with Covent Garden. Having lost control of his London Philharmonic Orchestra, which had become self-governing, Beecham established his own Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946, after war years spent largely in New York. In the same year Covent Garden re-opened, not under Beecham, who had had artistic control until 1939, but under Karl Rankl.Beecham naturally used his own newly formed orchestra for his recording of Gounod’s Faust, calling on the services of singers that included the French baritone Roger Bourdin, who was to spend some forty years in the service of the Paris Opéra-Comique from 1922 until his retirement in the 1960s and had appeared at Covent Garden in the 1930s as Pelléas to Maggie Teyte’s Mélisande. He was lucky to be able to engage Geori Boué, a distinguished soprano, who had sung the rôle at the Paris