Faust (Gounod)

So after I watched Poplavskaya and Keenlyside in Don Carlo, I asked for the DVD for my birthday (watch this space, because of COURSE I have Opinions) and then I went to Met on Demand and to my RL opera friend and asked both of them for everything they had with either of these guys. (...google tells me that Poplavskaya is a NY realtor now?? okay, if it makes her happy, but man, she was good)

As a result, I've now watched two back-to-back Gounod Fausts. The first was on Met Player, with Jonas Kaufmann as Faust, René Pape as Méphistophélès, and Marina Poplavskaya as Marguerite, and transposes Faust to a shiny 20th-C laboratory where he is a scientist. The second was a borrowed DVD of a ROH production with Roberto Alagna as Faust, Angela Gheorghiu as Marguerite, and Bryn Terfel as Méphistophélès (which it turns out I have actually watched before from Netflix, back when I had Netflix) and transposes Faust to 1870's Paris.

This opera is hard for me to watch, knowing what is going to happen to Marguerite by the time Act V comes around. Marguerite becomes pregnant by Faust, is abandoned by him and by everyone else -- except Siebel, maybe? Her brother Valentin challenges Faust to a duel and is killed, cursing Marguerite and blaming her for his death. As a result she goes insane and kills her baby, and then is condemned to death. (She attains salvation at the end, I guess, but that's a pitiful consolation given that if Faust hadn't seduced her she would presumably have been saved without having to go through all of that terribleness first.)

The opera seems almost to me to be about the limitations of divine power... everyone's always asking God to save him or her, and He doesn't. (To emphasize this, in the ROH production, the soldiers come back from war in their big Soldier's Chorus limping and bandaged.) He doesn't save Marguerite from Mephistopheles' second-hand seduction via Faust, or Valentin being awful to her, or going insane, or being condemned to death, or even Mephistopheles scaring her, despite her praying a lot. (I suppose -- if you were Valentin being awful -- you could make a case that when she gives in to Faust that she invites these consequences, but the opera makes it very clear that it doesn't subscribe to that interpretation, and that Marguerite is just about blameless in the whole thing.) Interestingly, there is an intimation that Marguerite's love in the medallion she gives Valentin saves him from harm, and when he throws it away it allows Mephistopheles to kill him.

Why does Valentin get to make that choice as to whether he wants to be protected, and Marguerite doesn't? I think there's a thread here of "[She] saved others; [herself she] could not save" -- a human being can make the choice to help or hurt another, but Gounod/Barbier/Carre's God (Goethe's God? Have only skimmed vaguely through Goethe -- I don't think the medallion thing is in there, though) isn't going to interfere with what humans (or even devils) choose. If Faust had chosen not to seduce Marguerite, or to stay with her (or even not to have summoned the devil at all), or if Valentin had chosen to be kind to her rather than awful: then Marguerite would have been able to make a choice as to whether to accept it. But God won't force any of them to make the right choice, even when it means taking away someone else's agency.

In principle I very much agree with this, and it is in keeping with the fundamental principles of LDS theology (my theological feelings and LDS theology are not necessarily always in harmony, but they are here), but in practice I'm totally appalled and feel that God should definitely step in here. Which is honestly pretty close to how I feel about real life.

Various other random thoughts:
( On Mephistopheles, Alagna's cuteness, and Terfel in drag, among other things. )