Carles Gounod’ Faust after the Goethe tragedy enjoys pride of place among the operas that captured Russian hearts back in the 19th century. The opera almost immediately gained popularity in Russia. The Bolshoi Theatre staged the first version in 1866, just seven years after the Paris premiere.
Faust is quite literally part of Russian and Moscow opera culture. Among the exited admirers of this piece was a young doctor who later became a famous writer and playwright, Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). Gounod’s opera is a recurrent character in Bulgakov’s work, and it is mentioned in the novel Master and Margarita.
The Novaya Opera Theatre presents its Faust in the year of the 150th anniversary of the opera’s Moscow premiere, and of the 125th anniversary of Mikhail Bulgakov’s birth. In this production, made by stage director Ekaterina Odegova and dramatist and opera critic Mikhail Muginshtein, Goethe’s and Gounod’s characters will possess recognizable Moscow features.
Says Mikhail Muginshtein, Dramatist:
The German-French matrix Goethe-Gounod will appear not only in the traditional way, but also in a dialogue with Bulgakov’s “faustianism” (when a student, the writer saw the opera41 times!). The culturology of the novel /Master and Margarita/is in many aspects determined by Bulgakov’s specific projection of Goethe and Gounod onto the Moscow ground. The coincidence of the heroine’s name, Margarita, is quite deliberate (the German opera has the same name). Allusions with an inner ring are also obvious: Goethe’s tragedy is reflected in the novel not only directly, but also through the mock mirror of Gounod’s opera (there are a number of peculiarities). Inspiring are not the parallels, but the intricate optics of the novel: interreflections of the semantics, playing with time and space (Satan “was at Pilate’s, and he was also at Kant’s for breakfast, and now he is paying a visit to Moscow”), avoiding simple linear action, etc. It is not that easy to re-intonate “the most operatic opera”. Making play around /Faust/’s clichés, an attempt can be made to accentuate again in the myth of European culture the ever-relevant problems: “human condition in the world”, the eternal choice between good and evil.