‘Sooner or later there must be a new recording of Doktor Faust’, declared MEO, welcoming the CD reissue of the 1969 DG version (8/89) – heavily cut, but with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the title-role. MEO also noted that the alternative realization of the opera’s ending by Antony Beaumont ‘deserves the currency of a recording.’ Now, later rather than sooner, we have that new recording, which not only provides the full, uncut text, as completed by Busoni’s pupil Philipp Jarnach soon after the composer’s death, but also offers as supplements Beaumont’s very different realizations of parts of the opera’s later stages. So complete is this version, indeed, that it includes the spoken prologues and epilogues, with Fischer-Dieskau providing a poignant link to that earlier recording.
The Erato recording was made at the time of the 1997 production at Lyon, which originally intended to use Beaumont’s version but finally switched to Jarnach. Given that Beaumont worked from sketches and other information of which Jarnach was unaware (or chose to ignore), there can be no question as to which of the two is the more genuinely Busonian, and the extended closing scene in Beaumont’s version has a persuasive gravity and sense of fulfilment quite different from Jarnach’s more terse yet slightly melodramatic completion. Nevertheless, it will take a sensibility more refined than mine not to be swept away by the sheer visceral power of Jarnach’s rendering of the death of Faust, and not even an ill-judged burst of manic laughter from Faust in this performance seriously compromises its effect. Dietrich Henschel displays considerable style and stamina during his two extended monologues in the opera’s final stages, and although his singing isn’t entirely free of straining for effect, or of bluster – the one point in the score where Busoni asks for Faust to convey a visionary spirit is not quite that here – the character’s tortured humanity is vividly conveyed. In those later stages, Busoni’s crumbling resistance to the epic aspects of his subject is graphically embodied in the way Faust wrestles heroically with his destiny.
Kim Begley makes a considerable success of the other principal role, although, in an ideal world, Mephistopheles would manage more variety – the loudness would be a little less consistent. But Begley tackles the many demanding aspects of the part with panache and, in the scintillating ballad, wit and menace are in perfect balance. Other parts are adequately taken, though the singers are not always responsive to the dramatic importance of often quite brief musical segments, and articulation of the German text varies in clarity and accuracy. This variability is one reason why the performance takes some time to take wing: another, more fundamental reason concerns the nature of the recording itself. This is not the first of Kent Nagano’s Erato releases from Lyon to have an element of dryness in the sound (see Les contes d’Hoffmann, 11/96). At times, principal voices are backwardly placed, and even when they are not one suspects (playing the discs at ‘normal’ volume) that the brilliance of the orchestral sound is being damped down in order to ensure their audibility, in ways which increase the occasionally opaque impression of Busoni’s harmonic writing. Maybe a genuinely live performance would have been preferable, despite the difficulties of balancing so much on- and off-stage interaction. Nevertheless, Nagano’s shaping of this extremely demanding and intricate score is neither inflexible nor inexpressive: and there is a cumulative appreciation of the music’s protean character as the opera unfolds. Doktor Faust can at last be heard in a recording, that, in the end, reaches and reveals its essence, and whose documentary value is inestimable.'