Schumann's "Faust" in Antwerp: night vision of childish innocence

Just as Moaning Myrtle in the "Harry Potter" novels inhabits an indoor wetland with an unappetizing smell, so do the lemurs - spirits of the dead, after all, just like Moaning Myrtle - at the end of the second part of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's " Faust” the “rotten dump”, which ultimately has to be “pulled off”.

And it is one of the unsettling features of Robert Schumann's imagination that in his setting of the "Scenes from Goethe's Faust" he demands for the lemurs: "To be cast with boys' voices, if possible".

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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It's not just boys who sing the lemurs in Antwerp when conductor Philippe Herreweghe and director Julian Rosefeldt stage Schumann's Faust, but it's the children's choir of the Flanders Opera.

And the pale, glassy sound of the girls' and boys' voices is absolutely spooky in this context.

In addition, the solo valve trumpet blares out of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra like a troop commander at a parade of child soldiers.

The baritone Sam Carl with his perfidiously haunting, alluringly manipulative timbre drives the lemurs together as Mephisto.

Just what did Schumann see and hear there?

It is a horror image of the childlike from the master of the "Children's Scenes" and the "Album for the Young", an anti-idyll from the panorama of ages:

Perforated monumentality

Herreweghe turned 75 on May 2nd.

Belgium is rightly celebrating this anniversary in a big way.

The “Faust”, which can be seen in Antwerp until July 2nd and then in Ghent, where Herreweghe was born, from October 28th to November 4th, is part of this festival.

Herreweghe, who became famous as a Bach interpreter, has been dealing with Schumann for a long time.

And while his recordings of the Schumann symphonies with the Orchestra des Champs-Elysées a decade and a half ago were still characterized by the fascination of thousands of small details in articulation and dynamics, one now hears a greater concentration on the "tone", the character of the pieces.

The orchestral sound is transparent for diverging courses at the same moment, which at the same time stand for contradictory feelings.

The overture already conveys – like the beginning of the violin concerto composed a little later – the impression of force, the mere assertion remains and collapses.

Herreweghe does not cement this riddled with monumentality, for precisely the tumbling and torn element of this music stands for the dubious sovereignty of Faust himself, who is often more the acted than the acting.

Yoga, tai chi and soft drugs

And in the first "Scene in the garden", the seduction of Gretchen, Herreweghe's 12/12 time is not taken "quickly", just as Schumann demands, so that a trepidation can be heard in the light.

That is Schumann's paradoxical tone: wistful joy, sad euphoria.

Later, when the “four gray women” appear, Herreweghe savors those sound effects of gothic hollowness in the coupling of piccolo flute and bassoon that Schumann may have overheard from Hector Berlioz, whose music he had attested to leave behind a sulphurous stench.

The Collegium Vocale Gent sings the Requiem in the first part with horrid blaze and the long chorus mysticus at the end in the tender semi-darkness of a poetry of suggestion, but always breathing carefully, respecting Goethe's verse and sentence structure.

Rafael Fingerlos, currently one of the up-and-coming baritones, especially in the song, is slightly unhealthy and as Faust he withdraws a bit, whereby he succeeds a lot: "In the colored reflection we have life" he sings quietly and forebodingly, with a timbre that has become likeness, knowledge is not exaggerated to triumph.

As Gretchen, Eleanor Lyons has a silvery, radiant, powerful soprano that always remains lyrical.

As Marthe, Zofia Hanna manages to create a kind of tonal complicity with Mephisto in brief moments, the cunning.

The tenor Ilker Arcayürek provides blissful moments of floating as Ariel in the midst of the overwhelming sunrise music.

Julian Rosefeldt as a video artist and director, together with his choreographer Femke Gyselinck, the costume designer Birgitt Kilian and the set designer Sammy Van den Heuvel, set the "Faust Scenes" in a kind of neo-hippie commune for yoga, tai chi and soft drugs.

The gymnastic-spiritual self-discovery exercises are contrasted on a screen with films about space debris and the exploration of extraterrestrial celestial bodies.

In the process, the externally guided Faustian urge to explore has a fatal ultimate goal: interplanetary homelessness and devastation.

“Faust's Transfiguration”, on the other hand, leads back to a blissfully stoned forest community doing group eurythmy.

The internally directed research thus brings stage and screen to coincide: immanence and transcendence as a

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