Faust
To have another chance, to be young again, to indulge one more time! That is Faust's greatest wish. Then the devil appears and promises to deliver exactly that if Faust then bequeaths his soul to him. The contract is signed and Faust plunges into a passionate relationship with Marguerite, whose innocence and naivety attract him as much as her exotic underclass origins. However, when she becomes pregnant, he chooses to abandon her. The abandoned kills her child and is executed.
Since his youth, Charles Gounod had been thinking about the plan from Goethe's Faustto make an opera. However, the French Faust has little in common with its German namesake. Gounod takes the Gretchen tragedy, treated very freely, as material for a precise portrait of the society of his time, the Second Empire with its unscrupulous lust for pleasure. A portrait that in many ways is amazingly similar to our present. Viewed in this way, Gounod's most successful opera offers us much more than a trivially sentimental love story: an enlightening and frightening look in the mirror. In this revival, Charles Castronovo sings the title role, his opponent Mephistophélès, as in the premiere, is Kyle Ketelsen, and the soprano Anita Hartig can be seen in Zurich for the first time in the role of Marguerite. With Philippe Auguin
