La Damnation de Faust review – Hawking walks and snails mate in mawkish opera

Opéra Bastille, Paris
Alvis Hermanis’s self-absorbed production gets it all wrong, but you can’t fault the singing in this star-studded version of Berlioz’s tricky work

Even Berlioz didn’t know how to categorise La Damnation de Faust. On the title page he erased his original designation, Opéra de Concert, in favour of the more romantically inscrutable Légende, later Légende Dramatique. To put this episodic and far from inherently theatrical work on the stage is therefore not easy, although both Harry Kupfer and Terry Gilliam have pulled it off in recent decades in London.

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