Product Description
Described as a « tour de force« during the operas initial run of performances Henry Faust by Gregory Sullivan Isaacs is a three-act, one character opera based on Goëthes play as translated by Anna Swanwich (1859) with a libretto by the composer. It was premièred at the Circle Theatre in Chicago on April 11, 1993 with the Composer as Faust and Kevin Hinton, pianist
Henry Faust started out as a thought about the essence of opera. Isaacs thought that one singer, one piano, and a black box theater were all that was really needed to achieve opera-ness. Goethes play, Faust, immediately came to mind. The tale of the professor who makes a deal with the devil for infinite knowledge and the restoration of youth, only to betray himself by lust, seemed perfect.
The three-act opera is for tenor and piano and in a Goethe-era English translation by Anna Swanwick. She was the leading translator of Goethe of her day and one of the first advocates for womens rights. Every word Faust sings is a line from the play.
The opera is set in a miserable single-occupancy hotel room furnished with an iron cot, a beat-up dresser and a tattered arm chair. Faust, disheveled and in his pajamas, lives out the drama. The ensuing events, the feverish creations of an addled brain, are all real to Faust. He sees and interacts with the other two characters the devil and Gretchen and flies to hell to dance at the Witches Sabbath.
Both the tenor and piano parts are equally demanding and require artists of the first order. The tenor part covers a great range both vocally and dramatically. The piano part requires a virtuoso and musically expresses all of the imaginary characters.
SOME SELECTED HENRY FAUST REVIEWS
You can add Henry Faust to that short list of successful single-singer operas (Schoenbergs Ewartung and Poulencs La Voix Humaine) ... it proved to be a moving experience. Isaacs music, cast in traditional forms, such as fugue, passacaglia, rondo and variation, is always accessible... often strikingly beautiful, as in the Ländler that closes act two.
THE DETROIT FREE PRESS (John Guinn) - Detroit
Written in what Isaacs calls refreshed tonality, this lush, supplely intense music serves the drama well ... from the despairing agitato of Faust's opening agonies to the lyrical frenzy of his first glimpse of Gretchen to a hushed declaration of love as tender as we could wish... Isaacs' tour de force certainly has a future.
THE CHICAGO READER (Larry Bommer) - Chicago
...the first (full evening) operatic monodrama ever promises to give Goethe's thrice-told tale a fresh contemporary slant a theater piece that uses opera as its language... a prototype of a new kind of small theater piece, eminently practical at a time of reduced opera company budgets... (Isaacs) brings solid professional credits ... an experienced conductor as well as composer/performer.
THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE (John von Rhein) Chicago
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