Cast
Katrin Cartlidge (The Woman)Paul Charles Clarke (Faustus)Derek BaileyWilliam ChubbJoanne Edworthy (Siebel)Philip Lloyd Evans (Wagner)Susan Gorton (Martha Schwertlein)Jason Howard (Valentin)Charles Mackerras (Conductor)Alastair Miles (Mephistopheles)Bob Peck (Narrator)Janice Watson (Margarita)Welsh National Opera (Opera Company)
Directors
Derek Bailey, David Jeffcock, Christopher Alden
Synopsis
Gounod's 1859 opera, staged here to commemorate Welsh National Opera's 50th anniversary, is only nominally about its anti-hero, who sells his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles. Its real subject obsessed well-to-do Parisians of its day: that of the 'Fallen Woman'. It was a prurient society, fixated with sex; convinced that every woman had her price; awash with prostitution and disease; suffused in male sexual hypocrisy. This was the time of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Nana; and of the paintings of prostitution by artists like Manet and Degas. These Traviata-like themes, that permeate the opera, are picked up in its interval entertainment, "Fallen Angels."
