Searching for Faust’s voice

As in the case of many nineteenth-century French vocal works, one of the main obstacles to a performance of Hector Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust lies on the tenor-role: like his contemporaries, Berlioz conceived the role of Faust for a type of tenor voice that disappeared during the nineteenth-century, and that, consequently, is extremely difficult to recreate nowadays. Such a voice is required to possess at the same time considerable souplesse in the middle register for the most lyrical passages, a soft top register (to be reached mostly with the so-called voix-mixte, and by no means with stentorian strength as has become customary in more recent years), and yet with enough power to face Berlioz’s massive orchestration. During the twentieth century, few important tenors have taken up Berlioz’s challenge: if we skim through the…