When Mozart is reliable, and Berlioz provocative (2)

As I already noted, with this production La Damnation de Faust received its first performance in Chicago. Because of the absence of a local tradition or already established visual expectations of the audience, this was the perfect occasion for the Lyric to propose a staging that broke the conventions of traditional opera mise-en-scène. Indeed director Stephen Langridge conceived a spectacle that, just as Berlioz’s music in its time, was at the same time highly virtuosistic and utterly innovative. Not only he did update the plot, setting the vicissitudes of Faust in East Germany during the Cold War, but he successfully matched his ideas to the musico-dramatic structure of Berlioz’s work, using twenty-one solo dancers as connecting presence between the several episodes of the plot. The transformation of Faust into a computer engineer was…