Faust’s Guilty Conscience and Other Crimes Against Opera

by Janet Tassel (January 2012)

Here is McAnuff himself, explaining, sort of:

from a ravaged city to a puzzling image of cascading designer roses, to a mutilated baby (complete with silly sound effects of baby crying), to the mushroom cloud itself. One video is an enormous study of the hapless Marguerite’s face, an ironic homage to the true subject of the tale (in Germany, the opera used to be called Marguerite) and perhaps McAnuff’s own mea culpa.

And the years have brought us only worse. As Heather Mac Donald writes:

Finally, we watch helplessly as politics completely annihilates opera. In a perfectly straight-faced review of a new DVD from the August 2011 Opera News, we read:

But as we have seen, it could, and indeed might, be worse.

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