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Opera Review

Polish Your Hooves When the Devil Calls a Tune

A new Deutsche Oper production of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust,” led by the German choreographer Christian Spuck, had its premiere in Berlin on Sunday.Credit...Bettina Stoess

BERLIN — “In the name of the Devil, dance,” Méphistophélès orders his minions in Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust,” and they follow suit with a sprightly minuet.

If any opera is begging to be directed by a choreographer, it is this one. Dance is in its DNA: not just in the Minuet of the Will-o’-the-Wisps called for by the malignant Méphistophélès, but also in well-known sequences like the spirited Rakoczy March and the lilting Ballet of the Sylphs.

So it was not much of a surprise when the Deutsche Oper turned to the German choreographer Christian Spuck to lead a new production, which opened here on Sunday. In the last decade, he has directed three operas at smaller houses, including Gluck’s similarly dance-heavy “Orphée et Euridice.” This was his opera debut in Berlin.

One of many musical adaptations of Goethe’s play, “La Damnation de Faust” is a work traditionally given to directors with untraditional opera backgrounds and visual flair, from Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera to Terry Gilliam at the English National Opera, probably because it is not quite a traditional opera. Sumptuous yet strangely flat, it is a hybrid work, a kind of oratorio that Berlioz called a “légende dramatique” and intended for concert performance.

Since the work was never meant to be staged, its scenic requirements could be impossibly fanciful, culminating in a furious horse ride toward hell. And the challenges are not just logistical. While a concert setting flatters the colorful, graceful score and forgives the muted interpersonal drama and abstracted characters, the work is often less satisfying when staged, remaining on the cool side.

Mr. Spuck, 44, deals with the work’s emotional coolness by pushing the action deeper into Faust’s mind and imagining the plot as endless layers of fantasy. The merry villagers are here reimagined as a mass of ominously black-clothed, yellow-pigtailed goblins in disguise, yet another iteration of Méphistophélès’s demonic forces. Marguerite emerges after Méphistophélès brandishes a doll version of her in an echo of the automaton lover in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.”

Conducted by Donald Runnicles, the Deutsche Oper’s music director, with particular sensitivity in lyrical passages, the production had a mood of internal reverie from the moment the curtain rose on a stage-filling raked disc, with some wintry trees near the back. (The sets and costumes, evoking Elizabethan ruffled collars, 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century furniture, were designed by Emma Ryott.) Faust sat forlornly on the floor, watched by two men — one black, one white, but otherwise nearly identical physically — sitting a ways off from him. The dance they eventually started, an exercise in mirroring, may have been a projection of his divided self.

Oddly enough, one of the least convincing aspects of the production was the choreography, which struck some standard modern-dance poses — a gyrating shiver of the spine here, a sideways scamper with knees bent there — and rarely felt original or organically connected to the music. Berlioz’s work is undoubtedly a capacious hodgepodge, but Mr. Stuck made elements of it seem arbitrary. Some of the attempts at whimsical stylization, from the toy-soldier-ish Rakoczy March to the mimed sex in the early scenes, came across as glib, as did the tiny half-timbered houses of Marguerite’s village. The race to hell featured two jarringly bright video projections of animated horses, below which dancers enacted slow-motion wrestling scenes.

As happens too often in operas directed by choreographers, the dancers and singers seemed to occupy wholly different aesthetic realms. In Auerbach’s tavern, the setting for a scene of blasphemous conviviality, the chorus (which sang with rich-voiced gusto throughout the performance) was chortling in old-fashioned bonhomie when some male dancers began to slide over and around the tables: It was as if Paul Taylor’s company had suddenly turned up in a sports bar during the Super Bowl.

The only performer who seemed entirely at home in this intriguing but scattered miscellany was the young mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine as Marguerite, who sang with creamy strength and authority. Lively even when asked to walk like a somnambulist, she sounded plummy and penetrating and acted with stylish commitment in “D’amour l’ardente flamme.”

If anything, she stood out as overly vibrant in an otherwise mellow cast. It was appropriate that the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, as Faust, began the opera slouched against a small desk, since he has the voice of an overgrown schoolboy: uncannily pure, focused, slender and plangent but largely without resonance or depth. His sound is among the strangest in opera today, with top notes that sometimes pinged out, bell-like, and sometimes were squeezed. He sang with remarkable poise in the aria “Nature immense” but seemed less comfortable in the duet with Marguerite.

Mr. Vogt has been extremely effective as Wagner’s Lohengrin, a role that works well with his otherworldly voice and gallant looks, complete with long blond hair. But he seemed less natural executing Mr. Spuck’s moody vision of Faust; instead of having an internal quality, his affect often registered as detachment.

The baritone Samuel Youn, even with his strong, solid voice, lacked the suavity and charisma for Méphistophélès, particularly in a conception of the plot as various figments of his imagination. But he gamely executed his sly little shimmies: As a nondancer in a choreographer’s production, he did the opera world proud.

“La Damnation de Faust” repeats on Thursday and continues through June 1 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin; deutscheoperberlin.de.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Polish Your Hooves When the Devil Calls a Tune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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