FAUST

DECADENCE, MAN, REALITY, AND FAUST’S STORY

Decadence - a sonorous word, even if it denotes decline - still retains its allure due to its French origin. This concept, style, and era - precisely the atmosphere that resonates in Vilnius City Opera’s Faust - belongs to the late 19th-century period, the time of the composer Charles Gounod. According to the production’s director, Dalia Ibelhauptaitė, choosing this era and setting (Paris) “adds a kind of magical aura to the story, allowing us to pursue a range of bold, vivid, and unconventional visual solutions, while retaining the oppressive mist of debauchery and the fine boundary that divides love from bestial passion.” Naturally, in preparing this production, there was a strong wish for a deep, thoughtful piece - and for a chance to view this well-known story from a certain distance. After all, these are universal questions we all face: What would each of us be willing to sacrifice for the sake of our dreams?

DECADENCE - A PROUD DECLINE?

Decadence characterizes the cultural and social life of the late 19th-century, whose main traits frequently recur today, preventing us from forgetting the darkest - yet most fascinating - chapters of history. Naturally, we shouldn’t rush to identify it directly with the Franco-Prussian war and the siege of Paris in 1870 - everything started much earlier.

Some will recall that as early as 1804, France saw the phrase “art for art’s sake” - a key notion for the future movement - whose main premise was the separation of art and morality. This view was encouraged by a growing disbelief in science, knowledge, moral certainties, and society’s stability, fueling a search for a new approach to life and art -putting emphasis instead on senses, impressions, and “revelations.”

This growing feeling of uncertainty reached its peak in the second half of the 19th-century - a period that gave birth to a strange European “fin de siècle” atmosphere - the feeling that the era was drawing to a close. This may have been more a coincidence than a cause - although many of us still remember a similar panic in the year 2000. Nevertheless, this ending was related more to the transformation of social reality.

In a broad sense, decadence meant decline - but by no means a simple decline of energy, talent, or moral standards. Quite the contrary - it was a time of high activity, concern, and nervous restlessness - a moment when all clear boundaries disappeared. All that is truly lost during this era is faith, hope, and opportunity.

The human condition, permeated by boredom, monotony, fatigue, and stagnation, becomes a powerful driving force for history. In this context, people do not cease to work, create, or imagine - but do so without much hope for change. In the case of the 19th-century, we find a society whose life was relentlessly advancing and constantly accelerated by the industrial revolution, a reshuffle of social statuses, intellectual innovations, and scientific breakthroughs. Accustomed to blindly trusting in the power and speed of progress, people began to view production, profits, and consumerism through a new prism - turning them into a kind of refuge and a way to control the only thing not influenced by external change: their own lives.

DECADENCE OF ART AND MAN

Decadence in art was often confused with symbolism - and not without reason. Both movements were fascinated by the mystical, the world of spirits, and their own internal worlds. The main difference is that symbolists believed their symbols revealed something greater - something essential - while decadents were simply looking for a new, different form of contact with the elusive, trusting that their activity was not real, thereby turning disbelief in reality into a supernatural or sensual quest. So is there a better place for the rebirth of the dualities of good and evil, when the main objective is an escape from reality and a descent into the pleasures of an aesthetic religion?

As R. K. R. Thornton wrote in Dekadansas vėlyvajame devynioliktajame amžiuje Anglijoje (Decadence in Late Nineteenth-century England):

“The decadent person is stranded between two opposites … on the one hand, the world attracts him, its needs and desirable allure, while on the other, he increasingly moves toward eternity, toward the ideal, toward the unspecified. This conflict forms a typical decadent subject’s main question and underpins the manners of the era… This opposition brings with it the character’s disillusionment, frustration, and weary boredom, while at the same time emphasizing another trait - irony.”

Such was the strange and multifaceted human condition of decadence. Probably, it’s not a coincidence that many details of daily life - which seem strange at first - could become ordinary during the siege of Paris (1870–71)… The isolation of the great city not only fostered a “golden age” for balloons - its only means of communication - but, with food supplies running out (including cats, dogs, and rats), it resulted in the killing of much of its zoo. And these are just small, dramatic details. What can we piece together from a broader historical perspective by looking at this?

SET DESIGNER DICK BIRD ON VCO’s FAUST IN PARIS

Paris in the second half of the 19th-century - when Gounod wrote his opera - is described as the most decadent city of its era. Baron Haussmann’s new city plan literally destroyed the medieval world with which we normally associate Faust. The poor were forced to move to the outskirts, into tenement buildings filled with factory workers from the provinces, while broad boulevards opened up at the city’s heart, designed for a bourgeois class made rich by the empire’s production.

While the middle class stayed home and kept themselves amused in their new, well-equipped apartments, Montmartre cafés and cabarets catered to an alternative society - those looking for oblivion in absinthe or moral and aesthetic refuge from the hypocrisy of church and state. It felt as if the entire city had struck a Mephistophelian deal - turning its back on its past, just as Darwin’s, Freud’s, and Marx’s new theories challenged previously held truths - in search of new pleasures, oblivion, excess, and eternal youth.

We found it intriguing to transfer our Faust into a world that is as disconnected from previous philosophies and generational teachings as its main character. Unlike Marlowe’s or Goethe’s energetic heroes, Gounod’s Faust is an elderly, dying man whose greatest wish - more than anything else - is eternal youth.

Fin de siècle Paris offers spaces that reflect both aspects of Faust’s moral conflict: strong religious piety alongside a degenerated, decadent underworld - a place where Mephistopheles can move unhindered, without suspicion.

We were fascinated by the most bizarre manifestations from the margins of this decadent world… For instance, “Cabaret l‘Enfer” (French for “Hell Cabaret”), where guests entered through the gaping mouth of a giant demon, or “Cabaret du Néant” (“The Cabaret of Nothingness”), where drinks were served in cups made to resemble human skulls, and tables were coffins - all amid skeletons and death imagery… An immense inspiration was Joris–Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature, a kind of manifesto for decadence.

The Concert Hall is a particularly wonderful space for creating a range of different scenes, moods, and locations. In this Faust, in order to bring to life the worlds of entertainment, debauchery, poverty, degradation, morality, and decadence, we used elements of 19th-century industrial architecture.