The Musical Coast / 2: Faust: A theatre that feels like music

Abstract

I cannot identify any one particular influence as being solely responsible for my embarking on a new operatic treatment of Faust. It seems rather to have been the result of a convergence of ideas and directions from all parts of my life and career as a composer. As a P.K. (Priest’s kid) in Vancouver I spent many a rainy Sunday morning pondering over whether God really wanted me to go to church or not. Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to know the truth, even as I harboured a growing suspicion that there may not be such a thing. My heros became those figures in whose torment I saw a confusion similar to my own: Cain, Judas, Pontius Pilate, Noah’s drowned friends, etc. I remember driving my father crazy with questions about them. I still do. Only now he shrugs in the places where he used to have answers. I would ask him “Why doesn’t God just appear in the sky waving a big sign – ’This way to heaven’?” It all seemed like such a riddle to me. It seemed only natural to challenge God for the definitive answer, but as I grew older I became paralysed by what seemed to me an endless array of ’human’ answers to these questions: “Sit on a rock and stare at the sun all day”; “say thirty-five Hail Marys and count your beads”; “be a vegetarian and recycle”. Who is right? And assuming that there is one right, is everyone else wrong?