In Munich, Faust gives birth to Mephistopheles, an over-sized, evil twin in red rubber gloves. Black magic or the product of a fevered mind? A little of both.

For his new staging of Busoni’s Doktor Faust, Nicolas Brieger works with the composer’s unfinished score. At the end the music simply stops and the last lines are spoken. Just as Faust fails, so does Busoni. Both Philipp Jarnach (in 1925) and Anthony Beaumont (1985) wrote completions of Busoni’s score, but a performance of the incomplete version is startlingly effective in its own right.