Dr. FAUST jun.

The academic Dr. Faust is sick and tired of working as a teacher, especially as he deeply regrets having introduced classroom teaching in his private school. How is he, as a man of advanced years, supposed to explain the human anatomy neutrally to young men just entering or going through puberty? And when the attractive, flirtatious Margarete is smuggled into the class by her brother Valentin and shows off the charms of her blossoming femininity, it all gets too much for Faust: It's time to be young again, and the devil incarnate helps him to achieve it. For the gift of youth, he does not ask for his signature in blood or even his soul; he simply demands Faust's intellect – and that is quickly sold …

A good sixty years after the publication of Goethe's "Faust" and a decade after the first performance of Charles Gounod's popular opera of the same name, the composer Florimond Ronger, alias Hervé, brought his "Dr. Faust jun.", a merciless parody of the two noble "classics", to the stage of the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques in Paris. With the French title of "Le petit Faust", he and his librettists Hector Crémieux and Adolphe Jaime created a bitingly comic Offenbachiade on the famous motif of the surly academic and garnished it with lively, sparkling, turbulent music full of catchy tunes. The Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz is presenting this almost forgotten crowd puller from 1869 in cooperation with the August Everding Theatre Academy and the University of Music and Performing Arts, Munich.