Renowned tenor makes 'Faust' role debut in TSO concerts

We caught up with tenor William Burden last week as he was getting ready to make his Tucson Symphony Orchestra debut singing the title role of Berlioz's concert masterwork "The Damnation of Faust" this weekend.

This is the first time Burden has ever sang the role, although he has extensive experience singing Faust in Gounod's opera of the same name.

Burden said Berlioz's concert setting lends itself to a broader exploration of the characters, something that gets a bit lost in the opera. 

"A lot of the storytelling is both implied and I think Berlioz expected his audience to have an understanding of the story so that he could kind of get a little more into the heads of the characters," he explained.

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Here are excerpts of the interview with Burden, who has been singing professionally with opera companies around the country since 1992, and his thoughts on the piece.

On the character: "What is most appealing to me about the character of Faust is what is considered just basic humanity. He is the character who falls prey to sort of all of the pitfalls that we as human beings going through this life experience can fall prey to. Faust kind of hits them all. And you see him at the beginning of the story at a point very late in his life where he is reflecting back with regret at his youth being lost rather than with a sense of gratitude for all that he's done. And that I think is one of the most human and natural and normal responses to aging. I think we all sort of struggle with if only I could be 20 again. … With hindsight, what would we do differently and how would we experience life differently. It's that very normal discussion about aging that I think we all struggle with some times. And Faust is an incredible literary example of that. And he makes really bad choices because of his sense of regret."

How Burden, who will turn 50 this year, can relate to Faust: "He is so enchanted with youth and life and energy and vitality and wants so much as an old man to experience that again. I see in him a man who is desperate to recapture what he is not satisfied to experience in memory."