DOKTOR FAUST. Music and libretto by Ferruccio Busoni. Production by Peter Mussbach. With Katarina Dalayman, Robert Brubaker, David Kuebler and Thomas Hampson. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Philippe Auguin. Attended Monday's opening. Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center. Repeated on Friday, Tuesday and Jan. 20, 25 and 29.

FERRUCCIO BUSONI'S opera "Doktor Faust" is deeply respected and rarely seen. Seventeen years in gestation and still incomplete at the composer's death in 1924, an obsessive visionary's magnum opus finally emerged onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera Monday night, in a production that seemed sure to send the work scuttling back into the shadows.

Busoni's libretto, based not on Goethe but on 16th-Century puppet plays, is grimly high-minded, his music belabored to the point of rigor mortis. The opera opens with more than an hour of throat- clearing-two prologues and an intermezzo before the first core scene (not counting a spoken introduction that Busoni wrote and the Met omitted). It then slouches reluctantly toward midnight, postponing the final curtain with oblique soliloquies and slow-motion processions. A few episodes might potentially come alive -the contrapuntal melee between drunken Protestant and Catholic students and the humorously stately cortege that ushers the Duke and Duchess of Parma toward a blighted wedding day.

New York City Opera staged this murderously difficult work with a certain ramshackle nobility and breathless flair in 1992, raising hopes that a little more money and a surer hand on the podium might really make it shine. The Met has spared no expense in stultifying the work, assiduously obscuring most of whatever qualities the score has.

Director Peter Mussbach introduced himself to the company with a wintry, slag-colored production first seen in Salzburg in 1999. Mussbach interprets "Doktor Faust" as a hallucination, which allows him to conjure up a surrealistic vision that doesn't square with the score's academic solidity. Faust and Mephistopheles wander stiffly through a black-and-white fantasyland dressed in long, gray coats and matching fedoras. Every so often, the stage spews smoke, snow or fire. On one painted flat, a dramatically foreshortened room is carpeted in fluffy clouds, on another, a nighttime landscape resembles an enlarged computer chip. Occasionally, a note of unintentional realism intrudes: The curtain comes up on graying piles of snow that look exactly like those currently decaying on the sidewalks of New York, which undercuts the dreaminess.

When James Levine pulled out of conducting "Doktor Faust," pleading sciatica, the opera lost the man who brought it to the Met and who might have made a more powerful case for the score. Philippe Auguin bravely agreed to make his company debut under these inauspicious circumstances, took over rehearsals with only a few weeks' notice and promptly caused the first performance to sink into quicksand. Busoni's frequently stark, nocturnal orchestration blurred into a mass of soft, velour sound. Intentionally or not, Auguin applied Mussbach's dream concept to the music, indulging in somnolent tempos and smudging the composer's exacting counterpoint.

Undeterred, Thomas Hampson sang the title role with his usual action-hero bearing, but his performance, like Busoni's music, wound up sounding lethally studied. Faust is alternately defeated and manically self-satisfied, but Hampson never abandoned his diplomatic equipoise. Robert Brubaker, his voice gaunt and angular, was more convincingly Mephistophelian, but the part's grueling demands got to him, and he spent a bad 10 minutes croaking.

Katarina Dalayman took the opera's only female part-the Duchess of Parma-and brought a welcome respite from so much baritonal sobriety, mooning over the unlovable Faust. The Met's intrepid chorus made most of its (sometimes inaudible) contributions from offstage, but when it materialized, it did so with customary gusto.