Unsettling power in the Bay City

“Where can I get a drink around here?” asks a fox in a field. “I wait for judgment,” declares a bearded man.

These are the stark images with which San Francisco Opera is advertising Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” and Busoni’s “Doktor Faust,” its two new June productions. The ads accurately tell us that opera in the War Memorial Opera House has an edge.

That edge has been the mission of Pamela Rosenberg, now finishing her third season as the company’s general manager. Both productions are mature and disturbing realizations of major 20th century works. And the fact that they could be seen back to back last weekend (“Vixen” on Saturday night and “Faust” on Sunday afternoon) was a vivid reminder that San Francisco really isn’t like the rest of America, where opera as ideas, let alone as a window on inner anguish and frank sexuality, is significantly less welcome than in Europe. Not for nothing has Rosenberg, an American who headed the bold Stuttgart Opera in Germany for many years, been accused of promoting Eurotrash.

“Vixen” and “Faust” do, indeed, come elaborately dressed in trendy overseas trappings. In San Francisco, Leos Janacek’s amoral, pantheistic vision of the animal kingdom is far removed from the cartoonish productions that attempt to turn it into children’s opera (in hopes that parents won’t notice the critters’ unblushing lovemaking). Ferruccio Busoni’s mystical masterpiece, which questions the very nature of knowability, is shockingly presented as a single, draining descent into degradation and self-destruction.

But what makes these productions such powerful theater is that not only are they visually exciting and dramatically arresting but they also have been lovingly prepared musically and are outstandingly cast. Those who come to “Vixen” for the singing alone, for instance, won’t be disappointed, not with Dawn Upshaw as the Vixen, Thomas Allen as the Forester and Dagmar Peckova as the Fox.

The temptation to be cute in “Vixen,” what with its adorable and free-spirited protagonist, may be insuperable. Certainly a hip young British production team (director Daniel Slater, set designer Robert Innes Hopkins, lighting designer Simon Mills and choreographer Aletta Collins) couldn’t avoid it. But they are also capable of brilliantly perverting Janacek’s concept.

Rather than have animals stand in for humans, they treat humans as proto-animals. Seated at an empty table in an old Czech bar, the Vixen becomes a vixen (in fox-lined coat). She drinks in the stares from an old Forester across the room. The walls of the bar fall away. Sexually energized, she enters into an erotic dance fantasy (enacted by doubles) with the young spirit of the Forester.

From this moment on, it seems as though all experience makes the Vixen more alive. The Badger canes her and she gets that much perkier. The love duet with the Fox is supercharged.

The humans as animals are marvelously grotesque -- especially the chickens -- often looking as though they might have stepped out of a Diane Arbus photograph, had Arbus’ sensibility been a bit merrier. Everything works. Upshaw is radiant; Allen, profoundly moving; Peckova, vibrant. The large cast functions as a superb ensemble. Alexander Polianichko’s conducting sparkles. I doubt that San Francisco Opera has ever been better.

“Doktor Faust” is a lot trickier to pull off. Though highly regarded in Germany, Busoni’s opera -- which he left not quite complete at his death in 1924, the same year “Vixen” premiered, and which was the culmination of his life’s work -- can mystify an operagoer not attuned to the genius of this composer’s mystical intensity. Busoni’s Faust is not Goethe’s dreamer and seeker of the Romantic ideals of love. He is a doer, a seducer. His occult quest is more for the power to unleash his demons than for knowledge.

For their production, director Jossi Wieler and dramaturge Sergio Morabito remove the occult altogether. Faust lives in the squalor of an abandoned factory. Onstage throughout, he spends much of the opera splayed on his grungy mattress. When we first see him, he looks as though he couldn’t sink much further. It turns out he can, and for the next three hours he does nothing but.

Anna Viebrock’s fabulously decayed set and bizarre costumes are studies in ways to unsettle. The contrasts are sometimes outlandish. When a brother attempts to avenge his sister, whom Faust seduced, he attacks wearing a medieval knight’s armor, but modern soldiers in battle fatigues kill him. When Faust next seduces the Duchess of Parma, at her wedding party, it looks as though the Italian Mafia has invaded the factory. Everyone in the production is vile. Mephistopheles delights in carrying the Duchess’ dead baby around in an old shopping bag.

Faust is Rodney Gilfry, in what is surely the role of his career. He may not match the vocal inflections that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau brought to the part, but this baritone, who usually presents himself as the embodiment of robust health, throws himself tirelessly into dissolution and bottles of Jack Daniel’s as Faust battles his inner and outer demons to the exceedingly bitter end. The outer demon, Chris Merritt’s creepy Mephistopheles, makes one’s flesh crawl. The orchestra practically glows under Donald Runnicles, which is exactly what Busoni was after in his rich and complex score.

A couple more San Francisco Opera strategies it would be nice to see other American companies copy: It puts its projected translations of the libretto not above the stage but on the sides, keeping the proscenium pure, and it puts a considerable effort into its program books, with serious, useful essays discussing various aspects of the operas and the thinking and visual impulses behind the onstage choices.

It should be said that these two important, uncompromising productions exist despite serious financial deficits. Rosenberg has said she will not let the economy compromise the quality of the company’s work. She hasn’t. But sadly, it has compromised the quantity. Such productions are currently affordable only once or twice a season.