Sex sells. Satanic sex sells even better. But if you want the biggest sell of all, you should mix some singing with your sex and satanism, as any blood-guzzling, bat-chewing rock band will tell you. Add some diabolical razzle-dazzle and you have an unbeatable formula.
Ozzy Osbourne was far from the first showman to combine these ingredients. Opera got there first. Since the end of the 18th century, composers have been exploiting the power of the Devil. Maybe it’s something to do with the artificial world of opera being the natural home of the pre-eminent artificer in creation. Maybe it’s that sin and sex are meat and drink to opera composers. Or maybe baritones just like to show off their legs in red stockings.
Whatever it is, the Devil has appeared in many forms throughout operatic history, and no survey could do better than to start with the mother of all malevolence, Méphistophélès. He’s the arch-fiend who provides much of the entertainment in Gounod’s Faust, and he’s really the ne plus ultra of all operatic hell-raisers.
One of the reasons Gounod’s version of the role works so well is that it’s written as part Lord of Darkness and part P. T. Barnum. The jaunty demon performs the show-stopping aria Le veau d’or (The Golden Calf) to entertain the crowds at a local fair, for example, but by the end of the opera he drops the buffo bonhomie and pulls out all the stops to engineer the heroine’s destruction. And all the while he exercises a strange psychosexual fascination over the hero, too.
David McVicar’s Royal Opera production of Faust is a lavish affair. He sets the opera in Paris just as the Second Empire bubble is about to burst, and turns Méphistophélès into a wonderfully protean figure who inhabits both the glamorous highs and sleazy lows of this world. He first appears surrounded by ghoulish demimondaines and acrobats; later he looks like a dandified squire; and later still he pops up in Queen Victoria-style drag.
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This time the baritone in the frock is John Relyea, a young American who has carved out a pretty impressive career at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and won plaudits at the Royal Opera.
At the Royal Opera Relyea has also sung Somnus, the god of sleep, in Handel’s Semele. For opera’s first 200 years this classical type of deity was the principal kind of underlord on the lyric stage. The hero of Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) goes to the underworld, but he confronts Pluto and Proserpina, not Satan and Beelzebub.
Things really began to hot up when operatic composers started to see the musical potential in mixing up sex with sin — and thus, logically, with the Arch Sinner. In Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) the antihero declares his defiance of religious and sexual restraints and pays with fire and brimstone.
It was in the 19th century that, operatically speaking, satanism and sexuality really became happy bedfellows, and lyric devilry flourished. In Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) the Devil appears as a character called Bertram who summons up a ballet of dead nuns who have all broken their vows. In Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) he pops up as a Germanic pagan spirit called Samiel. And the Devils based on Goethe’s Faust – in Berlioz’s Le damnation de Faust (1846), Boito’s Mefistofele (1868) and, of course, in Gounod’s Faust — are all supremely seductive customers.
There are some comic Devils too, such as the one in Dvorák’s The Devil and Kate (1899), but the most memorable ones are written with a real sense of menace. The heroine of Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel (1927) is tormented by fascistic demons, and the Mephistopheles in Busoni’s Doktor Faust (1925) is a nasty piece of work indeed. Both works were conceived in the wake of war.
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In modern times irony and ambiguity reflect a more secular age. The amusing Devil in Jerry Springer: The Opera is a chat-show host. Nick Shadow in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951) steals the hero’s mind, not his soul. In Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954) Miles’s last words are “Peter Quint, you devil!” though who the real Devil is in this case, it’s hard to say. And perhaps that’s the key to the best kind of Devil. It’s not the Devil you know, it’s the Devil you don’t that stirs a thrill. They should surprise you, even if they have to do it in Queen Victoria drag.