The Devil's in the details: A study of the musical idioms of Mephistophelean operatic repertoire and their religious, historical, and psychological bases

This document provides a source for the bass-baritone performer interested in the Mephistophelean repertoire (Devil or Satan roles), as well as potential composers of future works that might fit within this category. Based on the story of Faust, most existing research focuses on the role of Faust. It only requires a casual search to realize that there is very little scholarship synthesizing the musical idioms of Mephistopheles and producing any possible reasons for either their existence or effect. By first identifying musical idioms common to many depictions of the devil in the operatic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and applying interdisciplinary knowledge, this document will show how composers have often defined the character of Mephistopheles on the operatic stage. Ultimately, all of these characteristic idioms appear in the most prominent twentieth-century Mephistopheles, Nick Shadow in The Rake's Progress.;The musical examples were selected from the author's previous experience with Mephistophelean characters, primarily in opera performances and a lecture recital. Each was chosen for its representative treatment of the idioms herein identified, and this is a unique synthesis of these examples and their musical similarities.;The study refers to works from Weber's Der Freischutz, Offenbach's Les Conies d'Hoffmann, Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust and Gounod's Faust, to Boito's Mefistofele and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress.