Look at this line-up of musical villains, some of the most unscrupulous, cynical, devious, roguish figures of the opera stage. Bryn Terfel calls them the "demonic misfits and malcontents of this wonderful music". Some aren't just bad there's a diabolical whiff of sulphur about them as well.
Step forward Satan himself. He features in two late 19th-century musical versions of Goethe's Faust, and even snatches the title role for himself in Boito's Mefistofele. Introducing himself to Faust, this Mephistopheles defines his nature as "the spirit that denies everything", but Boito with a mind to the insecurities of his own time is surely also trying to express what he called "the doubt engendered by science, the evil engendered by good".
Two other characters that Boito scripted later draw from a similarly bottomless well of pure evil. Barnaba, in Ponchielli's La Gioconda, is a spy in 17th-century Venice who delivers his first-act monologue to what he describes in a nod to Dante as the "pit" of the Doge's Palace. In Verdi's Otello, Iago's machinations seem to spring, not from the Freudian motivations familiar to later audiences, but again specifically from Boito's idea of a stark opposition to "everything true, beautiful and good". After sending the unsuspecting Cassio on his way to Desdemona to set off a chain of misunderstandings and insinuations that will end in her murder and Othello's destruction, Iago is left alone on stage to expound his nihilist credo.
The eternal libertine Don Juan has come in for his own share of Freudian analysis. In the opera Don Giovanni, his double-act with his unprincipled servant Leporello subtly underlined by the music Mozart has given them makes the pair seem like two sides of the same coin. Bryn Terfel has sung both roles many times. Throw in Giovanni's nemesis, the ghost of the man he murdered come to drag him down to hell, and you have Bryn Terfel's delicious tour de force on this disc: a single voice expressing both evil and retribution, with Everyman cowering in the background as terrible events unfold.
Supernatural evil is similarly embodied by Kaspar in Weber's Der Freischόtz. He has ensnared the huntsman Max on behalf of his demonic master Samiel, with the promise of magic bullets that will give him everything he desires his jubilant solo "Schweig, schweig" brings down the curtain on the opera's first act.
And while Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd may be motivated by revenge in this extract he has only just failed to slit the throat of the man he blames for all his misfortune the audience is gradually drawn into the darkest recesses of Victorian horror ruled over by the unequivocal "demon barber" and his pie-making partner-in-crime Mrs. Lovett (a Cockney cameo here from Anne Sofie von Otter). For Terfel, the guiding principle in portraying these different villains is above all the nature of the characters themselves, and the pathological Sweeney Todd's macabre pathos makes this one of his favourite pieces to perform (The New York Times wrote of Terfel's appearance in Chicago in 2002 that "it would be difficult to imagine a more perfect marriage of role, voice and stage personality").
A more raffish knife-wielding London villain, from rather seamier streets, is evoked in the "Ballad of Mack the Knife": an unflinching description of Macheath's casual violence set to music that works like a hypnotic drug, and an appropriate curtain-raiser to Weill and Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), their caustic 1928 updating of the 1728 "Beggar's Opera".
Boito's Mephistopheles shrinks from the sight of the Gospels that Faust opens to read. In Gou-nod's 1859 operatic setting of the same story, it is the cross-like hilt of a sword that stops the character in his tracks, after he has introduced himself to a crowd of revellers in a song on the eternal appeal of the Golden Calf ("Le veau d'or est toujours debout!"). For Baron Scarpia, chief of police in the post-revolutionary Rome of 1800, on the other hand, religion is almost a drug that arouses his evil and erotic instincts. While the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle fills up with worshippers for a celebratory Te Deum at the end of the first act of Puccini's Tosca, he gloats over the opportunity to bed the hot-blooded opera star Floria Tosca and to send her free-thinking lover to the executioner.
It is the thought of another murderous opportunity that prompts prison governor Don Pizarro's raging outburst, "Ha! Welch ein Augenblick!" in the first act of Beethoven's Fidelio. Having illicitly locked away his blameless enemy Florestan, threat of exposure has made the vengeful Pizarro decide to put him to death and bury the body deep inside the prison.
Where most of these characters have no problem acting on their evil instincts, the hero of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1887 operetta Ruddigore is a harmless soul, who has to be coached and supervised in wrongdoing by his villainous Cornish ancestors, including Sir Roderic, who steps from his gloomy portrait in the Murgatroyd castle to sing "When the night wind howls". And the police inspector Javert, whose relentless pursuit of the convict Jean Valjean forms the narrative frame-work for the 1980 musical based on Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, acts out of an extreme sense of righteousness rather than sheer badness, as he declaims in his self-justifying solo "Stars".
The quack doctor Dulcamara selling his miracle-working wares in Donizetti's gentle comedy L'elisir d'amore and the unctuous Don Basilio extolling the destructive power of a well-placed bit of slander in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia are more calculating than genuinely evil and the dodgy doctor, a role Bryn Terfel has sung on stage dressed in a sparkly Elvis suit (in an outrageous production in Amsterdam), has a hand in achieving some good in the end.
So the best tunes may not always belong to the devil, though it is the dope-dealing Sportin' Life an unscrupulous and devious rogue, if ever there was one who has one of the most memorable tunes in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: that irresistibly jaunty and cynical anti-sermon "It ain't necessarily so".
Kenneth Chalmers
