Mephistopheles on stage: from Marlowe to Goethe, from Gounod to Boito
The tempting devil on stage: how Mephistopheles passed from the 1587 chapbook to Elizabethan drama, Goethe's Faust and nineteenth-century opera.
Few characters have had as long and changeable a life on stage as Mephistopheles. His name first appears, in the form Mephostophiles, in the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, the chapbook published in Frankfurt in 1587 by the printer Johann Spies. Its etymology is uncertain, and scholars have proposed various origins, from Greek to Hebrew, without reaching agreement. From that book the tempting devil soon passed into the theatre, which he would never leave again.
Marlowe and Elizabethan drama
The first great theatrical Mephistopheles is Christopher Marlowe's, in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, probably written between 1588 and 1592 and published in 1604. Here the demon is a melancholy figure who confesses that he carries hell with him wherever he goes, because hell is separation from God. Alongside this gravity the play keeps comic and farcical scenes, a legacy of the clownish devils of medieval religious drama.
Marlowe's text contains some of the most famous lines in English theatre, such as the question addressed to the spirit of Helen: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” Contemporary accounts also report legends about the performances, according to which one devil more than expected appeared on stage. These stories should be read as evidence of the fear the subject aroused, not as established facts.
From puppets to Goethe
In the following centuries the story of Faust survived above all in puppet theatres and among German travelling companies. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recalled having first encountered it as a child in that popular form. His Faust, whose first part appeared in 1808 and the second, posthumously, in 1832, turned Mephistopheles into a philosophical character, ironic and elegant, who presents himself as the spirit that always denies.
In a famous line he calls himself “part of that power which always wills evil and always works good”. Goethe's devil is no longer merely the enemy of the soul but a necessary element in the movement of the world, driving man never to stand still. For the first time the tempter is also the most clear-sighted and disenchanted spectator of the human comedy, able to comment sarcastically on the scholar's illusions.
The devil in opera
Nineteenth-century music seized on the character. Hector Berlioz composed La Damnation de Faust, performed in Paris in 1846; Charles Gounod presented his Faust at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1859, with a brilliant, worldly Méphistophélès who became one of the favourite roles of basses. In Italy Arrigo Boito, poet and composer, wrote both words and music of Mefistofele, which was a resounding failure at La Scala in 1868.
Boito thoroughly reworked the opera, which in its new version, presented in Bologna in 1875, was a success and remained in the repertoire. His Mephistopheles opens the work by challenging heaven and whistling in mockery, the last heir of the rebel demon. From Marlowe to Boito the character changes face, but he remains the symbol of a constant question: what price man is willing to pay to go beyond the limits of his condition.