Beyond Good and Evil

Producer's Note

“Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” With these words the serpent tempts Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, thereby bringing Evil into the world. The Adam and Eve story in Genesis, like all great myths, can be read in several ways, and is powerful precisely because of its ambiguity. It certainly suggests that Evil is not only connected with desire but also in some way with man’s striving for knowledge – possibly because acquisition of knowledge can lead us away from the awareness of our true essence and Being.

The excerpt from Haydn’s Creation gives the back story, with God creating light in a blaze of C major. Enter the wily serpent. As he tempts Eve, the excerpt from Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill Sonata’ gives us a clue as to the real identity of this talking snake.

In Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ the snake is a master politician and orator and his subtle and sinuous reasoning leads Eve imperceptibly into temptation and catastrophe.

The story of the Fall has often led to a mistaken conflation of sex, particularly female sexuality, with Evil.

In Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’, the anti-heroine is an immoral temptress explicitly related to the biblical Eve.

Baudelaire and Swinburne give contrasting portraits of two femmes fatales, vampire and dominatrix, evil in their cold and rapacious lust.

Influenced by the ideas of Freud, Strauss’s librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal saw evil in terms of mental health. In the opera, the confrontation between Klytemnestra and her daughter Elektra is a psychological study of neurosis. Klytemnestra’s diseased mind is what makes her evil. And this is represented by increasingly chromatic harmonies which Strauss contrasts with more “healthy” tonal music elsewhere in the score. As she describes her nightmare, the tuba slithers around in the bass representing the repressed fears stalking her subconscious.

Male evil is often seen in terms of black magic and the occult. The Black Sabbath track with its diabolic tritones and thunder effects verges on camp. But it matches Aleister Crowley’s over-the-top ‘Hymn to Lucifer’ which leads into Faust’s final encounter with Lucifer in Marlowe’s ‘Dr Faustus’, as Faustus is dragged down to hell. The Toccata from Boellmann’s suite continues the gothic mood.

The Devil-music from George Crumb’s ‘Black Angels’ abruptly changes gear for Blake’s apocalyptic ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. This segues into Verdi’s blazing trumpets announcing a vision of Hell which is taken up in an extract from Dante’s ‘Inferno’. (Liszt’s ‘Dante Sonata’ again starts with infernal tritones – the traditional sign of the Devil in Western music.)

The forest as a place of mystery and evil was one of the tropes of the German imagination. It features in many of the folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, and further back in the Anglo-Saxon epic ‘Beowulf’. And no one captured that sense of malevolence better than Wagner whose prelude to the second Act of ‘Siegfried’ conjures up the dark forest where the evil dragon lives (tritones again).

The final section looks at Evil as a matter of personal morality; something encountered everyday behind the mask of civilisation. The urbane anti-hero of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’, plots and counterfeits behind the scenes. His is the cloven hoof on the carpet.

St Augustine’s self-lacerating account of his lustful youth is again a private matter of free-will.

I make no apology for a second bit of Wagner, for whom Evil was a specialist subject. The extract from ‘Parsifal’ describes the tortured cravings of the magician Klingsor who has castrated himself in a desperate bid to get control over his evil and insatiable desires.

The programme ends with another master of the subject. Benjamin Britten knew that Evil is at its most evil when it sets out to destroy goodness and innocence, which is the theme of Blake’s ‘O Rose thou art sick’ and also Auden’s meditation on the mundane nature of Evil.

Clive Portbury (producer)