Two operas, Faust and Death in Venice, composed by Charles Gounod and Benjamin Britten respectively more than a century apart, tell the story of the follies and hazards of later life. They could be seen as ‘the story of [men] who give up their soul to gain the whole world’. Both Faust and Gustav von Aschenbach (Death in Venice) are disillusioned, tired, depressed ageing men, who are approaching the end of their creative lives. They contrast with the majority of our other operatic examples, who, apart from Boris and Otello, are all young men in their twenties or early thirties. Faust and Aschenbach, probably in advanced middle-age, have led emotionally barren lives of solitary study and intellectual endeavour. They have repressed their feelings in their drive to achieve. They are each weighed down by a severe moral and social conscience. But, in a later-life emotional crisis – for Faust this is a crisis of scientific disillusionment and for Aschenbach it is writer's block – they wish for youthful pleasures and artistic creativity respectively. Their wishes are granted, but inevitably there is a price to be paid.

Stories of men bartering their souls with the Devil in return for knowledge, power, self-realisation, wealth, youthfulness and love stretch back to antiquity. Faust, Aschenbach and Tom Rakewell (Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress) are well-known operatic examples – and all, significantly, are tenor roles. ‘A shadowy historical figure existed’ by the name of ‘Georg Faust who lived between about 1480 and 1540, a disreputable wandering academic charlatan who laid claim to out-of-the-way knowledge and healing gifts and was said to have come to a violent end.’ An early English version of the legend is Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, published posthumously in 1604. Debased versions of Marlowe's tragedy became well-known in Germany and even entered the repertoire of popular puppet theatres.

In Gounod's operatic version of Goethe's Faust, the protagonist, who has spent a lifetime in the study of science, is transformed by Mephistopheles into a youthful Don Giovanni-like figure. No longer depressed or emotionally repressed, and freed from his over-developed conscience, he seduces and then abandons the young, innocent Marguerite. In psychoanalytic terms, he is now acting out his instinctual impulses of the id, free from the constraints of his superego. As a result, his behaviour becomes irresponsible and guilt-free.