Word: satanity
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Whatever the opera's qualities, there could hardly be a better incarnation of Satan than Basso Norman Treigle, 42. Small, skinny, seemingly naked, Treigle flashed through the role like a black-voiced cobra. Plunging from profundo depths to baritonal heights, his voice remained huge and perfectly focused through one of the crudest bass roles ever written. "I can't say I really like this Mefisto," Treigle said afterward. "I think of myself as an actor, not a singer, and it isn't an interesting role. I just keep dashing out and gutting...
Treigle is an intensely religious man. "I was raised as a Baptist," he says, "but my religion really is the Bible." He takes a moralistic view of his evil doings in opera: "What better sermon could there be than the destruction of Satan?" His wife approves for another reason. "He's so kind and gentle at home. That's probably because he gets all the meanness out of his system on the stage...
Christ was tempted by Satan in the wilderness of Judah, so the Bible says, and James Pike was determined to go there too-"to meditate," as his wife wistfully recalled later, "and get a firsthand feeling of it." For the onetime Episcopal Bishop of California, it was just one more unusual adventure in a remarkably strange career (see following story). As always, he was anxious to get on with it. No matter that it was 1 o'clock on a hot Monday afternoon, hardly the time to set out into the blistering, arid desert. James Pike...
...self-contempt and haunted by a vision of a corrupt cupid from hell, a devil in crinoline (Marina Yaru), who appears before him bouncing a large and somehow ominous white ball. At the end, Toby terminates his pilgrimage and turns himself into a final sacrifice to Satan...
Fundamentalist Character In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter once defined the fundamentalist mind as "essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities." Wayne's fundamentalist character was not against the American grain...