"Alfred Schnittke wrote the role of Mephistopheles in his Faust opera for a countertenor. For the audience, it remains ambiguous whether the seducer is a man or a woman. The singer originally scheduled for the Hamburg world premiere, Derek Lee Ragin, had to withdraw from the role because he could not reach the extreme high register demanded by Schnittke.

The part was ultimately sung by the Austrian Arno Raunig, who also has the famous Farinelli aria “Son qual nave” in his repertoire.

In Schnittke’s opera, the uncertainty about gender and voice reaches its climax when, at the end, the Devil splits into two beings: a female and a male – and the man sings in a higher register than the woman. For some years now, sopranists have ceased to be a rarity. How it is possible for the male voice to reach ever higher regions cannot be physiologically explained. Presumably, there have always been singers who would have felt most comfortable in the soprano range; they simply never discovered it."