Ed Simon’s book Devil’s Contract is a fascinating examination of Faustian bargains through the ages.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Simon’s probing curiosity conjures up an enjoyable grab-bag of arcane knowledge. It’s a beguiling literary history of diabolical deals.”
In his own words, here is Ed Simon’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Devil’s Contract:
All of the arts have their demonic associations, but music has in particular had a bit more of the whiff of Sulphur about it. Theater and film may be the artistry of illusion, painting and the plastic arts can feel as if elaborate conjurations and poetry at its most inspired is synonymous with incantation, but only the alchemy of melody, harmony, and especially rhythm has that sense of the Dionysian that we associate with the dark arts. “So elemental, so primal, so universal, there’s an ecstatic reality to music, the way it can move past conscious intention, deep into the intrinsic part of the mind, of the soul. If there be magic, music seems an obvious example of it,” I write in my new book Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain. Naturally, the Faust legend intersects with music history at quite a few junctures, from the infamous story of bluesman Robert Johnson heading down to the crossroads to sell his soul to the Devil to classical performers and composers like Giuseppe Tartini and Nicollo Paganini who acquired their immaculate talents through diabolic intercession. While writing my book, I naturally gravitated towards the compositions of such musicians, as well as other melodies infernal that piqued my fascination. What follows then is a curated playlist of the music which inspired my book, the soundtrack to Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain. In assembling this Satanic mixtape, my intent is to hopefully conjure an experience eerie, uncanny, and otherworldly, and if not to answer why the Devil gets all the good tunes, to at least demonstrate the accuracy of that contention.
“Gloomy Sunday” by Billie Holiday
The greatest jazz vocalist performs her haunting rendition of the so-called “Hungarian Suicide Song” written by Rezso Serres in 1933. Composed in a Europe on the verge of immolation, the minor-keyed, melancholy dirge “Gloomy Sunday” has long had various myths accrue about it, from the melody being imparted to Serres by the Devil in a dream to the song itself being cursed and often leading to suicide in performers and listeners. Still banned by the BBC.
“Jazz Suite No. 2: VI Waltz 2” by Dmitri Shostakovich
The Soviet Union’s greatest composter Dmitri Shostakovich’s urbane, sophisticated, and slightly menacing waltz written in 1937, not long before Stalin and Hitler signed their mutual nonaggression pact, was popular during World War II, but the score was lost and not to be rediscovered until 1999. Shostakovich’s composition suggests jazz less than it does Moscow ballrooms and Leningrad interrogation rooms, a jaunty score for the brutal twentieth century.
“Carmina Burana: III. Veris leta facies” by Carl Orff
The bombast of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana is now a classical music cliché trotted out in apocalyptic movies and sporting events alike, a composition whose ability to once inculcate a feeling of dread now seems only tired. The rest of Carmina Burana, however, still maintains its general aura of fear in Orff’s arrangement of profane lyrics by the Medieval Goliardic poets, as in this second song from the cantata which almost evokes a Black Mass.
“Devil’s Trill Sonata” by Giuseppe Tartini
Technically known as “Violin Sonata in G Minor,” posterity will forever refer to Giuseppe Tartini’s equally melancholic and exuberant 1713 composition as the “Devil’s Trill Sonata,” for the violinist claims that that was the year that Satan appeared to him in a dream vision and conveyed the substance of this otherworldly melody.
“24 Caprices, Op. 1: No. 1 in E Major” by Niccolo Paganini
Known as the “Rubber Man” for his apparently incandescent, frenetic, and kinetic abilities with a bow and a violin, the strangely tall and thin Niccolo Paganini was long rumored to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for musical genius, a legend not entirely out of the realm of possibility when listening to this beautifully discordant 1802 composition.
“Baal’s Hymn” by Bertolt Brecht
Long before his Weimar-era collaborations with Kurt Weil, the brilliant German playwright Bertolt Brecht composed this sophomore effort in the last days of the First World War, a play entitled Baal about the decadent, wanton, sexual escapades of a character who shares his name with the ancient Canaanite demon. Musically arranged in 1981 by composer Dominic Muldowney, the necromantic figure of David Bowie recorded an entire album of Brecht’s compositions.
“The Rite of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky
Premiering in Paris in 1913, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s discordant paeon to the pagan and chthonic forces that dwell just beneath the surface of civilization was apparently so controversial that the otherwise staid audience broke out into a riot. A stunning example of how music is capable of conjuring its own reality.
“Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James
With the nocturnal squeal of the Delta blues guitar, Skip James taps into the legendary association between that most American of musical genres and otherworldly powers.
“Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11: Massig” by Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg’s difficult atonal music was the basis for Mann’s main character in Doktor Faustus, the composer Adrian Leverkühn. Like Mann, and Brecht, Schoenberg was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany now living in unlikely Los Angeles, but in the novelist’s imagination he remained an avatar of everything that Teutonic modernism represented.
“Canned Heat Blues” by Tommy Johnson
So associated were the blues as the Devil’s music, that not only is Robert Johnson not the only blues musician said to have sold his soul to Satan, he’s not the only blues musician named Johnson said to have done so, for his distant cousin Tommy was similarly impugned with diabolical associations as an explanation of how he developed his talent at the guitar.
“Runnin’ with the Devil” by Van Halen
Eddie van Halen always knows that it’s more fun to run with the Devil on the Sunset Strip than it is to stay home with the angels.
“Me and the Devil” by Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson, arguably the most iconic of musicians to have apparently sold his soul to the Devil, perhaps offers a confession in one of the handful of tracks that made him the godfather of rock music. Here, the brilliant spoken word artist and Hip Hop pioneer Gil Scott-Heron performs Johnson’s uncanny lyrics in an arrangement that’s unmistakably contemporary, less the crossroads than the recording studio.
“Mr. Crowley” by Ozzy Osbourne
Many have imitated him, many have been influenced by him, but no metal performer has ever bested Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne when it comes to conjuring the devilish realities of suburban, adolescent existence. In “Mr. Crowley” he makes a great musical sacrifice to Aleister Crowley – Agent 666 and the father of the contemporary dark arts.
“The Cold Song” by Henry Purcell
The chilling aria from Restoration English composer Henry Purcell’s 1691 opera King Arthur is representative of its composer’s incredible facility with being able to push his listeners towards extremes of melancholy. This version, performed by the experimental German opera singer (and David Bowie collaborator) Klaus Nomi appears on his self-titled 1981 debut. Nomi’s rendition, performed as he was dying of complications from AIDS, is the definition of haunting.
“To Beat the Devil” by Kris Kristoferson
It might be a hard life, but the country musician Kris Kristoferson wisely intones that “I ain’t saying I beat the devil/But I drank his beer for nothing” in his 1970 classic.
“Deal with the Devil” by Judas Priest
The British metal act returns to that most metal of stories in the form of the diabolical contract in their 2005 track wherein you “Gotta deal with the devil/’Cause you know it’s real/Done a deal with the devil/From a heart made of steel.”
“Stagger Lee” performed by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
All great folk songs are composed by that author named “Anonymous,” with a case in point being the iconic American murder ballad “Stagger Lee” about an unfortunate night of violence based in reality, when Lee Shelton killed a man in 1895 for stealing his Stetson hat. Lloyd Price’s rendition from 1959 is justly beloved, but New Zealand rocker Nick Cave’s 1996 reinvention of the old story (with new music and lyrics) conveys a positively Satanic infatuation with violence.
“Die Dreigroschenoper” by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht
That “Mack the Knife” has remained such a standard, whether performed by Bobby Darin or Frank Sinatra, is rather remarkable considering that it’s basically a song about a serial killer cowritten by a German radical playwright and an experimental composer who were both committed Marxists.
“Way Down in the Hole” by Tom Waits
In a voice equal parts bourbon and cigarettes, the great Tom Waits gives us some crucial advice in this 1987 song off of his album Frank’s Wild Years, where despite everything, you’ve got to keep the Devil “way down in the hole.”
“Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson
Johnson’s crossroads are the Trinity Test Site of American musical culture, the occult theophany when the bluesman supposedly met the Devil in a Mississippi nocturne the moment when rock and roll was born.
“Doctor Atomic, Act 1, Scene 3” by John Adams
Among the greatest of twentieth century American composers, John Adams turned to the most dramatic story of his country’s present in Doctor Atomic, which retells the tale of that Faustian figure J. Robert Oppenheimer as he develops the first atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project. Here Adams envisions the moment when humanity first transformed matter into pure energy in the New Mexico desert, drawing his lyrics from the metaphysical poet John Donne’s seventeenth century “Holy Sonnets.”
“Szomoru vasarnap” by Rezso Seress
Like the snake biting its own tale that is the Ouroboros, we return to the Hungarian original of “Gloomy Sunday,” with lyrics thankfully untranslated, their sentiments far darker than popular English versions.
Ed Simon is the executive director of Belt Media Collaborative and editor in chief of literary journal Belt Magazine. A staff writer for LitHub, his essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his family.