This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Amongst opera’s many failures, one of the feeblest is surely the way it wilfully ignores the most rewarding of all areas of aesthetic endeavour: I refer of course to its inexplicable neglect of vampires, whilst fannying about with all manner of half-arsed sub-vampire behaviour that simply begs to be taken that extra sanguinary mile.

Bloodsucking, in various more or less metaphorical guises, is after all opera’s happiest place. You could plausibly chart the whole shebang as a coterie of baleful figures (and not always men, forsooth: look at those hard-eyed hooker vamps Carmen and Manon) draining the life out of the saps who make the mistake of falling in their way.

Indeed, if opera houses really want to pack the joints out with halfwit children of confused sexual identity, as they always claim, a good place to start might be to present all the frightful fiends (and hot succubi) who so delectably ruin everyone’s lives as actual vampires — thereby also clawing something back from the ghastly way teen-tainment has debased the whole area from Buffy onwards.

Alfredo’s zombie pa Mr Germont in Traviata, sex-and-death epicure Baron Scarpia in Tosca, all those old phlebotomising prongs would scrub up very nicely in Nosferatu form.

Vampires being exempt from Me Too witterings — the ladies reliably hastening to get their Lucy Westenra on when these lads haul themselves out of their coffins — a proper old “fangs-for-the-mammaries” Don Giovanni could reclaim some of his mislaid mojo, a mojo that would incidentally be massively enhanced by no longer reeking of garlic.

But the freakish fact remains that, whilst there is the odd Dracula ballet knocking about, you seek in vain for the operatic version. There seems to be only one proper old-time vampire opera, though at least it deals with the actual prototype.

Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr of 1828, much in thrall to Weber’s spooky Freischütz, is based on the John Polidori novel that emerged from that fruitful fright night by Lake Geneva in 1816 where the Byron/Shelley combo got off their tits on laudanum and buckled down to competitive ghost-storytelling.

The germ of the story that became Polidori’s 1819 Vampyre was initially Byron’s — which “Pollydolly” acknowledged by calling his hero “Lord Ruthven”, the name Caroline Lamb had given Byron in her score-settling 1816 novel Glenarvon. The truth is that bad Lord B is (one of his less appreciated legacies) the progenitor of the whole vampire crew.

The opera isn’t performed nearly enough: earlier this summer Gothic Opera had a shot at it (at the Arcola) in a version which introduced what could have been (but wasn’t) an amusing grrl-power rewrite wherein all Ruthven’s victims basically had to give written consent before he could get stuck in. Perhaps they realised at some point that the satire was turning out to be entirely self-directed.

Still, as noted, once you start thinking along these lines, opera turns out to be simply bursting with thirsty nocturnal types preying on the healthily plasma’d. Verdi even serves up a highly entertaining double act, a kind of undead Bert and Ernie, in Don Carlos, with well-known Hispanic ghoul King Philip II chumming up with his even more saturnine wingman the Grand Inquisitor for small-hours death-list compilation larks.

We tend to avoid talking about Benjamin Britten in this column, for obvious reasons, but in The Turn of the Screw (at ENO from 11th October), a brilliant adaptation of Henry James’ 1898 chiller that adds even more layers to the millefeuille original, BB really nailed this important aspect of opera. Correctly viewed, there are about six vampires busily at work here, attached to each others’ jugulars like a surfeit of badass lampreys.

The story is simple enough: a young governess arrives to look after two children at an idyllic, lonely country house in the 1840s. She catches glimpses of a strange man and woman hanging about; it turns out they are Peter Quint, the absent master’s infamous ex-valet; and Miss Jessel, the former governess — and they have come for the children. But Quint and Jessel are dead …

Following James’ steer to put “the worst possible construction” on the story, we find a dreadful nexus of soul-devouring behaviours: the ghosts with the obscure horror of their desires and elusive CVs (“I am the long sighing flight of the night-winged bird”), the sinister come-hither moppets themselves, taunting the governess into psychosis with their hints of depravity, the jittery young woman herself with her thrillingly sordid imaginings, which in turn drive the (innocent all along?) children towards destruction.

And the sixth vampire? Well, dear viewer, it is of course — you. The opera’s final delight is to turn the audience into the dirty-minded ones, reading vile things into teasing childish behaviour, longing for the worst.

For Britten, the (indecently relished) opposite of innocence is not experience but corruption. This is an opera that revels in its own turpitude, all the time wearing a nonchalant look on its face: who, me?

And so we too take our seats, to savour this drowning of “the ceremony of innocence”: a mirror wherein we see clearly our own depraved image, greedily sucking on the life-giving blood of art.