Mefistofele is an opera in a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, the only completed opera by the Italian composer-librettist Arrigo Boito. The opera was given its premiere on 5 March 1868 at La Scala, Milan, under the baton of the composer, despite his lack of experience and skill as a conductor.
Mefistofele is all about the forces of good and evil, the battle between the sacred and the profane set in motion when the opera’s eponymous anti-hero draws Faust into his fateful bargain. In Boito’s libretto, based on Goethe’s Faust drama, the action sprawls from heaven to hell, a garden for gamboling lovers to a sublimely becalmed ancient Greece. Some of what takes place is wooly, silly or stiffly ideological.