What, exactly, is a fuckboy? When I asked people on what remains of classical Twitter to tell me about their favorite fuckboys in opera, the responses I received showed that, even after a nearly-decade-old debate around the word’s manifold meanings and usage, we’ve yet to reach a consensus.
I’m not here to define the fuckboy. As Potter Stewart famously said, I know it when I see it. And I see it a lot on the opera stage. What follows is a scientific, though not exhaustive, survey of opera’s fuckboys representing the culmination of a lifetime of having my heart broken by opera characters, and about 20 years of obsessively reading Susan McClary. To further break things down, I’ve arranged these characters on a matrix that ranges on the X axis from Deadly to Benign, and a Y axis that—in a nod to New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix—ranges from Despicable to Brilliant.
The Opera Fuckboy Matrix
A scientific organizing principle
