A joke about opera most commonly features a hollering, overweight Valkyrie in compulsory horned helmet. Later this term, we’ll turn to the role of Brünnhilde, leader of these warrior handmaidens of the gods, (significantly offspring of top god Wotan and Erda, the goddess of the Earth.)
But interestingly, stereotypic descriptions of opera focus on the weak and pallid heroine, victim of the ambitions and violence of strong men and dying of - amazingly commonly – consumption.
Catherine Clement in her book Opera, or the Undoing of Women accuses opera of being an institution that "thrives on the negative representation of women" and decries the imposition of anti-female sensibilities by a "phallocentric culture." If not pallid and submissive, they are undone by their assertiveness. Carmen is "a woman who refuses masculine yokes and must pay for it with her life."
"Carmen" is probably the single most popular opera of all time. If it isn't, then it's a close second to "La Bohème." Other contenders would be "Aida" and "Madame Butterfly."
Apart from excellent tunes, the common thread here is that there is a dead woman at the end of each. The operas named for women are particularly hard on their eponymous heroines: Norma, Manon Lescaut, Salome, Lucia di Lammermoor, Suor Angelica, Tosca, Elektra. All dead.
Of course we could and should challenge these generalisations. They stereotype the stereotypes. Of course we know operas that don't fit, and heroines that exert power and glow with agency. Interestingly opera companies are recently featuring those women! LA Opera has provided a great gallery of operatic heroines "not to be messed with". Glyndebourne offers "six of the best" heroines here. But there's much to consider in the feminist argument that "Submissive damsels and manipulative schemers: these caricatures of women pervade in the plots of canonical operas."
Femmes Fatales
Consumption gives a clue as to the time period of the stereotyped heroines. For a splendidly clinical account of the challenge of portraying tuberculosis on the stage, read this medical piece! And the link of consumption to female frailty and beauty is clearly relevant.
All the women in opera die a death prepared for them by a slow plot, woven by furtive, fleeting heroes, up to their glorious moment: a sung death," wrote Catherine Clement. "Opera … is no different from the other artistic products of our culture; it records a tale of male domination and female oppression. Only it does so more blatantly and, alas, more seductively than any other art form.
Clement argued that audiences are lulled to accept images of violent oppression by beautiful music. In mockery of Scarpia’s words to God, she declares, "Oh voices, sublime voices, high, clear voices, how you make one forget the words you sing!" Blake continues:
Stabbed. Strangled. Shot. Poisoned. Driven to madness and suicide. Opera is a deadly place for a woman. Our opera company seasons are dominated by stories in which women are abused, murdered or driven to suicide by men. Audiences across the world rise to their feet to applaud the violent deaths of Carmen, Cio-Cio-San, Isolde, Tosca, Lakme and Desdemona. In the world of 19th-century opera, a woman can consider herself lucky to die of tuberculosis.
Limelight’s cheery review of the best operatic deaths is here. More seriously, if you wish to pursue what opera can contribute in portrayal of death, try this article.
We of course can list operas in which the women survive and even triumph. They are mostly comedies (Don Pasquale, anyone?) And these raise questions about the portrayal of those females, and their modes of triumphing – gossip, intrigue, seduction and absurd good luck being, I’d argue, the main ones. Mad scenes and other hysterical moments are almost all female. With Charlotte Higgins we may ask, “How can I love an artform that is so consistently, insistently cruel to its female characters?”
Here's the counter-argument, presented by Barney Schwarz and featuring Lyndon Terraccini, whose conclusion is, "Frankly, this is only a very small debate, and it is false." To be discussed!!
Our journey with opera’s women
Here's the challenge for our term. We know of course that women in opera are not always portrayed as weak and fated victims – but also that there’s much truth in the stereotypes.
Was it just a 19th century fashion to glory in the death of weak but beautiful young women? We’ll move through a range of operas and composers, and as each opera unfolds we’ll focus on the portrayal of the heroine, what we learn of her through the libretto, the music that carries her story and the development of her personality as well as her fate.
We'll choose a group of operas displaying the variety of female characters and their fates.
We’ll explore the ways the special hold of opera exaggerates and protects its faults. Charlotte Higgins concludes:
It is as if genre itself seems to devour women. It is partly because opera is the form par excellence, not of argument like theatre, not of story like film, not of character like TV, but of emotion. Deep, unspeakable, ravenous emotion: the kind of emotion that can carry a character’s breaking out into song. Opera is not vanilla, opera is not beige, it is blood red and boiling. Opera is the artform of human catastrophe, the inheritor of the mantle of the darkest aspects of Greek tragedy. The tragedy is of course not just female tragedy (plenty of dead men, too). But the patriarchy makes sure that the women are marked out for special cruelty. Opera, and especially 19th century opera, allows dangerous women to coruscate thrillingly on the stage for a few short hours – then murders them.
And we’ll also , along the way, look at the now raging debate about the dominance of men in the creation, production and performance of operas. Who makes our operas? What are the structural barriers facing female composers? (One opera we'll watch, L’Amour de Loin by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, was only the second by a woman produced in the Met's 136-year history – and the first was in 1903.)
Lindy Hume, reflecting on her years at Opera Queensland, wrote that the future of opera depends on its tackling its biases.
I confess in this time I’ve been in and out of love with the art form, fascinated and bored by it. It’s been the epicentre of my life and a strange planet whose language I don’t speak. Like others, I am troubled by opera’s gender imbalance, lack of diversity, the racism and misogyny of many classics.
… Despite a large female audience, opera is controlled largely by middle-aged blokes who commission other blokes to direct, conduct and design operas composed by dead white men. Some of my favourite composers are dead white men, but the world has changed. There are countless excellent women composers, conductors, directors, set designers and more. There are no excuses for the industry’s casual bias... Yet still opera narratives of rape, murder and abuse, or stereotypes – from Carmen’s “bad girl” to Cinderella’s “good girl” – go unquestioned by creative teams.”
Term starts Friday 5th May
Our journey with operatic heroines commences not with a consumptive in a garret but with a deluded visionary in a cold harbour town – Senta, in Wagner’s Flying Dutchman.
Yes, she is neurotic and yes she dies, by suicide, but this is a complicated exertion of unique female power. After all, she does redeem him from the curse that prevents him from dying.
As this reviewer remarks, “Senta is breaking two taboos, one with conventional society and the other with the devil himself, by offering herself to break his contract with the Holländer. No Wagnerian heroine chooses convention when she can do something of cosmic import."
And yes, we’ll return, later, to Wagner's creation of Brünnhilde. A likely image is this - Amalie Materna aims for cosmic import as Brünnhilde in Bayreuth, 1876.
(Wiki Commons)
Lyn, 27/4/23
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