Domestic Violence: Carnage at the Opera

You may have read my last blog on Florence, Italy.  I did not mention that I attended the New Year’s Eve concert at the Maggio opera theater.  I noticed that Bizet’s opera Carmen was programmed for the beginning of 2018.  Its performance was a bomb to be thrown in the rarefied world of opera.  As an anti-violence-against-women protest, the male director changed the end of the misogynist plot, the first militant action of the #Times Up age.  Instead of being stabbed to death, Carmen shoots her would-be murderer, her dejected ex-lover Don José.  Carmen, mezzo-soprano Veronica Simeoni, liked the alternative ending.  This plot twist received mixed reviews, but the opera run was sold out.   Does crime against women no longer pay?  In Italy, women are so frequently murdered that a name has been coined for this social crisis: femminicidio or femicide.

Carmen is one of the world’s most oved operas and a favorite of first-time opera-goers. The libretto is based on Carmen, a famous 19^th century drama by Prosper Mérimée.  Carmen is a free -spirited, feisty gypsy who seduces a gullible soldier, Don José, in order to escape from jail.  Madly in love with her, he abandons his regiment.  Now an outlaw, he follows Carmen and her band of smugglers to the mountains.  In Seville, she dumps him for the flamboyant and handsome torero Escamillo.  After stalking Carmen, scorned loser Don José stabs her to death. 

                                                                               This was before

Another noteworthy victim of domestic violence is Desdemona in Otello by Giuseppe Verdi.  The insecure Otello is led to believe that his wife Desdemona is having an affair with a younger man.  Despite her claims of innocence, enraged and jealous, he strangles her in their matrimonial bed.  Another horrible femminicidio is committed by the cuckold Canio, the clown in Pagliacci (clowns in Italian) the verissimo opera written by Ruggero Leoncavallo.  Canio stabs his wife Nedda to death during the show they play together.  And for good measure, he also dispatches the lover with the same knife.

Additionally, wicked family decisions drive women nuts, and ultimately to death.  The wretched heroines die of despair and exhaustion or commit harrowing suicides.  In the death register, opera plots are both imaginative and preposterous.  These provoked deaths fall into two broad categories: paranormal deaths and outlandish suicides.  In the first category, one can list the courtesan Thais of Jules Massenet’s opera of the same name; the naïve country girl Marguerite of Charles Gounod’s Faust and Leonor, the mistress of the King of Castille in La favorite of Gaetano Donizetti.   Depreciated by men, and exhausted by their spiritual struggles, these women die delivered of their “sins”.

In the wacky suicide competition, opera stands second to none!  The inventory of creepy and spooky suicides is very long and this list is not exhaustive.  Fathers and brothers can be as cruel as husbands: they sacrifice their daughters and sisters to the altar of their selfishness and ambition.  These wretched girls are ultimately led to suicide.  Emotionally fragile Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), the strong-minded Valkyrie Brűnnhilde of Richard Wagner’s Ring, and the love-sick slave Aida (Verdi) are the most renowned victims.  Aida is manipulated by her father to steal military secrets from her lover, who is consequently condemned to death.  At the end, she decides to be buried alive with him.  Lucia is driven to madness, and before dying she murders an unloved husband chosen by her brother in their wedding bed.  Leonora in La Forza del Destino, another Verdi opera, is victim of honor killing: her brother stabs her for loving a mixed-race guy.

In terms of opera’s “air time”, Brűnnhilde is unique among the doomed opera heroines: she is the soprano with the most singing time, and carries on for more than twenty minutes before her self-immolation at the end of The Ring[1].   Although she has a stronger personality than Aida and Lucia, she is not spared the blow of weak men’s trickery and treason.  She is the daughter of Wotan, the chief of a dysfunctional family of gods.  Wotan is a loving but covetous and dithering father who will bring disaster on the family in spite of his daughter’s travels.  Frustrated and fed up with her father’s hypocrisy, her husband’s deception and her suiter’s tricks, she returns the damn ring to its rightful owners and rides her horse into her lover’s funeral pyre, a fire she lit.  Valhalla, the gods’ kingdom, goes up in flames.  This is my take on the Twilight of the Gods.  Wagnerites may not agree with me, as they regard Brűnnhilde’s self-immolation as an act of redemption for the reckless gods and the dawn of an era of love.  

                                                                    A Walkyrie, opera version

Brűnnhilde shares the self-immolation/redemption privilege with Norma from the opera of the same name by Vincenzo Bellini.   Norma also jumps into a funeral pyre, but her goal is more prosaic: to drive the Romans out of Gaul.  A Druid High Priestess, she was abandoned by the father of her children, a Roman commander.  In 19^th century dramatic operas, suicides with a purpose provide a pretense of merit for the heroines.  On the other hand, damaged for loving the wrong men, Butterfly, Tosca, Gilda in Rigoletto, la Wally, Elektra, Senta in The Flying Dutchman and Dido in Berlioz’ Les Troyens commit selfish, hence wasteful suicides.  As pointed out by many essayists: “Opera is the most misogynist art form.”[2]  Women are doomed and disposable, and exit the scene in the most horrible way in about 80 % of dramatic operas.

                                                                  Another Walkyrie, comic strip version

A few opera heroines are not victims but perpetrators of domestic violence.  One can name the unspeakable infanticide Medea (Cherubini), the disreputable serial killer Lulu (Alban Berg’s opera Lulu) and evil multi-murderess Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Dimitri Shostakovich)[3].  

So why does this blogger, a committed feminist, love opera, which treats women so shabbily?  Let’s rephrase: an art form which lets men treat women so meanly.  Blaming opera for excessive violence, shameless betrayal, hopeless love but perfect death (TB, suicide and murder)[4] is misdirected.  One should address the root of opera plots, the authors hidden behind the librettists and the drama, in other words, luminaries like Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, Prosper Mérimée and Alexandre Dumas, to name the better known.  These writers reflect the mores of their days: a merciless and corrupt patriarchy for which women were either virtuous or lost.  They created heroines with highly emotional roles, either free-spirited, brave and resourceful or vulnerable and wretched.  Probably drained of inspiration, their male characters are one-dimensional, shortsighted, one-track-minded and often emotionally handicapped.  For a few hours, thanks to their arias, the heroines are allowed to captivate our emotions before being punished, murdered or led to suicide.  Like Antonia in Les Contes d’Hoffman, whose aria is a death warrant, they literally sing themselves to death. 

So why love opera? A masochist fix? Certainly not, it is a blissful emotional experience.  Novelists, writers and librettists rightly bet that women make better dramatic characters than men and that powerful drama delves into domestic violence.  On a concluding note, to be fair, opera’s heroines are not always doomed; many get the upper hand.  My favorites are femme fatale Cleopatra in Handel’s Guilio Cesare and tough cow-girl Minnie in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West.  I nonetheless get my emotional fix when listening to Isold’s Liebestod aria.  The abstract purity of the love-death aria makes you forget that the lovers Tristan and Isold are dying.

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[1] “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings”. A colloquialism born out of this scene.

[2] Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, 26 February 2016.

[3] Medea is a 18^th century French opera based on Euripides’ tragedy.  Lulu and Lady Macbeth were written during the 20^th century.

[4] Opera is carnage.  Kristen compiled 42 operas on the topic of death.  Characters are either murdered (52%) or commit suicide (24%).  Illness comes third at 17%.  http://operaversity.com/culture-and-news/death-opera-visual-representation