Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera

by Mary Ann Smart

Overview

It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. Siren Songs is the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating topics—from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender—in Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for the study of gender and opera.


The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the evolution of the "trouser role" as it evolved in the lesbian subculture of fin-de-siècle Paris, the phenomenon of opera seria's "absent mother" as a manifestation of attitudes to the family under absolutism, the invention of a "hystericized voice" in Verdi's Don Carlos, and a collaborative discussion of the staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's operas.


The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner, Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement, Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691058139
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/05/2000
Series:	Princeton Studies in Opera , #15
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mary Ann Smart is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of the critical edition of Donizetti's Dom Sébastien (to appear in L'edizione critica delle opere di Gaetano Donizetti) and, with Roger Parker, of Reading Critics Reading: Criticism of French Opera from the Revolution to 1848. She is also a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and the Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (forthcoming).

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Siren Songs

Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera

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By Mary Ann Smart

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05814-6

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CHAPTER 1

Through Voices, History

CATHERINE CLÉMENT

As a philosopher who was educated in France during the heyday of structuralism, my approach to opera is an idiosyncratic one. Music is far and away the most difficult field to analyze. Why? This question in itself is a philosophical problem. Rather than a science, music is a confused and passionate art form, perhaps more suited to anthropological than philosophical methods of explication; and within the realm of musical aesthetics, the global vision of opera, thanks to the irresistible power of the voice, occupies the mysterious place of the heart in a body, which, according to Christian tradition, is also the place of the soul. It cannot be proven, but—like a religious illusion—nor can it be doubted. But if we take into account opera's ureligious" component, its emotional power and the devotion it inspires, then we can try to analyze its voices according to the method historians use to understand religious movements: by studying the use they make of history. Such an approach uncovers the deep ambiguity of opera, in terms of gender, power, and social factors, as well as uncovering a perverse relationship with history itself.

THE LYRE AND THE FLUTE

According to most European philosophers, it is impossible to think philosophically about music. Whoever they are, wherever they are born, European philosophers think not "about" music itself, but "around" it, until they reach an impasse. Even Hegel, who was famously equal to any philosophical problem, concludes his dialectic at the very borders of music; and writes in his Aesthetics that the essence of music is to express "the oh! and the ah! of the soul." "Oh" and "ah" are neither concepts nor ideas; and the word "soul" is rather unusual in the Hegelian vocabulary, which normally prefers "Spirit" or "Bewusstsein"—consciousness. I cannot take the time here to quote all the philosophers who, one after the other, concede to music the philosophical right of inaccessibility—that is, the right of resistance to philosophy itself. Nevertheless, I would like to mention two contemporaries, both French: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Jankélévitch.

Before becoming an anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss taught philosophy, and even if he would prefer not to be defined as such, his work seems to me to be that of a true philosopher. After having described the effects of music on human nature as scientifically as possible in his Mythologiques; after having analysed perceptions of musical time, duration, its physiological effects on the internal organs; after struggling to define its rules and concepts, Lévi-Strauss finally renounces all attempt to understand, sighing that "music will remain the supreme mystery of human sciences." And Lévi-Strauss is only one of many to conclude that there is no scientific basis for understanding music. Indeed, this mystery is at the core of the entire oeuvre of the great French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch. In his La Musique et Pineffable, he describes the mysterious power of music, quoting Franz Liszt's lied "Die Macht der Musik." Explanations are impossible, but descriptions are possible, and the more poetic the better. Whatever music is, whether material or spiritual, emerging from passion or calculated from the rules of harmony, it acts powerfully on humanity, with a sweet and sour effect like that of a medicine or a poison—what Plato calls Pharmakon in his famous dialogue.

This is precisely why many philosophers are so cautious about music. The first in a long history, Plato expels from his ideal Republic a certain type of music. A certain type: for under the still powerful Greek influence on our ways of thinking, one finds even today a philosophical opposition between two types of music. The opposition suggests Nietzsche's separation of the Apollonian and Dionysian arts, but Jankélévitch rightly reminds us that in classical Greece the true distinction was not between Apollo and Dionysus, but between Orpheus and Dionysus. Orpheus the magician calmed the beasts with his harmonious instrument, the lyre; he could set lions to the plough and panthers to the carriage; in the same manner he tried to soothe women. However, if his magic worked on the wild animals in the forest, with women he failed. The Bacchantes, devotees of Dionysus, driven to frenzy by his divine flute, cut Orpheus into pieces and slashed his flesh. The flute triumphs over the lyre, Dionysus over Orpheus.

The lyre is sober, quiet, severe, and masculine; on the contrary, the flute is excited, passionate, ecstatic, and feminine. When Plato prohibits "music" from his city, he naturally means the second type, the oriental: in Greek thrènôdeis harmoniai. It was with a flute that a magician hypnotized rats and children in the German city of Hamelin and drew them to the river, where they drowned. "Flute," too, is the symbolic name for seduction, referring to the secret voice of a plaintive woman hidden in the instrument. Jankélévitch concludes that for most philosophers "the lamento and the appassionato do not belong to the moral sphere." Lamento and appassionato: we are not far from opera. And if Jankélévitch is correct that lamento and appassionato are outside the sphere of the moral, then so is opera.

Let us think about opera's innumerable moral ambiguities. The most striking example of the historical treachery that opera can practice must be Fidelio, Beethoven's beautiful work about freedom and the courage of women. After the Nazi invasion of Austria (the Anschluss), when Hitler entered Vienna in 1938, the city's main opera house, the Staatsoper, announced a performance of Fidelio. Why? Because through Nazism, the opera's directors claimed, Austria had won ... liberty. Like Leonore, they said, Austria is a faithful wife, waiting and fighting for her husband ... Hitler. Field-Marshall Hermann Goering, who was later condemned in Nuremberg and hung for crimes against humanity, attended the Staatsoper's official performance; and according to some newspaper critics, he himself could have played the role of the benevolent governor, Don Fernando.

Seven years later, after the war, in order to welcome the restoration of its freedom, Vienna celebrated by performing ... Fidelio. But this time Hitler had metamorphosed into the tyrant Pizarro. And when the old Staatsoper building, damaged by bombs, was reopened ten years later, what work was chosen to mark the occasion? Again Fidelio. Thus within less than twenty years the famous prisoners' chorus served the causes of Hitler, the Russian army, and that of a "new" Europe. Today in Vienna, Fidelio has a new nickname: "the chameleon opera."

A spiritual chameleon: the phrase could describe the phenomenon of music itself, and because of music's elusive power, it might also describe that peculiar form of theater called opera. Because of music's expressive slipperiness, the stories told by opera have a special strength, full of ambiguity. Through opera, History speaks with a very strange voice: unlike theater, whose talent is to enlighten, opera's vocation is to darken History, to make it less intelligible. And there, in my view, resides the central question of gender in opera. Let me first address two points: how opera displays worlds on stage and how opera displays History.

CROWDS, CHOIRS, ROLES, AND POWER

On stage, through sets, costumes, and lights, every performance of an opera displays its own world, its specific vision, its style. But in any opera there is also what might be called a vocal backdrop, defined by the composer. Let us call it a society of voices.

Most frequently, an opera defines its particular world through the chorus, whether visible or invisible. The concept of world may seem vague; perhaps the German concept of Gestalt can clarify how such a world functions for the "consumer" of opera. We spectators see a people—a community—but also tribes and bodies, each with its own role in that opera's version of history.

The Musical Soul of the Operatic Community

The community is represented by crowds singing with a huge, vague voice, often expressing political feelings, but never political ideas. In Musorgsky's Boris Godunov or Khovanshchina, even if the men and women of the chorus sing different words, they all unite in expressing a rather simple psychic mood that might be summarized as either joy-and-hope or despair-and- sorrow. This is the mythical voice known as "the voice of the Russian people": as a collective being, like the collective Christ described in the poetry of Aleksandr Blok; the people hope, suffer, and weep, obeying the basic myth of the ecstatic Russian Orthodox passion. One can hear similar feelings, expressed even more straightfowardly, among the imaginary Chinese crowds in Puccini's Turandot: alternately cruel and compassionate toward the princess, floating with the rhythms of her complicated identity, whether inflexible or tender, the crowd is Turandot's collective mirror. In some operas the people express a quiet and solemn joy, as does the community at the end of Wagner's Die Meistersinger—and it is useless to recall how these peaceful feelings were distorted by the Nazis, in the city of Nuremberg itself. On the contrary, the famous chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Verdi's Nabucco expresses both hope and pain. Normally, the voice of the people belongs to both genders, feminine and masculine. Rarely, one hears an exclusively male melody, as in Das Rheingold, where the Nibelungen, a community of slaves, are all "Übermenschen," shouting and suffering.

Men, Women, and Tribes

When the chorus expresses itself as a tribe, their melodies tend toward the masculine, obeying the anthropological reality of tribes themselves. Nevertheless, the concept of "tribe" applies symbolically to a coherent group of human beings with their own rules and culture; one could also use the word "band," or even "gang." Unlike the mythical communities I described a moment ago, opera rarely allows women to share the tribal space: the heritage of these imaginary tribes seems to bring out the worst aspects of opera, cruelty and violence. The best example is Hagen's band of warriors in Götterdämmerung: rude and tough voices, without room for compassion. On the other hand, Parsifal presents a compassionate masculine "tune" among the "tribe" of the knights: there again, in the sacred circle, there is no place for a feminine voice, except the voice that is heard falling from the dome, strictly invisible. And in the realm of good classical humanism, we cannot escape the chorus behind Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte: whether tribe or band, this highly spirited and noble "gang" has nevertheless stolen a child from her mother.

Wagner was who he was: antisemitic, uneasy with femininity, fond of masculine tribes. Mozart was a freemason in a period in which freemasonry was strictly forbidden to women. But Georges Bizet shared certain revolutionary values with the Paris Commune: it is not surprising then to hear men and women singing together in Carmen's tribal band of gypsies, a number of whom, both men and women together, will break with the social system, apply their own rules, and act as smugglers. Carmen is, of course, among these. In this operatic world, even if the men are the rulers, there is a space for women. What happens in a chorus is full of meaning: either archaic and forbidden to women, or open to them and thus advocating progress.

Official and Visible Bodies

Let me turn to the locus of power, to discuss what I would like to call official bodies. These characters are the most strictly ruled by history: they are members of parliament, priests, soldiers, nobles. In Verdi's Don Carlos, when the crowd awaits the king's entrance, we see a huge procession of these "official" bodies, accompanied by bizarre music-solemn, slow, and pompous. The whole range of Spanish society is gathering on stage to attend an auto-da-fé, the great social spectacle of Jews burnt alive on a Christian pyre. The army in Aida is similarly aligned with power: one hears neither lyre nor flute, but the triumph of trumpets, brass instruments especially marked for war and victory. And in Puccini's Tosca, when the whole of the Catholic body solemnly enters the church for a Te Deum of victory, the real incarnation of power, Baron Scarpia, lurks nearby in the dark. The reality of power is never really visible, never truly located in a collective entity.

In fact, the choruses of these official bodies, among which one must include noble women in a royal court, represent a tribe that has defeated all the others, centuries before. Any tribe can become a body; any body has been a tribe long ago, and can become a tribe again. What about the guild of Meistersingers? Are they a tribe, a band, or a body? In fifteenth-century Nuremberg, the masters were an official body. Later, they disappeared. In between, they were probably a threatened tribe. And for Wagner, they are the visible symbol of the values of ancient societies, much more admirable in his eyes than anything in the modern world. But this is not Wagner's fault. Opera has indeed a special taste for the past.

INDIVIDUAL VOICES AND SOCIAL ROLES

No scheme that correlates voice types—soprano, tenor, baritone—and types of characters will apply to every opera in the repertory, but some generalizations are possible. As Gilles de Van puts it in what he calls his "little Verdian grammar," "we are far from a situation in which every opera fits this scheme [of voice types], but the exceptions form part of a logic governed by the interaction of factors; and those exceptions finally settle into a pattern that does not deny the code itself." So let us try to establish another code, with its own exceptions and its own logic.

Soprano: Persecuted Victim

In the operas of the nineteenth century, almost all heroines are victims, persecuted by men, baritone or bass. The situation of women in the real world has hardly followed a continuous line of progress and liberation, but has sometimes improved, sometimes receded into darkness, as we see from our perspective at the turn of a new century. After the Enlightenment followed the severely regressive nineteenth century and the rude twentieth century, in which European women were forced to pay the substantial price of history and wars. It is hardly surprising that opera reflects this situation. Humiliated, hunted, driven mad, burnt alive, buried alive, stabbed, committing suicide-Violetta, Sieglinde, Lucia, Briinnhilde, Aida, Norma, Melisande, Liu, Butterfly, Isolde, Lulu, and so many others ... All sopranos, and all victims.

But let us mention immediately the most important and symbolic exception of the early twentieth century: Turandot.

Tenor: Courage and Rebellion

Young, courageous, imprudent, heroes of a rebellion against the social order, fighting for love, most tenors are the masculine equivalents of sopranos, together with whom they often die. Perhaps the most self- conscious of all tenors is Tristan, both opposed to and synonymous with Isolde. Even if they begin differently—Tristan doomed to death, Isolde both a foreigner and a sorceress—the real aim of their mortal disease of passion is to blend the two of them into one unique, dead being. Tristan hesitates between obedience and rebellion, and finally decides to choose love, a choice that also implies rebellion, suffering, night, and death.

The tenor rebels are many: Il trovatore's Manrico against his brother, Don Carlos against his father, Pelléas against his brother Golaud, Tannhäuser against Christianity, Don José against the Spanish army, Walther von Stolzing against the Meistersingers, and Tristan against his king. Each one is in love with a forbidden "lady," to use quite deliberately the vocabulary of courtly love, as a reminder of the powerful influence of thirteenth-century poetry even on nineteenth-century notions of love. Since the thirteenth century, our culture has been permeated by the myth of an impossible love between the lady and her servant. Whether or not Carmen can be considered as such a lady is a perplexing question, but undoubtedly as a "black" gypsy, as a sorceress, and as a free woman, she is forbidden to Don Jose. And while nothing remains of courtly love, a vague trace of this social and symbolic fight against order and law survives, in a celebration of what I will call "prohibited feelings."

Again there are some exceptions: Mime in Wagner's Ring, and both Shuysky and the Innocent in Boris Godunov are tenors without being heroes.

Baritone: Organized Opposition

Older, more prudent, they hide their rebellion and calculate their plots. Their voices have symbolically reached the ideal of maturity of European men: not too young, not too old. They do not really succeed in contesting the ancient order; often they fail and sometimes they die. They are often placed in the difficult position of go-betweeen in a conflict. Strongly articulate, violent, full of anxiety but with a powerful philosophical mind, such are Don Giovanni, Macbeth, Posa in Don Carlos, Scarpia in Tosca, Amfortas in Parsifal, Iago in Otello, and even Giorgio Germont in La traviata.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowlegments

Introduction by Mary Ann Swart

Through Voices, History by Cathtriuc Clement

The Absent Mother in Oprah Seria by Martha Feldman

Staging Mozart's Women by Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Mary Hunter, Gretchen A. Wheelock

The Career of Cherubino, Or the Trouser Role Grows Up by Heather Hadlock

Elisabeth's Last Act by Roger Parker

Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera by Peter Brooks

Ulterior Motives: Verdi's Recurring Themes Revisited by Mary Ann Smart

Melisande's Hair, or the Trouble in Allemonde: A Postmodern Allegory at the Opera-Comique by Katherine Bergeron

Opera: Two or Three Things I Know about Her by Lawrence Kramer

Staging the Female Body: Richard Strauss's Salome by Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D.

"Soulless Machines" and Steppenwolves: Renegotiating Masculinity in Krenek's Jonny spiel auf by Joseph HHenry Auner

"Grimes Ia at His Exercise": Sex, Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes by Phillip Brett

Notes

Indexs

What People are Saying About This

Ruth Solie

Siren Songs is provocative and engaging. As a whole,the collection should become required reading among musicologists,and many of the individual contributions will interest scholars in other fields,as well as the opera-going public.

Thomas S. Grey

"This collection will join a select and widely read group of books from the past decade dealing with classical music--and opera in particular--from the perspective of feminist and gender studies, sexuality, subject formation, and related cultural theory. Siren Songs will be a valuable book."

Grey

This collection will join a select and widely read group of books from the past decade dealing with classical music—and opera in particular—from the perspective of feminist and gender studies, sexuality, subject formation, and related cultural theory. Siren Songs will be a valuable book.
— Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University

From the Publisher

"This collection will join a select and widely read group of books from the past decade dealing with classical music—and opera in particular—from the perspective of feminist and gender studies, sexuality, subject formation, and related cultural theory. Siren Songs will be a valuable book."—Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University

"Siren Songs is provocative and engaging. As a whole, the collection should become required reading among musicologists, and many of the individual contributions will interest scholars in other fields, as well as the opera-going public."—Ruth Solie, Smith College

Editorial Reviews

Using a variety of analytical approaches, the musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars in this thought-provoking collection scrutinize the intricate and sometimes vexing questions concerning the interplay of power and voice among the composer, librettist(s), performers, and many other factors inherent in opera production. Catherine Cl ment's fine opening essay is followed by studies about opera seria in the 18th century, Verdi in the 19th century, and discussions of Debussy, Strauss, Krenek, and Britten. Several authors (including Gretchen Wheelock and Wye Jamison Allanbrook) focus on specific live or filmed performances, while others explore the psychological intricacies of opera or the presentation of the body and voice, both on and off stage. Many selections present compelling arguments concerning opera as a musical and social force through detailed studies of individual operas. Clearly part of the next generation of gender studies in opera, this book will be of interest to scholars and informed amateurs alike.--Teresa M. Neff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"This collection will join a select and widely read group of books from the past decade dealing with classical music—and opera in particular—from the perspective of feminist and gender studies, sexuality, subject formation, and related cultural theory. Siren Songs will be a valuable book."—Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University

"Siren Songs is provocative and engaging. As a whole, the collection should become required reading among musicologists, and many of the individual contributions will interest scholars in other fields, as well as the opera-going public."—Ruth Solie, Smith College

From the Publisher