How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (11 page)

—The New York Review of Books,
November 30, 2006

I
n February 1834, Gaetano Donizetti, whom the première of his
Anna Bolena
four years earlier had made a star of the Italian opera world, accepted with joy an invitation by Rossini to compose an opera for the Théâtre-Italien in Paris. As the vehicle for his entrée into the Parisian music world, the composer cannily chose an adaptation of a popular French play about a murdered Venetian doge; and yet the run of
Marin Faliero
, as the new opera was called, was both unspectacular and short, closing after five performances. Partly this had to do with the fact that the opera premièred late in the season, a serious disadvantage particularly since it had been preceded by Bellini's hit
I Puritani
; partly it was because of practical aggravations of the kind amusingly familiar from the performance histories of early-nineteenth-century opera. (The Parisian fire marshals had insisted on testing their new safety system the day after the
prima
, a routine that involved, among other things, flooding the theater.)

But if
Marin Faliero
was waterlogged, at least one contemporary account suggests that the reason had less to do with the material production than with something intrinsic to the work itself—a work remarkable, as operas about Venetian doges can be, for its preponderance
of strong male roles. Two months after the Paris run, when the opera was produced in London, the critic Henry Chorley wrote that

It is tempting to think that Donizetti himself might have secretly, or at least unconsciously, shared this assessment of his work's fatal flaw. After all, soon after he returned to Italy, a month after
Faliero
's truncated run, in order to begin work on the first of three new operas he'd agreed to compose for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, he settled on a subject that seemed impervious to any possible objection that its heroine lacked “interest.”

That subject was a hugely popular 1819 novel by the recently deceased Sir Walter Scott—a work whose suitability for the theater, despite the author's odd assertion that it didn't lend itself to the stage, had already been demonstrated by the fact that when Donizetti set his sights on it, it had already been dramatized by librettists for three other composers (and been adapted in verse by Hans Christian Andersen for a concert performance, with musical accompaniment, in 1832). The novel—which not coincidentally has been considered the leanest and dramatically tightest of Scott's historical fictions by readers from E. M. Forster to Thomas Hardy, the least encumbered by swags and poufs of “history”—was
The Bride of Lammermoor
. During six weeks in the summer of 1835, Donizetti wrote his new opera to a libretto by Salvatore Cammarano (who would go on to provide Verdi with the texts to four operas, including
Il Trovatore
) that drastically pared down Scott's novel, stripping away everything but the bare bones of its Romantic tragedy: the tale of a young girl who, after being forced by her insensitive family to give up her true love and marry a husband of their choice for the sake of their political and financial advantage, is driven to madness and murder.

The madness instantly became the new work's most famous element, and it has remained so ever since. For the climactic moment in Act 3—when Scott's Lucy Ashton, here redubbed Lucia, having lost her mind and stabbed her husband to death on their wedding night, appears
before the horrified wedding guests—Donizetti memorably gave his heroine an extended scene in which the young woman's derangement is represented with brilliant musical ingenuity. In this great mad scene, the fragmentation of Lucia's thoughts is suggested by the fragments of earlier tunes running through the scene; her inarticulate longing and terror (earlier on, she'd sung of “joy that can be felt but not spoken”) are made plain in the flights of wordless vocal pyrotechnics that slither and explode between the more articulate moments. The spooky inarticulateness comes straight from Scott's novel: in it, when the blood-covered Lucy is finally discovered, she doesn't speak but instead “gibbered, made mouths, and pointed at them with her bloody fingers, with the frantic gestures of an exulting demoniac.”

Because of the ingenuity of Donizetti's achievement in this scene, it soon became the best known of a number of operatic representations of female insanity, many of them to be found in the bel canto repertoire of the early nineteenth century. Donizetti's breakthrough work,
Anna Bolena
, has one; the rather paranoid Bellini, always rivalrous when it came to the slightly older Donizetti, gave
Puritani
two. The popularity of such scenes, and the iconic status particularly of the Mad Scene in
Lucia
, make you wonder whether they represent something essential about opera itself—a genre that, like Greek tragedy, seems to take special pleasure in representing extremes of feminine suffering. The paradox of so much opera—that is to say, the genre's celebration of female power (that marvelous voice) and what you might call its punishment of female action (however spectacularly they sing, sopranos tend to die equally spectacularly, and in far greater numbers than, say, their tenor lovers do)—has led some scholars to see in opera, as indeed they have seen in Greek tragedy, the ambivalent operations of a male-run society that simultaneously desires women and seeks to constrain them. Typical of this school of thought is the French critic Catherine Clément, who has observed that opera

This reading of opera has a particular resonance when you think of
Lucia
, a work that was invoked throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in novels whose heroines, repressed and thwarted by their societies or husbands, themselves explode into climactic acts of violence (or are simply killed off): Donizetti's opera makes memorable and rather pointed appearances in
Madame Bovary
,
Anna Karenina
,
Where Angels Fear to Tread
, and other works.

 

Whether you agree with the feminist reading or not, you still have to wonder why it's the mad scenes that grip our imaginations so. (“These onstage collapses are fascinating to watch,” as an article in the playbill for the new Metropolitan Opera production of
Lucia
puts it.) Which is to say, why “want of interest in the female character” is fatal to an opera—and why that “interest” so often takes the form of virtuoso singing that expresses abjectness, madness, and violence. On its opening night in September 1835, at any rate,
Lucia
proved a triumph. There was certainly no want of interest in its female character.

As it happens, Donizetti and his librettist, Cammarano, took great pains to bring out, to the exclusion of virtually all else, the qualities of feminine pathos present in their source material. For starters, they gutted pretty much all of the late-Stuart intrigues that in the novel serve as the fraught background for the internecine maneuverings between Lucy's family, the Ashtons, and their rivals, the Ravenswoods (the family to which, inevitably, her beloved, Edgar, belongs). A recent academic critic of Scott's novel has written of what you might call the tension between “history” and “fiction” in
The Bride of Lammermoor
, a novel in which history

Donizetti, however, was famously unmoved by politics. (In 1831, after his triumph in Milan with
Anna Bolena
, he returned to a Rome afflicted by civic upheavals inspired by the July Revolution in Paris. His reactions are recorded in a letter to his father: “I am a man whom few things disturb, or rather only one: that is, if my opera goes badly. For the rest, I do not care.”) What did interest him—what had interested him from the start of his career, when as an ambitious young composer he was already chafing at the constraints imposed by the glittering Rossinian style and the happy endings invariably imposed by the censors—was what was interesting to many artists and composers and writers just then, which was “fidelity in love.” And of course the dreadful consequences when that love failed.

Hence while today's Walter Scott scholars may argue that in
The Bride of Lammermoor
, “the tragic erotic theme” functions “as a cautionary parable about the necessity for the Union,” the operatic version reverses those priorities: what references to the original historical setting remain (there are a couple of lines about William and Mary and the French, and so forth) serve merely to intensify a drama that is essentially domestic and erotic. When we learn, in the opera, that Lucia's brother, Enrico Ashton, finds that he has allied himself to the wrong political party, we're interested not in the Stuarts but rather in the awful dramatic result of Enrico's predicament: his decision to trick his sister into marrying a man she doesn't love, but who can help restore his own fortunes. (This intense domestic crisis flares most poignantly in the Act 2 duet between the two siblings, when to Enrico's repeated declarations that only Lucia's marriage to the rich and well-connected Arturo Bucklaw can save him, Lucia pathetically replies,
Ed io?
: “And what of
me
?”)

The most significant alteration on the part of
Lucia
's composer and librettist of their source material lies not, however, in their treatment of politics, but rather in the way they approach an issue having to do with gender. For in Scott's novel the villain of the story, the character who drives Lucy to madness and violence, is not in fact the heroine's brother (as those who know the story from the opera are likely to suppose),
but rather her mother, Lady Ashton, a “proud, vindictive, and predominating spirit,” a “bold, haughty, unbending” virago who is compared by the narrator to Lady Macbeth (!). This harridan has of course been dispensed with in Cammarano's adaptation: we're told in the first scene of
Lucia
that the girl's mother has recently died, and indeed the ongoing references to the daughter's grief are meant to suggest that Lucia's mental instability had been triggered by this terrible shock. During one of her Lincoln Center master classes, Maria Callas, a great Lucia, told a student that “you must make the public feel that this girl is ill from the beginning.” (She also referred to Enrico as a “snake.”)

The creators of
Lucia
have, then, very pointedly isolated their fragile heroine in a world that consists almost exclusively of men. Indeed, at a moment when Italian composers were exploring the rich musical and dramatic possibilities of intense pairings between two sopranos, or sopranos and mezzos, in Romantic melodramas—Bellini's Norma and Adalgisa in
Norma
(1831), Donizetti's own Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour in his breakthrough
Anna Bolena
—it's striking that Donizetti has worked so hard to deprive his Lucia of significant female companionship. (The role of her confidante, Alisa, is so shallow and negligible that even in the nineteenth century, not long after Lucia's triumphant première, people were likely to talk of the great “quintet” in Act 2, which is in fact a sextet.) More, the men with whom he and Cammarano have surrounded her—Edgardo included—are scarily self-involved and prone to violent emotions. (They talk a great deal about their
rabbia
, their rage.) They are, if anything, as proud, vindictive, and predominating as Scott's Lady Ashton ever was.

Here, comparison not with
The Bride of Lammermoor
but with another predecessor is instructive. Lucia is just as top-heavy with male roles as the failed
Marin Faliero
was; but in the later, successful work, the fact that the heroine is surrounded by strong men was not an oversight but a carefully considered plan—not so much an abandonment on the part of the composer as a purposeful imprisonment, one that makes us think of her vulnerability, her suffering. Her “interest.”

 

The effect produced by all this textual maneuvering is one to which we have become so accustomed, which feels to us so natural, that it's easy
to forget that it was the result of self-conscious and quite canny craft: the insistent, ever-growing emphasis, throughout
Lucia
, on qualities of abandoned pathos, of a feminine suffering that begins in an oppression symbolized by an act of sexual intrusion (the forced marriage), and ends with an explosion of spectacularly aggressive and finally self-destructive energies. That shift, from sacrificial victim to avenging harpy, reminds you of the Greek tragedies that were the ancestors of early-nineteenth-century dramas like
Lucia
.

That it's easy to take those archetypes for granted is plain in our reactions to the opera today. In an assessment of the notoriously postmodern, heavily (heavy-handedly, to some) symbolic production of Donizetti's opera by the director Francesca Zambello, which debuted at the Met in 1992 to a chorus of boos from the audiences and disdain from most critics, a
New York Times
writer referred to the “perhaps gratuitous feminist spin” that Zambello put on the opera in her director's note (where she referred to
Lucia
as “a tale of psychological terror, of emotional blackmail, and of sexual politics set in the half-seen realm of the unconscious”). And yet, as so carefully constructed by Donizetti and Cammarano,
Lucia di Lammermoor
is the story of an isolated young girl, the only female in a violent family, who's tricked by her ambitious brother into marrying a man she doesn't know—and by “marrying” we mean, necessarily, having sex with him; Cammarano's text is not shy about referring to the
talamo
, the “marriage-chamber,” into which Lucia is forced—in order to save her brother and his money and position. She must suffer, that is, to save the man. If to see such a story as having feminist overtones is “gratuitous,” it would be very nice to know what an ungratuitous feminist spin might look like.