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
is not forbidden to women. That is true. Women are its jewels, you say, the ornament indispensable for every festival. No prima donna, no opera. But the role of the jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing…. From the moment these women leave their familiar and ornamental function, they are to end up punished—fallen, abandoned, or dead. The “fair sex” indeed.
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
is a mélange of blood feuds, economic necessity and coercion, class enmities, religious intolerance, political rivalry, superstitious lore, and the menace of violence…. Critics who condemn as unwise or misplaced the love between Lucy and Ravenswood miss the point. Without fidelity in love, there is nothing worthwhile in the novel’s world.
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.
This work ought to have been an ideal vehicle for demonstrating the much-advertised priorities of the “new Met”—the institution that, under the leadership of Peter Gelb, has made a great deal in the press of its commitment to dramatically meaningful productions, directed by eminent people of the legitimate theater. This emphasis, I think, is part of the larger and very admirable aims of the new general manager to popularize grand opera, to bring it to a new audience: the drama in opera, you’re meant to feel, is the element that anyone, even those who aren’t (yet) in love with operatic music, could be moved by. The Lucia that premièred last month, in a new production by the Tony Award–winning stage director Mary Zimmerman and featuring the appealing French soprano Natalie Dessay (who, the promotion reminds us, started out as an actress and only then segued into singing) is, quite literally, the poster child for this new regime and its ambitious program. At the beginning of the autumn, it was impossible, if you lived in New York City, to wait for a bus without being greeted by the stark image of Ms. Dessay’s gamine face, eyes wide with simulated madness, her mascara running, plastered on the side of the bus stop.
All the more strange, then, that this important new production is such a bore. Despite a strong and committed cast and a director who could be counted on to make much of the dramatic aspects of a work whose ravishing music is often considered sufficient cause to perform it, this Lucia failed to add up—failed, most egregiously (and most surprisingly) of all, to make anything meaningful or memorable out of what you might not at all gratuitously call the “feminist” element: the very element, you’d think, that should give it particularly contemporary interest.
A big problem here is the direction. You could see why Donizetti’s opera, with its elemental Romantic plot and Every-Madwoman heroine, might have appealed to Mary Zimmerman, a writer and director who has always been interested in the possibilities of starkly dramatizing archetypal, even mythic material: the Odyssey of Homer, the Thousand and One Nights, and Ovid’s compendium of erotic disaster stories, the Metamorphoses. In staging these works, Zimmerman often has striking “concepts”: her Metamorphoses was set in a big, shallow swimming pool; her Arabian Nights ended in present-day Baghdad. Still, the problem with concepts is that most great works are too elastic, too polyphonic, to be squeezed into a single notion: just where those impressive-looking concepts get you, intellectually or indeed emotionally, isn’t always clear. I loved the idea of putting Ovid under water, not least because Ovid loved it, too: Metamorphoses begins with the watery chaos of creation, a perfect medium, you realize, for the corporeal transformations that follow. But Zimmerman never really made the water mean anything: it was just the stuff in which the actors splashed around as they acted out, fairly conventionally, the various stories.
A lot of the new Lucia has the same high-concept feel. There is, to start with, the mise-en-scène, which here has been inexplicably updated from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. (If you squint, you might think you’re watching a dramatization of Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds—at least as far as the costumes go: Zimmerman hasn’t filled the Met’s vast stage with much decor, perhaps intending for the airplane-hangar-like stage to dwarf the characters and thereby emphasize their isolation.) Updatings of operas can be controversial, but shouldn’t necessarily be so: there is, at the very least, an argument to be made for updating the action of many operas to the time of composition, the moment whose intellectual and cultural climate can explain a great deal about the work itself. This would certainly be the case of Lucia, composed during a period of a decade and a half that showed a particular fascination with female madness—the period of the Brontës, of the “madwoman in the attic.” Why Zimmerman should have chosen the late 1870s rather than the 1830s was anybody’s guess: it seemed not only against the grain (the end of the nineteenth century, with its bold heroines, jars as a milieu in which to set a pathetic Romantic tragedy) but gratuitous, a decision never explained.
And—worse—never capitalized on, never followed through. We hear again and again in Lucia that the girl is still in mourning for her mother; you’d have thought that Zimmerman would make something of this fact, given that few cultures have fetishized grief and mourning as much as the late-Victorian one in which she has chosen to set her production. A Lucia weighted down by the trappings of deep mourning would have presented a striking and psychologically suggestive picture—a visual reminder of the trauma that haunts her from the start. But Zimmerman doesn’t excavate the possibilities of her own concept.
A rigorously coherent use of the setting that she’s imposed on this Lucia would have given resonance to other clever but ultimately unrealized notions. During the great Act 2 sextet, when a furious Edgardo interrupts the wedding between Lucia and the wealthy Arturo and all the major characters sing of their various impressions and reactions at once, Zimmerman “opens out” this usually static moment in a suggestive way. As the principals sing, a wedding photographer fusses at them, nudging them into a wedding-day pose—a conceit that nicely communicates the dreadful tension, so common in operatic drama, between the crushing demands of the outside world and the interior turmoil that torments the characters. But like too much else in this staging—not least, an enchantingly pretty fall of snow that’s a perfect visual analogue to the descending harp arpeggios that introduce Lucia’s first aria (in which she describes seeing the ghost of a girl murd
ered by her lover’s ancestor)—this one is just a “moment” that comes and then, like the photographer’s flash at the end of the sextet, goes up in a puff of smoke.
Occasionally, Zimmerman’s concepts do serious damage to the carefully constructed meanings of the numbers. In the new production, as Lucia narrates her Gothic tale of ghosts and murdered maidens, the ghost itself, in the form of an all-too-corporeal, white-powdered dancer, flops around the heroine as she sings, and then glides away, writhing and beckoning, before disappearing a bit awkwardly into the fountain. Although this is visually arresting and certainly novel, to make the ghost concrete—to make it real—seems a very serious misapprehension of the meaning of the text here. Cammarano begins with this hysterical narrative of ghosts and visions because he wants, from the start, to underscore the girl’s mental fragility (as Callas understood so well). If the ghost is real to us, the audience, then our sense of the heroine’s delicate emotional state is inevitably diminished—as is, just as inevitably, our sense of the final murderous madness as a culmination, rather than an aberration.
Such novelties, so effortfully contrived (Zimmerman wants us to believe that the images of skeletal tree branches on the show curtain before each act represent “the human vascular system in the brain”), stood in stark contrast to the director’s inexplicable abandonment of the actors. Both times I saw this Lucia, I found my eyes wandering all over the stage (and sometimes the house) during even the most dramatic moments; there was nothing happening on the stage to hold the attention. Certainly nothing to do with the chorus, in which Zimmerman shows no interest: again and again they simply stood around in big clumps, bizarrely unresponsive to anything that was happening around them. The latter is a particularly serious problem, needless to say, in the Mad Scene. I recently watched a DVD of a 1967 Lucia with Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi, filmed in Japan, as well as a couple of performances by Joan Sutherland from the mid-1980s: what struck me was how each of the chorus members seemed to have been directed, to have been given a “character” to play, horrified, appalled, sympathetic, whatever. This is crucial: their reactions to the unfolding tragedy help cue the audience’s reactions.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 11
