Beautiful Singing, Hysterical Women
Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo: Part 3
A heads-up that this article contains stories of sexual abuse. Please take care while reading.
Welcome to Part 3 of Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, where we’ll be exploring opera’s current #MeToo reckoning through four centuries of misogyny and misconduct in the genre’s history — onstage and off. While you don’t have to have read anything else before diving in here, you can catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 for full effect.
It’s the beginning of 1846, and Gaetano Donizetti is falling apart. Just over a decade after the composer cemented his reputation as one of his generation’s greatest composers with Lucia di Lammermoor, he was now in Paris, an orphan, a widower, and having outlived all of his children. His nephew, living in Turkey, was so concerned that he had three of Paris’s top specialists in “diseases of the mind” examine his uncle, including Dr. Jean Mitvie of the famed Salpêtrière Hospital (the same hospital that Princess Diana would be brought to roughly 150 years later after her fatal car crash).
Madness with an audience: Natalie Dessay in the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera (screenshot)
The three physicians concluded that the Donizetti’s protracted case of neurosyphilis had reached a terminal stage, following “a slow, insidious march” that caused “the derangement at present existing in his brain.” This left the composer “no longer capable of calculating sanely the significance of his decisions.”
Donizetti was committed to a sanatorium in Ivry. His delivery there is a heartbreaking story in and of itself, an innocent, well-intentioned deceit that led him to believe he was being arrested as a thief. The letters he writes in this time period showed flashes of consciousness fragmented among disorientation. In one undated letter to an unnamed colleague in Paris, he writes:
“They arrested me… and I'm alone!… I beg you: My health is poor, but I'm not stupid. I'm weeping.”
After 17 months, Donizetti was released from Ivry, in worse shape than he was when he entered. Four months later, he was dead.
The madness of Donizetti mirrors the mad scenes he wrote for his leading ladies — two of which have come to define the genre: Anne Boleyn’s scena before her execution in Anna Bolena, and Lucy Ashton’s wedding-night delirium in Lucia di Lammermoor. Both epitomize the Bel Canto era of opera: beautiful singing, hysterical women. Both set the tone for how we would come to see opera heroines for much of the next two centuries.
Last week, we touched on hysteria in exploring the significance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (both the opera and its title character) in opera’s own #MeToo lineage. As Freud, after hearing so many women in the grips of so-called neuroses enumerate the abuse they suffered at the hands of their fathers, would conclude: One group had to be uniformly lying. He determined that the fathers were blameless. It was the women, gripped by the catchall term of “hysteria,” that were not in their right minds, and turning, Oedipus-like, on their fathers.
For men like Freud, hysteria was inherently gendered — even the name is owed to the Ancient Greek term for “uterus.” Yet in the era directly preceding the birth of psychotherapy (beginning with Freud’s own mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot ), hysteria was already a known quantity. And one of the places it was most readily found, and savored, was on the opera stage.
The operatic mad scene is a tradition almost as old as the genre itself, with some of the earliest examples tracing back to the 17th Century. Often these were moments of breakdown for male characters, a common trope being Orpheus temporarily abandoning his senses after the loss of Eurydice. The tradition continued into the 18th Century, with one of the most famous examples of the era being Handel’s 1733 opera Orlando. Once again, a male character (albeit one often sung by a female in trouser roles), the titular leader in Charlemagne’s army, takes leave of his senses after being rejected by a potential lover. It’s only the intervention of a priest that keeps him from destroying everything in his path as a result.
But male rage, as the Irish playwright Marina Carr once said, “has a different quality. It’s less self-destructive. Women’s rage turns inward most of the time. How wonderful to be able to burn down the whole world. Even if it is only a stage. Revenge.”
Roughly 50 years later, Orlando’s fury would turn inward with Mozart’s 1781 opera Idomeneo. With Elettra’s aria, “D’Oreste, d’Ajace”, the composer turned out what is now often referred to as a proto mad scene. Like Orlando before her, Elettra is a spurned lover, and invokes the Furies in a scene-chewing breakdown. But the elements of this aria, which clocks in at just under 5 minutes, resonated over the next half-century.
In “D’Oreste, d’Ajace,” we can trace the line of feminine rage, even hysteria, into Mozart’s later characters, including Donna Anna’s more reserved, noble breakdowns in Don Giovanni. The first of this kind comes when Anna realizes it was the Don who murdered her father, a scene alternately played as genuine epiphany by some directors, and as reputation-saving fabrication by others. The fury of the preceding recitative to Donna Anna’s “Or sai chi l’onore” mirrors the rapidfire strings in Elettra’s aria, although now Anna asks her fiancé, Don Ottavio, to take on the mantle of fury and avenge her.
Her repressed emotion returns with another outburst in Act II with the aria “‘Crudele! Ah nò, mio bene,” brought on by Ottavio accusing his fiancée of cruelty at wanting more time to mourn her father’s death before marrying him. In at least one staging (by Claus Guth, originated at the Salzburg Festival), this aria is played with the implication that Donna Anna will plan on taking her life as a result of her seemingly consensual liaison with Giovanni and resulting guilt. In a modern production, Claus Guth’s vision of Donna Anna is hysteria intellectualized.
When, in the first decades of the 19th Century, the Sicilian-born composer Vincenzo Bellini studied in Naples at the Conservatorio di San Sebastiano, Mozart was one of the focuses of his studies. It’s easy, then, to see how the young composer took inspiration from arias like Elettra’s and Donna Anna’s for his own eventual works, which came to define the Bel Canto era of Italian opera. Much like Mozart’s most Italianate works (especially those written with Lorenzo Da Ponte), the unofficial Bel Canto style came about as a way of Italians differentiating their style of opera from the Germanic style taking shape on the other side of the Alps.
While “Bel Canto” itself is a broad term, a broadness encouraged by the subjective nature of the phrase “beautiful singing,” its strongest associations are with works like Bellini’s I Puritani, where plot took a backseat to the drama of the vocal music, and singers were allowed to stop time, or at least the plot, for long melodious vocal lines that illustrated their technique, more closely mirrored the emotions of their characters than previous eras, and did very little to advance the plot. (Not for nothing in this era did Hans Christian Andersen posit that “Where words fail, music speaks.”)
Bellini was a master of articulating musical “sighs,” long notes that often descended in chromatic scales, tumbling out of a soprano’s mouth at a moment of shock or delirium. They became the perfect vehicle to also convey madness in works like I Puritani, which features its heroine Elvira going mad with grief when she believes her fiancé to have abandoned her on their wedding day. This in and of itself is a pithy distillation of a plot that involves the backdrop of the English Civil War, an army of Puritans, a vaguely Romeo and Juliet romance between one of their own and an opposing Royalist, and the widow of the executed King Charles I.
All of these machinations serve merely as plot devices leading up to two mad scenes in one opera, and yet Elvira often hovers over the opera more as a spectre than a character. Her first notes are sung offstage, a trend that continues before each of her entrances. And arguably the most popular part of the opera — the baritone-bass duet “Suoni la tromba” — is not sung by her, but in relation to her. And despite Puritani being a soprano showcase, the final aria (and a showboating high F) goes to Elvira’s fiancé, Arturo.
Bellini premiered I Puritani in Paris, where it was an instant success, in January of 1835. At the end of that year, Donizetti would premiere Lucia di Lammermoor in Naples eight months and one day later. And thanks to singers like Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, and, yes, Plácido Domingo, Lucia has continued as one of the most performed operas year-over-year nearly two centuries later.
In many ways, Lucia mirrors Puritani, but makes the love story both more prominent and more forbidden. Drawing on the already-popular Romantic novel by Sir Walter Scott, Salvatore Cammarano wasn’t the first librettist to adapt The Bride of Lammermoor (others had done so for operas composed in 1829, 1831, and 1834, the 19th Century equivalent of multiple film and series adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale), but he arguably did it most effectively. Eliminating Scott’s central villain, a mother on par with Lady Macbeth, he made Lucia essentially the only female character in the work (save for her maid Alisa). Between his libretto and Donizetti’s score, which pitted the fragile, feminine harp lines of Lucia’s arias against the full-throated fury of masculine brass and percussion, Lucia is a character slowly swallowed up by the patriarchal bent of her world.
Like Elvira in Puritani, we learn as much about Lucia from the men in her life (if not more) than Lucia herself. The first scene effectively sees her slut-shamed by her brother’s huntsman, Normanno, who tells Lucia’s brother (Enrico) of her illicit affair with his sworn enemy, Edgardo. Edgardo manipulates the plot, forging a love letter from Edgardo to another woman, in an effort to marry Lucia off to Arturo (a name which makes the Puritani comparisons admittedly confusing) for his own political gain. The family priest, Raimondo, convinces Lucia to make this sacrifice, but all goes south when her wedding is interrupted by Edgardo.
After the opera’s famed Sextet, a brawl breaks out between Edgardo and Enrico, and Edgardo then curses Lucia. In response, she sings, not doleful sighs, but bright, happy lines that almost sound like nursery songs in their simplicity. It’s the beginning of her break, which culminates in Lucia stabbing Arturo on their wedding night. It’s a scene that takes place offstage, and described to the wedding guests in horror by Raimondo.
All of this sets the stage for Lucia’s mad scene, “Il dolce suono,” originally written for (and still occasionally performed with) voice accompanied by the eerie, ethereal glass harmonica. In roughly 20 minutes, it’s a time that’s seemingly uninterrupted monologue for Lucia, who sees the ghost of Edgardo and reenacts their love affair for her wedding guests. In reality it’s easy to overlook that it’s in fact written in two parts, with the chorus adding commentary and Enrico eventually entering to discover his plan — and his sister — have come undone.
What’s more, Lucia’s vocal lines are disoriented and haphazard, she catches fragments of melodies from earlier in the work, hanging the longest on her Act I love duet with Edgardo, but quickly and erratically bouncing from one section to the next. For a time, the mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor was the sole reason people went to see the opera, and it was really in the 20th Century that (thanks in no small part to some skilled performers) audiences began to see Lucia as a holistically significant work.
In order to understand what else changed in that time, we need to go back to the Salpêtrière Hospital, home to one of Donizetti's physicians in 1846. Roughly 25 years after Donizetti was committed, the Salpêtrière would be home to three residents, all female, all believed to be exhibiting symptoms equated with hysteria. All three were being treated by the new head of the hospital, Jean-Martin Charcot, who would give weekly demonstrations with his three patients to the public. As Asti Hustvedt notes in her 2011 book, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, “Hysteria had become a fascinating and fashionable spectacle.”
Medical students weren’t the only ones to see Charcot’s lectures — in fact, the demonstrations could on any given day attract the same audiences who would go to the opera later that evening. And both Charcot and the opera became means for understanding the same end: In an age where women continued to be defined in relation to the men they had (or lacked), hysteria was seen as both an exclusively female affliction and one that came as a result of the demands placed on women. While sopranos expressed this affliction in floating vocal lines, the women under Charcot’s care did so through paralysis, muteness, a sense of strangulation, or other symptoms that now may match up with schizophrenia, extreme anxiety, depression, or chronic pain (to name just a few analogues).
The message in both opera and Charcot’s women (whose names, it should be added, were Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève) is also the same: Women’s bodies are more fragile, more vulnerable, less reliable than their male counterparts. It’s a message that is not unfamiliar today.
Augustine photographed at the Salpêtrière
Charcot’s work with Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève gave way to the theories of trauma that would inform the work of one of his students, Sigmund Freud. Of special importance in this was Augustine (born Louise Augustine Gleizes), who suffered her first hysterical convulsions as a symptom of what we’d now likely diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder after being raped at knifepoint at the age of 13. Her symptoms intensified when she later ran into her rapist on the street, and she began to act out on her trauma by having sex with her brother’s friends.
This did not go over well with Augustine’s parents, but more revelations abounded when her sexual history was discovered, including that her mother was in a relationship with her rapist. It’s also believed, as Hustvedt points out, that her brother may have been the illegitimate son of her rapist. All of this eventually landed Augustine in the Salpêtrière.
In Charcot’s public demonstrations, Augustine would often undergo hypnosis and reenact her history of sexual abuse. Freud was in the audience for one of these demonstrations. So was Edgar Degas. And, because Augustine’s arrival at the Salpêtrière coincided with the advent of photography, her contortions were often captured and sold as souvenirs. (Charcot’s other patient, Blanche, often described as a “virtuoso hysteric,” was immortalized in a painting, “A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière.” A copy of the work hung in Freud’s office.)
“A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière" by André Brouillet, 1887
Unlike Lucia or Elvira, however, Augustine couldn’t leave the stage at the end of the day, take off her costume and makeup, and return home. While Hustvedt’s research suggests that Charcot’s female patients were well taken care of, Augustine escaped the hospital after a few years, donning men’s clothes and never heard from again. Charcot, meanwhile, became all the more famous for using Augustine, Blanche, and Geneviève as case studies.
In some ways, Lucia’s and Elvira’s mad scenes presage the entertainment — and fame-making — value perceived by a (predominantly male) public later in the same century, much in the same way that audiences today gravitate towards true crime podcasts. Lucia’s allure extends from this same root. She is Augustine, Hae Min Lee, Laura Palmer, and Sharon Tate in one prescient package.
Over time, “Bel Canto” as a term has become almost a pejorative, sighed wistfully — as wistfully as the musical sighs programmed into Elvira and Lucia by Bellini and Donizetti — by those who think of beautiful singing as no longer a present phenomenon, but a bygone era. In this way, such fans are living in a way similar to Lucia.
“Only memory, all too present in a family that no longer wishes to or is able to see it, is lost, and they are the living perpetuation of this memory,” writes Catherine Clément. Her compatriot, the musicologist Jean Chantavoine, adds that the absurdity of the mad scene “is justified by the errors of a demented woman who discovers in horror itself a subject of joy.”
Natalie Dessay in the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera (screenshot)
Yes, women move through these scenes without actively processing them. What we now treat ably with a multitude of therapies derives from the Romanticized convulsions of Augustine and Blanche’s counterparts in Elvira and Lucia. Madness is but a dream, a retreat into fantasy to avoid the horrors of real life; of war, of beheaded kings, of political structures that threaten personal fulfillment.
In both cases, men not only have the last word, they also have control of the narrative, which becomes another key point throughout opera’s history of #MeToo. Arturo has the final aria in I Puritani, as does Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia dies offstage, the actual cause unspecified. Edgardo, in turn, stabs himself to join her. (“Madman!” Raimondo calls out in admonishment.)
And in the cases of Bellini, Donizetti, and Charcot, the stories of the women in their work are seen, in some sort of proto-auteur theory, as their creations. Their work is theirs, with (at least until recently) very little credit given to the women who enabled it. In Donizetti’s case, this is also a real-life woman, Janet Dalrymple, who deserves her own close read.
But perhaps Donizetti realized this. In his final years, with his facilities on a sharp downturn, the composer only responded to one piece of music that was played for him: the mad scene from Lucia.
Thanks for subscribing to Undone. Next week: Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, Part 4: The Puzzle of Puccini.
Further Reading and Viewing
Not without Madness: Perspectives on Opera by Fabrizio Della Seta (2012)
Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-century Paris by Asti Hustvedt (2011)
Mimomania by Mary Ann Smart (2004)
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality by Susan McClary (2002)
Donizetti and the Music of Mental Derangement: Anna Bolena, Lucia di Lammermoor, and the Composer's Neurobiological Illness by Enid Peschel and Richard Peschel for the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (1992)
The Silencing of Lucia by Mary Ann Smart for the Cambridge Opera Journal (1992)
Opera, the Undoing of Women by Catherine Clément* (1979)
On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf (1930)
There are several full-length Lucias on YouTube. I recommend this production, starring Lisette Oropesa, from the Teatro Real, Madrid.
*bae