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Verdiandtheundoingofwomen
JOSEPHKERMAN
CambridgeOperaJournal/Volume18/Issue01/March2006,pp2131 DOI:10.1017/S0954586706002072,Publishedonline:07June2006

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 18, 1, 2131 doi:10.1017/S0954586706002072

 2006 Cambridge University Press

Verdi and the undoing of women

JOSEPH KERMAN

Abstract: For a brief period in his career, Verdi wrote operas about compromised or fallen women, women condemned for their sexuality: not only Lina in Stielio and Violetta in La traviata, but also if we take into account the way their men regard them Lida in La battaglia di Legnano, Luisa in Luisa Miller and Leonora in Il trovatore. These women suffer or die. Gilda also dies, in Rigoletto, ultimately a victim of her sexual availability. This essay examines Verdis contribution to the undoing of women and relates it speculatively to his experience as Giuseppina Strepponis lover around the same time.

For Susan McClary, on the Big Six-O

Nearly twenty years ago a book came out that caused a tempest in what was then the teacup of opera studies: Opera, or the Undoing of Women by Catherine Clment. By getting the book translated and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1988 and writing the introduction to it, after having done much the same for Jacques Attalis Noise in 1985, Susan McClary became a force to be reckoned with in musicology at a time when her early articles still had to be hunted for, well before Feminine Endings. Clments book was calculated to shock, as McClary knew, and it still packs a punch today, after all the time we have had to explain whats wrong with it. The tone is personal vibrantly so and the rhetoric hyperbolic and totalising. In one way or another, Clment contends, women in opera are victimised, humiliated, and usually killed, seldom quickly. The patriarchal spectacle that is opera entails the ritual sacrice of women. It is easy for opera specialists or even buffs, then or now, to dismiss this claim. There are whole sub-genres of opera that treat their women with respect. But Clment is not an opera specialist, she is the French feminist author of such diverse books as The Feminine and the Sacred, Gandhi, the novel Theos Odyssey and several others. When she says opera, she really means Opra: not the genre opera over its entire history, but the repertory of the Paris Opra when she grew up in and around the 1950s, just as old people in the United States grew up with Rudolf Bing and the Texaco Opera Theater. And she no longer seems so easy to dismiss. That our basic, traditional operatic repertory drips with female blood is incontrovertible. And why is it that women are destroyed in opera/Opra plots? Only seldom for impeachable crimes, like Norma, the Druid priestess who has married a Roman before the opera begins; or as the outcome of tragic fate, like Lucy of Lammermoor; or just for amusement, as in The Tales of Homann.
This article goes back to a paper given as the Donald J. Grout Memorial Lecture at Cornell in 1999, under the title Some Verdi Heroines, and then on other occasions. It nds its true home as a tribute to a scholar who deserves much of the credit (and less of the ak) for the reconguration of music studies that has taken place in the last twenty years. I remain grateful to the late Lenore Coral for the original invitation to Cornell.

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The reasons women are destroyed in opera can almost always be traced to their sexuality. Sexual transgression, sexual aggression, even sexual victimisation: all can be deadly. At the top of the scale of iniquity is seduction, the original sin of Eve, re-enacted by operas most incendiary heroines: Carmen, Delilah, Kundry, Salome, Lulu. Carmen compounds iniquity by not only seducing her lover, but also abandoning him for another man; betrayal is an action that can be fatal, even if there is some secret, virtuous reason for it. Carmen seduces and betrays; she dies. Yet women who do not seduce or betray, women who are themselves seduced, are also at risk. This can be true whether they struggle against infatuation, like Amelia in Verdis Un ballo in maschera, or luxuriate in it, like Gilda in Rigoletto. Retribution is visited on operatic women for seduction, betrayal, and also submission. The works of Giuseppe Verdi bulk large in the operatic canon, and it is therefore worth asking if and how Verdis output as a whole stands up under Clments indictment. On the one hand, Verdi is no Puccini, whose routine ill-treatment of his women is an embarrassment even to his admirers. On the other hand, Verdi is no Gluck, who scoured the corpus of Greek tragedy for heroines of sometimes suffocating nobility, survivors all Alceste, Iphigenia in her two manifestations. Verdi had his bad patch: a whole clump of women come to grief because of sexual transgression, actual or perceived, in operas composed within a four-year period between 1849 and 1853: Lida in La battaglia di Legnano (1849), Luisa in Luisa Miller (1849), Lina in Stielio (1850), Gilda in Rigoletto (1851), Leonora in Il trovatore (1853) and Violetta in La traviata (1853). In La battaglia di Legnano, Lidas husband Arrigo returns from the dead and nds that she has remarried. He reviles her for her betrayal, as he sees it; she endures pangs of guilt and submits to a humiliating scene. Still, Lida survives, borne to safety on a ood of patriotic fervour that sweeps all before it, after Arrigo dies as the Italian champion at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. She survives because in another fateful year for Italy, 1848, nineteenth-century morality took a back seat to politics. The heroine of Luisa Miller dies at the hand of her jealous lover Rodolfo because he thinks that she has left him for another man. Ah, mi tradia! (Ah, she betrayed me!) Rodolfo cries out repeatedly in the refrain of his Act II aria. Luisa was compelled to act as if she had left Rodolfo in order to save her fathers life; nonetheless the betrayal leads to her death. Before Rodolfo gives her the cup of poison they will drink together, she had already decided to kill herself. Lina in Stielio is an adulteress, albeit a repentant one by the time the piece begins. Her husband nally forgives her, so Lina survives. She is, however, humiliated in an ugly way, both visually and musically. The proximate cause of Gildas death in Rigoletto is self-sacrice, of course. But behind that proximate cause lies her seduction, the fact that she allows herself to be seduced by the Duke in the rst place. She ignores Rigolettos warnings in Act I, activates his doomed plot in Act II, suffers and dies a drawn-out death in Act III. The opera is one long reprobation for her rst, fundamental feminine weakness.

Verdi and the undoing of women

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What we can call virtuous betrayal appears again, after Luisa Miller, in Il trovatore, where Leonora betrays her lover Manrico to save his life. Manrico only learns the truth when she is dying of a self-administered poison. Leonora dies not because she cannot stand to live with the Count di Luna, but because, after betraying Manrico, she cannot stand to live with herself. Indelity is as fatal for her as it is for Luisa (though unlike Luisa she gets to pour her own fatal draught). La traviata can be seen as a full-scale study in virtuous betrayal: Violetta betrays Alfredo in response to pleas from his father to save the good name of his bourgeois family. She will die indeed, she is already on the way to death the rst time we see her. Consumption, a manifest symptom and symbol of her life as a prostitute, actually drives the action. In the end, it is sexual promiscuity that kills her. This group of six Verdi operas, all composed in a four-year period, offers a series of studies of women caught in the toils of their sexuality. This topic emerges only at this stage in Verdis output. It is interesting, and perhaps revealing, to compare these women with the masculine types that inhabit many of his earlier operas. Abigaille in Nabucco leads a military coup; Joan in Giovanna dArco puts on armour and dies heroically in battle; and Lady Macbeth calls famously on the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts to unsex her. Two other of these redoubtable sopranos, Gulnara in Il corsaro and Odabella in Attila, stab their baritones to the heart. Like Tosca! The women in the operas composed between La battaglia di Legnano and La traviata are more feminine to the point, sometimes, of stereotype. They are punished for feminine iniquities or weaknesses, again to the point of stereotype. Giuseppina As the psychologist Gerald Mendelsohn argued some time ago, this new theme in Verdis operas follows upon a milestone in the composers personal life, his liaison with Giuseppina Strepponi, the soprano who created the role of Abigaille in Nabucco and who had befriended him even before that.1 After losing her voice Strepponi set up in Paris as a voice teacher, with Verdis help. Verdi visited Paris for the rst time in 1847, for the production of Jrusalem, and they fell in love. The manuscript of Jrusalem has been found to include some love notes they wrote to one another. Giuseppina Strepponi and Verdi were certainly in love. By nineteenth-century standards, however, Strepponi was a woman of loose virtue. As a young singer she had lived with several men and had a number of illegitimate children.2 How Verdi, who famously nurtured his image as a true son of the Italian soil, reconciled received views of womens purity with Strepponis impurity when the relationship amed up at the start we can never know. As the ames died down he clearly developed feelings of ambivalence. We do know that Giuseppina blamed herself for her past life bitterly, and that Verdi refused, declined or anyhow failed to marry her until
1

See Gerald A. Mendelsohn, Verdi the Man and Verdi the Dramatist, 19th-Century Music, 2 (1978), 11042, 21430, and La Dame aux camlias and La traviata: A Study of Dramatic Transformations in the Light of Biography, Perspectives in Personality, 1 (1985), 271303. This matter is investigated at great length in Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford, 1993).

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1859, twelve years after they started living together. He mortied her by bringing her to stay in provincial Busseto, where the neighbours were scandalised by her unmarried status: they sometimes brought dead cats to her house. Verdi could treat some people very harshly, Giuseppina among them. Again, we do not know how Verdis feelings towards his second wife were affected by his tragic rst marriage to Margherita, the twenty-two-year-old virginal daughter of his protector and surrogate father Antonio Barezzi. Their two babies and the mother herself died within a wrenching period of a year and a half, between 1838 and 1840. Verdi refused to have children with Strepponi. Mendelsohn thinks that Verdis new involvement with Strepponi nds its reection in the new focus of his operas on women in trouble. Parallels between Strepponis situation and the action in La traviata have occurred to many people before Mendelsohn: the woman with a past consumed by guilt, even though her moral credentials are impeccable; a love affair threatened by bourgeois morality; and so on down to a number of smaller details. I believe with Mendelsohn that the events of Verdis life in these years coloured, or rather determined, the action of many other operas. Take La battaglia di Legnano, for example. Writing about this ultimate operatic ag-waver, a critic as intelligent as Gabriele Baldini found it curious that what should by rights have been Verdis most public opera . . . nishes by being, even at rst glance, one of his most private works.3 Baldini found it curious that Verdi should have lavished so much energy on Lidas troubles in view of this operas patriotic imperative. Given Strepponi and the date 1848, however, does this really seem so curious? What is striking is the ambivalence of feeling revealed in these six operas. The plots could almost have been chosen methodically to explore Verdis conicted passions. His younger men present a wide gallery of jealousy: Verdi can identify with Rodolfos despair but turns a cold, clinical eye on Stiffelios bottled-up rage. His older men, men closer to his own age, are more forgiving, either sooner (Rigoletto) or later (Germont). As for the women, four emerge as particularly revealing of Verdis ambivalence: on two of them, Lina and Gilda, he can vent his disdain or his disgust, while two others, Luisa and Violetta, gain his admiration and his love. Or so I will argue.

Lina Stiffelio is a Protestant minister, and the operas central conict is between the forgiveness he preaches and his phenomenal propensity for jealousy. His wifes adultery is discovered in Act I; in Act II the man of God actually moves to kill his wifes lover (his hand is stayed). In Act III, scene 1, Lina pleads with Stiffelio for forgiveness more: for absolution in a strong duet, which Roger Parker calls a
3

Gabriele Baldini, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi: Oberto to Un ballo in maschera, trans. and ed. Roger Parker (Cambridge, 1981), 151.

Verdi and the undoing of women

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crucial clash of vocal forces.4 But Lina gets no comfort from Stiffelio, only a divorce. In this Act III duet the plot allows Lina to assert herself for the rst time, and I am not as sure as Parker is that the music Verdi gives her really rises to the occasion. The question is moot, however, for Lina is crushed denitively in the next scene, the operas nale, set in Stiffelios church. As he preaches, the lectern Bible falls open to the passage where Christ forgives the woman taken in adultery; the spirit moves Stiffelio and he publicly forgives Lina by glaring at her as he reads the words out loud. She mutely crawls up to the pulpit on her knees and falls at his feet. All this in public view; there is no private forgiveness, no personal gesture towards her by Stiffelio of any kind. After Lina has been reviled verbally for three acts, stage action takes over from words and humiliates her graphically. Parker is right on the mark about this repellent scene. In his book Leonoras Last Act, after observing that there are two kinds of women in nineteenth-century opera, the docile ones who usually suffer and die; and the scary ones who almost always suffer and die,5 Parker draws attention to many parallels between Lina and Gilda in Rigoletto. Linas humiliating crawl is mirrored by Gildas shameful enclosure and exposure in the sack. Parker also traces some striking musical parallels. At the same time, he trumpets a crucial difference in the chapter title Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings. Unlike Gilda and the other undone heroines who die, at the end of her opera Lina falls silent. She utters nothing during her crawl except a few broken exclamations; Verdi denies her a voice in her own undoing, and to deny an operatic character song is to cancel her very being. Linas dfaite is not death but extinction. Although the plot may pardon Lina, Verdis music or absence of music does not. As another woman remarks bitterly in another Verdi opera, To the wretched woman who once fell, mankind will always be implacable (Cos alla misera, ch un d caduta . . . Luomo implacabile per lei sar; La traviata, Act II). Stielio emerged from obscurity only in the 1990s, when it was revived at Covent Garden for Jos Carreras and at the Metropolitan Opera for Plcido Domingo. Videos from both productions are available. At the Met, Sharon Sweet does not crawl; she sinks majestically to the ground. At Covent Garden, Catherine Maltano bravely gives it a try, but even she doesnt do a full crawl. This would have been too much for the director, one can guess. In any case, no soprano cantilena is heard soaring atop a grand nale ultimo. When the show is over, the lady hasnt sung.6 She cries Gran Dio with Di on high C, but she doesnt sing. Gilda The leading lady in Rigoletto also receives an icy portrayal from her composer, it seems to me. The ways Verdi found to depict Gildas innocence her bewildered immaturity, as someone has said are well known and appreciated; Elizabeth
4 5 6

Roger Parker, Leonoras Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, 1997), chapter 7, Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings, 14967, here 160. Parker, 1589. I take this irresistible formulation from Parker, 162.

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Hudson drew up a list of them in an insightful article a few years ago.7 Gilda sings very often in simple repetitive two-bar fragments, and rather than originating musical ideas, she tends to echo music belonging to other characters, who are in any case constantly interrupting her or completing her phrases. Her Act I aria Caro nome is not only unusually simple in its basic melody, but it also fails to promote a cabaletta. A heroine in Ottocento opera without a cabaletta is someone pretty seriously impaired. Hudson shows how much more richly Gilda sings in Act II, especially in Tutte le feste al tempio, the second of her big musical numbers, after her abduction and rape. It seems characteristic, however, that even this is not her own number, but a duet shared with Rigoletto, and she shares the cabaletta, too. The music shows a woman who has grown up in a hurry; Hudson calls it a musical transformation and observes that the radical difference between Gildas music in the two acts has made nding the right type of voice to sing the role a long-standing problem. In Act III, unlike Lina in Stielio, Gilda does get to sing as she dies, and sing beautifully. Yet at this moment Verdi has her regress to the musical simplicities of Act I, as clearly as her thoughts turn back there in the libretto (she evokes her mother both times). Again Gilda is given simple dare I say infantile music in self-repeating two-bar phrases, and again she is interrupted repeatedly, as Rigoletto breaks in to register his anguish Dio tremendo! . . . ella stessa fu colta, Non morir . . . mio tesoro, pietate, Se tinvoli . . . qui sol rimarrei, Gilda! mia Gilda!. He sings longer lines than she does and his music modulates. He steals the scene. The only modulation in her death scene an abrupt key switch comes when her D at melody ratchets up to D major for one bar and then sinks down again. I spoke of Verdis disdain for Gilda: even when she gets up to D major, she sings the same simple music. This sounds cruel to me, as though Verdi were in the sack twisting the knife. That the crux of D and D at runs through the score makes the moment all the more excruciating. A wonderful old video with Tito Gobbi cuts the last one of Rigolettos interventions, surely the relic of a tradition imposed by prima donnas averse to being, like their roles, undone. Rigoletto is an odious character, yet his melodic generation and modulation convey passions so heartbreakingly prolic that Verdi can turn our sympathy to him even as we sicken at the death of his near-inarticulate victim. Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings, says Parker. Gilda sings, perhaps, to rehabilitate Rigoletto. Hudson makes a very sharp observation about Gilda in Act III. In the quartet Bella glia dell amore, she notes, Gilda does not react in the way we would like her to for which we nd it difcult to forgive her.8 Rigoletto forgives Gilda, but nobody else does: not Victor Hugo who wrote the original play, nor Verdi who wrote the opera, nor, we have to say, mankind.

7 8

Elizabeth Hudson, Gilda Seduced: A Tale Untold, this journal, 4 (1992), 22951. Hudson, 251.

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Luisa If Violetta is the most traviata character of the heroines discussed here, Luisa Miller is the least. Verdis portrait of her is radiant, and her opera has on the whole been undervalued. While less mature than Rigoletto, of course, it marks a major step forward in Verdis rapid advance as a musical dramatist under the tutelary inuence of Giuseppina Strepponi. To begin, as a way of depicting an innocent village girl in love, Verdi draws by no means innocently on the semiseria tradition, the contemporary genre of mild, sentimental pieces with happy endings for their doll-like heroines. Thus in Act I, when Luisa is happily in love with Rodolfo, her music is pretty and vacuous: her cavatina Lo vidi, e l primo palpito gives no hint of the tragedy to come. Act II brings about a complete change, however: Luisa endures a harrowing scene with Wurm, henchman of Rodolfos father, the ruthless local magnate who intends his son for a certain Countess. Luisas father Miller has been thrown in jail and will be executed, Wurm tells her, unless she testies that she has only been toying with Rodolfos affections and really loves him, Wurm. Her letter will be leaked to Rodolfo, and as a further price on her fathers head, Luisa must marry the loathsome Wurm. The whole scene is excellently composed in Verdis best recitative-cum-ariosocum-parlante style of that period. At its centre is a remarkable aria for Luisa. In terms of dramatic structure Tu puniscimi, o Signore serves as a necessary pause in the tense psychological action, allowing the character to collect her feelings and express herself before acting before giving in. The piece makes a textbook example to show how music in opera can transform a verbal text.9 It is printed here with all the repetitions in italics:
Tu puniscimi, o Signore, Se toffesi, e paga io sono, Ma de barbari al furore Non lasciarmi non lasciarmi in abbandono. Signor, non lasciarmi in abbandono, Non lasciarmi in abbandono; No, no, o Signore, se toesi mi punisci, Ma non lasciarmi, non lasciarmi in abbandono. A scampar da fato estremo Innocente genitor Chieggion essi . . . a dirlo io fremo! . . . Chieggon essi Della glia il disonor Della glia il disonor. O signor, non lasciarmi in abbandono, Non lasciarmi in abbandono, no, no, O signor, Non lasciarmi in abbandono, non lasciarmi in abbandono, Non lasciarmi, non lasciarmi in abbandon, o mio Signor, Non lasciarmi, ah! . . . non lasciarmi in abbandon.
9

For a recent discussion along these lines, see Emanuele Senici, Words and Music, in The Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott L. Balthazar (Cambridge, 2004), 88110.

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[Punish me, O Lord, if I offended you, and I will be content, but dont leave me, abandoned, to the fury of the cruel ones. To save an innocent father from a mortal fate, they ask I shudder to say it his daughters dishonour!]

Verdi has Luisa hark obsessively on one key phrase, non lasciarmi in abbandono. The aria does not modulate, and the lingering tonicisation on a wayward, pleading harmony, V/vi, adds desperation to obsession. As compared to the excess orderliness with which the semiseria Luisa of Act I expressed her happiness, the way she expresses her distress in Act II shows a new consciousness and a new maturity. Like Gilda, Luisa has had to grow up in a hurry. No one would rate this piece very high on purely musical grounds, strictly as music; its an unpretty, ungainly aria, one never to be met with at song recitals or opera concerts.10 While the orchestral accompaniment is appropriately stressful and relentless, its texture hardly reaches for more subtlety than that of Lady Macbeths Or tutti sorgete or Manricos Di quella pira. But pretty music or pure music is not the point the point is music working for drama. This aria exemplies the young Verdis music drama at its best. Soon after Tu puniscimi, o Signore Luisa is further humiliated by a confrontation with Rodolfos designated spouse, Countess Federica. It is all too much for her, and the beginning of Act III nds her writing a suicide letter. Miller, now released from prison, is horried by this development. Verdis response is more interesting: he sees it and sets it as a regression on Luisas part, a regression to the childlike state in which he had depicted her in Act I. She reverts to her semiseria mode in an only slightly less frothy version; her andantino La tomba un letto would sit comfortably enough in such semiseria standards as La sonnambula or Linda di Chamounix. But Miller has barely launched into a vehement melody of reproach (Figlia? . . . Compreso dorrore io sono!) before Luisa bursts in with Schillers famous line colpa amore? (Is love a fault?). This, needless to say, is quite unconventional in a big duet at this time. Particularly after her tremulous opening music, the passion of this pertichino this brief, unexpected interruption is unnerving. The distraught woman we saw emerge in Act II has not, after all, regressed to the girl of Act I. Unnerving: Miller is completely thrown off and starts a totally different risposta, less indignant and more self-serving (and more tedious: Di rughe il volto . . . mira . . . ho solcato). Will she die and leave him, a broken old man, all alone? This time Luisa hears him out. When she sings another pertichino that breaks into Millers melody, she is not really interrupting; she is speaking not to Miller but to herself: Quanto colpevole, ahim, son io (How guilty, alas, I am). It is a moment of conversion, a private moment, made moving by the cross-rhythm between Luisas expanding song and Millers stiff phrases, and by quiet, poignant harmonies. Luisa tears up her suicide letter and agrees to start a new life with her father, somewhere far away.
10

Hardly ever: I heard it on a brilliant and moving programme at Berkeley in April 2003, performed by Gillian and Jonathan Khuner of the Berkeley Opera.

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Two pertichini in a single long duet may seem like small specks around which to build a reading, specks easily blown away in what Carolyn Abbate calls the drastic experience of opera in the opera house.11 Abbate pits this live experience against gnostic experience in the study. Operas begin life in the study, however, or in the workshop, and these pertichini certainly mattered to Verdi, for while the rst of them was indicated by the libretto, the second was not, and he had to create the dramatic location for it, as well as the music. Verdi was tracking Luisas reactions with precision, and we should be paying attention.12 If it is presented faithfully, the dramatic progression up to now from unconsciousness to despair, regression, and then the telling pertichini gives Verdis Luisa the emotional authority for her two supreme statements in the operas last scene. In the rst of them, the duet with Rodolfo, she is able to comfort him even while he is rejecting her harshly. And in the following terzetto nale her dying song evokes both the maturity she has acquired over the course of the action and also the simplicity and frankness of character that Verdi had indicated at the beginning of Act I and reminded us of again in the regressive passage of Act III. Piangi, piangi il tuo dolore, Ah! vieni meco, deh, non lasciarmi no one who has heard Luisa Miller will have forgotten these melodies. We can compare the limpid, restricted melodic line with which Luisa dominates the nal number with the more ample, ecstatic lines of other Verdi heroines who expire in last-act ensembles of this same sort. Luisa is not Leonora or Violetta, and she is certainly not Gilda. She is her own distinctive and rather quiet self, the rst of Verdis profound studies in . . . feminine psychology was on the tip of my tongue, but Ill just say: psychology. Violetta As a sex worker, Violetta stands higher than any other of Verdis women on the scale of feminine iniquity. Yet, ironically or not, Verdi is determined to show her in the best possible light. Also, ironically, whereas in Luisa Miller the tragedy stems from upper-class tyranny, which Verdi deplores, in La traviata the pathos stems from bourgeois morality, which Verdi supports.13 Catherine Clment understands this very well, and she writes scathingly about the scene where Germont, evoking patriarchal family values, persuades Violetta into renouncing Alfredo.14 Clment writes about La traviata as though it were the
11

12

13 14

Music Drastic or Gnostic? Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 50536. I should also acknowledge here the essay by Carolyn Abbate that has been so important for recent opera studies, Opera, or, The Envoicing of Women, in Musicology and Dierence: Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), 22558. I should perhaps have declared earlier that I still hold to the view of opera as rst and foremost text, reecting intentions of its composer, rather than as act, reecting those of its singers, conductor and director. In one such act that I remember, at the San Francisco Opera, Luisa might as well as have been mooning the audience during this number. I have written on La traviata at greater length in Opera, Novel, Drama: The Case of La traviata, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 27 (1978), 4453. Catherine Clment, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing, foreword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis, 1988), 605.

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equivalent of Dumas play La Dame aux camlias, its source. I know this sounds like a broken record and I know the simile sings of another era but the message of an opera is not the plot, it is the plot as manipulated by music. Musical meanings in opera trump verbal meanings (as well as directorial interventions); the music of an opera transforms the plot. It transforms the libretto. Music traces the response of the characters to the action and operas, like plays, are not essentially about the vicissitudes of women (or men); operas are about their responses to those vicissitudes. In the great Act II duet of La traviata Germont does not bully. Music shows his attitude towards Violetta change, from hostility to a tenderness that is nally symbolised by his accepting her as, in effect, his own daughter. Is he being hypocritical, asks Clment? Music knows no hypocrisy anyway, Verdis music in the 1850s knows no hypocrisy. Music cancels the very question of hypocrisy. Elizabeth Hudson says we nd it hard to forgive Gilda for her sacrice. If we nd it easy to forgive Violetta for her sacrice, that is because Germont is not the monster of patriarchal authority that he is in the play. Music recasts him as a fellow human being who moves her by his own unhappiness. The music at the end of Act III of La traviata surely counts as one of Verdis greatest inspirations. Violetta is hallucinating hearing things and what she hears is the melody of Alfredos declaration of love in Act I. Gino Roncaglia once called this melody the operas tema cardine, or hinge theme, because it keeps coming back at crucial moments in the drama.15 The difference this time is that the melody modulates, indicating an expansion, a owering of that love, a maturing, an apotheosis, new joys, a new ecstasy; that this happens when Violetta, at the very moment she is dying, imagines that she is reviving, adds to the scenes invincible pathos. No doubt it is hard to feel, until almost the very last moment, that the recipient of that love would have been adequate to this owering. After a promising rst act, Alfredo turns out to be one of the shallowest of Verdis tenors. Violettas dying, undying love may be thought sentimental, like her effusions over the portrait. Maybe so Clment probably thinks so but maybe not entirely. Alfredo has a remarkable outcry near the beginning of the nale, when the men interrupt Violetta just briey: No, non morrai, non dirmelo, dei viver, amor mio, and so on (No, you will not die, dont say so, you must live, my love). To me this six-bar phrase is the truest thing Alfredo sings in the whole opera; there is a new Alfredo a-borning here, with Verdi as midwife. Just as Gildas death scene reects on Rigoletto, Violettas death scene reects on Alfredo. What is more important, Alfredos moment works to validate Violettas hallucinatory fantasy. Desdemona, Alice There was a short, intense period in Verdis life when he chose half a dozen librettos which, wildly different as they are, all present women greatly distressed and usually
15

See my Verdis Use of Recurring Themes, in Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), 27487.

Verdi and the undoing of women

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destroyed. Many commentators have sensed a parallel between Giuseppinas situation and that of Violetta in La traviata enough to make Julian Budden go out of his way to ridicule the notion that Verdi portrayed Giuseppina in this opera. But Budden is missing the point.16 Of course Verdi would never have dreamt of equating Strepponi with Violetta. The point is that Violetta allowed him to explore feelings of love, guilt and suffering that he learned from his experience as Strepponis lover. Verdi explored similar feelings in other operas around the same time. After La traviata, the fallen-woman syndrome retreats in Verdis oeuvre. In Simon Boccanegra Amelias supposed betrayal hardly registers after it has allowed for the tenors double aria. In Un ballo in maschera another Amelia goes to the brink, to the brink of adultery, yet she survives; although her husband means to kill her, he relents and gradually she fades out of the opera, leaving the pathos for Riccardo. The tenor gets the death scene, not the soprano. In Don Carlos, while Elisabeth certainly has a hard time, it somehow does not seem as hard for her as for the men around her. Leonora in La forza del destino betrays nobody but her father. And although Aida dooms her lover she does not betray him (and he does not blame her). And then, much later, we get to Desdemona and Alice Ford. How striking it is that, on returning to the stage after fteen years in retirement, the old man should return to the sexual sin of betrayal twice, in both Otello and Falsta. Both times the betrayal is imaginary imagined by Otello in one opera and by Master Ford in the other. In the mondo implacabile of Violetta Valry, in the misogynist world of Catherine Clment, imaginary betrayal also qualies as a sexual sin, along with virtuous betrayal. One opera turns it to comedy, the other to tragedy, the most heartbreaking of all of Verdis undoings of women. All this may be seen as a subliminal acknowledgement on the part of Verdi of Giuseppina Strepponi, of what he understood he had derived from her forty years earlier, when their liaison began and his art underwent profound and unprecedented changes. Under her aegis Verdi had reached the rst plateau of his mastery as a dramatist. Now he reached the nal one. If there was some acknowledgement of the past here, conscious or unconscious, it was now blended with something new, in the plots as well as in the music. In his nal works Verdi found a new dimension in his heroines. In Falsta he shows us a world run by women, a mondo not implacabile, but burlone, where women fool their men, marry off their daughters, laugh, plot, dump and pinch. And in Otello there is an emotional bond between Desdemona and Emilia unlike that between women in any earlier Verdi opera. Ma basta. To enter any further into the new world of Falsta and Otello we will need a new essay, a new discourse.

16

Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1992), II, 1656.