Verdi and the Undoing of Women

Cambridge Opera Journal, 18, 1, 21–31 2006 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0954586706002072 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 Stiﬀelio 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 Verdi’s contribution to ‘the undoing of women’ and relates it speculatively to his experience as Giuseppina Strepponi’s 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 Clément. 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 Attali’s 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. Clément’s book was calculated to shock, as McClary knew, and it still packs a punch today, after all the time we have had to explain what’s wrong with it. The tone is personal – vibrantly so – and the rhetoric hyperbolic and totalising. In one way or another, Clément contends, women in opera are victimised, humiliated, and usually killed, seldom quickly. The patriarchal spectacle that is opera entails the ritual sacriﬁce 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 Clément is not an opera specialist, she is the French feminist author of such diverse books as The Feminine and the Sacred, Gandhi, the novel Theo’s Odyssey and several others. When she says ‘opera’, she really means ‘Opéra’: not the genre opera over its entire history, but the repertory of the Paris Opéra 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/Opéra 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 Hoﬀmann.

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 finds its true home as a tribute to a scholar who deserves much of the credit (and less of the flak) for the reconfiguration 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.

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 opera’s 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 Verdi’s 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 Verdi’s output as a whole stands up under Clément’s 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 Stiffelio (1850), Gilda in Rigoletto (1851), Leonora in Il trovatore (1853) and Violetta in La traviata (1853). In La battaglia di Legnano, Lida’s husband Arrigo returns from the dead and finds 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 flood 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 father’s 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 Stiffelio is an adulteress, albeit a repentant one by the time the piece begins. Her husband finally forgives her, so Lina survives. She is, however, humiliated in an ugly way, both visually and musically. The proximate cause of Gilda’s death in Rigoletto is self-sacrifice, of course. But behind that proximate cause lies her seduction, the fact that she allows herself to be seduced by the Duke in the first place. She ignores Rigoletto’s 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 first, fundamental feminine weakness.

What we can call ‘virtuous betrayal’ appears again, after Luisa Miller,inIl 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. Inﬁdelity 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 ﬁrst 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 Verdi’s 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 d’Arco 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 Verdi’s operas follows upon a milestone in the composer’s 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 Verdi’s help. Verdi visited Paris for the first time in 1847, for the production of Jérusalem, and they fell in love. The manuscript of Jérusalem 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 women’s purity with Strepponi’s impurity when the relationship flamed up at the start we can never know. As the flames 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), 110–42, 214–30, and ‘La Dame aux camélias and La traviata: A Study of Dramatic Transformations in the Light of Biography’, Perspectives in Personality, 1 (1985), 271–303. 2 This matter is investigated at great length in Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford, 1993).

1859, twelve years after they started living together. He mortified 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 Verdi’s feelings towards his second wife were affected by his tragic first 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 Verdi’s new involvement with Strepponi finds its reflection in the new focus of his operas on women in trouble. Parallels between Strepponi’s 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 Verdi’s 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 flag-waver, a critic as intelligent as Gabriele Baldini found it ‘curious that what should by rights have been Verdi’s most ‘‘public’’ opera . . . finishes by being, even at first glance, one of his most ‘‘private’’ works’.3 Baldini found it curious that Verdi should have lavished so much energy on Lida’s troubles in view of this opera’s 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 Verdi’s conflicted passions. His younger men present a wide gallery of jealousy: Verdi can identify with Rodolfo’s despair but turns a cold, clinical eye on Stiffelio’s 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 Verdi’s 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 opera’s central conﬂict is between the forgiveness he preaches and his phenomenal propensity for jealousy. His wife’s adultery is discovered in Act I; in Act II the man of God actually moves to kill his wife’s 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.

‘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 first 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 definitively in the next scene, the opera’s finale, set in Stiffelio’s 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 Leonora’s 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. Lina’s humiliating crawl is mirrored by Gilda’s 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. Lina’s défaite is not death but extinction. Although the plot may pardon Lina, Verdi’s 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’ (‘Così alla misera, ch’è un dì caduta . . . L’uomo implacabile per lei sarà’; La traviata, Act II). Stiffelio emerged from obscurity only in the 1990s, when it was revived at Covent Garden for José Carreras and at the Metropolitan Opera for Plácido 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 Malfitano bravely gives it a try, but even she doesn’t 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 finale ultimo. When the show is over, the lady hasn’t sung.6 She cries ‘Gran Dio’ with ‘Di–’ on high C, but she doesn’t 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 Gilda’s innocence – her ‘bewildered immaturity’, as someone has said – are well known and appreciated; Elizabeth

4 Roger Parker, Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, 1997), chapter 7, ‘Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings’, 149–67, here 160. 5 Parker, 158–9. 6 I take this irresistible formulation from Parker, 162.

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 Gilda’s music in the two acts has made finding the right type of voice to sing the role a long-standing problem. In Act III, unlike Lina in Stiffelio, 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 t’involi . . . 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 flat melody ratchets up to D major for one bar and then sinks down again. I spoke of Verdi’s ‘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 flat runs through the score makes the moment all the more excruciating. A wonderful old video with Tito Gobbi cuts the last one of Rigoletto’s 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 prolific 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 figlia dell’ amore’, she notes, Gilda ‘does not react in the way we would like her to – for which we find it difficult 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 Elizabeth Hudson, ‘Gilda Seduced: A Tale Untold’, this journal, 4 (1992), 229–51. 8 Hudson, 251.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 25 Sep 2021 at 11:38:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586706002072 Verdi and the undoing of women 27 Luisa If Violetta is the most traviata character of the heroines discussed here, Luisa Miller is the least. Verdi’s 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 Verdi’s rapid advance as a musical dramatist under the tutelary influence 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 contem- porary 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 Rodolfo’s father, the ruthless local magnate who intends his son for a certain Countess. Luisa’s father Miller has been thrown in jail and will be executed, Wurm tells her, unless she testifies that she has only been toying with Rodolfo’s affections and really loves him, Wurm. Her letter will be leaked to Rodolfo, and as a further price on her father’s head, Luisa must marry the loathsome Wurm. The whole scene is excellently composed in Verdi’s best recitative-cum-arioso- cum-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 t’offesi, 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 t’offesi 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 figlia il disonor Della figlia 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), 88–110.

[Punish me, O Lord, if I offended you, and I will be content, but don’t 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 daughter’s 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; it’s 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 Macbeth’s ‘Or tutti sorgete’ or Manrico’s ‘Di quella pira’. But pretty music or pure music is not the point – the point is music working for drama. This aria exemplifies the young Verdi’s music drama at its best. Soon after ‘Tu puniscimi, o Signore’ Luisa is further humiliated by a confronta- tion with Rodolfo’s designated spouse, Countess Federica. It is all too much for her, and the beginning of Act III finds her writing a suicide letter. Miller, now released from prison, is horrified by this development. Verdi’s response is more interesting: he sees it and sets it as a regression on Luisa’s 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 è 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 d’orrore io sono!’) before Luisa bursts in with Schiller’s famous line ‘È 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 Miller’s melody, she is not really interrupting; she is speaking not to Miller but to herself: ‘Quanto colpevole, ahimè, son io’ (‘How guilty, alas, I am’). It is a moment of conversion, a private moment, made moving by the cross-rhythm between Luisa’s expanding song and Miller’s 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.

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 first 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 Luisa’s 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 Verdi’s Luisa the emotional authority for her two supreme statements in the opera’s last scene. In the first of them, the duet with Rodolfo, she is able to comfort him even while he is rejecting her harshly. And in the following terzetto finale 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 final 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 first of Verdi’s profound studies in . . . feminine psychology was on the tip of my tongue, but I’ll just say: psychology.

Violetta

As a sex worker, Violetta stands higher than any other of Verdi’s 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 Clément understands this very well, and she writes scathingly about the scene where Germont, evoking patriarchal family values, persuades Violetta into renouncing Alfredo.14 Clément writes about La traviata as though it were the

11 ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’ Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 505–36. 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 Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), 225–58. 12 I should perhaps have declared earlier that I still hold to the view of opera as first and foremost ‘text’, reflecting intentions of its composer, rather than as ‘act’, reflecting 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. 13 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), 44–53. 14 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing, foreword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis, 1988), 60–5.

equivalent of Dumas’ play La Dame aux camélias, 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 finally symbolised by his accepting her as, in effect, his own daughter. Is he being hypocritical, asks Clément? Music knows no hypocrisy – anyway, Verdi’s music in the 1850s knows no hypocrisy. Music cancels the very question of hypocrisy. Elizabeth Hudson says we find it hard to forgive Gilda for her sacrifice. If we find it easy to forgive Violetta for her sacrifice, 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 Verdi’s greatest inspirations. Violetta is hallucinating – ‘hearing things’ – and what she hears is the melody of Alfredo’s declaration of love in Act I. Gino Roncaglia once called this melody the opera’s 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 flowering 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 scene’s 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 flowering. After a promising first act, Alfredo turns out to be one of the shallowest of Verdi’s tenors. Violetta’s dying, undying love may be thought sentimental, like her effusions over the portrait. Maybe so – Clément probably thinks so – but maybe not entirely. Alfredo has a remarkable outcry near the beginning of the finale, when the men interrupt Violetta just briefly: ‘No, non morrai, non dirmelo, dei viver, amor mio’, and so on (‘No, you will not die, don’t 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 Gilda’s death scene reflects on Rigoletto, Violetta’s death scene reflects on Alfredo. What is more important, Alfredo’s moment works to validate Violetta’s hallucinatory fantasy.

Desdemona, Alice

There was a short, intense period in Verdi’s life when he chose half a dozen librettos which, wildly different as they are, all present women greatly distressed and usually

15 See my ‘Verdi’s Use of Recurring Themes’, in Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), 274–87.

destroyed. Many commentators have sensed a parallel between Giuseppina’s 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 Strepponi’s lover. Verdi explored similar feelings in other operas around the same time. After La traviata, the fallen-woman syndrome retreats in Verdi’s oeuvre. In Simon Boccanegra Amelia’s supposed betrayal hardly registers after it has allowed for the tenor’s 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 fifteen years in retirement, the old man should return to the sexual sin of betrayal twice, in both Otello and Falstaff. 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 Valéry, in the misogynist world of Catherine Clément, imaginary betrayal also qualifies as a sexual sin, along with virtuous betrayal. One opera turns it to comedy, the other to tragedy, the most heartbreaking of all of Verdi’s 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 first plateau of his mastery as a dramatist. Now he reached the final 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 final works Verdi found a new dimension in his heroines. In Falstaff 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 Falstaff 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, 165–6.