The Taming of Manon and Mimì

i The Taming of Manon and Mimì: Engaging with Women in Puccini’s Operas Emily Siar Senior Honors Thesis Music Department University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Fall 2014 Approved: Tim Carter, Thesis Advisor Annegret Fauser, Reader Jeanne Fischer, Reader ii Table of Contents Preface iii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Social and Political Climate 3 Gender Onstage 5 An “Effeminate” National Composer? 6 Chapter 2: Manon Lescaut 8 From Novel to Opera 9 Act II: Bad Behavior 13 Chapter 3: La Lupa 18 The Taming of the She-Wolf 20 Chapter 4: La Bohème 24 Mimi’s Transformation 25 “Good Girl” and “Bad Girl” Music 28 Vocal Oppositions 35 The Courtyard Act 36 The Domestication of Musetta 37 Chapter 5: Last Words 40 A Verdian Precedent 40 Non voglio morir! Manon’s Death 42 Silenzio: Mimì’s Death 46 iii Preface I began research on this thesis in the late fall of 2013 under the guidance of Tim Carter. The product that has resulted analyzes the female characters in two operas by Puccini, Manon Lescaut and La Bohème, and one interim project, La Lupa, which was never completed. For this thesis, I have drawn the Italian libretto texts from the website “Libretti d’opera italiani” (http://www.librettidopera.it/), and the English translation of these librettos from Dmitry Murashev’s website (http://www.murashev.com/opera/). The one exception is Musetta’s aria, which was translated by Aaron Green (http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/classicalmusictips/qt/quando-Men-Vo-Lyrics-And-Text- Translation.htm). Although the translations are drawn from Murashev and Green, I have modified some of them to ensure that they are accurate and literal translations of the Italian text. The musical excerpts included come from the editions available from the IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org). There are several people that I would like to thank for their help and support on my thesis journey. First and foremost, I wish to extend my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Tim Carter, who has been an unwavering source of support and guidance throughout this process. His immense knowledge and true passion for music are, perhaps, only surpassed by the generosity he shows his students with his time and encouragement. His reassurance and assistance helped me to minimize the “freak out” moments that I faced on this new and, at times, daunting journey, and I am very grateful for that. iv I also wish to thank the members of my committee, Annegret Fauser and Jeanne Fischer, for taking the time to read my thesis and offer their commentary. Professor Fauser’s “Women in Music” course helped me to discover a great passion for the intersection between gender and music, a passion that compelled me to undertake a thesis on this topic. I am also grateful to her for meeting with me during this process and guiding me toward several useful resources. Dr. Fischer, my voice teacher, has served as my cherished mentor during my entire education at Carolina. Words cannot express my eternal gratitude for her unyielding wisdom, guidance, and support. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their constant love and support. To my father, a wonderful English professor, for imparting a deep love of literature and for editing my papers for many years, and my mother, the most amazing woman I know who teaches through example. It is with love that I dedicate this thesis to them. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction In February 2013, a new production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut premiered at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium. The director, Mariusz Trelinski, updated the time period from the second half of the eighteenth century to the present day, setting the action inside a Paris Métro station. Keeping in line with common Regietheater practice, sexuality dominated the stage, with women’s naked bodies perpetually visible. Manon’s interim lover, Geronte, was a mobster trafficking women in an underground sex ring, and Manon’s deportation scene became a “human meat auction.”1 Trelinski’s Manon, sung by Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, entered wearing a red trench coat and dark sunglasses, smoking a cigarette. She was, without question, “the very image of a prostitute,” a stark contrast to the innocent and girlish Manon characterized in the beginning of L’Abbé Prévost’s novel, the text on which the opera is based. This production presented Manon and the women around her as the objects of a persistent and grotesque male gaze. It attempted to depict a corrupt, misogynistic society, and the barren wasteland of “New Orleans” became one of our own modern cities, infested with technology and moral emptiness. As a result, Manon was more the image of a weary, exploited prostitute than the coquettish, materialistic eighteen-year-old that Puccini likely had in mind. This production’s explicit engagement with issues of gender poses a disturbing question: how do we deal with women in opera? A troubling pattern in opera productions and their reception has led many feminists to believe that opera is an inherently misogynistic and deeply problematic art form. French philosopher and literary critic Catherine Clément first approached this issue in the landmark text L’Opéra ou La Défaite des femmes (1979) (Opera, or The 1 Loomis, “‘Rigoletto’ in Vegas, ‘Manon Lescaut’ in the Metro.” 2 Undoing of Women, 1988). The book seeks to deal with the issue of misogyny in opera: specifically, the significance of the unfailing “death”—in one sense or another—of the operatic heroine as the curtain falls. Clément argues that the emotionality of music allows for “risk-free identification” that discourages scholars and audiences from engaging with opera’s potentially problematic subject matter.2 She focuses on opera librettos, but her analyses are sometimes simplistic and forced, playing into a dichotomy of “good girls,” who conform to the rigid rules set by their fathers and husbands, and “femme fatales,” women who, as a consequence of disobeying social codes, are condemned to die night after night. A paradox is created whereby modern productions, by responding to this type of reading and attempting to vindicate (or not) opera’s heroines onstage, can actually reinforce a limited view of operatic women and, perhaps, perpetuate misogyny. With our attention diverted by the allure of naked female bodies or the empty glamour of a “femme fatale,” we lose the potential complexity of characters like Manon that exists underneath the spectacle, within the opera’s text and music. As scholars, artists, and audience members, we are often tempted to view operatic heroines as “good girls” or “bad girls,” but these one-dimensional labels often overlook the nuances that can be discovered through a deeper textual and musical analysis. As feminist music scholarship moves forward in the wake of Clément’s look at operatic heroines, we continue to struggle with how to deal with these women in light of recent advances, and continuing discrepancies, in gender equality. Some more recent feminist analyses, rather than condemning these works as “antifeminist,” point out that the genre can inadvertently empower women by creating an important space for female vocalism. In an article responding to Clément’s text, “Opera; or, The Envoicing of Women” (1993), Carolyn Abbate argues that opera, rather than disempowering women, can actually grant women power onstage by 2 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 9. 3 “unveiling an authorial voice as a woman’s.”3 This thesis will take feminist analysis in a different direction, one that seeks to understand gender issues in opera through a pointed analysis of several of Puccini’s multi-layered works. To assemble a fuller picture of who these women are beyond shallow stereotypes, we must explore their metamorphoses from the original sources of their literary genesis to their new identities onstage. Through a case study of Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, and an interim project, La Lupa, I will engage with several questions that I hope may contribute to an ongoing discussion of women in opera: What problems did Puccini and his librettists face in staging these women, what issues do such characters pose for an audience, and how can we, as performers, make interpretive choices that do them justice? Through my research, I seek to navigate my intersecting identities as performer and feminist, and it is my hope that a deeper, more nuanced analysis of operatic heroines can, perhaps, provide insight into how one can perform these women’s identities in a meaningful way. Rather than seeking to define these works definitively as “feminist” or “antifeminist,” I hope that a more nuanced analysis of the issues that these works present will actively contribute to a dialogue that values women’s stories and seeks to express their value through performance practice. Social and Political Climate In the foreword of Clément’s book, feminist musicologist Susan McClary asserts, “Opera was one of the principal media through which the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie developed and disseminated its new moral codes, values, and normative behaviors.”4 Hence, in a struggle to understand Puccini’s women, it is valuable to consider the unique social and political climate of the period in which his operas were produced. Musicologist Alexandra Wilson considers the 3 Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” 228. 4 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, p. xviii. 4 profound role that social and political circumstances play in shaping the manner in which art is received in her text, The Puccini Problem. In her introduction, Wilson states: the Puccini problem became a problem of progress and reaction, of modernity and tradition […] this reflected broader aspects of the cultural moment: fears of a profound crisis of modernity—prompted by the threats posed at the turn of the twentieth century by urbanization, industrialisation, and technology—were widespread, and they came to be filtered through criticism of Puccini’s music.5 The defining political event in nineteenth-century Italy, the catalyst for many of the fears to which Wilson refers, was the Risorgimento, or the campaign for Italian unification, which lasted from 1815 to 1871.

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