LULU’S DAUGHTERS:

PORTRAYING THE ANTI-HEROINE IN CONTEMPORARY OPERA,

1993-2013

by

NICHOLAS DAVID STEVENS

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Susan McClary

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Music

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

August, 2017

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

Nicholas David Stevens

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*.

Dr. Susan McClary Committee Chair

Dr. Daniel Goldmark Committee Member

Dr. Francesca Brittan Committee Member

Dr. Susanne Vees-Gulani Committee Member

Dr. Sherry Lee Additional Member Faculty of Music, University of Toronto

Date of Defense: April 28, 2017

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Figures ii Examples iii Tables iv Acknowledgments v

Abstract ix

Chapter 1 Lulu’s Daughters: An Introduction 1

Part I: Remembering the Twentieth Century

Chapter 2 Old, New, Borrowed, Blew: Powder Her Face, Polarity, and the Backward Glance 39

Chapter 3 My Heart Belongs to Daddy: Editing, Archetypes, and Anaïs Nin 103

Part II: American Dreams, Southern Scenes, and European (Re)visions

Chapter 4 Trashy Traviata: Class, Media, and the American Prophecy of Anna Nicole 157

Chapter 5 Berg, Billie, and Blue Velvet: American Lulu and its Catastrophic Stage(s) 207

Conclusion The Marilyn Triptych and the Cracked Killing Jar: Ways Forward for Opera and 251 Scholarship

Supporting Materials

Appendix A Timeline of selected significant events, premieres, and publications, 1835-2017 261

Appendix B Louis Andriessen’s libretto for Anaïs Nin and its source materials: a comparison 267

Appendix C Olga Neuwirth’s cuts and edits to Berg’s Lulu in American Lulu 278

Bibliography 283

iv

FIGURES

2.1. Anonymous memento mori, used as cover art for the vocal score of Powder Her Face 52

3.1. Stage setting for the 2014 21C Festival performance of Anaïs Nin 110

3.2. Anaïs Nin in the early 1930s; Cristina Zavalloni as Nin in 2010; Zavalloni, still from video recording of Anaïs Nin, 2011; Nin in the 1950s 132

3.3. Zavalloni as Nin watches a film of herself at Allendy’s lecture on jealousy, Anaïs Nin, Amsterdam, 2011 [DVD] 145

4.1. August 22, 1994 cover of New York, with an outtake from a photo shoot with Smith 162

4.2. The death of the protagonist in Act II, Scene 8 of Anna Nicole 168

4.3, Double-scrim interlude presentation, Act II, Interlude, Anna Nicole 179

5.1. BLACK 1 of American Lulu at the Komische Oper Berlin, 2012 227

EXAMPLES

2.1. The Duchess and Lounge Lizard in Canon, Powder Her Face, Scene 2 61

2.2. Dialogue between the Duchess and the Waiter, Powder Her Face, Scene 4 63

2.3. Final sonority of the opera, Powder Her Face, Scene 8 70

2.4. Entrance of the Duke, Powder Her Face, Scene 2 71

2.5. The Duchess Exits with her Phonograph, Powder Her Face, Scene 8 75

2.6. Chromatic melody and Dance rhythms in the tenor’s aria, Powder Her Face, 79 Scene 2

3.1. “Strange days, weather bad” passage, Anaïs Nin (final part of II. Allendy) 108

3.2. End of circus fanfare and beginning of violin solo, Anaïs Nin 139

3.3. Contrabass clarinet ostinato in context, Anaïs Nin 141

3.4. First appearance of the father motive, LH piano, Anaïs Nin 142

3.5. A sadomasochistic beating, musicalized as Nin and Allendy meet, Anaïs Nin 145

3.6. Nin’s triumphant fanfare, followed by her pining for her father, Anaïs Nin 148

4.1a-b. Anna Nicole’s first and final lines, Act I, Scene 1 and Act II, Scene 9, Anna 202 Nicole

4.2a-b. Low wage blues and Drug ballad, Act I, Scene 3 and Act II, Scene 8, Anna 203 Nicole

4.3a-b. Anna Nicole’s aria and Stern’s final lines, Act I, Scene 6 and Act II, Scene 204 9, Anna Nicole

5.1. The “rhythm section” and post-minimal motor of American Lulu, mm. 8-10 223

5.2. Lulu describes her earlier life, Act III, American Lulu 223

5.3. Lulu sings of her johns in her highest register, Act III, American Lulu 234

vi

TABLES

2.1. Graphic synopsis of Powder Her Face 45

3.1. Graphic synopsis of Anaïs Nin 136

4.1. Graphic synopsis of Anna Nicole 173

5.1. Berg’s jazz band and roles in Lulu; Neuwirth’s orchestra and roles in 219 American Lulu

5.2. Graphic synopsis of American Lulu 221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This document could never have existed without the path-breaking work and tireless encouragement of my advisor, Susan McClary. From methodology and structure to style and sensibility, her writings have informed not only my research for this project – the briefest glance at the bibliography will reveal that debt – but also its central conceit.

Her seminar in opera since the premiere of Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda

Childs’s Einstein on the Beach first sparked my interest in music theatre after the Cold

War. In the spring of 2014, when I remained unsure whether I should delve into the music of Alban Berg or into twenty-first century opera, Susan was the first to suggest that

I might find a way to reconcile these interests. Throughout my process of making and remaking the resulting argument, Susan read drafts, made suggestions, corrected my course when I digressed, and reminded me at all times that there was more than a personal career milestone at stake. She approached the advising process with patience, enthusiasm, and an irrepressible sense of humor. I have met countless scholars through her, as well as directors and composers of new opera, such as Peter Sellars – who has also offered his encouragement from the first, and thus deserves thanks of his own. As I enter the next phase of my career, I offer this dissertation as an extension of the critical musicology that Susan helped establish – and I cannot thank her enough for her guidance.

I also owe much to Daniel Goldmark, whose courses in Film Music, Sound and

Media Studies, and Tin Pan Alley provided historical contexts and methodological tools that have shaped this work in ways both subtle and obvious. Whether casually handing me some vital, hot-off-the-press publication, showing me the way to a more precise and considered argument, or simply checking in on my progress, Daniel provided viii

indispensable mentorship. Francesca Brittan provided not only the foundational

knowledge of nineteenth-century aesthetics and intellectual culture that undergird the

entire project, but also innumerable stimulating conversations and an abundance of advice and support. Susanne Vees-Gulani, a scholar of German literature, helped me

think beyond the boundaries of my discipline, giving much-needed advice on

terminology as well as simple reminders to consider the needs of readers outside

musicology. Sherry Lee of the University of Toronto, in addition to corresponding with

me throughout my dissertation-writing process, rushed from an unfamiliar airport to an

unfamiliar campus to participate in the defense of this document, mere hours before

giving a colloquium talk. Georgia Cowart helped steer my development as a writer,

patiently pushing me to embrace clear lines of argument and logical structure – while also

encouraging me at every turn, and serving as a model of professionalism, collegiality, and

scholarly rigor.

I am also grateful to David Metzer, Silvio dos Santos, Judith Lochhead, Sherrie

Tucker, Drew Massey, and Yayoi Uno Everett for discussing this project with me at

various stages of its development. Thanks to Marianna Ritchey and Andrea Moore, the

co-organizers of the Musicology and the Present conference series, I was able to receive

feedback from music history researchers with similar interests – and thanks to Edward

Venn, Catherine Davies, and Paul Archbold, I was able to open lines of communication

with other scholars working on the operas of Thomas Adès. I’m particularly grateful for

the conversations that I had with Drs. Venn and Massey, Emma Gallon, John Roeder,

Philip Stoecker, Jane Forner, Scott Lee, and Thomas Adès in London in April of 2017, at

a conference organized around the UK premiere of Adès’s The Exterminating Angel.

Many thanks also to Kerstin Baumgardt of the Komische Oper Berlin, for her invaluable assistance with my research on that house’s 2012 premiere of American Lulu.

Without the advice of Matt Smith of Case Western Reserve University’s School of Graduate Studies, I might never have hashed out a dissertation completion timeline as fruitful and accommodating as the one I ultimately chose. I must also thank Brandon

Bowman, the Manager of Graduate Academic Affairs, for his patience and guidance in administrative matters. Laura Stauffer and Jennifer Wright of the Department of Music helped provide much-needed logistical support, as did its Chair, David Rothenberg. In the

Department’s weekly musicology dissertation seminar, I received feedback on this document in a positive environment that, despite its generally friendly atmosphere, never lacked for incisive questions, solid advice, and genuine challenges. Among the various friends and colleagues who conversed with me about the project, few provided as much insight and encouragement as Daniel Batchelder, Sam Lopata, Peter Graff, Kaitlin Doyle,

Kate Rogers, Paul Abdullah, Farrah O’Shea, and Sophie Benn.

I owe some of my most productive hours to the various coffee shops of

Cleveland, Ohio, and to the Kulas Music Library. I wish that the late Stephen Toombs, the endlessly helpful head music librarian at CWRU who once rush-ordered a book just so I could finish a project on time, could have read his name here. I also conducted research at the Library of Congress as part of a fellowship co-sponsored by the Library and the CWRU Department of Music, and prepared my final two chapters with the support of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities. I can hardly overstate my gratitude to the administrators and staff of both institutions. x

Acknowledgments tend to stand incomplete due in part to the shortcomings of memory, but also to the sheer impossibility of thanking every friend and stranger who contributed to a project’s origins, development, and completion. To all those mentors, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, administrators, and others who have contributed to this process in a heretofore unacknowledged way: thank you. To all the academics, poets, critics, songwriters, and storytellers I’ve never met, but whose work I’ve emulated in my prose: thank you. I would never have finished the project without the support of close friends and family. Thanks a million times over to my parents, Gary and Kristina

Stevens, for year after year of encouragement, support, conversation, and love. Thanks also to all the extended family members, living and departed, who have cheered me on along the way. And thanks, of course, to Sophie – without her support, comments, and feedback, this project might never have come about, let alone been completed.

Lulu’s Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera, 1993-2013

Abstract

by

NICHOLAS DAVID STEVENS

In this dissertation, I argue that opera’s anti-heroine archetype – one of the most familiar in the genre’s historical canon – returned to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century, along with many of its typical tropes and plot trajectories. Between 1993 and

2013, four leading composers chose to update and adapt the basic idea of a transgressive heroine who rises in her society only to fall silent in the end. Each of the creative teams behind these works finds a novel way to modernize, transform, disrupt, or critique opera’s long tradition of doomed anti-heroines – but each also draws upon a common, historically rooted set of musical and dramatic devices in characterizing their compromised protagonists. Like Alban Berg’s Lulu of 1935, these operas incorporate forms of American popular music into modernist scores; all partake of and thematize audiovisual media, such as film, photography, and phonography. In an introduction, I trace the phenomenon of opera’s anti-heroine back to its historical heyday, and discuss the methodological and theoretical frameworks in which I operate. In the first two case studies, grouped under the heading Remembering the Twentieth Century, I examine new opera’s depictions of two real women who came of age between the wars. Margaret,

Duchess of Argyll becomes a complex concatenation of archetypes in Thomas Adès and

Philip Hensher’s Powder Her Face, and Anaïs Nin, the posthumous librettist and sole physical character of Louis Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin, becomes an insatiable femme fatale xii in the Dutch composer’s tightly edited biographical sketch. The second pair of case studies, American Dreams, Southern Scenes, and European (Re)visions, opens with a look at a third quasi-biographical account of a female celebrity’s rise and demise: Mark-

Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas’s Anna Nicole, a satire influenced by the tabloid culture of the 1990s and 2000s. In the final chapter, I turn to a work that eschews the depiction of a real woman, instead featuring a new version of a pre-existing operatic femme fatale: Berg’s Lulu, reimagined as an African-American native of New Orleans in

Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu. I conclude by suggesting paths forward, for both scholarship and contemporary opera.

1

Chapter One

Lulu’s Daughters: An Introduction

Her crime spawned tabloid coverage, quickie books and three made-for- TV movies. Now Amy Fisher, who became known as the Long Island Lolita nearly a quarter of a century ago when she shot her lover’s wife, has inspired something rarer: a made-for-TV aria[.] The idea was hatched as a joke in the writers’ room of “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Golden Globe- winning Amazon comedy…but to bring it off the show took it very seriously, persuading the composer Nico Muhly to take a break from working on his second opera for the Metropolitan Opera to write the music[…]

“All I kept thinking was, why isn’t this story an opera already?,” recalled Peter Morris, a playwright and writer on the series who wrote the aria’s libretto. “It’s perfect for a sort of postmodern 21st-century opera, because it was basically a grand opera plot that subverted itself. She was an aspiring femme fatale[.]”1

Why, in 2016, might a team of television writers joke about the prospect of

positioning a real, infamous woman as the central femme fatale in a new opera? Why

might the producers behind this streaming television series find the idea so compelling

that they would commission one of the country’s most prominent opera composers to

realize the writers’ gag? Why would the librettist behind the aria’s text express

amazement at the fact that this real-life tale of adultery, attempted murder, and public

scandal had not yet become the subject of a “postmodern 21st-century opera?” Why

would an opera plot in which a woman engages in a lurid affair but fails to commit

murder strike him as a subversion of the expected norm? Why did the idea of a

contemporary opera about Amy Fisher, the underage lover turned would-be murderess

1 Michael Cooper, “An Aria for the Long Island Lolita on ‘Mozart in the Jungle,’” New York Times, December 7, 2016, accessed December 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/arts/television/amy- fisher-mozart-in-the-jungle.html?r=0. 2 turned tabloid boon, strike a team of classical music devotees and pop-culture creators as so prima facie obvious, even clichéd, as to merit little additional explanation?

The figure of the doomed anti-heroine – perhaps the most familiar archetype in operatic history – has returned to prominence in the new operas of the early twenty-first century. In Lulu’s Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera,

1993-2013, I call attention to the devices and tropes that bind four such operas to the late

Romantic and modernist past, appraise their unique musical and theatrical features, and illuminate the cultural milieux in which they took shape. A specific concatenation of plot, protagonist, and musical devices, the opera on the rise and fall of the compromised, tragic fallen woman or voracious femme fatale reemerged in the 1990s after a long Cold-War hiatus. In each work, a flawed female protagonist, whose deeds and demeanor stand at odds with patriarchal standards of social and sexual behavior, finds the agency to rise within her society – only for figures of authority to silence her in the end. My project situates this archetypal figure within multiple musical and social contexts, from the long nineteenth century that saw the emergence of the type to the millennial transition period in which these composers returned to it. The final decade of the twentieth century, with its myriad pop-cultural, academic, musical, political, and social upheavals, served as the crucible for this trend.

The revival of this type of opera reflects the political and technological realities that guide composers and librettists, along with their critics and audiences. Thomas

Adès’s Powder Her Face (1995), Louis Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin (2010), Mark-Anthony

Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011), and Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu (2012) belong to both a distinctive strain of new opera and a particular operatic heritage. In all of them, 3

past and present, modernist art music – inflected by echoes of popular song and dance,

often coded exotic in character – accompanies the exploits and eventual demise of a

central anti-heroine. This subtype of opera, cultivated extensively in fin-de-siècle

Western Europe after the somewhat delayed success of Bizet’s Carmen, reached a zenith of complexity in Alban Berg’s Lulu (1935), a work left unfinished in the genre’s supposed twilight hour but completed and premiered in the midst of an operatic revival

(1979). The type has resurfaced in an era dominated by personality-driven entertainments, such as reality television and biopics – both major influences on the dramatic contours of the works that I examine. The transgressive figure at the heart of this narrative now undergoes reincarnation on a roughly annual basis, and frequently bears the name and life story of a real, once-living woman.

Whether an aristocrat, a celebrated literary figure, a stripper-turned-star, or a revised version of Berg’s own character, this kind of heroine thrives on attention from the lovers and father figures who surround her. She sings, dances, and goes about her seductions to simulations of period popular music: her music. We perceive her not only as a body on stage, but as the subject of an interstitial film projection, or the topic of a recorded song, or the target of a camera. She violates the terms of those with power over her; the drama ends with her death, exile, or silence. But she leaves a lasting impression, posing such challenges to the values of the men around her that, in retrospect, her downfall may strike audiences as profoundly tragic. In Lulu’s Daughters, I interrogate the pervasive dramatic tropes that surround the transgressive operatic anti-heroine: tropes manifested through scoring, text, and performance.

I emphasize concerns of image, mediation, and construction of character identity 4

because these ideas, latent in Berg’s Lulu, have long motivated creation in both high-art

circles and pop culture. These operas, which appear under the auspices of the former but

gesture emphatically toward the latter, bear out this claim. As Berg borrowed from

nineteenth-century opera, expressionist drama, the Zeitopern of Weimar Germany, and

cinema in creating his overdetermined cipher of a heroine, so living composers have

adapted and appropriated elements of Lulu and other works. In this age of the troubled,

gawked-at female celebrity, an archetypal figure of tabloid media dubbed the

“trainwreck” by the critic Sady Doyle, they have mapped them onto women who really

lived.2 In asking how artists continue to mine this vein of operatic storytelling, I ask why

they do so as well. Why fallen women? Why once-living people? Why now?

The means to answer these questions lie all around, in fragments of existing

scholarship, journalism, and primary-source media. In this study, I take up the tasks of

synthesis and hermeneutic exegesis. Susan McClary’s historical and theoretical work on

the mythos and sound-world of the femme fatale and fallen woman comprises the

foundation of this project, and Yayoi Uno Everett’s recent work on archetypal

protagonists in contemporary opera has lent considerable support to my arguments. Julian

Johnson’s Out of Time, a model of transhistorical analysis in art music, has provided a

framework in which the scholar may trace connections between works that, despite

chronologically disparate dates of origin, all coexist in the cultural present. David

Metzer’s work on musical modernism, allusion, and meaning has provided the means by

which my work bridges alleged aesthetic gaps between pre-World War II and post-Cold

War art. These theoretical, conceptual, and meta-historical works, while foundational to

2 Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2016). 5

my project, never speak directly to the actual operas under consideration in this study;

indeed, few scholars have addressed them thus far. I thus add to the small number of

extant scholarly considerations of Powder Her Face and American Lulu, and contribute the first academic writings on Anaïs Nin and Anna Nicole.

If Everett’s Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera has demonstrated the promise of mixed-methodology analyses of twenty-first century opera, then I hope to offer further inquiry in a similar area – albeit with a greater emphasis on pop-cultural and mass-mediated contexts.3 Where Everett examines meditative operas

with a shared bedrock of humanitarianism, I explore the seamier side of recent work in

opera. Composers and librettists have revisited and revised a number of touchstone

stories and character types in recent decades, from the Faust legend to the Christ

narrative. In this dissertation, I ask why we have also returned to the silencing of Eves,

Pandoras, Liliths, Lolitas, and Lulus.

Almost concurrent with the rise of second-wave feminist critical theory in the academy, a widespread cultural and critical backlash to women’s-rights advocacy swept the West in the 1980s and ‘90s. At the same time, media outlets began to capitalize on a pervasive culture of voyeurism and tabloid scandal that homed in on abject female stars.4

New opera entered a period of reinvigorated creation and production in this period, with so-called CNN opera, a type of spectacle that claimed quasi-documentary representation of real events, becoming a particularly fertile site for composerly cultivation. The anti-

3 Yayoi Uno Everett, Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 4 See: Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, 15th Anniversary ed. (New York: Broadway Books, 2009). 6

heroine of the opera canon returned to public visibility, with popular adaptations

of Bizet’s Carmen everywhere and Lulu an increasingly standard work in the wake of the

premiere of Friedrich Cerha’s completed version in 1979.5 In the world of television and

other news and entertainment media, critics hailed the dawning of the age of a tawdry

tabloid culture, in which outlets clamored to cover transgressive behavior, sexual scandal,

and falls from grace. With increasing frequency, composers began to revive the anti-

heroine archetype as it stood when Berg left it: a narrative in which popular music speaks

to the sordid, and in which multimedia elements emphasize the necessity of the public

gaze for the fabrication of a femme fatale image – itself a media product, projected onto

the surface of a real woman. In an age when remakes and adaptations dominate the

entertainment landscape alongside reality television and biopics, new opera’s general

tendencies to return to past convention, to court controversy, and to focus on historical

figures cannot come as any particular shock. Spurred on by broader impulses to re-

present real events with an aura of authenticity – many of these operas resemble

reenactments within documentaries – and to revisit old tropes, composers began to map traits of the femme fatale and fallen woman onto real women. This trend continues apace.6

Jazz- and rock-inflected instrumentation has become common in this context, and

non-operatic voices now often stand side by side with traditional sopranos, mezzos,

tenors, and basses. Along with the social transgressions of the anti-heroine come

5 For a list of Carmen adaptations in circulation at the time, see: Ann Davies and Phil Powrie, Carmen on Screen: An Annotated Filmography and Bibliography (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis Books, 2006). For a consideration of some of these, see “Carmen on Film,” the final chapter of McClary’s monograph on Carmen: McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 130-146, as well as her “Carmen as Perennial Fusion: From Habanera to Hip-Hop,” in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, ed. Chris Perriam and Ann Davies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2005), 205-16.

7

transgressions against genre on the parts of composers. The European composers whose

work I examine associate the fallen-woman character type with various social classes,

sexualities, and racial groups, but each character boasts at least a connection – at times a

thematically indispensable one – to the United States, and a specific, pessimistic vision of

American-ness. “This is one bleak nihilistic tale,” shouts the chorus in the prologue to

of Anna Nicole, “…about a beauty wannabe/ who was gone from the get-go.”7 The label

could fit any of these pieces, and any of their heroines. Though I aim to demonstrate that

this trend is, in a sense, nothing new, I also hope to explain why its resurgence has

continued unabated in an era that, contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s utopian predictions, has seen not an end to history, but rather endless returns thereto.

---

…even if there always exists a discrepancy between the theatricalized representations that circulate in a society and actual lived behaviors, those images still bear some relationship to the ideologies of those who produced and witnessed them. If we cannot read cultural texts as cold, objective evidence of everyday reality, we can still glean a good deal about a historical moment – its fantasies, projections, comic exaggerations, and anxieties – by studying them.8

In Lulu’s Daughters, I examine “theatricalized representation[s]” – several

operas, all composed within the past quarter-century – in an attempt to read them as

musical and poetic texts. Products of their creators, opportunities for directors and

dramaturgs, ordeals for the bodies and minds of performers, multimedia spectacles for

audiences, and defendants in the courts of critics, operas transcend their scores and

libretti as they cross the space between palpable document and experienced event. They

7 Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas, Anna Nicole [Full Score] (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 2014), 24-25. 8 Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (Berkeley, University of California Press), 11-12. 8

also reflect and confront the values of the societies that produce, receive, and evaluate

them; in this case, the societies and cultures in question lie within a quarter-century of

this document’s composition and publication. In subjecting these operas to analysis and

criticism, I hope to “glean a good deal about a historical moment” – the recent past that

led to this study’s present, a time of profound political, cultural, and social unrest and

uncertainty. To claim to diagnose the Western world’s ills through its operatic

innovations would be the height of hubris – but, in the grand tradition of Adorno, Attali,

and McClary, I hope to demonstrate this music’s ability to make sense of, even prophesize, the social conditions surrounding its immediate past, present, and future. Lulu itself, along with its sibling Wozzeck and immediate predecessors by other composers, such as Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins, Paul Hindemith’s Mörder, Hoffnung der

Frauen, and Kurt Weill’s Aufsteig und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, offered audiences glimpses of a dystopian nightmare world that, in reality, lay mere months ahead.

The epigraph above affirms the value of art as a window, however clouded, onto

the assumptions under which its creators, facilitators, and audience operated. The operas

covered here address the fascinations of living writers and musicians, speak to the

anxieties of a living audience, and, in three of four cases, portray people who lived into

the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These represent only one trend among

the new operas of the new century. Some of the most critically acclaimed operas of the period derive from centuries-old troubadour tales, and minimalist and neo-Romantic composers have claimed the hearts of many audience members.9 However, certain

9 Statistics, available to the public at the website Operabase.com, placed Philip Glass, Jake Heggie, and John Adams at the top of their field in this regard as of the 2013-2014 season – but all three had written more operas than most of their peers. The same list places George Benjamin and Kaija Saariaho, composers 9

tendencies in contemporary opera writ large – the impulse to depict a famous person in

her or his final days or hours, the incorporation of sounds from popular music, the

omnipresence of multimedia components – apply across boundaries of style and subject

matter.

Theories on the construction of identity, both personal and collective, will lend

support to my arguments on characterization. Concerns of quasi-biographical

representation can only grow more pressing as composers and librettists continue to

overlay images of once-living people with the character types of operatic tradition – as

Adès, Andriessen, and Turnage have done in their works. Neuwirth’s opera raises its own set of ethical questions, as it borrows two acts’ worth of music from Berg’s Lulu and replaces the debased Austrians of the original work with African-American civil rights activists. I maintain a steady focus on the question of representations of women, an inescapable issue in operas such as these. I consider each piece as a potential source of identification, empowerment, and subversion as well as an inevitable vehicle for misogynistic pageantry. Few would argue that this sort of opera must be either an undoing or an envoicing of women, without potential for slippage – though the operas I cover frequently leave critics full of misgivings.10 Through directorial interventions and

of the troubadour-legend operas to which I allude, at twelfth and twentieth places, respectively. These figures are available for perusal at: “Living Composers,” Opera Statistics 2013/14, last modified 2014, accessed October 5, 2015, http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en&break=0&show=alive&no=200&nat=. 10 I do not choose the terms “undoing” or “envoicing” at random. The former term refers to Catherine Clément’s influential treatise L’opéra, ou la défaite des femmes, and, by extension, Susan McClary’s preface to that work in its translation as Opera, or the Undoing of Women. McClary’s “Excess and Frame: the Musical Representation of Madwomen” introduced the concept of opera as confinement mechanism for female sexual excess, and Georges Bizet: Carmen explores similar themes and advances the feminist critique of opera through deep analysis. Carolyn Abbate’s meditation on Richard Strauss’s Salome, provocatively titled Opera, or the Envoicing of Women, confronts Clément’s narrative of “undoing” with questions of the female voice as bearer of authority and agency. I adopt these terms in order to argue not for their polar opposition, but, on the contrary, for their necessary coexistence. See: Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Susan 10

subtle tweaks in acting, even the bloodiest hits of the nineteenth century may show us a

heroine who gets up and walks away at the end, defying the libretto.11 But, more

frequently, attempts at creating that which Frank Wedekind, author of the original Lulu

plays, called a “tragedy of monsters” – a drama meant to elicit sympathy, even empathy, for unsavory characters – seem to echo an omnipotent moral authority, enacting

punishments for the marginalized through rituals of élite entertainment.

The authorial voice of opera, already split between performers, directors,

composers, and librettists, splits even further when additional media like films and

narrating voices enter the audience’s field of attention. Critics, who must express their

thoughts concisely, frequently speak of the opera as though it were an agent in itself. I

resist this displacement of agency onto the text, beginning my analyses with critical

perceptions and unpicking the tangle of influences that contribute to the ultimate shape

and affect of the event. Such questions of authority, to which all opera is subject, begin to

look like minor concerns once the fragmentation, flashbacks, and meta-narration of

modernist and postmodernist theatre become standard practice post-1970: to what ends

these juxtaposed shards of narrative? In this respect, Berg again anticipated later trends,

embracing disjunctions, abstract structuring devices, and even film. From the flashbacks

and interludes of Powder Her Face to the sung signposting in Anna Nicole and recorded

speech in American Lulu, the operas of the past quarter-century rupture the confines of

McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 225–58. 11 I refer here to the 1991 Minnesota Opera production of Carmen, starring Denyce Graves and directed by Keith Warner, in which Carmen lingers, bleeding profusely and attempting to crawl away, after the music stops. In its insistence that a gory image of the heroine remain in silence, this production anticipated the 2012 premiere of American Lulu at the Komische Oper Berlin. Susan McClary describes the production and its effect on the audience in a foreword to the Italian translation of her Carmen monograph: McClary, foreword to Georges Bizet. Carmen, ed. and trans. Annamaria Cecconi (Milan: Rugginenti, 2007), i-vi. 11 acted theatre.

This disruption of straightforward storytelling extends into the domain of chosen medium: in the twenty-first century, barriers between the “live,” the pre-recorded, and the electronically altered have become porous. Onstage bodies mingle with recordings and recording devices, in a literal sense and on the level of narrative structure itself. Since the moment in which Berg decided to substitute silent film for staged action at the midpoint of Lulu, audiences and artists have learned to conceive of narrative through the devices and conventions of cinema. New opera, when read as a form that incorporates techniques from film, begins to make sense as part of twenty-first century multimedia culture.

Further complications arise when I consider the source documents upon which the operas rely. Powder Her Face draws on tabloids, legal records, memoirs, and photographs;

Anaïs Nin sets diary entries, letters, and psychoanalytic treatises to music; Anna Nicole re-creates the exploitative spectacles of reality television, and bears the imprint of internet conspiracy theories; American Lulu comprises two acts of a pre-existing opera, and new material derived in part from Blaxploitation cinema. People already know of the real women whose lives inspired the former three pieces – but at a remove of several paces. Opera adds still more distance between those portrayed and the perceptions of them held by the audience.

Methods and Perspectives

A myth, nurtured by some journalists and the occasional scholar, maintains that opera as medium for new music suffered a near-fatal shock sometime around the deaths of Giacomo Puccini and Berg, remained on life support under the watchful eye of

Benjamin Britten, and began to stir somewhat with the premiere of Philip Glass and 12

Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach. Brutal in its reduction of history to a decline-and- fall narrative with an ellipsis and question mark tacked on at the end, this version of events nonetheless chimes with statistical realities. With a handful of exceptions – most scored by Britten and Francis Poulenc – few operas premiered between 1940 and 1978 have survived the judgments of the artistic directors, critics, sponsors, and audiences who decide which pieces merit continued re-production. Post-Romantic composers, including

Americans like Samuel Barber and Carlisle Floyd, contributed to the genre throughout this midcentury period, and Igor Stravinsky submitted a full-length pastiche of eighteenth-century opera, The Rake’s Progress. A few compelling pop-hybrid works, such as Astor Piazzolla’s María de Buenos Aires, have lingered and even thrived. Each country, region, and continent has its own distinct version of the European and American operatic canon. However, even the more accessible works of the era have fallen by the wayside with time, regardless of national origin or musical language. Pierre Boulez, a leader among Darmstadt Ferienkurse-affiliated postwar modernists, all but declared opera a lost cause.12 Emily Richmond Pollock and Mark Berry, among many others, have

contributed incisive analyses of postwar modernist operas.13 However, few of these have

approached repertory status.

12 Boulez later applied pressure to opera’s conservatism and canon-fixation from within, as a conductor. Olga Neuwirth reminds her readers of this fact with a colorful metaphor, remarking of her colleague: “he worked away at draining the swamps of culture, especially of opera houses.” When Boulez conducted Friedrich Cerha’s completion of Lulu in 1979, Neuwirth – then eleven years old – tuned in live, a formative experience. For more of Neuwirth’s thoughts on Boulez, see Neuwirth: “A Mensch: Nachruf auf Pierre Boulez (2016),” Die Zeit, January 28, 2016, accessed March 10, 2016, http://www.zeit.de/2016/03/nachruf- pierre-boulez. For the late composer’s original comments on opera houses, see: Boulez, interview with Felix Schmidt and Jürgen Hohmeyer (“Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!”), Der Spiegel 40 (September 25, 1967), 166-74. 13 See: Mark Berry, After Wagner: Histories of Modern Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 264-266; and Emily Richmond Pollock, “Opera After Stunde Null” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2012). 13

In A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years, a sweeping text first

released in 2012, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker issue a grim prognosis for

contemporary opera. Their original final chapter characterizes even the most vibrant and

frequently performed post-Britten works as always already moribund, and hails the

continued reign of canonic warhorses.14 A 2015 revision saw a softening of this rhetoric,

but the question of a historian’s role in evaluating very recent music remains a fraught

and open one.15 Leon Botstein, for one, argues that the genre’s future prosperity depends

on the revival of lesser-known works from the past – not, one gathers, on the efforts of

Tan Dun, Kaija Saariaho, Tania León, Unsuk Chin, Jake Heggie, Salvatore Sciarrino, or

other established living opera composers. The underlying premise of Botstein’s 2015

essay “The Future of Opera,” that the word opera refers to a body of historical works

rather than an active outlet for living composers, remains implicit – too obvious to state.16

In this study, I examine contemporaneous reception with an eye to cultural resonance, but

hesitate to make any predictions about future adoptions into the canon. In addressing

critical and audience responses as well as musical and dramatic content, I lay a

foundation for those who do appraise these pieces and their places in history years hence.

“Opera” will henceforth denote a living medium as well as an imaginary museum.

14 In the chapter in question, titled “We are alone in the forest,” Thomas Adès puts in an appearance as an exception whose work proves the putative rule. Abbate and Parker focus on The Tempest rather than Powder Her Face. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera (New York: W.W. Norton and Company), 516-548. 15 Reviewing A History of Opera for the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe made the book’s approach to contemporary opera the focus of his critique: “…[t]he culprit may be the limitations of musicology, a stubbornly conservative discipline that tends, like this book, to admit only grudgingly that operas continued to be made after Britten[.]” Woolfe, “Has the Fat Lady Finally Sung?,” New York Times, December 27, 2012, accessed May 20, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/books/a-history-of-opera-by-carolyn- abbate-and-roger-parker.html. 16 Leon Botstein, “The Future of Opera,” Musical Quarterly 97 no. 3 (March 2015): 353-359. 14

The mandate of historical distance that hamstrung previous generations of

scholars, cautioning them to wait until a given work had remained in the canon for

generations, has lost much of its authority since the early 1990s. Dedicated conference

series now exist for the study of recent art music and the living figures who make it.17

When musicologists began to decamp en masse for the domains of historical and cultural

context, criticism, philosophy, and hermeneutics near the end of the twentieth century,

questioning their field of study and its purview, they started to consider contemporaneous

art music, along with popular genres, marginalized musics, and the musics of the

marginalized. The moment at which the field went through its “critical turn” coincides

almost exactly with an incursion of politically and sexually charged subjects from recent

memory onto the operatic stage. This was no coincidence.

The period in question also coincides with a time of rapid change in scholars’

methods. Strategies native to the time of the “critical turn” have found their way into the

mainstream of the discipline, and the pivot itself has become institutional lore. Every new

graduate student reads and hears of the watershed that opened up the field, making

composer hagiography but one of many pursuits available to the music scholar. The

vocabularies and approaches of literary criticism came to saturate the literature, and

modernist narratives of musical greatness and progress wobbled and fell. As Thomas

Adès rehearsed Powder Her Face for its premiere, the transition from post-War

conventions of Musikwissenschaft to musicology-as-critique kicked into high gear.

Composers had championed postmodern aesthetic orientations since the late 1960s, and,

in the 1980s and ‘90s, musicology joined the party.

17 I here refer specifically to Musicology and the Present, a conference series and academic network in operation since 2013. 15

The following years saw the birth of sub-disciplines and the fall of old analytical

régimes: sound studies, film musicology, and ecomusicology arrived, while applications

of psychoanalytic theory fluctuated in influence. Scholars have more recently hailed a

phenomenological (or affective) turn, which has redirected scholarly inquiry from the

producers of works to their audiences and interpreters, from texts to acts. As the literary

theorist Stuart Hall might put it, readers’ and listeners’ decodings of cultural texts have

become as available for consideration as artists’ ways of encoding meaning.18

Christopher Small’s concept of musicking, now widely known and adopted, posits

everyone involved in the presentation or preservation of a text as co-creators of a lived

experience.19 But these ideas still leave us with the “code” itself: a text at the center of

myriad human relationships and acts. In this holistic vision of performed art, an opera encompasses both things and events, products and experiences, sets of instructions and evening’s entertainments. As new approaches in musicology continue to emerge and theorists of art and culture question the limits and possibilities of once-revolutionary models, the analytical toolkit available to humanists continues to expand.20

I therefore approach each opera from multiple angles, with multiple tools of

explication. In four case study chapters, each devoted to a single opera, I isolate points of

similarity and difference between each piece and its antecedents, and describe moments

within each as necessary. But my methods vary according to the qualities of the opera in

question. Each new work, and production thereof, introduces new complications and

18 Hall’s model remains vital and useful. For a relevant excerpt from his writings on the subject, see: Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 2007): 90-103. 19 Small’s text remains as important as ever: Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 20 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 16

implications for a story that remains similar in basic shape, but can always play host to

new anxieties, sensibilities, and subversions. I therefore employ multiple modes of

analysis, shifting between hermeneutic exegesis, close reading of scores and libretti,

explanation of cultural and historical contexts, and “thick” descriptions of individual

performances.21

In the latter portion of this introduction, I revisit the tradition of the transgressive

heroine, ask where it went, and suggest why it has risen, phoenix-like, in the era of

neoliberalism and new media. By the time of Alban Berg’s death and Dmitri

Shostakovich’s censure, when Lulu joined the canonic ranks of the incomplete

masterpieces and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District fell into state-mandated silence,

authors and composers had developed dozens of characters based on the idea of the fallen

woman. Always already doomed for her incongruity with societal norms, the literary and

operatic heroine of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed something

strikingly close to her present forms in Berg’s opera. In explicitly comparing the heroines

of new opera to Lulu and other leading women of the past, I do not always suggest that

the composer and librettist have evoked specific works with clear intention. In a

monograph on audiovisual aesthetics in recent popular music, John Richardson explains his own comparative project thus:

Nowhere do I take for granted affinities between historical [examples] and the emerging forms that I discuss. Rather, the relationship I am proposing is in the nature of a family resemblance…implying overlap of several

21 Clifford Geertz coined the phrase “thick description;” see: Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-33. The term refers to a practice in which the scholar describes an event or behavior while simultaneously supplying the social, cultural, and historical context of the acts in question – thus critiquing the text while surpassing the usual limits of journalists’ criticism. Small brought the method into musical scholarship in Musicking, cited above. 17

conceptual nodes rather than direct conceptual alignment…It is enough to demonstrate how the present-day practices discussed “work” on their own terms, how they afford meanings in similar ways to historical antecedents, and how they hook up with larger discursive formations in contemporary society and the theories that have been produced to explain them.22

Lulu does not necessarily serve as a direct template for composers in my assessment – nor do older works that bear even slighter resemblances, such as Carmen.

Rather, I focus on the figure of the anti-heroine as a protagonist, and point out the accrued associations that have built up around her over decades of operatic, cinematic, and even televisual iterations. In Lulu’s Daughters, the titular heroine serves as the sun about which the Duchess, Anaïs Nin, Anna Nicole, and (the new) Lulu orbit, at closer or further removes depending on the opera.

The relationship I propose will require more explanation than a Venn diagram or mere plot summary could provide. The process by which the nineteenth-century dangerous woman, passing through Berg’s nightmare world, eventually becomes Anna

Nicole Smith resembles that of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 797, a collaborative artwork first realized in 1995 – the year of Powder Her Face’s premiere run, and, according to

Joseph Campbell, the crucial year that determined the course of early twenty-first century media culture.23 In LeWitt’s work, an artist draws an irregular curved line at the top of a

wall; in the space below, successive participants attempt to copy the line without

touching the original. This process, which eventually generates an apparently solid field

of wavelike shapes, works because of the impossibility of copying the top line with

22 John Richardson, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 4-5. In his opening section for this monograph – a virtuosic explication of his methods and frames of reference – Richardson explores many of the themes that I have mentioned, in far greater detail. It has served as a model for this Introduction. 23 W. Joseph Campbell, 1995: The Year the Future Began (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 18

perfect fidelity. No artist’s drawing can overlap with her predecessors’ work, but the contours remain similar: peaks, valleys, and swerves survive and grow as each successive participant amplifies or smooths away the deformations of the previous efforts. If nineteenth-century operas on fallen women represent the first tentative few lines in this

analogy, with their clear ascent to a summit and descent to oblivion, then Berg’s Lulu stands out as a particularly thick, symmetrical, and luridly colored iteration, a precedent that Adès, Andriessen, and Turnage, taking up the task decades later, could not avoid.

The likeness breaks down a bit in the case of Neuwirth, who has compared her work on

American Lulu to painting over an existing canvas.24 She returns to Berg’s line and draws

directly over it, deviating as she sees fit. In this study, I aim to capture both unique

features and transhistorical resonances, diversity and compatibility, the complexity of the

overdetermined musical-theatrical work and the simplicity of a recognizable Gestalt.

I proceed through these case studies in chronological order, by premiere date.25

Chapter Two covers the phenomenon that has been Powder Her Face, from its prehistory in the early 1990s through its two-decade victory lap around the world’s stages. For a demanding piece of musical theatre that has polarized critics since its premiere, Adès and

Hensher’s Monstertragodie of depraved aristocrats has enjoyed a rare degree of success. I treat the piece’s mixed reception as an entry point for analysis. Whither the perception of the piece as emotionally cold and cruel, what of the opposing view, and why the

24 Olga Neuwirth, interview with Kenan Malik (“Interview with Olga Neuwirth – Bregenz Festival”), September 6, 2013, accessed February 4, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlSjB4ZdAd0. 25 In the cases of the latter three, each composer’s period of work on his or her respective piece overlapped with those of the others. Neuwirth began her work on American Lulu as early as 2006, Andriessen worked on Anaïs Nin throughout 2009, and Turnage and Thomas embarked on the process of hewing Anna Nicole from tabloid narratives mere months after her death, in 2008. The existence of a chronological gulf between Powder Her Face and the others – eleven years before Neuwirth began work on American Lulu – does not negate its resemblance to, and influence upon, the others. Indeed, its success and tenacity may have made it clear to subsequent composers that such a pursuit could work in the twenty-first century. 19

persistent focus – in journalism as well as scholarship – on quotation, allusion, and

stylistic emulation? I suggest many answers for each of those questions, based in an array

of contributing factors: England’s history of birth- and marriage-based social

stratification, Hensher’s fascination with the Lulu story, the camp sensibility that frames

and filters every event in the drama, and, of course, the hyper-complex network of abstract musical processes and wry stylistic references that constitute Adès’s score. The figure of its protagonist, the Duchess, appears in multiple incarnations within her own opera, from the drag impersonation that opens the action to the recorded popular song

that seems, like the portrait in Lulu, to contain her essence – symbolically destroyed in

the end. As scholars have argued, Powder Her Face includes both musical paraphrases

and long-term harmonic structures that together function to mock and break down its own

heroine. I contend that the Duchess, in her various stages of life, embodies a hybrid of

operatic archetypes: both a femme fatale turned fallen woman, and Orpheus.

At first glance, the resemblance of Louis Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin to any prior fallen woman may seem to end with her sexual voracity. One could even question whether his monodrama resembles opera; cast for small ensemble and amplified voice, it makes no strong claim for that designation. But the presence of jazzy fanfares, inserted film sequences, and a series of male lovers points to a deeper correspondence between

Lulu in particular and the version of the real Nin that Andriessen coaxes from found texts. In a time when artists still speak of “multimedia opera” as though it were something new and unexplored – four decades after Glass’s Einstein on the Beach of

1976 – Andriessen’s piece culls from a famous writer’s diaries in order to give her a 20

(singing) voice.26 But, in this second chapter, I tease out the paradoxical results of this effort. Does the story remain hers when her husbands and lovers literally hover over her, projected on a screen, and she speaks almost exclusively of them? When the voice that

brings the piece to a close is hers, but the sound emanates from a recording, and the

words come from the father who abandoned her as a child and seduced her as an adult? I

argue that Andriessen’s formal scheme – contrasting modules of tempo, texture, rhythmic

pattern, and instrumentation, stitched together to form a whole – matches Nin’s own

inward-facing narrative style well. Yet the harmonic, affective, and leitmotivic teleology

of the piece, along with its tight zoom into an exceptionally fraught period in Nin’s long,

productive life, bespeaks an internal tension. Even as musical form suggests a variable

and multifaceted individual, other aspects of the score, along with the text and

multimedia interludes, shift the listener’s attention elsewhere: to the figure of the femme

fatale and, increasingly as the piece wears on, away from the subject entirely and toward

her father.

A dramatized litany of latter-day evils – reality television, playboy billionaires,

cosmetic surgery, frivolous litigation, even fast food – Mark-Anthony Turnage and

Richard Thomas’s Anna Nicole subjects American culture to brutal, crass satire. But it

also resurrects the operatic anti-heroine in order to press her into service: as the familiar

tabloid-media figure of the female celebrity “trainwreck,” undone by men, materialism, and substance abuse. Not for nothing do Turnage and Thomas rehearse the traditional

26 For an example of this, see the trailer for Los Angeles Opera’s production of composer Missy Mazzoli and co-librettist Royce Vavrek’s Song from the Uproar (2015), in which Vavrek states: “there’s a multimedia component, so it feels like a…really new type of opera.” While Mazzoli and Vavrek have no doubt crafted an original experience, the piece bears a striking similarity to Anaïs Nin in its use of diary entries by its once-living titular heroine, and its incorporation of video projections. See: Los Angeles Opera, “Song from the Uproar Trailer,” YouTube. Flash video file. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBSv5z9rZaA. 21

undoing-of-women narrative, clad in the party dress and designer heels of early-2000s reality stardom. An act of caustic transatlantic critique, the piece depicts Smith as an all- too-human victim of a grotesque, perverse American dream. That the characters

constantly call attention to the artifice and uncertainty of the story they inhabit only adds to the dense web of meanings that the British composer and librettist have constructed

around their pinup “Clown Messiah.” Questions of music and affect arise when the drama

hits the stage: what of the pop-rock grooves, Broadway-ready melodies, and scorching

dissonances that animate Anna and her exploiters, and how does the piece work (or not

work) as satire and tragedy in its various productions? In my third chapter, I argue that

Anna Nicole both reflected and predicted the sociopolitical conditions of the early

twenty-first century in ways that neither Turnage nor Thomas could have foreseen with

absolute clarity. Though their heroine owes much to historical precedent, the immediate mass-media context of the piece – a turn towards the tabloidesque and tawdry in

entertainment, along with myriad negative depictions of the United States’ rural white

working class throughout popular culture – plays too large a role in the eventual shape of

Anna Nicole to ignore.

My final chapter brings the story of the new old anti-heroine to a close, but not an

end; as I write, new operas about real, once-living fallen women, from Hollywood stars

to exotic dancers framed for espionage, continue to debut on stages across Europe and

North America.27 Among them all, one stands out for her unique connection to the canon:

27 Both Gavin Bryars and Robin de Raaff have composed operas set in the final hours of the life of Marilyn Monroe: Marilyn Forever (2015) and Waiting for Miss Monroe (2012) incorporate the jazzy sounds of Monroe’s lifetime, and speak to an ongoing cultural fascination with her early demise. They follow Ezra Laderman’s Marilyn (1993), which precedes all of the operas that I discuss. This streak of Marilyn Monroe operas – none exceptionally successful, to go by critics’ assessments and the lack of new productions for 22

Lulu, an African-American dancer in the segregated South of the midcentury United

States, headed for success as a New York-based escort. In Chapter Four, I leave the

domain of the biographical and observe the operatic trend of the sordid femme fatale as it

comes full circle – back to the source. At once a radical production of an old score

(Berg’s Lulu of 1935) and a contemporary opera in its own right, American Lulu features

a new scenario and original third act by the composer Olga Neuwirth, along with

multimedia interludes featuring films, audio samples, and more. Its heroine Lulu, a New

Orleans showgirl living in the days of segregation and Civil Rights, dances and seduces to Berg’s score, but dies enveloped by Neuwirth’s newer soundscape.

I argue for the opera’s status as a bridge between the operatic canon and the realm of new music, between the historical moment of Lulu and that of opera’s contemporary currents. A return to both modernism and postmodernism that adds a heteroglossic glut of new influences to a landmark piece, American Lulu has prompted controversy that can only grow: a good-faith effort at art as activism, it nonetheless indulges in troubling racial stereotypy. In combining Berg’s Lulu with the imagery of Blaxploitation cinema and the soundscape of the South, Neuwirth pries apart the original and fills the cracks with reminders that even the most hedonistic and self-involved of people live their sordid lives amid the march of history. Given the preservation of Lulu’s murder, one might justifiably wonder what makes this piece feminist at all. Focusing on Neuwirth’s original prelude and third act, along with the figure of Eleanor – a blues singer reminiscent of Billie

Holiday, and the living composer’s replacement for Berg’s tragic Countess Geschwitz – I

any – could serve as the topic of an entire other essay, and, due to constraints of space and time in this study, will have to do so. Matt Marks’s Mata Hari, in many ways a new pinnacle of many of the trends I outline herein, won critical acclaim upon its premiere at the Prototype Festival of new opera in New York in 2017. 23 suggest an answer. As of the present date, American Lulu remains seldom performed and firmly unpopular among music critics, despite its apparent appeal to music historians and cultural theorists as an object of analysis. In considering its initial resistance to critical acclaim, I circle back to the motivating questions of this study: why fallen women? Why real historical figures in three cases, and a remake of an existing character in the fourth?

And why the 1990s through 2010s, a period in which cycles of feminist advocacy and reactionary backlash have accelerated and issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence have returned to the center of the West’s political and cultural discourses?

---

A killing jar is a tool used by entomologists to kill butterflies and other insects without damaging their bodies: a hermetically sealable glass container, lined with poison, in which the specimen will quickly suffocate. Voices from the Killing Jar depicts a series of female protagonists caught in their own kinds of killing jars: hopeless situations, inescapable fates, impossible fantasies, and other unlucky circumstances…Among these women are housewives and teenagers and mothers and daughters, innocents and tragic heroines and femmes fatales.28

Kate Soper, a composer, performer, and co-founder of the new music ensemble

Wet Ink, wrote Voices from the Killing Jar as a response to an entire literary canon’s worth of works that exhibit, entrap, and silence their female protagonists. As the primary actor-soloist, Soper envoices a series of troubled characters. Iphigenia, Lady Macduff,

Emma Bovary, Daisy Buchanan, and others sing out their heartaches, frustrations, and existential dilemmas. The piece’s broad chronological sweep, from antiquity to the novels of Haruki Murakami, dilutes the attendant historical context around each figure.

The protagonists become a transhistorical community, diverse in character but unified in circumstance. Soper writes that the “killing jar” of the title describes each woman’s

28 Kate Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar (DMA Thesis, Columbia University, 2011), 1. 24

situation within her fictional world. However, an alternative reading might posit the

literary work itself as the poisoned prison, the container of identities that allows the

viewer to gaze upon the beautiful object as it struggles in vain to defy death. Susan

McClary, considering Cio-Cio-san in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, has written of that opera’s pinning of the titular butterfly (in more than one sense).29 The metaphor

also works at the level of genre itself. Opera has a particular habit of mounting anti-

heroines for the public’s gaze.

The title of this study could have been Voices from the Killing Jar. As Catherine

Clément first observed and many have since verified, opera, a central vehicle for the classically trained voice for most of its period of existence, has had a unique

preoccupation with the exhibition, containment, and silencing of female characters for

centuries.30 Since the mid-nineteenth century, few kinds of heroine have fascinated opera audiences so consistently as the femmes fatale and fragile. In her program note, Soper writes of “hopeless situations, inescapable fates, [and] impossible fantasies;” the protagonists of Powder Her Face, Anaïs Nin, Anna Nicole, and American Lulu face all of these conundrums, and yield to the forces that confront them. Women have long appeared in Western operas, ballets, melodramas, and even instrumental music as ciphers, symbols, and archetypes, surfaces upon which the artist and audience may project familiar tropes

and preconceptions. Further, from antiquity through the early twentieth century, Western

cultures have cycled through periodic infatuations with the idea of a consuming feminine

evil, a gendered metaphor for societal decadence and decline – never quite an absent

29 Susan McClary, “Mounting Butterflies,” in A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly, ed. Jonathan Wisenthal, Sherrill Grace, Melinda Boyd, Brian McIlroy, and Vera Micznik (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 21-35. 30 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women. 25

theme, but more pronounced in some eras than others. The period between the 1870s and

1930s, which saw the premieres of Carmen and Lulu, the publication of a number of still- influential essentialist psychoanalytic texts, the spread of the poisonous conjectures of

Otto Weininger, and frequent mutterings of societal decadence, accounts for one such spike. It is possible that another such upward-reaching trend line began to rise in the

1990s.

Where Soper opens up the killing jars and lends each character a unique voice, the operas that I cover in this document find real, once-living women placed in new yet familiar vessels. I posit Adès’s Duchess, Andriessen’s Anaïs, Turnage’s Anna Nicole, and Neuwirth’s Lulu as members of a similar sort of sisterhood, all descendants of the late nineteenth-century fallen woman via a common interwar ancestor: Berg’s Lulu. Any academic who seeks to write histories of misogynist archetypes in art runs the risk of replicating the original harm; of paving over complicating factors, of finding femme fatales and problematic storylines everywhere courtesy of confirmation bias, of erasing the perspectives of those who find these works enervating and empowering. My task itself is fraught with peril, insofar as I will never know on a personal level what it feels like to identify with a silenced woman in the way that Clément does while hearing operas, or that singing actors like Barbara Hannigan do while singing them, or that Soper does while reading novels and plays. To the extent possible, I thus aim to listen to and amplify the voices of critics, composers, performers, and scholars who have taken in these works, seen something of themselves in the silenced characters, and come away transfigured by the experience.

Given the long history of the silenced anti-heroine in Western storytelling – a 26 phenomenon with roots in the myths of antiquity – some definition and background will be in order. I have chosen to use the broad terms anti-heroine and, less frequently, compromised woman in this study, as few alternatives consistently fit across, or even within, the selected operas. The former term correctly names the character in question as a clear protagonist, but, with its prefix, reminds the reader of the stigmatized actions or qualities that places her at odds with her society. In the early 2010s, a glut of popular anti-heroes – charismatic monsters who keep secrets, sleep around, murder innocents, suffer losses, and enjoy prosperity – prompted critics to hail a golden age of television.

Why not acknowledge the fact that, around the same time, opera creators invited audiences to watch women break the rules as well? Compromised women rings poetic due to the multiple possible meanings of the word compromised – a passive construction of an already variable verb, and thus a term that avoids either labeling or blaming the figure in question. To bandy about such archetypal labels as “fallen woman” and “femme fatale” with an air of universality, by contrast, is to conjure associations that may not always obtain.

As Clément pointed out, La traviata could stand as the name of any of a number of operas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One would be hard pressed to compile a list of enduring operas that does not include the tales of Verdi’s Violetta and

Puccini’s Mimì, two consumptive heroines whose ill-fated love affairs and untimely deaths reliably summon tears. As Joseph Kerman has pointed out, even La traviata, the tale of a former sex worker who inadvertently threatens the respectability of a wealthy bourgeois family, gives the protagonist a more sympathetic hearing than the play that 27

served as its basis, La Dame aux Camélias.31 Though he finds earlier portrayals of compromised women – such as Gilda in Rigoletto – colder and more frankly misogynistic, Kerman notes a gradual thaw in the composer’s operatic output, an evolution from the use of Gilda as a disposable pawn to the gleeful matriarchal milieu of

Falstaff decades later. According to Kerman, the turnaround began around the time when

Verdi unwittingly gave his opera on the love and death of a courtesan a name that would become a persistent archetype.

The femme fatale has pervaded Western media from the late nineteenth century through the present. Various scholars, such as Maree Macmillan and Edith Zack, have tied the figures of opera heroines like Lulu and Carmen all the way back to antiquity and the origins of the Abrahamic religions. Millennia before the arrival of modernity, mythmakers spun tales that, according to more recent readings, invite believers to blame figures such as Eve and Pandora for the miseries of the human condition.32 Zack in

particular argues for a boundlessly transhistorical myth of the femme fatale who ruins

everything via sexual excess, plucking various figures like Lilith and Keats’s Belle dame

sans merci from a long timeline that terminates with Lulu and Richard Strauss’s

Salome.33 In making her case – that Carmen, Lulu, Turandot, and Salome emerge not

merely from a late nineteenth-century intellectual spike in misogyny, but also from far

more enduring and powerful collective myths – Zack conjures a bird’s-eye view so lofty

as to lose all sense of historical particularity. A concise, totalizing master narrative in an

31 Joseph Kerman, “Verdi and the Undoing of Women,” Cambridge Opera Journal 18, no. 1 (March 2006): 21-31. 32 Maree Macmillan, “‘Boxing’ Pandora: The Pandora Myth in Berg’s Opera Lulu and Pabst’s Film Pandora’s Box,” in Musics and Feminisms, ed. Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1999): 109-11. 33 Edith Zack, “Carmen and Turandot: femme fatale to femme créatrice in Opera” (PhD diss., Bar Ilan University, 1999). 28

age when even postmodernism has faced charges of over-broadness, her argument

nonetheless opens innumerable historical doors onto a longstanding problem: the

apparent sheer persistence of misogyny in Western art.

To posit a still somewhat loose but productive generalization, specifically about

images of dangerous women in the decades before and after Lulu: artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century, still drunk from the poetic libations of Baudelaire and Wagner and newly inspired by psychoanalytic theory, began to depict femmes fatales anew

whenever and wherever societal catastrophe loomed. Rita Felski has reinterpreted novels

of the late nineteenth century as efforts to express fears that productive humanity, coded

masculine, could topple in an industrial age defined by the coded-feminine act of

consumption.34 This came on the heels of Andreas Huyssen’s influential arguments about

modernism and mass culture in After the Great Divide, which posited modernism as an

attempt to define masculine art and experimentation against feminized mass culture.35

Thirty years later, composers continue to introduce popular music – the sound of mass

culture, to critics both before and after Adorno – into opera by placing transgressive women at the center of the action, enacting violations of class and genre through the

sounding female body.

Decades ago, George Ross Ridge pinpointed Baudelaire’s poetry as the birthplace

of a particular vampire-like femme fatale, similarly defined by her ability to consume the

male subject.36 Soon after this, Wedekind, Freud, and Weininger arrived. With the

34 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 35 Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986): 44-62. 36 George Ross Ridge, “The femme fatale in French Decadence,” French Review 34, no. 4 (February 1961): 352-360. 29

alienation of the urban male artist in a suddenly industrial Western world came a

tendency to liken the unwelcome forces of change to women and femininity. By 1908,

the notion of a woman’s sexuality leading to the ruin not only of a male subject, but of an

entire world – the subject of Arnold Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens, perhaps

the first fully atonal piece of music in the Western art canon – had become newly

pervasive, as Kerry Anne Ginger has argued.37

The traumas of the World Wars brought about the mainstreaming of this image.

The world caught fire just as feature films arrived and began to attract mass audiences;

thus, amid the misery and mourning of the postwar Weimar Republic, influential

filmmakers sought images of abjection and horror to distill the mood of their audiences.

In a series of publications on the subject, Barbara Hales has argued that the rise of the

criminal femme fatale in Weimar cinema reflects the trauma of the Great War. She

documents a sudden fascination with women – by and large the survivors of a conflict

that decimated a generation of European men – as agents of individual as well as societal

undoing in the midst of a badly damaged patriarchy.38 The quintessential example she

cites, G.W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora, brought the figure of Wedekind’s Lulu to

international prominence courtesy of the American actor Louise Brooks.39 Six short years

later, as the Nazis took ever more power, Alban Berg died while setting the same work in

the form of an opera, complete with gestures toward American jazz and a silent film of its

own.

37 Kerry Anne Ginger, “Modernism and Misogyny in Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Opus 15” (DMA diss., Arizona State University, 2012). 38 Barbara Hales, “Projecting Trauma: The femme fatale in Weimar and Hollywood Film Noir,” Women in German Yearbook 23 (2007): 224-243. 39 Idem., “Woman as Sexual Criminal: Weimar Constructions of the Criminal Femme Fatale,” Women in German Yearbook 12 (1996): 101-121. 30

Even as German audiences learned to fear transgressive women, French and

Italian ones absorbed similar messages. As Molly Haskell has demonstrated, the “vamp”

figure of these films proved influential, and contributed to a broad tendency toward the

degradation of women over the course of twentieth-century cinema – “from reverence to

rape,” as the title of her feminist genre history provocatively proclaims.40 From the

vamps of France and femmes fatales of Weimar Germany, Hollywood filmmakers

condensed perhaps the most familiar incarnations of the dangerous woman in the past

century: those of American film noir in the 1940s and ‘50s. Jack Boozer and Jans B.

Wager have pointed out the links between early European femmes fatales and those of

classic noir, and many a film scholar – including Julie Grossman, James F. Maxfield, and

Mary Ann Doane – have analyzed these filmic embodiments of perilous allure in depth.41

The deep, uniformly fascinating literature on the femme fatale in all her most familiar guises lies beyond the scope of this study. To summarize: given the multitude of definitions of the term and contexts in which such characters have arisen, one cannot use the term lightly. In Chapters Three and Five, however, images of feminine evil and consuming entrapment become so powerful that must I revisit the term.

Beyond particular labels and archetypes, the anti-heroines of Lulu, Powder Her

Face, Anaïs Nin, Anna Nicole, and American Lulu have something in common: transgressions against norms of sexuality and sexual behavior within the context of their respective social contexts. The Duchess of Powder Her Face sleeps with too many men

40 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in Movies, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 41 See: Mary Ann Doane, Femmes fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991); Julie Grossman, Rethinking the femme fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and James F. Maxfield, The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Fim Noir, 1941-1991 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). 31

given midcentury British aristocratic norms, and the activities in which she engages with

them stand too far removed from standard practice. Anna Nicole strips and poses her way

to fame, both stigmatized activities in the United States of the 1990s. Both Berg’s and

Neuwirth’s Lulus dance in seedy clubs and sleep their way through extended series of

men, and in Andriessen’s edition of her personal chronicles, Anaïs Nin sings of almost

nothing other than her multiple simultaneous partners.

These modernist and contemporary anti-heroines share a series of famous

nineteenth-century predecessors: Georges Bizet’s Carmen flirts, charms, and takes lovers at will, Verdi’s Violetta comes from a background in elite sex work, and Gaetano

Donizetti’s Lucia, especially in late nineteenth-century productions, desires a man with such passion that having to marry another prompts an episode of ecstatic, murderous

incoherence. Without some sort of transgression against the patriarchal norms of female

sexuality in the period and location depicted, the transgressive anti-heroine of opera

cannot exist. Across all examples, from Lucia to Neuwirth’s Lulu, this prevailing theme

of sexual transgression holds. Most of these anti-heroines offend mainstream sensibilities

in other ways as well, from murder and intrigue to simple arrogance – but, above all else,

they exhibit carnal longings, both real and feigned, in ways that both buoy them to

prosperity and hasten their subsequent downfall. As Susan McClary has argued,

chromaticism sets the oversexed femme fatale apart in sonic terms – as it does for her

close relative, the madwoman.42 At times, these categories overlap. For the purposes of

this study, I trace the lineage of the compromised woman whom society must contain as

far back as Lucia, but thereafter leave figures of tragic insanity behind.

42 McClary, Feminine Endings, 80-111. 32

These pieces’ shared plot trajectory – with its intimations of fate, necessity,

inevitability, and, for lack of a better term, verismo – sees the anti-heroine ascend to some

brief moment of fulfilment, wealth, stability, and power, only to face some crisis, and

subsequently to plumb new depths. Her silence, usually brought about by death,

completes the arc of the drama; despite any comic and satirical elements, these operas

invariably feature tragic endings. In accounting for the essential symmetry of the

heroine’s story, composers and librettists have frequently produced works in rough or

exact arch structures, with first acts that allow audiences to encounter a heroine on the

rise, middle acts in which she faces a turning point, and final acts that depict her decline.

In Act I of Lucia di Lammermoor, for instance, it remains plausible that Lucia will marry

her beloved – but, by the end of Act II, her signing of a marriage contract with another

man ensures that she will snap, murder the groom, and die in Act III. Violetta’s time of

pastoral bliss, good health, and domestic peace ends midway through Act II of the three-

act La traviata, and Carmen succeeds in pulling her eventual murderer, José, away from

his military duty at the end of her opera’s first half. The middle portion of Salome begins

with the title character’s lusting after John the Baptist, and ends with her request for his

head. Berg, whose concern for formal symmetry registered in much of his mature music,

took pains to ensure that the interlude between the two scenes of Lulu’s second act would consist of a silent film with a there-and-back-again plot of its own, accompanied by a musical palindrome in the orchestra. Neuwirth, in reorganizing and rescoring Berg’s piece, retained this central film and adapted Berg’s original score – but I argue that her refusal to portray Lulu in decline represents her piece’s essential departure from the forms and norms of this sort of opera. 33

Other composers, however, have retained this trajectory. The middle two of

Powder Her Face’s eight scenes feature the Duchess’s transgressive sex act and its exposure, respectively. Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin begins to sing of her incestuous father’s impending arrival at almost the exact midpoint of her monodrama. Turnage, despite the placement of a multimedia interlude closer to his opera’s three-quarter mark, sees to it that Anna Nicole’s marriage ceremony, the portal to her time of bliss – and ultimately, to her downward spiral – comes just before the medial intermission. Men always at least help to precipitate the central crisis, if not directly cause it, from the marital meddlers of

Lucia and La traviata to Dr. Schön and Dr. Bloom in Berg and Neuwirth’s respective operas – from the Duke of Powder Her Face to Joaquín Nin in Anaïs Nin and J. Howard

Marshall II in Anna Nicole.

Other similarities bind these fallen women. All of them, whether lusting after lower-status men (Powder Her Face, Salome, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth) or sleeping their way to wealth and influence (Lulu, American Lulu, Anaïs Nin, Anna Nicole), cross boundaries of class as well as sexual propriety. Rabelaisian chaos ensues as this woman, depicted as either a gold-digging commoner or a slumming aristocrat, conducts her seductions; social strata tilt and collapse. Crime and debauchery accompany this class- mixing and sexual anarchy. Gestures from popular and folk music infiltrate the traditional frameworks of opera: in Carmen, Cuban and Roma dance music, barely distinguishable from one another in the Western European bourgeois imaginary, accompany bacchanals, bullfights, and betrayals. Even La traviata, with its tragic fallen woman, contains edgy, all-too-Parisian exoticist divertissements, meant to summon associations with Spain and its Roma population. Lulu sees the incursion of jazz and an organ-grinder’s street tunes; 34 to this, Neuwirth adds a theatre organ and steamboat calliope. Adès frames his opera with tangos and inserts a mock Tin Pan Alley song, Andriessen channels Sidney Bechet and

Coleman Hawkins, and Turnage evokes many forms of African-American popular music, from weary blues and infernal disco to swaggering country.

Thanks in part to the historically rooted and highly problematic associations that all of these composers invoke between musical style and genre, class, sex, gender, sexuality, and race, the society depicted thus sounds seamy, decadent – rotting from the inside out. In leaving her caste and the confines of marriage behind, the fallen woman becomes a vector for societal disease, and the forces of patriarchal order must contain the threat that she poses. The operatic anti-heroine is inextricable from her environment, a degenerate world of corruption, danger, and license in which societal hierarchies and regulations have broken down, and vernacular music resounds in every dark corner. That so many avowed political progressives from the world of composition continue to reinforce these associations speaks to the degree to which the operatic type has become musical and dramatic second nature over the past century and a half.

Another peculiar feature has persisted in representations of the femme fatale since the time of Lulu: a fascination with image and mediation on the levels of characterization and performative realization. As Silvio dos Santos has argued in his analytical tour de force Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s Lulu, the title character has no true leitmotif, no tone-row of her own; her origins remain a mystery, she seems detached from her own inner life, and even her name varies according to the man who addresses her – Eve,

Nelly, Lulu, Mignon.43 Instead, her portrait has a row. Its appearances throughout the

43 Silvio dos Santos’s work has exerted a profound influence on my own, and the title of this document 35

piece trigger rapturous reflections on her youthful beauty, even as she ages. Like Wilde’s

picture of Dorian Gray, it seems to contain her true essence; unlike that vessel, Lulu’s

portrait remains young and uncorrupted while her body withers from age, disease, and starvation. In addition, she owes her rise in social status at least partly to free promotion provided in the pages of Dr. Schön’s tabloid. The anti-heroines of contemporary opera

similarly seem to distribute their senses of self among audiovisual media, and to appear

to the public through the same – sometimes without their consent.

Adès’s Duchess has something akin to Lulu’s portrait, a text that depicts her as

young, beautiful, and famous even as patriarchal figures find new ways to humiliate her:

a popular love song, dedicated to her and recorded at the time of her first marriage in the

1920s. Her downfall comes about because of a photograph, and tabloids tear her apart in

cruel, salacious columns. Anaïs Nin, in the monodrama that bears her name as in real life,

records emotional fluctuations, tries on identities, and plumbs the depths of her own

psyche in a journal – which Andriessen converts into a video diary. Nin’s career gained

little traction until the publication of expurgated versions of her Diary – a work in a

medium associated with confession and intimate disclosure. Anna Nicole becomes a

willing sacrifice to televisual media, and Turnage’s version of her seems completely

aware that she has died and must now retrace her life story for an audience; she breaks

the fourth wall almost continuously. As Heidi Hart has pointed out, Neuwirth’s Lulu

appears not only in a portrait, but also as a live, dancing doppelgänger of the singer, in

myriad video projections, and in the silent film of Berg’s original – all of which

alludes, subtly and for a while unintentionally, to the title of his own doctoral dissertation: Silvio dos Santos, “Portraying Lulu: Desire and Identity in Alban Berg’s Lulu” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2003). 36

contribute to the fragmentation of her identity across media.44 As in Lulu, the showgirl

title character thrives on the good reviews she receives in her third husband and would-be murderer’s newspaper.

Carmen and Lulu both present fictional characters, and the adaptation of La traviata from Alexandre Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias obscured that story’s roots in the relationship between the novelist and his real recently-deceased lover, the courtesan Marie Duplessis. At the turn of the millennium, however, few composers have missed opportunities to superimpose the images of the operatic fallen woman and femme fatale over the figures of real, once-living celebrities – some quite recently deceased. The creators of Powder Her Face found their anti-heroine in the obituaries: Margaret,

Duchess of Argyll passed mere months before Philip Hensher suggested her life as a subject for his project with Thomas Adès. Anna Nicole emerged not quite three years after the titular reality-TV star’s death. Anaïs Nin had been dead for over forty years when Louis Andriessen began work on his monodrama about her, but his adaptation of her unexpurgated diary Incest followed its publication – and critical panning – by just over a decade. Of the composers I cover in this study, only Neuwirth has opted to use a fictional character as her femme fatale.

However, none of these composers or librettists have invented entirely new fallen women. This trend toward biographical representation, non- or part-fictional source material, and non-original characters reflects a broader tendency toward remakes, revivals, biographical sketches, and adaptations throughout twenty-first century cultural life, from film and television to the novel. Film remains important throughout my

44 Heidi Hart, “Silent Opera: Visual Recycling in Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu,” Ekphrasis 2 (2013): 126-7. 37

consideration of these operas; both the apparatus and temporalities of the cinema come to

the operatic stage through their scores and libretti. The composers of these new operas have increasingly adopted a device that composers like George Antheil, Max Brand, Kurt

Weill, and Berg championed in the the late 1920s and ‘30s: the multimedia montage

interlude. At the dawn of the genre’s fifth century, its creators grow increasingly

dissatisfied with the physical and temporal limitations of live theatre. Films, projections, and other closed-curtain visual presentations have become normalized in and integral to much twenty-first century opera, and cinematic temporalities – such as the rapidly passing time of a montage – have become essential to a form of musical storytelling that increasingly partakes of strategies from the toolkits of filmmakers. Though each of these

operas falls at a different position on a hypothetical spectrum from no need to absolute

need of visual interludes to depict non-staged action or comment on events, each bridges

its gaps with instrumental music, just as Lulu does. In many ways, William Kentridge’s

2015 production of Berg’s opera at the Metropolitan Opera seemed a direct response to

this preoccupation with mediation and spans of compressed time. The director’s signature

paper-and-ink projection art captures a quality of Lulu that bleeds over into the contemporary operas I consider: an awareness of mediation itself, of the relationship between generators of images and the screens that receive them. Berg’s masterpiece about a painter, a tabloid editor, a composer, and the woman who models and dances for them concerns projection as an inescapable metaphor.

In Anaïs Nin and American Lulu, composers and video artists engage in a sort of

postmodern play with the hoary notion of projecting gaze and superficial object thereof,

subverting the paradigm in pieces that would make no sense without their integral 38

prerecorded elements. Powder Her Face, American Lulu, and Anna Nicole all begin in

the diegetic present of the protagonist’s silencing, only to flash back to the past for an

account of the events that led to these denouements. Anaïs Nin and Anna Nicole both

feature anti-heroines who narrate their own life experiences directly to the audience. With

the exception of Anaïs Nin, all of these operas feature orchestral interludes that bridge

chronological gaps, compensating for the lack of the blink-of-an-eye transitions between

settings that characterize narrative filmic storytelling. Berg anticipated this impulse to

speed up operatic time through multimedia interludes: thus the prison sequence of Lulu,

with its frantic montage of chronologically disparate events, all held together by a brief

musical palindrome that rushes by in torrents of sound.45

---

The century of the transgressive operatic anti-heroine – she who defies or flouts

structures of social and carnal regulation, from Lucia in 1835 to Lulu in 1935 – would not

end until Europe itself arrived at the brink of cataclysm. Between the late 1930s and mid-

1970s, aesthetic progressives all but abandoned opera, with rare but significant

exceptions – and even composers of a more populist bent wrote works that have tended

not to inspire new productions.46 However, after the rises of minimalist and postmodern

45 Marc Weiner and Melissa Goldsmith have written sophisticated analyses of this interlude, attending to both its musical qualities, cinematographic demands, and historical context. See: Marc Weiner, “Alban Berg, Lulu, and the Silent Film,” in Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR, eds. Robynn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 56-58; and Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith, “Alban Berg’s Filmic Music: Intensions and Extensions of the Film Music Interlude in the Opera Lulu” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2002). 46 Audiences in 1971 did see the premiere of one experimental “show” that involves a femme fatale figure, after a fashion: Hans Werner Henze’s cautionary tale of straying from the true path of Socialism, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natasche Ungeheuer. This music-theatre piece for baritone soloist, jazz combo, brass quintet, Pierrot group, and Hammond organ appropriates the name of a real woman, Natascha Ungeheuer. A then-living visual artist and decidedly non-salacious figure, Ungeheuer became Henze and his librettist’s “Siren of a false Utopia” not for any particular anti-left agitation, but simply because of her apparent popularity among young leftists at the time. Despite its frequent allusions to 39 pastiche opera in the late 1970s and of “CNN opera” in the 1980s, many avowedly modernist composers began to contribute to the genre. While the twenty-first century anti-heroine, with her various gestures toward the fallen woman, femme fatale, celebrity trainwreck, and other historical and current archetypes, might have emerged without any one of these events, trends, precursors, and technological advancements, I aim place the figure in as rich a context as possible. Throughout the study, two questions will linger: how do these composers tell this story in their divergent musical languages, and how, if at all, do they offer a way to break the typical narrative trajectory – to put a crack in the killing jar?

popular music and its titular reference to a real woman, this piece falls well outside the purview of my study. For more on Natascha, see: Berry, After Wagner, 172-204.

Chapter Two

Old, New, Borrowed, Blew: Powder Her Face, Polarity, and the Backward Glance

Powder Her Face, a chamber opera with music by Thomas Adès and a libretto by

Philip Hensher, has played before hundreds of audiences in dozens of cities, enjoying

rare success among recent operas.1 But it has also polarized critics, striking professional

auditors as either an act of wanton mockery or a poignant study of human imperfection. I

argue that the opera draws its musical and dramatic power from the same source of

tension that so divides would-be interpreters: the series of internal oppositions and dualities that Adès and Hensher build into their score and libretto. Throughout the piece,

ideas, actions, and emotional cues arise in tension with their antitheses. Familiar musics

infiltrate alien soundscapes; events take place in an individual’s memory and in the world

of the living present; the protagonist, a disgraced Scottish Duchess, disgusts and disdains

the audience, only to invite their sympathy. Singing actors literally double as multiple

characters, and allusions to past musics encourage the listener to feel at home, even as

Adès twists and revokes those very gestures. Behind the paper-thin façades of each

character lie abysses of vanity, mere greed where inner life should be – yet the piece’s

late moment of pathos threatens to outweigh all prior shallowness. Crucially, the Duchess

herself embodies a host of contradictions, and stands as a synthesis of two ancient

operatic archetypes: the monstrous femme fatale as tragic Orpheus, outcast for her

transgressions but seeking in vain to recover the past through song.

Principal among the intrinsic polar oppositions of the piece – which translates into

1 Adès has made the full list available at his website: “Past Performances,” Thomas Adès: Powder Her Face, last modified October 2015, accessed December 7, 2015, http://thomasades.com/compositions/powder_her_face. 41

this polarized reception – is the bifurcated identity of the Duchess, who also embodies

and enacts the differences between voracious youth and miserable old age. As an

octogenarian, she pines for the past, constantly in search of lost time.2 She inhabits an archetype of derangement and past-fixation with precedents in twentieth-century film. As a young woman, she chases, uses, and discards men, in perpetual search of husbands and lovers. She plunges headlong into the (literally) orgastic future with her desires alone to guide her, only to plummet into abjection. In other words: she resembles Lulu.

Intended as a black comedy, the piece depends on such rhetorical doubleness for its effect. Intentions aside, the creators’ treatment of their heroine as both a punching-bag and a victim of social forces beyond her control implies an unusual freedom for directors and performers to play with her identity, and for audiences to form their own judgments of the seductress at the center of the action. One such listener, the musicologist Richard

Taruskin, has proclaimed that the opera pays touching tribute to its anti-heroine:

…Mr. Adès’s work has been unusual in its air of sincerity. For all its precocious technical sophistication and its omnivorous range of reference…it does not put everything “in quotes.” It has urgency and fervor and communicates directly. What has put Powder Her Face, Mr. Adès’s first opera…in such demand worldwide as to be newsworthy, it seems to me, is not just the notorious fellatio aria. It is rather that having set up its main character, an aging nymphomaniac duchess, as a figure of cruel and predictable fun, it [the piece] turns around and honors her, and the audience as well, with unsentimental and affecting sympathy at the lonely end.3

As Taruskin notes, even the Duchess’s swan-song moment, an island of genuine sorrow, stands out from the ocean of ridicule that surrounds it.

2 Philip Hensher proclaimed in 2003 that he had “loved [Marcel Proust] ten years ago” – around the time when he and Adès began work on Powder Her Face. See: Richard Canning, Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003): 303. 3 Richard Taruskin, “A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism,” in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, ed. Taruskin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009): 145. 42

Given the amount of musical and cultural flotsam that rush past in the opera – quotations, paraphrases, and stylistic imitations from the imaginary museum of canonic

works – Taruskin’s claims about things “in quotes” deserve some scrutiny as well. Adès’s

conspicuous borrowings and pastiches only sometimes register as interruptions, set apart

from original material by texture, timbre, or harmony. For those unable to spot, say, a glimmer of a tune from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress or the silver-rose chords from

Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier as they flicker in the orchestra, the wit of the allusion may not register, though its foreignness to the surrounding textures may still pique curiosity.

Hesitant to assume an ideal listener who will catch every sonic wink and cut-away gag, I

approach Adès’s borrowings from both perspectives: as meaningful intertextual gestures, and as moments of startling difference per se.

Some deem Powder Her Face cold, misogynistic, and heartless, “[a]n opera without empathy or soul.”4 Others insist that it redeems its anti-heroine in the end, and

pokes harmless fun at society’s élites in the meantime.5 Adès and Hensher married

familiar tropes from older operas that feature anti-heroines to an array of other references

to the past, and filter all through a series of alienating theatrical effects. Powder Her

Face, a Monstertragodie in a time of perpetual tabloid scandal, presents a sad and sordid tale with perhaps fewer sympathetic characters than Berg’s Lulu – or, in the words of one

4 Paddy Johnson, “Powder Her Face: An Opera without Empathy or Soul,” Art F City, February 22, 2013, accessed October 21, 2015, http://artfcity.com/2013/02/22/powder-her-face-an-opera-without-empathy-or- soul/. 5British critics in particular have used colorful language, both pejorative and admiring, to describe the piece. For examples, see the following: Michael Feingold, “Bed-Bouncing Opera,” The Village Voice, February 20, 2013, accessed October 21, 2015, http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-02-20/theater/bed- bouncing-opera/; and D.L. Groover, “Fellatio and Fishing Reels in Powder Her Face,” The Houston Press, November 11, 2011, Accessed October 21, 2015, http://blogs.houstonpress.com/artattack/2011/11/powder_her_face_and_then_some.php. 43 director, “…a Don Giovanni for the Monica Lewinsky generation.”6 The analogy works on multiple levels, not least that of chronology; Powder Her Face received its July 1995

premiere mere months before Bill Clinton began his affair with Ms. Lewinsky.7 Given its historical position – between the canonization of the completed Lulu and the rise of new anti-heroines in the 2010s – it serves as a productive case study in both the reception of historical influence from previous works, and the exertion of its own. It stands as a historical way station, a throwback ahead of its time.

Alban Berg updated the nineteenth-century image of the silenced anti-heroine in

Lulu, summarizing what she had meant to composers and listeners. Like Berg, Adès and

Hensher appropriate the tropes of the anti-heroine opera in order to build upon them.

Unlike any predecessors (with perhaps one exception), they spliced them into a true story, pieced together from memoirs, tabloids, and legal documents.8 In Powder Her

Face, the operatic anti-heroine exceeds the boundaries of the leading role and splits into multiple personae. Those qualities and tropes that not reassigned to the coloratura

6 Jay Scheib directed Powder Her Face at the New York City opera in its 2012-13 season – the company’s final year of operation. His comments specifically target the Millenial generation, who came of age during the mass-media furor surrounding Clinton’s sexual encounters with Lewinsky. “Edgy” operas such as Powder Her Face and Anna Nicole have frequently been presented as part of efforts to draw young viewers to opera houses. Schott has made the quoted press release available online: Schott-EAM (Anon.), “New York City Opera Presents Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face,” Schott-EAM News, January 31, 2013. Accessed October 10, 2015. https://www.eamdc.com/news/Thomas-Ades-Powder-Her-Face-In-New-York- City-Opera-Production/. 7 W. Joseph Campbell’s account of the year 1995 – a turning-point in Western culture, in his reckoning – includes extended commentary on the cultural context around the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, complete with a timeline of the events in question. See: W. Joseph Campbell, 1995: The Year the Future Began (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015): 130-51. 8 The “one exception” to which I allude, composer Ezra Laderman and librettist Norman Rosten’s Marilyn, shares striking similarities with the operas I cover in this dissertation: a heroine who suffers and perishes after becoming an darling of mass media, a score that admixes popular idioms into a modernist art-music framework, flashbacks, a cadre of male lovers. Had it survived to a second production, I would cover it in this document. For an exemplary negative review, see Edward Rothstein, “New Milieu for Monroe: City Opera’s ‘Marilyn,’” New York Times, October 8, 1993, accessed October 10, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/08/arts/review-music-new-milieu-for-monroe-city-opera-s-marilyn.html. 44

soprano’s characters – squealing, sexy Lolitas and venomous gossips – remain with the

Duchess character, mapped onto a caricature of a real, once-living woman.

Despite of the opera’s relative popularity, it remains unfamiliar to many readers.9

Before considering the words, actions, and music of the Duchess, I examine those of the other characters, thus tracing the arc of the opera four times, with unique concerns and events in mind each time. First come the servants, rumor-mongers, and singer played by the tenor; next, the grotesques of femininity allotted to the high soprano, perhaps the most demanding role of all. The tenor and high soprano function in much the same way, chattering and insulting their social superiors no matter which costumes they wear – like a misanthrope’s nightmare versions of Figaro and Susanna.10 The five roles for bass come

next. Whether a major dramatic force or a stranger on the end of the Duchess’s misdialed

calls, the man singing in shouts and fractured patter always serves as a foil for the central

anti-heroine.

However, my project belongs to the anti-heroines of contemporary opera, and, accordingly, I devote most of this chapter to the Duchess, the predatory Lulu who later becomes an outcast like Stravinsky’s Baba the Turk and, later still, finds herself alone like Strauss’s Marschallin.11 For all the scene-stealing tours de force doled out to

9 The few writers who have scrutinized Powder Her Face include Richard Taruskin, Drew Massey, and, most important, Emma Gallon. I discuss the latter’s work at length throughout this chapter. Massey has read conference presentations drawn from his research on Adès, and will soon release a monograph on the composer: Thomas Adès: In Seven Essays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, under contract). He and Taruskin engaged in a fascinating exchange after a talk in 2014: “Thomas Adès and the Dilemmas of Musical Surrealism,” paper presented at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, November 5-9, 2014. 10 Few have noted the common elements that unite Powder Her Face and Le nozze di Figaro, let alone commented on them. In fact, I am unaware of any print source for the comparison, and internet searches yield only a review of the piece on a defunct blog: Barry Drogin, “Thomas Ades’ [sic] Powder Her Face,” Not Nice Music, April 26, 2009, accessed December 1, 2015, http://www.notnicemusic.com/Contrarian/ades.html. 11 I here refer to Berg’s Lulu, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and Richard Strauss’s Der 45

characters played by the other three singers, this opera centers on the tragicomic tale of a

real woman, reinvented as a haughty, deranged camp figure à la Norma Desmond.12 Her

attempts to dominate others end with her eviction from a hotel, which Adès codes as a symbolic death. The manager of that hotel, equal parts Jack the Ripper of Lulu and Stone

Guest from Don Giovanni, forces her out of her home and comfort. The audience is left to wonder: can one take more away from this story than the composer’s aphoristic anti- moral, “even horrible people can be tragic?”13

---

The score for Powder Her Face calls for four vocal soloists, without chorus: a

dramatic soprano, a coloratura soprano (or “Helden-Soubrette,” as Adès once joked), a

tenor, and a bass.14 The dramatic soprano portrays the Duchess at various stages of her

life, from her champagne years as a débutante through old age. She rests for only two of

the eight scenes. Her coloratura counterpart plays six characters and appears in seven scenes; the tenor, five characters and six scenes. The bass sings in only half of the opera, but inhabits three major roles. The fifteen-piece orchestra includes a string quintet, plus

horn, trumpet, trombone, harp, button accordion, and piano. Its lone percussionist

commands a large battery of instruments, most of indeterminate pitch. The three

Rosenkavalier, three operas to which Adès and Hensher refer explicitly in both music and text. 12 I owe my knowledge of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), and of Albert and David Maysles’s Grey Gardens (1975), to Daniel Batchelder, a colleague with expertise in film, music, and popular culture. Both films feature women who grew accustomed to wealth, fame, and glamor in their youths, but have since lost their former status and begun to live in denial of present reality. The melodramatic Desmond bears an especially strong resemblance to Adès and Hensher’s Duchess. She, along with the Beales of Grey Gardens, an unscripted documentary, employ grandiose speech and mannerisms, but live sad and lonely lives; their status as heroines of Camp comes as a result of their excessive panache and strong senses of (outdated or socially unacceptable) style. 13 Liner notes (anon.) to: Thomas Adès, Philip Hensher, Plazas, Buck, Norman, Broadbent, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Powder Her Face. DVD. Directed by David Alden. Forked River, NJ: Kultur Video, 2006. 14 Tom Service, “Opera on Television: Powder Her Face, Channel 4, December 25,” Opera 51, no. 3 (March 2000): 119. 46 woodwind soloists play four instruments each, from standard soprano- and alto-register saxophones and clarinets to bass and contrabass iterations thereof. Adès divides the opera’s duration into two acts, with five scenes before the intermission and three afterwards. Instrumental interludes come between each scene, and an Overture and

“Ghost Epilogue” bookend the action. Table 2.1 clarifies the creators’ elaborate scheme of single- to sextuple-cast singers, and stage events set in discontinuous tableaux.

Table 2.1, Graphic synopsis of Powder Her Face

The opera opens and ends in the hotel room that the elderly Duchess rents as her long-term residence. She has stepped out before the beginning of Scene 1, “Nineteen

Ninety,” and in her room, a Maid and Electrician, sent in for cleaning and repairs 47

respectively, mock her. The Electrician puts on a little drag show in her wig and furs.15

The Duchess has been listening from outside; she enters and begins to bark orders at the young workers, asserting her social superiority. But she soon appears to become detached from the here-and-now, singing as though in her past even as the workers marvel at her fine possessions in the present.16

This moment of rupture, of slippage from reality into memory, becomes in

hindsight the first of many clues that suggest that the middle six acts of the opera may

take place in the Duchess’s mind. In this scenario, the audience catches glimpses of the

1930s, ‘50s, and ‘70s not because of a diegetic “flashback,” but because the Duchess

projects images of the past onto present reality, seeing her working-class tormentors and

their boss, the Manager, as though figures from yesteryear. Yet other details contradict

this interpretation. The Duchess disappears for two scenes, both of which only make

dramatic sense if she is not present for the action depicted. In order to maintain the belief

that all past events take place in her memory, one would have to believe that she has

made entire scenes whole cloth out of her imagination. Most important for the purposes

of this chapter: Adès and Hensher never resolve this tension between reality and

hallucination. They leave any decisions on the true time and place of the events – perhaps

a distorted or made-up set of memories, perhaps a genuine past reality, perhaps a

postmodern theatrical space in which such distinctions do not matter – to directors,

15 Indeed, any director could deceive the audience into thinking that the Electrician is the Duchess, saving the surprise for the moment when the tenor first sings at bar 146. This staging would certainly chime with the early history of opera, when men in drag sang as old women on a routine basis. Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea comes to mind. 16 The relevant passage comes at letter Y in the published vocal score: Thomas Adès and Philip Hensher, Powder Her Face [Vocal Score] (London: Faber Music Ltd, 1996): 29. 48

performers, and audience members.

In either case, Scene 2 finds a young socialite – the future Duchess and former

Mrs. Freeling, just divorced from a rich but common man – in the company of her

Confidante and a Lounge Lizard.17 It is 1934, and the divorcée is as determined to wed

the Duke as Berg’s Lulu is to pin down Dr. Schön. The former’s greed for wealth and

status has little to do with the sort of affection that drove Lulu, however. The two

flatterers gossip about the future Duchess as she languishes, complaining of her boredom.

The Lounge Lizard sings over a record; the selection is a recent Tin Pan Alley song,

written in honor of the former Mrs. Freeling. At this point, the audience learns why the

Electrician of Scene 1 crooned “[t]hey wrote songs about me…You know that song…”

before launching into his drag parody.18 He meant this song. At the end of the Scene, the

Duke finally arrives. The following scene (3) consists entirely of a five-minute aria for the high soprano, playing a Waitress behind the scenes of the Duke and new Duchess’s

lavish wedding reception.

Scenes 4 and 5 take place in 1953, perhaps at the same time in that year. Each

finds a member of the ducal couple, now married for seventeen years, engaged in a form of infidelity: the Duchess initiates the latest in a long series of anonymous trysts with

servants, and the Duke meets with his younger, married Mistress. In Scene 4, the Duchess

coaxes and reassures the Waiter until he consents, not remembering that she has done this

with the same man a year prior. She has had so many working-class hookups that she

cannot possibly remember them all. By contrast, the couple one sees in Scene 5 approach

17 The real Margaret, Duchess of Argyll had a first husband named Charles Sweeny. “Freeling” stands in for that surname. 18 Adès, Powder Her Face [Vocal], 14. 49

each other with the familiarity of long-term lovers. Of the central couple, only the

Duchess consummates her encounter. After misdialing twice (a nod to Francis Poulenc’s

1959 monodrama La Voix humaine), contacting a Laundryman and a Guest both voiced

by the bass, she reaches room service. Almost without fail, critics have gone out of their

way to foreground the passage that comes next: the vocalise that the Duchess hums as she

fellates her Waiter.

In Scene 5, the Duke veers between reminiscence and reality, snarling and

pleading. Adès and Hensher took reports of the real Duke of Argyll’s alcoholism

seriously, albeit in the interest of mocking him for it. The Mistress, who remains sober,

sings in girlish squeals, intimating that she knows a secret about the Duchess. The two

rifle through her papers in a pantomimed “Paper Chase,” and the Duke finds evidence of

her liaisons.

Act II opens with a duet for ordinary British subjects, played by the high soprano

and tenor, who denounce aristocrats as immoral. They look on as the bass, now the

presiding Judge in the Duke’s suit for divorce, delivers a rabid, over-the-top character

assassination of the Duchess under the guise of a verdict announcement.19 She emerges from this verbal thrashing and defiantly asserts both her untouched aristocratic rank and

her role in society: to be better and more beautiful than those in the “middle classes.”20

She then stalks away on foot.

Fifteen years later, in Scene 7, the high soprano reappears as a Society Reporter,

19 Lord Wheatley, the justice who presided over the real Argyll divorce, actually went much further than Adès and Hensher’s Judge in his rebuke of Margaret. The advocate Allan Nicol has summarized the proceedings in a series of posts at the legal blog The Firm: “The Argyll Divorce, Edinburgh 1963: The Three Stranded Pearl Necklace,” parts 1-10, The Firm, July 22, 2013-October 8, 2013, accessed April 5, 2017, http://www.firmmagazine.com/final-argyll-divorce-edinburgh-1963-stranded-pearl-necklace/. 20 Adès and Hensher, Powder Her Face [Vocal], 185. 50 preparing to question the now-reclusive Duchess on her cosmetic regimen. Largely a duet between the two women, the Scene begins with the two in dialogue but breaks down in short order. The Duchess delivers a rant against the changing world as the journalist fabricates beauty tips aloud. A Delivery Boy (the tenor), who has been coming in and out with hatboxes the entire time, emerges at the end of the interview and hands the Duchess a stack of bills. The ensuing Interlude depicts her tallying her debts over a period of twenty years. This ends when the Hotel Manager (the bass) enters for Scene 8, intent on evicting the now-bankrupt old lady. It is 1990 again, mere minutes or seconds after the events of Scene 1.

The delusions that prevented the Duchess from acknowledging the emptiness of her life vanish when the Manager, far too gloating to be anything other than an image of death, informs her that her time is up. She remembers her childhood and realizes, perhaps for the first time, that she has never had a friend who was not paid to serve her. The

Manager returns, and the Duchess reaches her emotional point of no return; she attempts to seduce him, but he brusquely casts her aside. She breaks down and exits. In a tango- driven “Ghost Epilogue,” the Maid and Electrician of Scene 1 emerge from hiding-places in the room and dance as they clean it out, replacing the emotional trauma of the preceding scene with flippant flirtation.

The synopsis of the action that Hensher supplies in the published vocal score understates and euphemizes all of these events – to darkly comic effect. The hotel manager’s eviction of the Duchess, the emotional nadir of the entire piece, thus becomes:

“Her Grace receives two visits from the Manager…They finalize details of her 51

forthcoming departure and, in the interim, she reflects. She vacates the suite…”21 The formality and detachment with which Hensher treats the Duchess’s great moment of abjection pervades this official synopsis. Her tryst with the Waiter becomes “…the friendly welcome which has earned her such popularity among the [hotel] staff.” Grave happenings yield glib summaries, just as the jolly Ghost Epilogue follows the final shaming and disappearance of the Duchess. In Powder Her Face, one can never have something without also having its opposite.

Hensher, Adès, and the Idea of the Duchess

London’s Almeida Theatre has, since 1992, commissioned a couple of operas each year for its summer season. The brief is strict: small cast, small orchestra, no particular demands on staging. Two years after the programme started, they contacted composer Thomas Adès and asked him to write an opera…

At this point, I came into the story. I’d known Tom for some years. We had spent long evenings going over Berg’s Lulu and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, which we were both obsessed with…

When the commission came, I’d just published my first novel, a work of running jokes and high aesthetic obsessions, largely about Lulu…The Argyll divorce case was my idea as a subject, and we saw that it would make quite an opera. A 1960s sex-and-Polaroids scandal centring around an allegedly sex-crazed duchess seemed perfect for [the co-commissioning new-music Festival at] Cheltenham.

For me, Powder Her Face ended up as a mixture of a grim memento mori, with Death making a personal appearance at the end, and a series of jokes, half literary, half musical. Some of the silliest jokes got into the final product; others got left out, too libellous, obscene or private in meaning – though it ended up being an opera full of quotes, some obscure to me even now.22

True to Philip Hensher’s interpretation, the published vocal score for Powder Her

21 Adès and Hensher, Powder Her Face [Vocal], iii (unnumbered). 22 Philip Hensher, “Sex, Powder and Polaroids,” The Guardian, May 28, 2008, accessed October 19, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/may/29/classicalmusicandopera2. 52

Face features a memento mori sketch by an anonymous artist from eighteenth-century

France (Figure 2.1). A woman’s head floats above a surface; its left side bears a staring visage, young and beautiful. From the right, the skull that one expects in this sort of drawing gazes at the viewer, wearing a three-stranded pearl necklace. The image alone tells the viewer a great deal about Adès and Hensher’s concept for the Duchess. Their character embodies vanity, and thus the dialectics of life and death, youth and old age,

and plenitude and decay that the concept embraces. She obsesses over the idea of

youthful good looks, unable to accept the reality upon which all vanitas art insists, with

more or less subtlety. Any enthusiast of Berg’s Lulu – and Hensher and Adès must count

as such, to judge from the former’s testimony – will recognize this vanity as a

fundamental trait of that opera’s heroine. Even those who fail to deduce the role that

Lulu’s portrait plays in her rise and fall will understand that her androgynous sex appeal,

the reason for her relationships with the men around her, fades away in Act III and takes

her life with it. In this, more than in any specific musical or textual resonance, the

Duchess of Powder Her Face is a successor to Lulu.23 This remains true even when one

leaves aside Hensher’s fascination with Berg’s piece – one that led him to write an entire

novel from the perspective of a soprano who learns the title role, as her musicologist

lover inspects a spurious manuscript of the opera.24

23 The figure of Lulu, in turn, bears a strong resemblance to that of Émile Zola’s literary anti-heroine Nana, introduced in an eponymous novel of 1880. Like the Duchess, Nana seduces men by the dozen, spends money on luxury items with alarming profligacy, and suffers for her incongruity with societal norms in the end. The final paragraphs of that novel describe the face of the dead courtesan, literally decayed, in graphic detail; the body becomes the memento mori. For a virtuosic analysis of Nana and the archetype of the monstrous, empowered prostitute, see Bernice Chitnis, Reflecting on Nana (London: Routledge, 1991). 24 Philip Hensher, Other Lulus (London: Hamish Hamilton Limited, 1994). 53

Figure 2.1, memento mori, used as cover art for the vocal score of Powder Her Face

At the time the Cheltenham Festival and Almeida Opera extended their commission offer to Adès, Ethel Margaret Campbell – née Whigham, formerly Sweeny;

Duchess of Argyll by marriage to Ian Campbell, the Scottish region’s 11th Duke – had been dead for only months. Her passing had called attention to the story of her divorce, after decades of relative obscurity. Newspaper obituaries rehearsed the “sex-and-

Polaroids scandal” one last time.25 Authors noted her fame as a young débutante, her

spectacle of a first wedding, her critically-panned memoirs, her television appearance on

a program about Horse Racing. But, most of all, they recalled the scandal, one of the first

sex-related controversies to set the tabloids ablaze with the kindling of instant

photographs. Her marriage to the Duke of Argyll began to collapse in 1957; he filed to have her banned from their ancestral castle in 1959. His legal team submitted many documents to the court that heard his divorce trial in 1963, but the most damning was a photograph that depicted his wife, fellating a man whose face lay beyond the frame – he

25 For a representative example, see: Philip Hoare, “Obituary: Margaret, Duchess of Argyll,” The Independent, July 29, 1993, accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-margaret-duchess-of-argyll-1487856.html. 54

wearing nothing, she likewise but for a three-stranded pearl necklace. The identities of

this and other so-called “headless men” remained unknown for years. Rumors flew that

the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was among them. (He was.)26 Lord Wheatley, the

presiding justice in the hearing, found the Duke innocent of wrongdoing. Margaret,

however, received a four-hour rebuke on 8 May 1963, read from a 160-page judgment

that stopped just short of branding her evil:

…a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men, whose promiscuity had led to a queer form of perversion and whose attitude to the sanctity of marriage was what the moderns might call sophisticated but what in plain language can only be described as wholly immoral.27

The British public never forgot Margaret’s transgressions. She withdrew from public life.

When she released her autobiography in 1975, people bought it, expecting to read stories

of wild midnights and castle trysts. But she had denied the allegations wholesale again,

accusing the Duke of alcoholism, avarice, and conspiracy. She spent the next eighteen

years moving from home to hotel suite to long-term care facility, giving the people one

last mass-mediated appearance: on the late-night television talk show After Dark in

1988.28

The story of her downfall mirrors that of the British aristocracy in general.

According to the historian David Cannadine, the breakdown of titled society that had begun in the late nineteenth century – a result of wealthy bourgeois buying their way into

26 So argued a recent documentary aired on the UK’s Channel 4, the same network that broadcast Powder Her Face on Christmas Day in 2000. See: Sarah Hall, “‘Headless Men’ in Sex Scandal Finally Named,” The Guardian, August 9, 2000, accessed October 17, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/10/sarahhall. 27 Nicol, “Three-Stranded Pearl Necklace,” part VII. 28 This too was a production of Channel 4. 55 luxury – accelerated in the early twentieth, when marriages between nobles and foreign celebrities reduced the number of aristocrats who had been raised as such.29 P.G.

Wodehouse captured this milieu in his fiction, evoking the increasing debauchery of the young and wealthy.30 In Cannadine’s elegant formulation: “[b]y the late 1930s, the

British landed establishment was less British, less landed, and less of an establishment than it had been at any time since its marked disintegration first began[.]”31

Adès and Hensher chose to depict the young “Mrs. Freeling” of this time, 1934 and ‘36, as already interested in seducing and marrying the Duke; their ceremony takes place two years later. In life, Margaret remained married to Charles Sweeny until 1947, and did not marry Ian Campbell until 1951. The transposition of setting to the 1930s resonates with Cannadine’s pronouncements about the social climbing and decadence of the era. Adès and Hensher, aware of their national history, adjusted events from real life to fit narratives of decline. In reality, the date of Margaret’s accession to the title of

Duchess fell in a period of aristocratic revival, more than a decade’s worth of comeback seasons for the landed élite.32 Continuing to shift events back in time for their part- fictitious version of Margaret, the opera’s creators place the taking of the “headless man” photographs – and the Duke’s discovery of them – in 1953, at a time in which the nobility had regained some of their money and status. The trial scene in Powder Her Face takes place in 1955, years before the real divorce proceedings of 1963. By that point, the temporary resurgence of high society was almost over.

29 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990): 347. 30 Ibid., 348. 31 Ibid., 606. 32 Ibid., 651-2. 56

History begins to line up with operatic narrative in Scene 7, when the Duchess

laments the changes that have estranged her from the outside world. The elevated society

in which she had circulated had reached a point of crisis; the expensive bacchanals of

Margaret’s youth and married life had trailed off, never to resume. British society, with

its enforced social hierarchies and deep veins of prejudice, became steadily more equal.

Gay and bisexual subjects, for instance, gained ground in this era, as they advocated for and won decriminalization of sex between men in England and Wales.33 Encouraging

though the progress they made between 1950 and 1980 was, the rollback of some legal

protections under the régime of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made life harder for

openly gay Britons, such as young Adès (b. 1971) and Hensher (b. 1965). The

collaborators, who wrote the opera in a time of laws that restricted public discussion of

homosexuality, chose to make their Duchess, a product of the 1920s and ‘30s, a

representative of the bad old days: a shrill reactionary.34 This informs the moment in the

opera designed to turn even those unoffended by her subterfuges and posturing against

her:

Everywhere things are changing. When one is driven in the street one never knows what one may see. One never sees a white face, not in the street, not now…Black men buy houses /Jews go everywhere /Concrete is everywhere /and buggery is legal…Never go out. It isn’t safe. Lock your door and stay inside. There’s only you, and slowly the terror subsides. And outside there it’s Africa. The young fucking in the street – […] The terror. The ugliness. The shame they never had. The shame I never lost.35

And so Margaret, Duchess of Argyll becomes the Duchess of Powder Her Face, a stand-

33 Stephen Jeffery-Poulter, Peers, Queers, and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform from 1950 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991): 68-89. 34 On the law forbidding the “promotion” of homosexuality, Clause 28 of the Bill of Gay and Lesbian Rights, see: Ibid., 284-5. 35 Philip Hensher, Powder Her Face: Libretto for the Opera by Thomas Adès (London: Faber Music Ltd, 1995): 37. 57 in for all of the posh hypocrites and hedonists who had lost control of British society over the course of the century – who would rail against the freedoms of the young and marginalized. Adès and Hensher even adjusted the timeline of events to accord with a narrative, spaced in neat, nearly two-decade intervals, of aristocratic decadence and decline. Margaret Argyll became a synecdoche for her class when transfigured into the

Duchess of the opera. But the creators of the piece needed more raw material for her character than a Camp old lady and emblem of upper-class vices. The hallmarks of the operatic anti-heroine, star of a show which will end with her humiliation and silence, filled this lacuna. Hensher’s remarks on the genesis of the opera, quoted above, hint at this marriage of operatic and literary tradition with a true story.36 The librettist has commented on the piece several times, and, in one interview, made the connection explicit:

There’s always a strange kernel from which things start. [The m]ost startling was with the libretto I wrote for Thomas Adès’s opera Powder Her Face. The starting point was the idea of having an aria for the soprano in which she seduced a man and then gave him a blow job. It sounded ridiculous, but the more I thought about it, the more it resonated with other ideas – with the idea of the historic silencing of women’s voices, for instance.37

Hensher has since cited Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, a classic text on opera reception with substantial discussions of the tragic anti-heroine archetype, as a vital

36 See pages 11-2. 37 Canning, Hear Us Out, 300. 58 influence on his thinking.38 Scholarship on the undoing of women in opera thus indirectly contributed to his reexamination of historical tropes, archetypes, and narratives in the libretto.39 Powder Her Face began as a comic image of seduction and supplication with direct ties to historical precedent, as documented by musicologists around the same time.

The notion of the undone temptress was in place before a word or note had been written.

Where Lulu’s tale ends with blood and a scream, the Duchess’s concludes with the promise of a slow, natural denouement in penury.

Chorus of Two: The Maid and Electrician

Powder Her Face introduces seventeen distinct characters over the course of its eight scenes; the bass sings three major and two tiny parts, the dramatic soprano only one. The high soprano and tenor thus act as the roster of supporting characters, and the only remnants of the traditional opera chorus. But Adès and Hensher see to it that, as much as the latter two singing actors bracket their characters off from one another, they cannot help but maintain a continuity of identity. The mere fact of bodily sameness across scenes accounts for some of this effect, but musical gestures and textual tics recur across characters as well. This results in an aura of uncanniness, even of unreality, around both – generated from a dialectical tension between identity (same faces, same phrases) and difference (different costumes, years of appearance, and functions as agents in the drama). It also helps the creators to evade the question of whether the drama takes place

38 Asked about his thought process at the time of the libretto’s creation in a 2017 interview, Hensher explained: “let’s go with the general tendency [i.e., silencing] of the form [opera].” In the same interview, he implies that current social concerns did not impinge on his determination to write an opera that hewed close to historical tradition, explaining (to paraphrase) that an opera in which Margaret went to University to fight for women’s rights would not be much of an opera at all, let alone a compelling one. Philip Hensher, interview by Paul Archbold, Be not afeard: Language, Music, and Cultural Memory in the Operas of Thomas Adès, London, April 25, 2017. 39 Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993). 59

in diegetic “real” life, or in the Duchess’s fugue state.

Contradictions attend the singers even when they remain in character for an extended period, however. They may strike the audience as doubles of one another, and

of the Duchess and Duke. At times, it seems as though gender alone separates the pair of

lower-class characters, or that class alone divides character pairings of the same gender.

Indeed, the high soprano in particular seems to act as an extension of the Duchess much of the time – a have-not who would, in an opera less obsessed with the takedown of

aristocrats, suffer as much as her privileged counterpart. The Waitress of Scene 3 says it

herself:

[…]I’d be like her. I’d marry rich men[…] I’d buy a whole shop full of diamonds and have it delivered in a carriage if I felt like it. And I would feel like it, and I’d look as miserable as sin. Just like her. Just fancy being her[…] Fancy purchasing a Duke[…] That’s what I want.40

The Waitress in particular articulates a desire to take the Duchess’s place – a drive that all

of the high soprano’s characters appear to share, on some level. If the Duchess is the Eve

of Biblical myth, one who brings sex, lies, and dissolution into a space that society

regards as elevated, then the high soprano’s characters are the eponymous Eve of Joseph

L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 film All About Eve, a bright young thing bent on replacing a

woman who has aged out of that role.

The high soprano’s voice opens the opera with some of the carefully notated

laughter that distinguishes the piece’s gleeful, cruel first quarter. Her Maid character of

Scene 1 prompts the Duchess to reveal her classist attitudes for the first time, responding

40 Hensher, Powder Her Face,16-7. 60

to an order for tea by gesturing for the aristocrat to pour it herself. As the so-labeled

Confidante of Scene 2, she indulges in some two-faced talk, stroking the ego of the

Duchess even as she assures the Lounge Lizard of her friend’s future misery. Scene 3

affords the high soprano her richest opportunity to shine as an individual character, the

Waitress. The music of the “Fancy” aria that constitutes the entire scene will sound

familiar to any listener who has heard either instrumental suite from the opera; its

bouncing, gigue-like pulse produces a near-constant hemiola against the Waitress’s

duple-meter exclamations. The instrumental lines are high, sometimes piercing – not

unlike the soloist’s voice, which usually lies near the top of the treble-clef staff but

occasionally skips up as high as the C#, D, and E above. Overall, the high soprano’s

music spans a tessitura similar to that of Berg’s Lulu. A figure of perpetual youth and lust

for advancement, she also anticipates the role of Ariel in Adès’s The Tempest, which

demands pitches up to a third higher.

As the Mistress of Scene 5, the high soprano must convert the jealous screeching

of the Waitress into girlish squeals. Referring to the Duke time and again as “Daddy,” she

displays two opposite sides: the silly, baby-voiced lover whom he wants to hear, and the

cunning, sober woman who gradually leads her consort to the discovery of his wife’s

infidelity. The audience can hear it when she slips from the former persona into the latter.

The intoxicated Duke clearly cannot. The Society Journalist of Scene 7, by contrast, has

no discernable motivations or feelings, aside from a desire to come away from her

interview with the Duchess with a usable transcript – hence her attempts to ignore her

subject’s raving and come up with stock beauty tips on her own, blocking out the

Duchess’s torrents of fear, delusion, and loathing. 61

Of the four singers, the tenor portrays the opera’s least powerful characters:

almost all servants, plus two performers who cannot finish their songs without the

Duchess interrupting. Though revisionist productions have assigned great agency to the

Waiter of Scene 4, that character more or less exists to be fellated in Adès and Hensher’s original concept.41 The Electrician co-opts and preempts the Duchess’s story, but his

impersonation of her tells us more about the target than the bully. The Lounge Lizard

sings and gossips, but does little to influence the course of the drama. The Delivery Boy

hovers in the background. The high soprano, in contrast, steals the stage for an entire

scene and, as the Mistress, initiates the Duchess’s downfall.42

There is, however, an element in Adès and Hensher’s instructions for the tenor

role that has so far gone disregarded and, thus, irrelevant to audiences. Still, were opera

companies to heed the note on casting that the creators include in their initial description

of the singer, a question implied in the Duchess’s tirade in Scene 7 would have an

answer: in this drama of differences in class, gender, power, and sexuality, what of race?

The creators knew. They appear to have labored under the assumption that the tenor

would be “a very tall black man.”43 The note appears in the published vocal score, but not the libretto; the preference may have been Adès’s alone.

Staged as it almost always has been, Powder Her Face is an experience of overwhelming whiteness, from its imagery and language of faded imperial aristocracy to

41 La Monnaie’s 2015 production of the opera, directed by Mariusz Trelínski, converts the intended consensual episode of fellatio in a hotel room, with the Duchess clearly in control throughout, into a hookup-turned-rape on the hood of a car at a gas station. It ends when the leering Waiter has his orgasm and throws the helpless Duchess to the pavement. This violent revision moves the opera closer to the realm of outright tragedy; it disempowers the Duchess character, renders later moments of comedy unfunny, and makes the trial scene into a more wrenching moment, shot through with all-too-familiar victim-blaming. 42 She also presumably replaces the Duchess, if one understands her as an indirect portrayal of the Duke’s lover and fourth wife, Mathilda Coster Mortimer. 43 Adès, Powder Her Face [Vocal], 6. 62

its uniformly Caucasian cast – divided into clear hierarchies but united in this one form of

social privilege. The creators intended otherwise. As disgusting as the Duchess’s words in Scene 7 would appear under the usual casting circumstances, the onstage presence of someone she so denounces would raise the stakes of her words and actions. Imagine, for a moment, two productions of Powder Her Face, identical but for the appearance of the tenor. Would the Duchess of one not carry even more power to nauseate, given the depths of hypocrisy to which she descends, and the willingness she displays to insult these men from her past and present? By the penultimate scene, she receives services, serenades, and sex from the same singing actor. He delivers hats to her room as she rants about the legal ability of black men to buy houses. An opera already freighted with concerns of identity and power would carry even more weight, were it staged this way.

The tenor may also play the opera’s only gay character. When an interviewer asked Adès whether a “gay aesthetic” existed in his music in 2007, the composer replied:

“[w]ell, there was in Powder Her Face…I don’t know. I’ve thought about doing an opera with two male leads, but that would be too gay, too contrived.”44 There are no

unambiguously gay people in this chamber opera, except, perhaps, for the tenor’s character in Scene 2; Adès and Hensher suggest that this Lounge Lizard is attracted to the

Duke. Though the Duchess is the first to challenge her Confidante’s characterization of

the Duke as “boring,” the tenor soon follows in a canon at the tritone, proclaiming the

man “heaven” and “charming” before the Duchess does so (Example 2.1). Though this

remains the only suggestion that any character experiences same-sex desire, directors and

actors could easily find ways to mark the Lizard as a queer character, making the

44 Peter Culshaw and Thomas Adès, “Don’t Call Me a Messiah,” The Telegraph, Thursday, March 1, 2007. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/3663485/Dont-call-me-a-messiah.html 63

Duchess’s later complaints about the legalization of gay sex sound like another backstab

to old friends.

At this moment, the Lounge Lizard comes together with the Duchess in harmony

– but, far more frequently, the tenor’s characters collude with the high soprano’s in

mocking or deriding the aristocrats. Though the Duchess disrupts the levity of Scene 1, the servants’ pitched laughter – passed back and forth – runs almost throughout, like a musical and dramatic ostinato. When allied with the high soprano, the tenor becomes a constant source of commentary and mockery, from the first pages through the final

words.

Example 2.1, the Duchess and Lounge Lizard in Canon, Powder Her Face, Scene 2

Hensher avoids obvious expository language by introducing the protagonist

through the tenor’s words and body, with her backstory as a send-up of haughty self-

narration. He builds a dialectical opposition between the two-bodied entity of the servants 64

and the unitary Duchess into the libretto from the first, having written his Scene 1 as a

conceptual echo of double-exposition sonata form – inspired, in part, by the “Sirens”

chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.45 He no doubt refers to the alternation between the energy of the young people and the reactive, powerless, static, even regressive quality of the aged Duchess.46 Scene 2 opens with hocketing banter, in which the pair share

shocking rumors of domestic violence and abandonment in the Duke’s prior affairs –

apparently, he dismissed the pleas of a mistress who carried his child, and laughed when

informed of her death. They fail to share this with their supposed friend, despite her

obvious desire to wed the alleged monster.

The tenor’s great moment of independence, Scene 4, has long served as a locus

for commentary in critical appraisals of the opera. The Duchess’s initiation of sex

notwithstanding, I argue that the tenor’s charade in this scene encapsulates all that is

frustrating and inscrutable about the opera itself. His participation in the Duchess’s

escapade also makes him a stand-in for the dozens of men that Margaret allegedly bedded

in reality, and his role in this scene thus makes him an accessory to the Duke, the

Mistress, and the Judge: an agent of the Duchess’s undoing, albeit an unwitting one.

When the Waiter enters, the Duchess addresses him in clipped staccato phrases; he

quietly responds in kind, appending the required honorific “Madam” in rising thirds at the

end of each statement (Example 2.2). This mechanical exchange is a ruse on both ends.

45 The exact nature of the correspondence is difficult to make out, much less to construe as a series of clear Primary or Secondary thematic groups. Hensher: “…The libretto [for Powder Her Face] was a really good exercise. I consciously constructed scenes like classical music forms. The first scene is the double exposition of a concerto, for instance.” See Canning, Hear Us Out, 312. Hensher clarified the relationship between his libretto and Joyce’s chapter “Sirens” in an interview at a conference devoted to Adès’s opera: Philip Hensher, interview by Paul Archbold, Be not afeard: Language, Music, and Cultural Memory in the Operas of Thomas Adès, London, April 25, 2017. 46 For a famous assessment of gendered themes in sonata forms, see: Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 65

The Duchess, who has been writhing in ecstasy at the mere thought of the encounter to

come, knows what she wants. So does the Waiter, who reveals after their tryst that he

received the same friendly welcome a year prior. Asked whether he knows who his

hookup is, he replies, in a sudden leaping legato: “Oh yes, your Grace. Ev’ryone knows

who you are. All the boys, your Grace. Ev’ryone. On chuchote.”47 The latter French borrowing serves as a verbal motif throughout the opera. This drama depends on the fact that people whisper, and the mutually exclusive states of secrecy and exposure animate

the narrative through Scenes 4 and 5.

Example 2.2, Dialogue between the Duchess and the Waiter, Powder Her Face, Scene 4

The formality, detachment, and utter lack of emotion of the Duchess and Waiter’s initial

exchange hides the true motivations of those involved. Once the game has ended and

everyone has won – for the time being – the Waiter opens up verbally and musically,

47 Adès, Powder Her Face [Vocal], 113-4. 66

revealing his foreknowledge and gloating over his anonymity. The Duchess, who

believes herself safe from exposure, finds that her secret is known to an ominously vague

“Everyone” and “On.”

Scene 6 finds the high-soprano and tenor pair, reunited and dressed as bourgeois

Rubberneckers at the Argyll divorce trial, exchanging more rapid-fire gossip in

Sprechstimme. They join in harmony, however, when making their most judgmental

pronouncements about the ducal couple. These passages, located at rehearsals D, G, and

EE in the vocal score, showcase Adès’s signature technique for building melody and

harmony, the alignment of recurring interval cycles. The tenor and high soprano trade

chromatic and whole-tone scale segments with one another in a very un-Adèsian

plodding foursquare rhythm, making a contrapuntal process that the composer usually conceals clearly audible. The message is clear: these onlookers are simple, unsubtle, and obvious – damned, unlike every other character, to forthrightness in both music and word.48 As caricatures of the “middle classes” whom the Duchess will decry at the end of

the scene, they could scarcely differ from their dissembling, sophisticated social better

more.

The tenor is relegated to physical labor and occasional interjections in Scene 7,

and disappears during Scene 8. But, in the Ghost Epilogue, he and the high soprano re-

emerge from their hiding places in the Duchess’s room. Adès and Hensher ask them to

perform a “Sheet-folding tango” and “Flirtation game,” all in time with the dance music.

48 For an in-depth look at Adès’s idiosyncratic use of interval cycles – not unlike Berg’s heterodox approach to twelve-tone series – see: Philip Stoecker, “Aligned Cycles in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet,” Music Analysis 33/I (2014), 32-64. For more on his characteristic use of irregular and irrational rhythms, which saturate most of the opera’s timescapes, see: Huw Belling, “Thinking Irrational: Thomas Adès and New Rhythms” (MM Thesis, Royal College of Music, 2010). 67

“Enough!” cries the Maid; “Or too much,” rejoins the Electrician, holding the word much

on a D natural for over twenty beats. The opera ends here, with a frivolous little dance

and vague exchange between the employees.49 Bored in the wake of the Duchess’s

eviction, they have already moved on. The chosen agent of her downfall transforms over

the duration of the opera, but retains the same sepulchral voice throughout. The Duke,

Judge, and Hotel Manager represent the dissolution and cruelty of the British male

aristocrat, the moral double-standards of a sexist society, and the indifference of late

capital to aristocratic privilege, respectively. But all represent patriarchy and death, the

societal and natural forces that come together in physical form to bring about the

Duchess’s downfall.

The Hotel Manager: Fate, Death, and Patriarchy Envoiced

In Berg’s Lulu, the double-casting of singers as multiple male characters lends a

sense of palindromic symmetry to the plot – but also encourages audiences to think of

each pair of characters as mirror-images of one another, sides of a single coin. Silvio dos

Santos has tied these dual personae to the ideas and institutions that they represented for

Berg. Lulu’s husband Dr. Schön and final john Jack the Ripper, for example, represent the perils of marriage and prostitution respectively – states of bondage both, which Berg saw as equivalent to one another.50 Adès counts on a similar intradiegetic resonance when

he calls for a single man to play the Duke who ruins his wife’s life, the Judge who

pronounces her “fairly appalling,” and the Hotel Manager who turns her out with sadistic

glee. Music too ties the bass’s characters together; the parts all require a wide vocal

49 See: Adès, Powder Her Face [Vocal], 248-9. 50 For more on this idea, see the fifth chapter of dos Santos’s monograph: Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s Lulu (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014): 118-49. 68

range, sudden dramatic shifts in pitch, and an ability to hold single words or notes for

long durations. He bellows and wails his highest lines, and growls the lowest. His is a

cartoonish assemblage of masculine-gendered traits, divided among the personae but

always accompanied by a tendency to menace.

Throughout Adès’s score and Hensher’s libretto, stage directions refer to this singer as the Hotel Manager – not the first guise in which he appears, but, perhaps, the only one not generated by the Duchess’s memory. As of the end of Scene 1, “Nineteen ninety,” the hotel’s Electrician and Maid shout “Here he comes,” referring to their

Manager – but the reminiscing Duchess echoes their line while speaking of the Duke, her ex-husband of decades ago. She is already “in” the Scene to come, dated “Nineteen thirty four.” The flashback begins for her before we, the audience, perceive any change.51

However, the Duke does not arrive at this point; nor does the Manager. The former only enters at the end of Scene 2, and the latter at the beginning of Scene 8. The audience member may thus assume that the six middle scenes of the opera take place in the Duchess’s head, all in a brief moment: the few seconds between the staff’s announcement of the Manager’s arrival and his actual entrance. In this scenario, the

Duchess, whose reminiscences guide the audience’s experience of her life, maps the shared function of the Duke and Judge – persecutor – onto the Manager who comes to evict her. Later scenes, in which the Duchess disappears from the stage, challenge this rationalization of the temporal shifts. At these points, a director may intervene. Leaving the Duchess onstage throughout, even for scenes in which she does not sing and could never have been present, could imply to viewers that she imagines those incidents in

51 The overlap between the Electrician and Maid’s exclamation on one hand, and the Duchess’s on the other, becomes clear with a glance at the published libretto: Hensher, Powder Her Face, 9. 69

Scenes 3 and 6 for which she was, in fact, absent. Hensher’s lack of guidance on her entrances and exits leaves this element of the stage action to dramaturgs. If all of the bass’s characters are in fact the Duchess’s projections of others’ identities onto the

Manager, then audience members may empathize with her character in seeing these men as so many guises of a single villain. The musical and dramatic colon placed at the end of

Scene 1, “Here he comes” – an antecedent whose consequent, the entrance of the actual

Manager, falls into place an hour later – registers as a fracture in the straightforward flow of the preceding action.

Any audience members familiar with analepsis in literature – surely, most if not all listeners – would process the shift from a sequence of events set in 1990 to a vignette from 1934 without difficulty. But in opera, as in cinema, music must stitch together disparate times, places, and dramatis personae.52 The interludes between scenes in

Powder Her Face perform the essential work of stalling for time as scenery and costumes change, as they have long done in opera.53 But Adès’s sonic connective tissues bear burdens of signification, and the first interlude, between “Nineteen ninety” and “Nineteen thirty four,” manifests the Duke-cum-Hotel Manager character well before his body appears onstage. The music slips by in chromatic eddies, almost all at quiet dynamic levels – with two exceptions. Between bars 416 and 424, the upper saxophones play smeared, clashing figures that anticipate the opera’s most (in)famous four minutes: the

Duchess’s vocalise aria of Scene 4, in which she fellates the Waiter. The arch, ironic tone

52 Claudia Gorbman codified this bridging of scenic gaps as one of seven principal functions for music in narrative film. See her classic treatise: Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 53 Scholars have only recently turned to the instrumental interludes of opera as meaningful musical events in their own right. See: Christopher Morris, Reading Opera Between the Lines: Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meaning from Wagner to Berg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 70

of that Hensher’s synopsis bleeds into the opera itself, starting in Scene 1. “Here he

comes,” a double entendre, can refer to any of the men with whom the Duchess consorts,

especially the waiter who receives that friendly welcome onstage.

As Emma Gallon has argued, the interlude manifests the Duke-Manager as well, whose literal “comings” and goings lead the Duchess to disaster.54 The other motive

embedded in this passage, a pair of loud, bass-register eighth notes that would leap out of

any texture, punctuate every moment at which Adès wishes us to remember encroaching

fate; it evokes the sound of a taxi horn, specifically that of the car that comes to take the

Duchess away. Despite Adès’s onomatopoetic rather than referential intentions, the

motive might remind sharp-eared listeners of Stravinsky’s Threni, that composer’s first

fully serial piece and a setting of texts from the Book of Lamentations, which mourn the

abandonment and destruction of Jerusalem. Throughout that piece, pairs of eighth notes,

played on a sarrusophone, accompany choral chanting of indeterminate pitch. The bass

saxophone, which plays the two-note motive in Powder Her Face, sounds strikingly like

this relatively rare instrument in the register in question. The accidental resonance works

all the better for the text of the lamentation under which Stravinsky’s motive resounds:

Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! Facta est quasi vidua domina gentium: princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo. Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimae ejus in maxillis ejus. Facti sunt hostes ejus in capite, inimici illius locupletati sunt Quia Dominus locutus est super eam propter multitudinem iniquitatum ejus.55

54 Emma Gallon, “Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès (PhD diss., Lancaster University, 2011), 226- 229. 55 How the city that was full of people sits solitary! How she becomes as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how she becomes a tributary! She weeps in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks. Her adversaries are chief, and her enemies prosper, for the Lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions. Emphasis mine; translation adapted from: Andrew Kuster, Stravinsky’s Topology: An Examination of his Twelve-Tone Works through Object-Oriented Analysis of Structural and Poetic-Expressive Relationships, with Special Attention to his Choral Works and Threni (DMA diss., University of Colorado, Boulder, 2000), Table 53, 71

The only commercially available video recording of Powder Her Face captures a

production in which security camera footage shows the Manager peering into the

Duchess’s hotel room as the Interlude passes by.56 Given Adès’s fondness for

onomatopoetic musical gestures, the motive could also signify the knocking of fate, embodied as the bass, on the Duchess’s literal (hotel-room) door. “Here he comes” thus

refers to the patriarchal presence who seems to linger on the hotel-room threshold for

Scenes 2-7, but has in fact been steadily advancing since the halcyon days of her youth.

He is the enemy who prospers amid the abjection of the once-proud Duchess.

The audience next hears this characteristic gesture, defined as much by register

(lowest) and articulation (staccato) as by rhythm, when the Duke makes his first

appearance – which is, again, a sort of non-appearance in Adès and Hensher’s ideal

staging. A stage direction indicates that “a man’s figure [should be] outlined against

brilliant backlighting.” In other words: the audience should perceive only a silhouette

against intense white light, an image reminiscent of the fifth-door passage of Béla

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.57 The eighth-notes sound only once, on a minor third

of B-flat and D-flat – implying a tonality that the Duke confirms, singing an F to

complete the triad at bar 324 (Example 2.3). This low-register B-flat minor sonority

returns later in the opera; in fact, a muffled stab of that chord ends the opera. Adès has

made oblique reference to that final harmony and its role in ending the opera:

It had to be a black full stop, that ending. It’s as if every bit of scenery on

https://sites.google.com/site/stravinskystopology/6-threni-large-scale-musical-poetical-and-formal-row- employment-with-objects. 56 Thomas Adès, Plazas, Buck, Norman, Broadbent, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Powder Her Face, DVD, directed by David Alden (Forked River, NJ: Kultur Video, 2006). 57 This resonance hardly ends here; the young divorcée who will become the Duchess falls for a fabulously wealthy man whose monstrous character becomes obvious, not unlike Bartók’s Judith and her bloody bridegroom Bluebeard. 72

stage is folded up and packed away, and at the end the hotel room is empty. You know how there is nothing more final than a room that someone’s lived in after people have been in and cleared everything out: it’s an image of death. There are a lot of false bottoms in the harmony and I go through them all in the last pages: that was the only way I could finish it. Once all of those are closed, there’s a kind of further harmonic door that’s closed, of the whole opera[.]58

The harmony that closes the door on the Duchess and her life at the end of the opera – the

B-flat minor triad that sounds, and even looks, like a “black full stop” after the scene of

her eviction (Example 2.4) – recurs multiple times throughout the piece, as Gallon has

pointed out. As she argues, it serves as the musical emissary of fate. At the end of Scene

2, we listen as the Duke creates that sound, seals that fate, just under sixty years before

her symbolic death. His voice brings her ruin.

Example 2.3, Final sonority of the opera, Powder Her Face, Scene 8

To the extent that one understands the bass’s characters not as independent, fully

formed individuals, but rather as shapeshifting embodiments of a sometimes-invisible

power structure, the B-flat minor sonority is the antagonist of the opera. Powder Her

Face, thought of as a deed of long-term harmonic unfolding made visible, ensnares and deposes its protagonist through this sonority, which attempts time and again to stamp out

58 Tom Service and Thomas Adès, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012): 61-2. 73

that of the Duchess. To discuss these men in the Duchess’s life without mentioning the common specter that animates all of them is to lose sight of the fundamental dialectic

polarity of the piece, between the Duchess’s D major and the B-flat minor of patriarchy

in all its guises. Like Stravinsky’s Devil, Adès’s Hotel Manager takes many forms while

remaining essentially the same.

The tenor holds a D, senza vibrato, for several measures before this final chord of

the opera. Below, example 2.4 shows the incursion of a B-flat minor sonority upon the

uncanny sound of a bell – on D natural – being detuned, its pitch flattened out of

existence, at the end of Scene 2, upon the Duke’s first appearance. After the Duke and his

Mistress find the Duchess’s photographs during the “Paper Chase” interlude after Scene

5, Act I ends with a long-held D-natural, still sounding after a brusque, fortisissimo B-flat

minor triad. This sonority, which recurs whenever the Duke moves closer to ruining the

Duchess once and for all, represents the slamming of Adès’s door – and thus, the fate

handed down to the Duchess by patriarchy.

Example 2.4, Entrance of the Duke, Powder Her Face, Scene 2

It is thus fitting that the Manager’s barcarolle in Scene 8, at rehearsal E – a song

in which he dwells on the idea of the Duchess’s time having come – begins in D minor, 74 only to sink to C# minor (the enharmonic equivalent of D-flat) in the second strophe and, finally, to B-flat minor. The Manager takes leave of her in the two bars before rehearsal

G with an augmented fifteenth from high D to low D-flat, set to the words “Your Grace.”

No longer content to simply bend her pitch into its flat doppelgänger, the bass instead drags it into the abyss, the registral space in which only he – and other men – can hold absolute sway. The orchestra understands the pitch-allegory and registers it, responding with a series of open fourths and fifths on B-flat and F. When he returns to announce that her car has arrived, the low winds sound the eighth-note motive on a fortissimo B-flat minor triad. The stage direction that Adès inserts at this gesture indicate the triumph of the sonority and the motivic unit alike: “Complete breakdown of Duchess.”59 From these instances to the pedal B-flat that precedes the Judge’s rant, Gallon has found manifestations of this harmonic conflict throughout the opera’s duration. How did the

Duchess’s situation become so dire, after the halcyon days in which she seemed destined for fame, fortune, and freedom? The answer – like everything about the opera – involves two complementary strands of musical signification: a pastiche popular song, and a series of musical paraphrases that progressively degrade, exoticize, and masculinize the

Duchess, setting her apart as an Other.

The Duchess: Porteresque Portraiture in the Imaginary Museum

Forget restrictions Legality No more commandments When your eyes are fixed on me. There’s nothing in all the world Like being curled around your little finger Divinest feeling Dizzying touch But for Mr. Freeling

59 Adès, Powder Her Face [Vocal], 243. 75

I would float right through the ceiling And admit my heart is reeling With this electric feeling That I love you Why don’t you love me back until we’re ninety-five[?] Your love is keeping me alive And I’ve succumbed to your unchecked ability Chased away respectability Stretch me out Touch the feelings that we feel when we collide You’re my ideal So see you tonight. … Who said it mattered What the public prints will say? They should be flattered Now one reads them every day They say our love is queer and sinful and blind But darling don’t let panic muddle your mind For if you ran away Every night and every day I would pursue you I’d walk a thousand miles Endure your guiles For just one chance that you’d hold me/ Touch me/ Love me I’m in your clutches Duchess Mine.60

Every Pandora figure has her boxes: the one full of evils, which she unleashes upon the world, and the prison in which storytellers lock her for safe-keeping, some vessel that contains her image or essence.61 Lulu, a Romantic heroine, force of nature, and sexualized child all in one body, located her youthful beauty, and thus her identity, in a portrait.62 The Duchess of Powder Her Face preserves her sense of débutante’s glamour by endowing luxury items, such as her furs, dresses, and signature perfume with auras of

60 Hensher, Powder Her Face, 13-4. 61 Maree Macmillan, “‘Boxing’ Pandora: The Pandora Myth in Berg’s Opera Lulu and Pabst’s Film Pandora’s Box,” in Musics and Feminisms, ed. Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1999): 109-11. 62 dos Santos: Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s Lulu, Chapter 4. 76

personal identity. But she does not lose everything until she loses her song, the love

ballad “in modo populare 1930” that we hear in the second scene, and in fragments

scattered throughout the opera. The warm heart of an otherwise dark comedy, the

imitation 1920s popular song in Powder Her Face stands out. In it, Adès stretches his

own style to the point that the song sounds more like a lush, sentimental insertion from

the pen of a first-rate jazz-age songwriter – the likes of Noël Coward, Jerome Kern, or

Cole Porter – than an original. For the Duchess, the tune serves as a sort of shelter: the

killing jar’s dialectical negation and thus her own affirmation, a utopian space in which

her memories, secret sexual preferences, and self-image reside. Adès evokes the time of top hats, tails, and tap shoes in order to carve out this space, in which the Duchess can safeguard and preserve her sense of self. As Gallon has argued, one could safely

characterize the score of Powder Her Face as a long-term harmonic struggle for one triad

(B-flat minor) to silence a related but irreconcilable one (D major) by a combination of

chromatic transformation and brute force. I contend that Adès layers still more musical

elements in counterpoint with this underlying narrative; his opera is the story of a popular

song’s failed attempt to remain whole in the face of appropriation, fragmentation, parody,

and outside interference.

The opera’s great moment of pathos arrives when the Duchess leaves her hotel

room in Scene 8, clutching only a phonograph that she has set in motion sans record. The

“[h]ideous white noise of [the] needle going round the rubber turntable,” which Adès

realizes with quiet col legno strokes on stringed instruments, clicked keys on woodwinds,

mutes rattled in bells of brasses, and drum heads scraped with live microphones, stands in

for the sound that the anguished woman most wants to hear: her song (Example 2.5). 77

Instead, she hears only absence, and we understand that she’s as good as dead.

Confronted with only the outer scenes of the piece, the ones set in 1990, an audience member might well wonder why the now-destitute woman chooses only this one object to carry away, having carried on about everything from her perfume to her fur coats, but never mentioned music. The reason she walks out with the phonograph upon breaking down, thus abandoning her willfully rosy view of life, becomes obvious only after the set of flashbacks that constitute the middle three quarters of the opera.

Example 2.5, The Duchess Exits with her Phonograph, Powder Her Face, Scene 8

In her autobiography, the real Margaret, Duchess of Argyll boasted of a “verse from Cole Porter’s song ‘You’re the Top’” that cited her as Mrs. Sweeny, her first married surname:

You’re the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire, You’re Mussolini, You’re Mrs. Sweeny, You’re Camembert!63

She must not have known that Porter had nothing to do with her inclusion. P.G.

63 Margaret’s autobiography, a seemingly endless succession of name-checks and claims to fame, features these lines as the epigraph to its tenth chapter. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, Forget Not: The Autobiography of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (London: Star Books, 1977): 78. 78

Wodehouse swapped those lines into the song when a production of the musical came to

London’s West End in 1935. Margaret’s married surname had displaced Porter’s original reference to “Whistler’s Mama.” Recall that Wodehouse had been lampooning the glamourous youths of high society for decades. In this context, his juxtaposition of “Mrs.

Sweeny,” a wealthy Scot who had insinuated herself into aristocratic circles after growing up in New York and marrying an American businessman, with the despised

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, makes a hyperbolic sort of sense as a nod to those at

“the Top” of social and political hierarchies.64 Adès and Hensher likely encountered her reference to Wodehouse’s contrafactum while researching the model for their lead character, and the historical connection between Anything Goes and the Duchess has led many a critic and scholar to mention Porter’s name in the context of Adès’s faux popular song. However, well after many such writings had already emerged, Adès noted in an interview that the singer Jack Buchanan, rather than any particular songwriter, served as his inspiration for the style of the mock-Tin Pan Alley song.

Though Wodehouse’s West End version of “You’re the Top” cites Fred Astaire, an American, Jack Buchanan’s name might have made for a better reference among

London theatergoers. As performers, Astaire and Buchanan occupied similar aesthetic territory, both dapper song-and-dance men who tapped their way into the hearts of their respective nations through performances in stage and film musicals. Buchanan had made his name as a delicate crooner, a specialist in comedic and romantic tunes. His

64 A contemporary advertisement by the Daily Mail has placed the reality-television star Kim Kardashian West alongside Kim Jong-un, the brutal leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Popular culture, as well as opera, repeats itself. See: Dylan Byers, “Piers Morgan joins Daily Mail Online,” September 30, 2014, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/09/piers- morgan-joins-daily-mail-online-196312. 79

performance style, similar to that of Astaire but with a distinctly English and specifically posh inflection, tended to leave a strong imprint on the songs he performed. It seems that

Adès went into his own songwriting process with the Buchanan sound in mind, a conflation of various songwriters’ styles united by elements common to many such late-

1920s songs.

In the manner of a recording of the time, Adès includes only one verse, and

repeats the chorus. Through dialogue, the characters reveal that the song explicitly

concerns the débutante herself. In order to preserve the rhyme scheme and, presumably,

to avoid litigation, Hensher changes her surname from Sweeny to Freeling. From the first

few lyrics of Adès’s song, we learn that Mrs. Freeling – on the prowl again after her

divorce – thinks little of societal norms and legal boundaries. In Scene 2, set in 1934, one of her hangers-on, a Lounge Lizard, launches into a diegetic (phenomenal) performance of this song.65 It is in this scene that the co-creators advance their vision of the Duchess at

her prime; the song, as sonic representation of her, likewise appears in full, rather than

the state of decay and fragmentation in which the audience hears it later. At this point in

the plot, the young divorcée is a flirtatious social climber, deaf to rumors about the Duke

of Argyll’s violent ways at the prospect of marrying a wealthy aristocrat. Just the sort of

bright young thing that Berg sketched in his adaptation of the Lulu plays, with the

exception of her pre-nuptial glamour, Mrs. Freeling resembles Lulu herself, likely more

so than the real, historical Mrs. Sweeny. Adès and Hensher project Margaret’s later

65 I do not intend to engage with Abbate’s theories of voice and performance at length, as Gallon has contributed a compelling example of this sort of analysis to the scholarly record, and my own chosen theoretical framework differs substantially. See Gallon’s chapter, as well as Abbate, Unsung Voices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). This particular “phenomenal” song has clear boundaries; it stands apart from the surrounding material as a delineated event, a performance-within-a-performance. 80

promiscuity backwards, into her débutante days. The resulting character, attracted to rich

and powerful men and predatory in her pursuit of them, elides the figure of the operatic

femme fatale with an anachronistic vision of a real woman.

Adès adopts the yearning chromatic lines and complex harmonies characteristic of Porter

and his transatlantic colleagues, borrowing idioms with the warm embrace of an admirer.

Hensher’s clever internal rhymes and assonances likewise echo those of the urbane, self-

consciously sophisticated lyrics of the era. In an opera dominated by pitched but speech-

like declamation – consequences, perhaps, of Adès’s admiration for the operas of Berg

and Leoš Janáček – recognizable melodies stand out.66 The song registers as a moment of

profound emotion in part because it emerges from nowhere: a sentimental love song in

the middle of so much Sprechstimme gossiping. Its structure, with a verse that bounces along in syncopation and a big-tune chorus that gushes by comparison, hearkens back to the late 1920s or early 1930s. The chromatic glide down to G, the off-tonic starting pitch of the chorus, in bars 196-7, smacks of George Gershwin or Jerome Kern – and it also makes for a seductive gesture, pulling the listener through a layer of mild dissonance to warm stability (Example 2.6). The cheeky, syncopated rhythm in the piano at bars 211-4 suggests a soft-shoe or tap routine by Astaire or Buchanan all by itself. Adès even gives his pop song a bridge, with a conventionally fleeting suggestion of the minor mode, in mm. 263-83. The key of the song becomes crucial in the grand pitch-allegory of the

opera: D major, and the tonic pitch in isolation, conflict with the B-flat minor of the Hotel

Manager, fate, and death.

66 Adès comments on opera extensively in the journalist Tom Service’s book of transcribed interviews with the composer: Service and Adès, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux): 2012. 81

Example 2.6, Chromatic melody, dance rhythms in the tenor’s aria, Powder Her Face, Scene 2

82

Hesitant to dedicate much time for exposition, Adès and Hensher embed hints about her sexual reputation throughout the song. Adès and Hensher, children of the late twentieth century who came of age – and came out – in England in the conservative 1980s, deploy the loaded adjective queer with a knowing wink. Hensher groups it with two other adjectives, “sinful” and “blind,” and all three apply to a form of love – a love so radically different that the addressee of the serenade has to be told not to panic at the thought of exposure. Taken together, these three terms suggest a sexuality that stands apart. It lies beyond the boundaries of the normative, its precise contours undefined.

The Duchess’s love is thus queer in a double sense – odd from the perspective of polite society in 1930s England, but also, in contemporary discourse, set apart from heteronormative standards of normalcy. In Mariusz Trelínski’s staging for a 2015 production at La Monnaie, the shared caresses of the singing actors in Scene 2 suggest that the Duchess’s sexual partners include both her confidante and her lounge-lizard friend.

Over the course of the opera, both before and after Scene 2, the men who chip away at the Duchess’s status and security do so by chipping away at her song. By the second scene, the audience has already heard a foreshadowing snippet of the tune. In

Adès and Hensher’s ideal staging, the curtain opens on Scene 1 (“Nineteen ninety”) after a brief overture, and the audience sees the Electrician and Maid. The Electrician, playing dress-up in the Duchess’s coat and wig, strikes “a very camp Statue of Liberty pose” – perhaps referencing New York, the city where Margaret grew up. The working-class young people have discovered whose “fabulously hideous gilt and pastel hôtel room” they have found – and they both know all about her past transgressions. We first hear 83

fragments of the Duchess’s song through the Electrician, in drag as the Duchess.

Addressing the Maid, he introduces his parody:

Let me tell you about me. Let me tell you about my life as a famous beauty. They wrote operas about me. (laugh) They wrote novels about me. (laugh. Song starts in the orchestra about now) They painted portraits of me that won every prize in London. (grand gesture to spotlit blank wall) They wrote songs about me. You know that song. Everyone knows that song – Love me Why don’t you suck me off until I can’t take more I’ll really ram it in your jaw* Because you practice every night fellatio67 It’s the most delightful art you know… (*Enter Duchess, behind. Tiny, terrifying, dressed in another fur coat, even more grotesquely enormous…)68

With all the pomp and emphasis of a drag queen impersonating a lost female

celebrity, he sings the chorus of Adès’s fictional Tin Pan Alley song about the Duchess,

complete with lewd substitute lyrics that cruelly lampoon her for the transgression that

brought about her divorce. More troubling than the invasion of the Duchess’s living space

and clothing by a mocking doppelgänger, the Electrician’s invasion of her song poses an existential threat to her sense of self and self-worth. It constitutes a violation of the sonic space in which she safeguards her pride, that lost world of the past when sex and money seemed unlimited, the secret of her promiscuity safe, and songs about her remained laudatory and romantic. In narrative time, this burlesque – which the Duchess overhears –

turns out to precede her final psychotic break by mere minutes.

67 Adès instructs singers to pronounce the word “fellatio” as in Italian, to rhyme with “art-y’know.” The poetic voice of this parody – a male suitor – sounds ridiculous and posh when pronouncing the English word as though an exotic borrowing. Not only does the added touch enable a silly rhyme, it also amplifies the message that the Duchess surrounds herself with effete snobs. 68 Hensher, Powder Her Face, 6. 84

The term queer crops up again in Scene 5, during the romp in which the Mistress

teases the Duke with hints about his wife’s dalliances. Though this culminates in their

discovery of the Duchess’s scandalous polaroids, the taunting Mistress playfully quotes

the Duchess’s song first, reframing the adjective queer as a definite pejorative and linking

it with the loaded terminology of perversion – a step beyond the sinful or blind. At the conclusion of the Paper Chase pantomime which closes Scene 5 (and thus Act I), the mistress paraphrases the song again, crying “[s]he’s in your clutches” to the Duke as they examine the incriminating photographs. The melody of the two-bar declaration of triumph approximates that of the original phrase. Taken together, Scenes 4 and 5 represent the dramatic midpoint at which the Duchess’s rise to fame, fortune, and sexual bounty comes to an end. On chuchote, insist the characters – and the whispers become the Mistress’s taunts, delivered to the Duke through the Duchess’s own tune. Seconds after the audience hears the paraphrase, Act I ends with a brief fortississimo stab of B-flat minor followed by a long-held pianississimo D-natural. The Duchess’s music becomes tainted with the B-flat sonority the moment she meets the Duke, but her fall cannot begin in earnest until the discovery of the photographs; the score registers this turning point.

Her good fortune ends with the exposure of her sexual excesses – a cataclysm marked by the mistress’s appropriation and distortion of her song. In breaking down the song, the mistress breaks down the walls that protect the Duchess’s sexual secrets.

That the co-creators of the opera introduce their heroine through a double – a drag

double – is no reasonless whim. The Duchess’s song, a sentimental number about

forbidden and non-normative love, speaks to her difference. The word “queer” hovers

about her in scene after scene, and the sex act that indirectly leads to her ruin and 85

disgrace is stigmatized as a perverse act in the historical moment of the diegesis. At every turn, the words and events of the drama complicate the Duchess’s sexuality. Music aids in this agenda; whenever a character tries to capture what it is that makes the Duchess so different, we hear her song. Given the available evidence, it’s well-nigh impossible to avoid the conclusion that Adès and Hensher conceived of their heroine as an allegorical figure, so determined not to bend to societal standards that she broke instead. In their

vision, her path to ruin traces a nightmare scenario for any individual whose sexual

encounters must happen in secret: not mere exposure and ridicule, but massive, public

exposure, and bitter mockery sustained for decades. In Adès and Hensher’s framing of

the situation, the Duchess’s is an epistemology of the closet – apologies to Sedgwick.69

The final two gestures toward the song come near the end of the opera, in 1990 once again, as the Duchess – snapped out of her extended flashback by the delivery of the eviction notice – struggles with her feelings of loneliness and despair. “There’s nothing in all the world,” she cries, quoting the song’s verse – before breaking off and declaring that there is, indeed, nothing left for her as she nears the end of her life, her few friends dead, her money spent, and her home now gone. The opera’s moment of deepest pathos arrives when the Duchess leaves her hotel room, clutching only the phonograph that played her song six decades ago, when all seemed full of promise. From Adès’s use of a faux Tin

Pan Alley tune as nostalgic space and vessel of identity, I draw two conclusions. First: the widespread conception of popular entertainments, and early twentieth-century musical theatre in particular, as utopian spaces – an idea articulated by Richard Dyer –

69 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Revised ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 86 has held up not only within academic discourse, but in pastiche depictions of this sort of music.70 Like Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, Powder Her Face offers up a vision of bygone pop music in service of tragic nostalgia; the past, with its grand performances and clever, lush love songs, is a lost and permanently inaccessible domain of happiness, promise, and plenty. Of all the differences that separate Follies, a musical about aging

Broadway performers, and Powder Her Face, about a socialite feted by a fictitious Tin

Pan Alley or West End songwriter, the amount of emphasis placed on a single musical moment – the Duchess’s song – most clearly signals the novelty of Adès’s approach. He effectively narrows the Duchess’s fantasy world to the space of a song.

Second: Adès advances not just this particular song, but popular music writ large, as a kind of shelter from the slings and arrows of a hostile world. The pattern that he establishes in Powder Her Face recurs in his famous orchestral piece Asyla, in which an

EDM rave serves as one of the titular spaces of asylum. In 1994, the same year in which he wrote Powder Her Face, Adès also finished the string quartet Arcadiana, itself a string of pastiche pieces that depict forms of arcadia – one of them a parodic tango, clearly related to the ones that bookend the concurrently composed opera. Time and again in the mid- to late 1990s, he created musical spaces of refuge and security: expanses of musical time occupied by pop music. Powder Her Face forms another part of this larger project within Adès’s work – and it reaches the pessimistic conclusion that few spaces, sonic or physical, can remain truly safe under conditions of inhumanity, greed, and patriarchal domination.

If the popular song represents the Duchess, then what of the stretches of

70 Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 19-35. 87

modernist art music that dominate the opera? Nested within this broad latter category,

one finds another dichotomy: that between old and new, borrowed and original. Though

many of the references to works past remain subtle, even obscure – recall the possible

two-note reference to Stravinsky’s Threni – others seize audience members by their

collars, refusing to remain hidden. The Judge’s aria of Scene 6, a lengthy showpiece for

the bass based on the real verdict handed down by the presiding official in the Duchess of

Argyll’s divorce proceedings, comes across as a mad scene – a particular, canonic mad

scene. Overwhelmed by the extent and number of the fictionalized Duchess’s

extramarital sexual exploits, the man becomes unhinged. He employs particular turns of

phrase: queer acts – beast – Don Juan among women. Wigged, robed, and barking orders

incoherently, the judge here resembles King George III, as depicted by Sir Peter Maxwell

Davies in that masterpiece of postmodernist raving, Eight Songs for a Mad King.71

Shortly after this vicious screed, the Duchess declares her defiance, her will to persist in the face of invective – but Adès instructs the performer to undercut the seriousness of the moment. In a gesture toward her new status as a pariah, and a moment of surreal intertextual jest for the composer, the singing actress is asked to appear bearded as the orchestra plays a paraphrased melody from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. The implied complication of gender identity here gets at a deeper issue than that of Adès’s fascination with Igor Stravinsky’s character, Baba the Turk. Whether she appears wearing a beard or sits in silence as a Judge brands her a Don Juan figure, one senses that the characters, and perhaps even the creators, of the opera have a hard time confining the

71 In the performance of Scene 6 captured on DVD, bass Graeme Broadbent sounds uncannily like Julius Eastman, the American baritone, pianist, and composer who first recorded Eight Songs in the role of King George III. 88

Duchess to a rigid gender category – and this fact bothers them to no end. This is but one

symptom of a broader alterity, a thorough if vague difference that eventually leads to the

Duchess’s ruin and reclusion.

The creators’ extended project of Othering the Duchess – of making her appear

too rich, arrogant, old, sexual, and deranged to take seriously through the first seven

scenes, all before opening the affective trapdoor under their listeners in Scene 8 – does

not end with a few well-chosen song lyrics. Adès depicts his own characters as figures

from other operas, plants musical paraphrases and quotations at key points in the drama, presents transparent stylistic and technical emulations of predecessors, and in general treats his own work as a curated wing within that grandest of edifices in Western art music, Goehr’s Imaginary Museum of Musical Works – the canon. The Duchess thereby becomes a refugee from the past, stranded in the present – not only a punished Pandora, but also a gender-swapped Orpheus who pines for the beautiful girl she has lost: her own past self. The two mythic images collide and interact throughout the piece, and through it all, Adès maintains a certain degree of calculated uncertainty about the precise gender of his heroine: is she Orpheus in drag, or Pandora with a beard? The answer, as always in this piece: both.

Powder Her Face, a sort of sonic modernist gallery of composers and works collected and exhibited by the young Adès, stands as a punctuation and farewell to the musical century it recalls: an Orphic moment for musical modernism, the backward glance that confirms the viewer’s love even as it consigns the object of affection to oblivion. In looking back, Powder Her Face also reshapes the musical past in its own image – and its recollection of history deviates substantially from standard narratives like 89 those of Darmstadt high-modernism or Rockism. It proposes a way forward for art music that, as Julian Johnson might put it, “re-members” twentieth-century music – reconfigures it – as the heyday of composers like Astor Piazzolla, Alban Berg, Henry

Cowell, Leoš Janáček, and even Tin Pan Alley and Argentine tango songwriters, rather than, say, Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, or the Beatles.72 As I have argued above,

Powder Her Face also stood at the beginning of an ongoing trend. Even as the piece’s historical gestures place the Duchess in the position of a latter-day Pandora, Lilith, or

Eve, they also situate her as Orpheus.

The period covered by Powder Her Face saw the transformation not only of social mores and aristocratic privilege, but of opera and popular music as media and art- forms. The extraordinary musical developments of the century coincided with the extraordinary events of the Duchess of Argyll’s life, and thus formed the basis of Adès’s score. Margaret Campbell was born a year after Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier premiered, when social dances like the Tango had just begun to sweep Europe. By the

1930s, she had become a star in Britain’s social firmament – just as Tin Pan Alley song and jazz began to travel to mass audiences over the airwaves, and sordid tragedies like

Berg’s incomplete Lulu hit stages. By the 1950s, when Margaret’s marriage imploded in full view of the tabloid-buying public, only a few composers showed any interest in the genre at all. As she retreated into the privacy of her hotel room, experimental and hybrid

72 I have not chosen Boulez and Webern’s names by arbitrary whim. In Full of Noises, Adès defends creators of new tonal languages, such as the Ligeti of the Horn Trio and subsequent works, against modernist charges of regression and stagnation, citing the internal logic of these systems as comparably complex to and more aesthetically compelling than certain high-modernist styles. He mentions integral serialism in particular as a false pinnacle compared with the work of Ligeti and similar composers, thus echoing the arguments of Susan McClary in her critique of compositional faux-positivism. See: Service and Adès, Full of Noises, 141-142; and McClary, “Terminal Prestige: the Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring, 1989): 57-81.

90

pieces like Astor Piazzolla’s tango operita María de Buenos Aires began to suggest ways forward. György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre sent up the entire Western art music tradition when it premiered in 1978, and, only a year later, a completion of Berg’s Lulu swept the world with all the force of a brand-new piece. Suddenly, Pierre Boulez’s recommendation that the opera houses be blown up seemed more absurd than ever; he was now conducting them. Adès, born in 1971, came of age just as the commissioning, composing, and production of new opera began to accelerate across Europe and the

Americas. So-called “CNN operas” like John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which portrayed recent public events, and situated versions of real people among their dramatis personae, proliferated. By 1994, the idea of writing a controversy-courting opera based on a real tabloid scandal must have seemed almost too obvious.

In a dissertation on quotation, paraphrase, and allusion in Le Grand Macabre – the postmodern pastiche opera par excellence – Peter Edwards argues that that opera

“...demonstrates a subcutaneous engagement with the musical past...makes apparent the shortcomings of conventional notions of parody and pastiche...[and] moves beyond the postmodern play of signs and towards the transformation of past musical material from within.”73 Adès’s paraphrases perform a similar sort of work. They tend to emerge from

his own music without obvious moments of rupture, as though grafted into the piece’s

harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic tissue. When, for instance, a melodic quotation from a

tango by the Argentine songwriter Carlos Gardel appears only a few bars into the

Overture, Adès does not simply cut and paste in an act of Berio-style bricolage; he works

out a compromise between his musical language and that of the borrowing. Such

73 Peter Edwards, “Tradition and the Endless Now: A Study of György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre” (PhD diss., University of Oslo, 2012), 4. 91

paraphrases – and there are many – stand out. As David Metzer has argued, this kind of obvious borrowing prompts fresh contemplation of the material in question, and brings new resonance to the quoted or imitated music – the old grows into the new, even as it

remains foreign to its surroundings.74 The Overture and Epilogue that bookend the

opera’s main narrative introduce this paraphrase of Gardel by way of the tango nuevo

style of Astor Piazzolla, a predecessor of Adès in the lineage of twentieth-century

musical innovators who similarly sought to amalgamate popular song and dance idioms

with the trappings of modernist art music.

This first example raises an elementary question: why does an introductory tune

from a now-obscure 1930s dance track appear so early in this opera? The answers are

many. Emma Gallon has persuasively argued that tango serves as a topical signifier of

licentiousness throughout the piece; those broad cultural implications have remained

consistent for over a century.75 Yet further substrata of meaning lie beneath this fleeting

paraphrase. How better to mark the Duchess as a sexual Other than to associate her with

the habanera bassline, a defining feature of the Tango and the basis of opera’s great

come-hither aria of all time, “L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Bizet’s Carmen?

Susan McClary has written extensively on the ties between the chromatic slippage and

dance rhythms in Carmen’s music and the slippery, sensuous, and ultimately dangerous

nature of the character herself.76 With its surfeit of interstitial leading tones and off-kilter

habanera rhythms, this retouched borrowing from Gardel invites a comparable

interpretation. In addition to tying the Duchess to Carmen as a fellow doomed seductress,

74 David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 75 Gallon, Narrativities, 217-226. 76 Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 44-61. 92

the reference kick-starts the opera’s long-term project of exoticizing her. Hardly content

to mark the Duchess as an Other in sexuality alone, Adès also surrounds her with

references to non-Western genres, styles, and opera characters. The hidden lyrical content

of this Tango, “Cuesta Abajo” – “Downhill” – actually foreshadows the Duchess’s fate:

Si arrastré por este mundo If this world has seen me dragging la vergüenza de haber sido All the shame of what I have been y el dolor de ya no ser… And the pain of being no more…

Si crucé por los caminos If I roamed and if I wandered como un paria que el destino Like an outcast who was haunted se empeñó en deshacer… By a baleful destiny…

Ahora, cuesta abajo en mi rodada These days I’m incapable of tearing las ilusiones pasadas Out the old hopes I’m still bearing, ya no las puedo arrancar. Now that downhill is my track. Sueño, con el pasado que añoro, Dreaming of the times I was in clover, el tiempo viejo que lloro Of the past I’m weeping over y que nunca volverá... And that never will come back... … … Ahora, triste en la pendiente, Now I’m sad and sliding downward, solitario y ya vencido… I’m so lonely and defeated…77

Gardel sings in the voice of an abandoned lover, using exceptionally apocalyptic language to depict his newfound position as a lonely outcast, forever sealed off from his happy past. For those precious few who hear the piece, recognize it, and recall its lyrics – a group that may well include only Adès and a few latter-day tango aficionados – the paraphrase will spoil the plot. Downhill: such is the inevitable trajectory of the Duchess, and of every operatic femme fatale in the latter half of her respective story. It bears mention that, in addition to all of these layers of intertextual meaning, this opening paraphrase plants the seeds for the opera’s long-term harmonic growth; G minor, the key

77 Translation by Coby Lubliner: http://faculty.ce.berkeley.edu/coby/songtr/tangos/cuesta.htm. 93

to which Adès transposes the tune, contains both B-flat and D. In true Beethovenian or

Brahmsian fashion, the young composer plants the seeds of the piece’s eventual outcome

in its first few bars. Adès here hints at the deed of music to be done, the problematic sore

pitch that must be purged: the Duchess’s D, as both tonal center and independent pitch-

class.

Scene 7, which finds a veiled Duchess fighting to maintain composure after the

Judge’s searing verdict in her divorce trial, contains another significant paraphrase – in

this case, a scrambled recollection of Act III, scene I of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s

Progress. An opera based on William Hogarth’s eponymous eighteenth-century

engravings, the piece features Tom Rakewell, a lazy and gullible young man; Nick

Shadow, the deputy of Satan who lures him into a life of sin; Anne Trulove, Tom’s

abandoned sweetheart; and, most important for this example, Baba the Turk, a stage

performer who takes her sideshow act as a bearded lady quite seriously. Baba stands apart from the crowd of nondescript powdered wigs and bustles around her. For all her autonomy, agency, and confidence, she is clearly the designated exotic Other of the opera. An outcast accustomed to stares, she assumes the stereotypical behaviors of the

Diva, demanding payment if she is to be gawked at. In this scene, having – like Anne – been abandoned by Rakewell, Baba makes her exit in a moment of grandiose third-person assertion: “you – ! summon my carriage…out of my way…the next time you see Baba, you shall pay!”

In the published vocal score for Powder Her Face, Adès makes his intended pastiche of this moment obvious, suggesting that the Duchess unveil herself to reveal a 94 bearded face.78 Even without this visual gag, seldom observed in performance, the scene presents a clear musical and textual echo of Baba’s moment in the limelight. Here, the

Duchess shows her Otherness – if not on her face, then in her words and manner. Though

Adès appropriates the relatively powerful figure of Baba and maps her mannerisms onto his own heroine, the effect of this garbled quotation is of rendering the Duchess and the onlookers absurd. She also continues to look and sound exotic compared to other characters. The Duchess’s emergence as Baba also raises the issue of gender performance. The specter of the drag queen arises again in this moment: the Electrician’s impersonation of the Duchess in her clothing raises a number of questions by itself, but the fact that the Duchess’s first attempt to speak back to male power comes from behind a beard renders the question unavoidable.

Whither and why this intentional confusion of the Duchess’s gender? The answer involves a long history of depictions of older women as masculinized, as well as Adès’s overall project of establishing the Duchess as an allegorical figure who stands in for gay men. As early as Monteverdi’s operas, men played old women onstage. That Adès indulges in this sort of gender conflation in a scene set in 1955, when the fictionalized

Duchess would have been in her mid-40s, speaks to societal double-standards around age and sexuality for women in the West. However, the more powerful resonances occur in the outer scenes, when she has entered the ninth decade of her life and thus closely resembles Norma Desmond. As the critic Hilton Als has pointed out, Desmond – with her exaggerated silent-cinema theatricality, lurid makeup, and grandiose declarations – herself resembles a drag queen in costume as an old woman, especially in the musical

78 Adès, Powder Her Face [Vocal], 89. 95 play version by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.79 Despite her advanced age, this version of

Desmond, like the cinematic one, aspires to play a teenage Salome – a femme fatale. The

Duchess’s declaration of independence and resilience becomes her own Sunset

Boulevard-esque staircase moment, and, because of this persistent association of older women with masculinity in general and the drag queen in particular, she wears Baba’s beard. Her sexual agency, assertiveness, and age – or, more precisely, lack of girlish sexuality à la Maid and Mistress – conspire against her to make her display of confidence and defiance absurdly mannish, as well as somehow foreign.

Another paraphrase speaks to the Duchess’s age in a different sense. Strauss’s

Der Rosenkavalier, which ends in the resolution of a love triangle between an aging

Countess, her young consort Octavian, and the wealthy Sophie, takes age difference and ephemerality as central themes. Powder Her Face, by contrast, places its spotlight on a single woman in multiple phases of life, from glorious youth through miserable, lonely old age. In one moment of Scene 7, which finds the Duchess participating in an interview as a porter brings in her new collection of extravagant hats, the disconnect between the

Duchess’s present reality and her self-image becomes painfully apparent thanks to a brief reference to Strauss’s piece. In Act II, Scene 1 of Der Rosenkavalier, Octavian delivers a silver rose to Sophie, fulfilling his duty to propose marriage on the loathsome Baron

Ochs’s behalf. At this point, the delivery boy and recipient become smitten with each other. The comparable moment in Powder Her Face could scarcely present a greater contrast in affect, as we hear the sequence of chords that accompany the presentation of

79 Hilton Als, “Dressing Like a Woman in ‘Sunset Boulevard,’” New Yorker, February 27, 2017, accessed March 6, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/dressing-like-a-woman-in-sunset- boulevard. 96

the rose when the adult porter hands her a hatbox and she dons it, obsessed with beauty and fashion even in her days as a recluse. The Duchess, of course, will not meet another suitor; she only ever sees servants and professionals like the porter. She is, in this

situation, a clear analogue for Strauss’s Marschallin, who ends up lonely again at the end

of Rosenkavalier. The Duchess clings to her sense of youthful glamour and sex appeal,

however, thinking of herself as more of a Sophie as she receives expensive tokens and –

she imagines – the adoration of all who lay eyes on her. As her deranged ranting later in

the scene will show, her temperament resembles that of Ochs. Adès renders this quotidian

moment profoundly sad while characterizing his anti-heroine through musical humor.

Full coverage and analysis of Adès’s quotations and allusions lies beyond the

scope of this chapter; however, one more bears mention. In a compelling thesis, the

conductor Geoffrey Pope has observed that the interlude that follows Scene 2 in Powder

Her Face mirrors that between Scenes 4 and 5 in Act III of Berg’s Wozzeck, the famous

closed-curtain “Invention on a Key” in which Berg invites his audience into a ritual of

collective mourning for the deaths of Wozzeck and Marie.80 Though any audience

member familiar with Berg’s first opera might discern surface-level similarities between

the two instrumental slow movements, from their dark, muted timbres to their shared

tendency to approach tonal confirmation while also flouting it, Pope has discovered a

subtler correspondence: the two laments, both tripartite in form, share near-exact

sectional proportions. Striking though this correspondence may be, the musically similar

tragic adagio that follows Act I, Scene 2 of Lulu matches Adès’s in dramatic significance

as well as sonic character. It follows the title character’s declaration that, try though he

80 Geoffrey Pope, “‘Similar Concerns’ in Alban Berg’s Final Interlude from Wozzeck and Thomas Adès’s Second Interlude from Powder Her Face (M.A. Thesis, University of Rochester, 2012). 97 might to resist, Dr. Schön will marry her yet – a prediction that comes true in short order, to the detriment of both parties. In both operas’ second scenes, the anti-heroine announces her intention to wed a powerful man whose machinations will lead to her ruin

– and a mournful adagio laden with half-step sighs follows. Adès, who bonded with his librettist over their mutual love for and intellectual investment in Lulu, here lays the piece’s debt to Berg bare. The allusion helps to completes Adès’s musical portrait of the

Duchess, a transgressive figure doomed to ostracism: at once too exotic and sexual

(Gardel via Piazzolla), too assertive and masculine (Stravinsky), too old (Strauss), and too much of a femme fatale (Berg), she defies every expectation that her society sets out for a female peer. Gestures toward popular music and the operatic canon mark the

Duchess as an Other, and serve as red flags to draw the attention of patriarchal disciplinarians – the opposite function of the Tin Pan Alley song, her shelter and the site of her desires.

These musical citations also help bind Powder Her Face to history, welding it to a diverse range of styles, genres, and levels of cultural prestige. As the elderly recluse at its center spends most of the opera’s duration remembering, so too does Adès’s music function as an agent of memory. Though both character and piece remain to some extent fixed in the context of the early 1990s – the Duchess at the end of her life, the opera at the moment of its debut – both return, in their own ways, to the past. The Hotel Manager speaks as a representative of both death and history when he informs her, singing in lament mode, that she is too late to save herself. In raising the topic of “lateness,” I invoke Julian Johnson’s concept of the modern artwork as always already late, 98 fundamentally nostalgic – no matter how new or purportedly divorced from history.81 In his monograph Out of Time, Johnson argues that such ubiquitous themes of post- medieval Western experience cannot help but color art, especially when the artist engages with the history of a medium as a matter of course. A cursory glance at the index of Full of Noises, a book-length interview with Adès by the journalist Tom Service, reveals dozens of references to past composers; the musician behind Powder Her Face has an extraordinary preoccupation with history.

In Johnson’s thought, the essentially modern piece of music – whether

Monteverdi’s L‘Orfeo or an Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus – seems to “remember,” or invoke, that which is lost to time, even as it pieces together some fragmentary effigy of a lost mood, state, or moment – “re-members” it. Powder Her Face arrives too late to coexist with the music that it emulates, just as the Duchess is too late to salvage her situation. If the opera seems a fitting extension to the canon, then perhaps the affinity between it and older examples of musical modernity has to do with its evergreen message about the persistence of memory. The Duchess embodies the opera’s pessimistically modern ethos. In her monograph Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary

Opera, Yayoi Uno Everett brings narrative theory to bear on a phenomenon that has only become more prevalent since the 1990s: the tendency of today’s opera composers to fashion lead characters along the lines of clear mythic archetypes, from the Faust-figure of Robert Oppenheimer in Adams’s Doctor Atomic to the grieving Marian protagonist of

Saariaho’s Adriana Mater.82

81 Julian Johnson, Out of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13-46. 82 Yayoi Uno Everett, Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 99

The Duchess of Powder Her Face stands as a grand conflation of two mythic

images: the femme fatale archetype as described by McClary and others, and the

determined but ultimately unsuccessful Orpheus as captured by Johnson. She is a Carmen

felled by the rapier wit of tabloid wags, a Salome who loses her mind rather than receiving a head, a Lulu who lives to see her portrait seized by a creditor; and yet she conjures music – her song – in a desperate attempt to retrieve what she has lost, only to fall silent in the end. The tragedies of the femme fatale and the master musician become one and the same. The Duchess’s youthful bedroom adventures exceed the frame allotted a woman, especially one of her stature, by society – and her later-in-life attempts to

remain rooted in her past similarly earn her the sneering wrath of a society that wishes to

remember her only as a punchline. Adès composes out a subjective state, advances a

piece that seems capable of reminiscence. The opera opens in a tango nuevo soundscape,

with accented premonitions of the fellatio aria theme tearing open Adès’s portal to the past – but tango gestures also declare the Duchess lost and mostly forgotten at the end of the opera. Her attempt to escape present sorrow by clutching at the past fails, just as

Adès’s attempt to reassemble the past in the present dissolves into dance. The Duchess’s glory days, and the past composers and compositional styles that Adès champions, are, like Euridice, fated to remain lost.

Conclusion as Continuation as New Beginning

The operatic anti-heroines of yore resisted the societal status quo, often just by

existing. The Duchess, who represents loathsome hierarchies even as she violates codes

of sexual propriety, compounds the crimes of opera’s poor harlots with her hypocrisy.

Before the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, before 100

“income inequality” became an ever-present buzzword, before the economic crises of

2008, there was the Duchess and all she stood for: pernicious social arrangements,

flaunted with furs. Adès and Hensher see to it that their work dispatches her with abundant ridicule and force – but not entirely without sympathy. And so the fictionalized

Duchess, in some ways an ally to those ideologues of 1980s Britain who kindled nostalgia for an imperial past and peddled anti-gay sentiments, ends her decades of denial at the feet of post-1980s greed, her possessions and dignity gone forever. A certain irony colors the fact that this representative of ancient British hierarchies invites sympathy for her plight. Tossed aside, assured that her honorific means nothing at the end of her life

(and of the century), she shows audiences what contemporary society has done to the odious old system – and, perhaps, inspires some pity for it and its surviving beneficiaries.

The old class system enforced hierarchies that benefited a precious few at the expense of the many. However, the Duchess, for all her dissembling and nastiness, has none of the

chilling insistence of the Hotel Manager. No longer able to coast on her title and unworked-for riches anymore, she becomes a human twin of her outmoded accoutrements, and of the Peerage itself: so much detritus for the ash-heap of pre-1995 history, subject to scorn and dismissal when money is at stake.

W. Joseph Campbell has identified the year of Powder Her Face’s premiere as a

fissure in history: “Nineteen Ninety-Five was the inaugural year of the twenty-first

century, a clear starting point for contemporary life.”83 In crafting an opera in which past

and present collide and mingle in dialectical tension, Adès and Hensher also mark the end

of the bad old days, and the beginning of a new age that threatens to be just as inhumane.

83 Campbell, 1995, 1. 101

Whether they sensed it or not, the year of Powder Her Face was, in Campbell’s tidy

formulation, “the Year the Future Began” – a black full stop for the twentieth century.

Channel 4’s decision to broadcast their television production on Christmas day in 2000,

less than two years’ time after the acquittal of Bill Clinton and six days before the actual

millennial turn, fit the spirit of the times for many in the industrialized West. Powder Her

Face, with its tawdry tabloid subject matter, cardboard-cutout characters, sick sense of

humor, and all-too-brief glimpses of humanity, is arguably the opera that the century of

the world wars deserved – and a warning of continued misery, alienation, and societal

unraveling that the twenty-first might have heeded.

In terms of the operatic tradition, too, Powder Her Face hovers between the

modernism and postmodernism of the preceding ninety years – from Strauss, Berg, and

Stravinsky to Ligeti, Adams, and Corigliano – and a thriving new-opera scene that then

remained in its infancy. Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) initiated a series of

contemporary operas in which artists have explored grand themes such as war, love,

hatred, death, and compassion in meditative, politically-charged rituals – latter-day

descendants of J.S. Bach’s oratorio-Passions.84 Powder Her Face presages another trend

entirely – the sordid, death-driven shockers of the 2010s – and looks back to different

ancestors: the anti-heroine vehicles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By 2013, it had itself become an ancestor to a second wave of similar works, a tour de force of musical modern art suspended between the gleam of newness and the patina of canonicity.

In an era defined in part by easy access to art and entertainment, a conventional

84 Most of these operas have involved collaborations between leading composers and the director Peter Sellars, such as Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf’s renowned L’Amour de loin (2000). 102

wisdom has taken root in art music circles in general, and opera in particular: audience

members, no longer convinced by essentially nineteenth-century paeans to edification, need something to hold onto in new music, lest the works fail to speak and the patrons

cease to care.85 I suggest that Powder Her Face provides a superabundance of things to

hold onto. For a text that resists easy reading, it offers an overwhelming array of familiar

images and sounds, all stripped of context – things made rich and strange by

juxtaposition with the new. The resulting wash of character sketches, musical motives,

and dramatic moments leaves savvy listeners with an unusual amount of interpretive

work to perform. Over a quarter-century after its emergence, Umberto Eco’s concept of

the “open work” remains relevant.86 Recent operas similar to Powder Her Face, despite

having such obvious narrative precursors as Carmen and Lulu, flaunt their chameleonic

character – their willingness to supply multiple sides of a story, and multiple moral

perspectives, at once.

They nonetheless share the common telos of the woman’s silence, in addition to

the fascinations with mediation, popular music, and femme fatale subjectivity that have

driven composers and librettists to produce new work on these themes, and motivated me

in this study. Drawing upon Campbell’s arguments in favor of 1995 as historical

boundary, I suggest that the early- to mid-1990s served as a crucible for this trend in new

opera. By 2013, Powder Her Face remained popular even as a raft of new works by

85 For a notable example of this position, refer to the comments that David Gockley, director of the San Francisco opera, made in the summer of 2015. Two journalists with the radio station WQXR led a panel discussion on new opera after New York-based critics pronounced George Benjamin’s expressionist work Written on Skin a triumph. Of Benjamin’s piece, Gockley said: “[i]ts musical language is extraordinarily complicated. I mean, are you going to sit down and play [a recording of] that at dinner?” Naomi Lewin and Brian Wise, “Contemporary Opera: Pleasing Both Connoisseurs and the Masses?,” WQXR: Conducting Business, August 31, 2015, accessed October 21, 2015, http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/contemporary-opera- pleasing-both-connoisseurs-and-masses/. 86 See: Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 103

Louis Andriessen, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Olga Neuwirth, and others began to take up

the challenge of the anti-heroine and her operatic legacy anew. In the next chapters, I

examine two further biographical accounts – Andriessen’s portrayal of a rough contemporary of the Duchess, and Turnage’s ripped-from-the-headlines romp through the

life and death of a reality television star – and trace the lasting effects of the late

twentieth century’s artistic currents, political developments, and cultural shifts. 104

Chapter Three

My Heart Belongs to Daddy: Editing, Archetypes, and Anaïs Nin

I write love letters to Henry [Miller], to Father, to Hugo [Guiler]. Not to [René] Allendy, because he is acting spitefully, like a woman. Not taking his defeat like a sage. And [Antonin] Artaud asked me, “What have you done to Allendy? You have done him harm.” And, “Why do you give that terrible impression – of evil – of cruelty – of seductiveness, trickery, superficiality? Is it an appearance? I hated you at first as one hates an all- powerful temptress. I hated you as one hates evil.”

I feel supremely innocent, yet I have done evil. I have committed all the sacrileges. And I must be all evil now, because I am even free of remorse. I feel no remorse toward Hugo or Artaud or Henry. And I am becoming aware that I am wreaking a kind of revenge upon men, that I am impelled by a satanic force to win and abandon them…Life, or my own ingenuity, provides me with beautiful justifications. How exonerated for betraying Hugh I would be by anyone who knew the sexual tortures I endured from the beginning. Even my Mother knows of my despairing visits to the doctors when I thought there was something wrong with me.

Solitude. I seek to be divided – I seek this tension and multilateral flow. It is the true expression of myself.1

The French-American literary luminary Anaïs Nin knew the value of her own

long-maintained journals. She used entries from them as source material for her novels

and, later, for the expurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin.2 The latter, published in seven volumes between 1966 and 1980, attracted a substantial following among the reading public, and continues to fascinate a broad internet-based fan community.3 The composer Louis

Andriessen, having read a volume from the posthumously released, unexpurgated version

1 Anaïs Nin, Incest, Vol. 2 of From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, ed. Rupert Pole (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1993), 196. 2 This original series was published as the following: Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 7 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966-80). 3 Sady Doyle, “Before Lena Dunham, There Was Anaïs Nin,” Guardian, April 7, 2015, accessed April 10, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/apr/07/anais-nin-author-social-media.

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of Nin’s diary – sold through the late 1980s and 1990s as A Journal of Love – similarly

saw Nin’s recorded memories as irresistible raw material.4 He assembled most of his

libretto for the monodrama Anaïs Nin from her private writings of 1933, choosing those

events and swaths of text that he found most compelling.5 His interest in her work, born

of a broader increase in posthumous notoriety for Nin in the early and mid-1990s, led to

the creation of the piece over a decade later.

In this chapter, I illuminate the ways in which Andriessen pieces together an

operatic protagonist and mediated supporting cast from fragments of Nin’s published

recollections and writings by her lovers. Though the work has no plot per se, Andriessen

uses music and film to craft a cohesive narrative structure based on Nin’s quotidian

observations and cosmic musings. The composer’s process of selection and adaptation, a

literal editing of texts and effective editing of Nin’s persona, necessarily entailed some

simplification of her complex character. Such is the eternal dilemma of any artist trading

in biographical narratives, including composers and librettists of operas that place singing

actors onstage to play the once-living. Such was the dilemma that Adès and Hensher

faced, and met with black humor and camp caricature, when depicting the Duchess of

Argyll in Powder Her Face.

These perils hardly end when the finished piece hits the stage. Of all the stories

one could tell about persons past, of all the facets of an individual’s personality that can

4 This second series was initially published as the following: Anaïs Nin, From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, ed. Rupert Pole (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1986-96). This run included four volumes: Henry and June (1986), Incest (1992), Fire (1995), and Nearer the Moon (1996). Gunther Stuhlmann assumed editing duties in addition to Pole for vols. III and IV. After Harcourt dropped the series in 1996 and Pole died in 2006, the publication of additional volumes ceased until 2013, when the editor Paul Herron released Mirages under the imprint of the Ohio University Press. Another new volume from Herron, Trapeze, is set for publication in 2017. 5 I include the libretto as Appendix B. I have presented it in the immediate context of Nin’s writings, with editorial indications of Andriessen’s omissions and additions. Please see p. 267.

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emerge as the essential core of their characters, the ones that fascinate the latter-day artist

most will be the ones that come to the fore in the biographical retelling; for the most part,

audiences will receive these as gospel truth. I argue that in his monodrama, Andriessen

preserved a vital transgressive streak in Nin’s personal life that, now available as public

knowledge through her diaries, has both endeared her to the sex-positive and alienated

others. In doing so, however, he also obscured the aspects of Nin’s life and work that

made her a darling of late twentieth-century literati and that continue to earn her the

adulation of many readers. From her perspectives on psychoanalysis and gender to her

thoughts on writing – even the mere fact of her literary career – many of the memories and running themes that fill Nin’s diary vanish upon Andriessen’s translation into multimedia music theatre. To judge by Andriessen’s libretto, one might never guess that the subject of his monodrama sought to break out as a novelist in the months depicted.

I seek to make sense of Andriessen’s act of redaction by considering the piece from several frames of reference. These include Nin’s own cultural milieu and

sensibilities; the source documents on which Andriessen based his work; the state of Nin

reception in the 1990s, when the composer first dove into her work; and the atmosphere

in which he completed the piece, decades into a long, illustrious career and well into the era of tabloid television and biopics. I scrutinize the function of each anecdote that the

listener encounters in Anaïs Nin, examining the ways in which film interludes featuring

words from Nin’s lovers serve as narrative glue, and arguing for the role that musical

gestures and motives play in reducing “Nin” from the sum of her memories to a familiar

archetype. The libretto and score of the monodrama replace Nin’s characteristic mode of

narrative – an unbroken flow of thoughts, vignettes, associations, and digressions, 107

teleology be damned – into an altogether traditional tale, complete with a climax at the three-quarter mark. The literary parts of Nin’s life fall to the cutting-room floor.

My argument addresses the details that Andriessen preserves: the threads of sexual compulsion, deception, transgression, and trauma that Nin herself wove into her grand tapestry of self-narration.6 The composer teased these out in making his

monodrama, yielding an image of a self-styled femme fatale and promiscuous artists’

muse. Nin herself believed and invested in both of these feminine archetypes. However,

she took up, discarded, and complicated them at will, ever toggling among various

identities – from literary visionary to maternal caregiver to mystic, and beyond.

Andriessen’s work homes in on her lies, poses, and above all adulterous sex, locating the

variety in Nin’s life not so much in her multiple personae and social roles as in her

multiple relationships with notable men. The passages in her Diary of 1933 that best

resonate with the Wedekindesque epigraph above, the entries in which she maintains a

tight focus on her fraught affairs with writers and psychoanalysts – these are the writings

that the composer has selected, edited, and juxtaposed with quotations from Nin’s lovers

to form the arc of Anaïs Nin. I contend that the Nin of the early 1930s, who sought to

make sense of herself by playing into gendered psychoanalytic categories and narrative

archetypes, becomes another of Lulu’s daughters in Andriessen’s biographical sketch.

6 Andriessen, however, was hardly the first composer to write a music-theatre piece that trained its topical focus on Nin’s affairs and deceptions. In February 2010, months before the debut of Anaïs Nin, the Center for Contemporary Opera presented the semi-staged premiere of the composer Susan Hurley’s Anaïs in New York. Hurley’s one-act chamber opera finds Nin on her deathbed, confessing myriad past transgressions to her lover, Rupert Pole. Composed in a diatonic, post-minimal idiom to a libretto after writings by Barbara Kraft – an interviewer who visited Nin near the end of her life – the piece centers around “innumerable infidelities, incestuous relations[,] and a violent rejection of motherhood.” It ends with Nin’s tragic death. Scored for soprano (Nin), baritone (Pole), string quintet, horn, clarinet, and percussion, the piece went unperformed for years before its premiere, and remained unperformed long after. A copy of the piano-vocal score exists at the Library of Congress: Susan Hurley, Anaïs (Los Angeles: Mearasound, 2001).

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The title of the piece, simply Anaïs Nin – rather than, say, 1933: the Loves of Anaïs Nin, or Incest: Anaïs and Joaquín Nin – implies that the audience should leave the theatre understanding something essential about the title character, that this monodrama captures her life in microcosm. On the contrary, it excludes even the formative events that immediately preceded and soon followed this period in Nin’s life: her affair with June

Miller and her mid-1934 abortion, respectively. Her work never quite comes up.

With its modular yet seamless structure, Andriessen’s piece mirrors the form of his source material: Nin’s diary. The monodrama offers stark contrasts of pace, rhythm, affect, and rhetoric between its various formal units – not unlike Nin’s journal, in which any given entry may present an entirely different tone, language, and cast of characters from the previous one. At times in Incest, it almost seems as though Nin modulates between personae – attitudes, self-images, modes of subjective experience – from one entry to the next. This, I argue, is the crucial point at which Andriessen’s edits create a split between the real, unfiltered Nin and the mediated Nin of his monodrama. The latter remains fixated on her circle of male admirers, her carnal urges, and her tendency to mislead loved ones, even as the music morphs around her, varying the textual theme of licentious living. Nin’s emotional states do shift, as between diary entries – and this registers in the score. However, the subject matter remains almost entirely constant. In addition, the motivic trajectory of the piece tells another story. The distinctive triplet- based ostinato that signifies Nin’s relationship with her long-estranged father, the songwriter Joaquín Nin, wends its way through so much of the piece – starting near the exact midpoint of its duration – that the opera, musically as well as textually, threatens to become a story more about the sire than the siren. 109

Like Lulu, this version of Nin must lose the power to shape her story’s

conclusion. Her “father story,” an extended recollection of her first sexual encounter with

her parent, assumes such central importance that the narrative leaves behind its titular

protagonist almost altogether at the end. Already portrayed as a deceitful seductress

rather than an aspiring literary icon, Andriessen’s protagonist loses even this shred of

agency as her father’s art replaces her own. Nin the elder’s song lyrics become the

piece’s final words, his setting of a Basque folk song its final sound – and he looms in the final image of the video projection as the main character drifts off the darkened stage.

From the scenario to the libretto to the level of musical motive, Andriessen’s piece fulfills opera’s imperative to proffer a seductive anti-heroine, then mute her at the last minute. Though Andriessen has professed his admiration for Nin, and his monodrama contains references to her work and ideas, critics and audiences have taken her for a woman whose entire life consisted of assignations and proud declarations of deceit: a man-eater who cracks up in the end, still unsatisfied after conquering her own kin. The piece itself, especially in the staging supervised by Andriessen and recorded for commercial release on DVD, does little to contravene that interpretation.

---

“Strange days, strange days – weather bad, weather bad.”7 As the soloist who

plays Nin sings these words, a video screen, hovering above the stage, displays images of

her floating underwater, nude but for a red veil. She faces away from the fourth wall and

the viewers beyond it, toward the light streaming through the pool’s surface. She drifts,

7 See Appendix B, or the liner notes for the sole commercial audio recording of Anaïs Nin: Louis Andriessen, liner notes to Anaïs Nin/De Staat, trans. Richard Wigmore, Cristina Zavalloni and the London Sinfonietta, Signum B005HO1W92, CD, 2011.

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moving but directionless (Figure 3.1). The music sparkles with dissonances – the soft

chimes of a glockenspiel and a piano, and high lines for a lone violin – as the soloist

intones her diatonic melody (Example 3.1).8 The singer and onstage ensemble have just reached the middle third of Louis Andriessen’s monodrama Anaïs Nin, and the words that

the mezzo-soprano sings here are some of the few in the libretto that do not concern a love affair. A fanfare will soon disrupt the moment of musical stasis, but the soloist, echoing a lone trumpet, will nonetheless continue to sing of personal thoughts and agency for a moment. She draws an implicit comparison between her own self-mastery and a

godlike power to reshape the world, ignoring the difference between subjective state and

physical reality: “…so I created my own weather.” At no other point in the piece does

this character assert such control over her domain, save the occasional line about controlling and betraying her lovers.

Example 3.1, “Strange days, weather bad” passage, Anaïs Nin (final part of II. Allendy)

8 Louis Andriessen, Anaïs Nin (London: Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd., 2010), 24-6. 111

Figure 3.1, Stage setting for the 2014 21C Festival performance of Anaïs Nin (still from video)

In this performance, the Canadian mezzo Wallis Giunta delivers these lines of prose with a persistent vocal glitch: an idiosyncrasy beyond the glides from pitch to pitch that Andriessen includes in the score (Example 3.1). Somewhere between the uvular r of spoken French and the w sound of American English-speakers with speech impediments, this affected pronunciation of the rhotic consonant – which persists throughout the performance – is there for a reason. So is the silk robe that Giunta wears over a negligée, and the wig, a gleaming helmet of black hair reminiscent of Louise Brooks’s distinctive

bob as Lulu in Die Büchse der Pandora.9 In this performance, the singing actor does her

best to mimic the manner, speaking voice, and dress of the real Nin, not only a celebrated

novelist, diarist, and lecturer, but also an icon of liberated Western womanhood in the

9 Gayle Rosenkrantz, daughter of Nin’s brother Thorvald, recalls: “My earliest memories of Aunt Anaïs are of an exotic looking, strangely dressed woman talking with a funny accent which she claimed was French, but which my dad said was phony. I suspect she had a speech impediment which made it difficult for her to pronounce her r’s.” Gayle Nin Rosenkrantz, Untitled [“Anaïs Nin was my aunt…”], in Recollections of Anaïs Nin, ed. Benjamin Franklin V (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996), 1.

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1960s and ‘70s.

A brief monodrama performed without intermission, Anaïs Nin has, in its first

several years of existence, had multiple productions across Europe and North America,

and been recorded for commercial distribution twice – once on video, and once as the B-

side of an all-Andriessen record with the London Sinfonietta.10 In February 2012, the Los

Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group performed the piece with Cristina Zavalloni, the creator of the Nin role; it shared that program with Andriessen’s La Girò (2011), another piece for soloist and ensemble in which the protagonist, a young woman, serves as a muse for a better-remembered male artist.11 The 21c Festival performance of May

2014, featuring Giunta in her Lulu wig, has been the only one to translate one of Nin’s

moments of free-associative reverie, of “multilateral flow” – mostly excluded from

Andriessen’s libretto, though frequent in her diaries – into such a striking visual, as well

as musical, tableau. I return to the question of video presentations, including this one by

the filmmaker Valerie Buhagiar, below. A 2016 production at National Sawdust in

Brooklyn found the movements of Andriessen’s seldom-heard music theatre piece

Odysseus’ Women (1995) interleaved with the sections of Anaïs Nin, and soloist Augusta

10 The piece moved on to Bad Kissingen and Amsterdam after its premiere performance in Siena in 2010. The Amsterdam concerts were recorded and released on DVD early in 2011, paired with Catherine Bjilsma’s making-of documentary about the piece, Never a Dull Moment. The London Sinfonietta performed the piece with Zavalloni in 2011, and recorded it for release on CD alongside Andriessen’s breakout hit De Staat (1972). Late in 2012, the British-American mezzo Phoebe Haines starred as Nin in a performance at London’s Tête à Tête opera festival. 11 La Girò presents the fictionalized musings of Anna Maddalena Teseire, Vivaldi’s favorite singer and sometime housemate, who styled herself Anna Girò for the stage. Cees Nooteboom contributed the libretto, in which the young singer grows close to the aging composer. Andriessen, who explicitly treats Teseire as Vivaldi’s muse, has suggested more than once that he considers Monica Germino, the violinist and vocalist for whom he wrote the piece, to be his own “Girò.” The parallels between this piece and Anaïs Nin, and the similar roles played by Zavalloni and Germino in these works, are striking. Louis Andriessen, “Composer’s Notes on La Girò,” Boosey & Hawkes, 2011, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Louis-Andriessen-La-Gir/56280. 113

Caso stripped naked by the four female singers of the latter piece at the moment of Nin’s congress with her father – all courtesy of the Center for Contemporary Opera.12

Andriessen’s writing for the vocal soloist tends to fall on and under the treble

staff, with the top third of the part’s range reserved for particularly dramatic or emotive

portions of the text. The ensemble consists of an amplified violin, two reed players,

trumpet, horn, percussion, piano, and double bass. This orchestra resembles that of

Powder Her Face, albeit in microcosm. The reed players take up soprano and alto

saxophones along with B-flat, bass, and contrabass clarinets; the latter instrument in

particular, rattling away in the ensemble’s lowest register, invites listeners to hear textural

similarities between Andriessen’s octet and Adès’s orchestra. The string players are

outnumbered, as in Powder Her Face; the percussionist commands a large battery of

instruments, including some found objects in addition to a drum kit, guiro, glockenspiel,

sandblocks, and others. In scoring for violin, bass, percussion, two brass players, and two

woodwind players, Andriessen also echoes the instrumentation of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire

du soldat. Explaining his choice of timbres, the composer mentions jazz musicians from

the time period depicted: “[t]his explains the use of saxophones, clarinets (Sidney Bechet,

Coleman Hawkins) and percussion…the soundworld for Anaïs Nin is like a little circus

band and the music closely tracks the irony, despair and passion of this many-sided and

brilliant woman.”13 Anaïs Nin is, of course, not the first piece to introduce its anti-heroine

through a circus-band fanfare, nor the first example of edgy music-theatre in which the

12 Anthony Tommasini, “When Anaïs Met Circe, and Other Operatic Adventures,” New York Times, October 21, 2016, accessed October 22, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/arts/music/review- when-anais-met-circe-and-other-operatic-adventures.html. 13 Louis Andriessen, interview with staff, Boosey & Hawkes Composer News, October 2010, accessed February 8, 2016, http://www.boosey.com/cr/news/Andriessen-interview-about-new-monodrama-Ana-s- Nin/12084.

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score evokes 1930s jazz – Berg’s Lulu shares both elements. The onstage “jazz band” of that piece, with its surfeit of winds and handful of violins, resembles the orchestras of both Powder Her Face and Anaïs Nin, and also becomes the bulk of the pit ensemble for

Neuwirth’s American Lulu.

Anaïs Nin has no marked subsections in score or live performance. However, the extant audio recording of the work, which excludes some of the unaccompanied spoken material that sounds during the film interludes, cuts the piece into tracks – many of which bear the names of Nin’s male lovers as titles. The piece proceeds in juxtaposed modules of contrasting tempo and texture; film interludes and instrumental passages break up the text into independent floes of narrative and emotion. Anaïs Nin thus has the feel of a multi-scene piece, though, in the ideal staging implied by the score and in all recorded performances to date, the stage setting never changes and the single character never

leaves.14 Any audience member would be hard-pressed to retell the plot of the opera, as the Nin character reminisces rather than narrates, shifting between situations and lovers

in sync with transitions between musical modules. Despite this absence of plot, the text

and score exert an undeniable teleological pull. Playing at Andriessen’s recommended tempi, the ensemble should arrive at the halfway and three-quarter points of the piece’s

duration around R. 31 and m. 709. These are the respective moments at which Nin begins

to sing of her first sexual encounter with her father, and at which the climax of their

coitus becomes audible as musical onomatopoeia. Given the dramatic weight resting on

14 I will sometimes use these track titles in my discussion of the piece, as these lend more narrative heft to hermeneutic exegesis than, say, bar numbers. A title like The Seduction communicates the crucial events, meaning, and location of a section more effectively and succinctly than something like “the section that extends from two bars before rehearsal 41 to the general pause four bars before rehearsal 60.” 115

these events, and the fact that the lion’s share of the piece deals with the father-daughter

affair, any audience member unfamiliar with Nin’s work might assume that this

relationship played a central role in the woman’s life.15 Even a cursory survey of her

resumé would suggest otherwise.

“Sex, Lies, and Thirty-Five Thousand Words”16

Nin left the world 150 manuscript volumes’ worth of journal entries, a vast tract

of intimate disclosures, intellectual digressions, and snapshots of daily activity that covers more than forty years of her adult life. For his libretto, Andriessen culled extracts from the posthumously edited and published, but “unexpurgated,” edition of her entries dating from late 1932 through late 1934. Rupert Pole, Nin’s husband between 1955 and

1966 and the executor of her trust, released Henry and June, the first volume of the series

From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin, in 1986. Incest, the second volume and the book that inspired Andriessen, followed in 1992. In the meantime, an eponymous feature-film adaptation of Henry and June, written and directed by Philip

Kaufman, made Nin famous all over again – admittedly, for reasons other than her craft.

Maria de Madeiros starred as Nin in the film, which publicists billed “A True Adventure

More Erotic than Any Fantasy.”17 It was the first to carry an NC-17 rating from the

15 Critics have come away from the work with similar impressions. See, for example: Lydia Perović, “Hatzis, Current, Schafer, Andriessen at 21C Festival,” Definitely the Opera, May 23, 2014, accessed May 25, 2016, https://definitelytheopera.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/c21-nin/. 16 I owe this title to Claudia Pierpont, whose scathing review of Incest in the New Yorker summarizes Nin’s life and work in concise fashion. Pierpont’s was but one of many critical thrashings that Nin’s work received in the 1990s. See: Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Sex, Lies, and Thirty-Five Thousand Pages,” New Yorker (March 1, 1993): 74-90. 17 David E. Haberstitch, a champion of the cinematic work of Ian Hugo (Hugh Guiler), has noted an “uncanny” resemblance between Madeiros and Nin, down to the “voice and accent, with its Elmer-Fudd r’s[.]” David Haberstitch, “Wayward Wife as Muse: Anaïs Nin and Ian Hugo,” in Anaïs Nin: A Book of Mirrors (Huntington Woods, MI: Sky Blue Press, 1996), 49.

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MPAA in the United States.

The writings in Incest that became the libretto for Anaïs Nin all come from an

eight-month period in 1933, between January and October. Over this brief span, Nin

writes of her accomplishments and projects, and those of her friends. Flashes of literary

inspiration come at least weekly, sometimes more than once in a day.18 Her thoughts on

Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and other writers fill pages.19 She writes of

psychoanalysis, gender, Paris, and Jazz.20 Ever fascinated with the porous boundary

between life and fiction, she shifts between accounts of her experiences and accounts of

her creative ventures – including the diary itself.

Initial hesitation notwithstanding, Nin embraced avant-garde literature as it

flowered in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is therefore easy to read Nin’s

Journal as a window into a fascinating literary milieu: poets, writers, psychoanalysts,

artists, publishers, and playwrights meet, talk, drink, and engage in love affairs. She

wrote reams about her life as an ambitious young writer and amateur psychoanalyst. In

Incest, however, this accounts for only the warp of her narrative arras. Her erotic exploits

comprise the weft. The portion taken up by Andriessen in his libretto begins just after the

departure of Henry Miller’s wife June in the autumn of 1932. Nin had counted both of the

Millers as lovers. The Journal goes on to cover Nin’s continued love affair with Henry;

the decline and end of her sexual relationship with her analyst, René Allendy; her

abortive, unconsummated liaison with the playwright and theorist of the “theatre of

18 For an exceptional bit of literary sketching, apparently dashed out too quickly to have coherent sentence structure – a rarity in Nin’s uncannily polished diary – see Nin, Incest, 233. 19 Nin rhapsodizes about the work of the former author, a major influence on her work, at Ibid., 106. 20 For an exemplary passage on writing and jazz, see Ibid., 27-8 (“Syncopation...orgasm”). For her valedictory discussion of psychoanalysis in the wake of her initial encounter with Otto Rank, her own first attempts at analysis, and the trauma of her 1934 abortion, see the final paragraph of Incest: Ibid., 426. 117

cruelty” Antonin Artaud; the beginning of a passionate affair with her father; and the

constant subterfuge required to hide all of these lovers from one another, and from her husband, the banker Hugh Guiler. Guiler provided Nin with the funds to hone her experimental prose style in private, pay for her ostensible therapy sessions with Allendy, and – without Guiler’s knowledge – fund Henry Miller as he approached his midlife breakout as a writer. Later known as an avant-garde filmmaker and engraver under the pseudonym Ian Hugo, Guiler remained married to Nin through the end of her life, and may not have learned of her decade-long concurrent marriage to Rupert Pole until her death.21

We can never know the extent to which the experiences of the woman in the diary

mirror the interactions, activities, and beliefs of the flesh-and-blood Anaïs Nin. In one

episode recounted in the diary, Nin informs her despairing husband that the entry he has

just read after stealing a volume – an account of a bedroom romp with Miller – comes

from a set of imaginary events, one in which she sublimates her wildest fantasies and

desires.22 Though she records this as a nuisance, and resolves to begin a second, censored

diary to present as the “real” one to Guiler, how might her readers know whether the

diary they hold conforms to their definition of the real? As the poet and scholar Helen

21 The New York Times reported the death of Anaïs Nin, survived by her husband Hugh Guiler; the Los Angeles Times reported the death of Anaïs Nin, survived by her husband Rupert Pole. See: C. Gerald Fraser, “Anais [sic] Nin, Author Whose Diaries Depicted Intellectual Life, Dead,” New York Times, January 16, 1977, accessed May 22, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1977/01/16/archives/anais-nin-author- whose-diaries-depicted-intellectual-life-dead.html; and Celeste Durant, “Anais [sic] Nin Dies; Noted as Writer and Feminist,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1977, accessed May 21, 2016, https://latimes.newspapers.com/image/164887753/?terms=anais%2Bnin. 22 “And when I saw [Guiler’s] face I began to lie, to lie eloquently[:] ‘You only read the invented journal. It is all invention, to compensate for all I don’t do – believe me, I’m a monster, but only imaginatively. You can read the real journal anytime. Ask Allendy. He knows about the invented journal. He called me ‘la petite fille litteraire.’ I need to write these things. I have too much erotic imagination – and that way it spends itself. I will show you the difference between the truth and the literature.’” Incest, 268.

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Tookey notes, Nin reveled in the ambiguity and multiplicity of identity that came with this proliferation of self-writing projects.23 An ambitious woman whose early work

predated crusades against sexual essentialism, Nin wished to fulfill a perceived imperative to motherhood. As a feminist and artist, however, she aimed for a figurative rather than filial maternity. She sought to give life to both literary works and new selves –

new narratives of self – which she could inhabit, alternate between, or discontinue at her

own discretion.

For Nin, as for Miller, a life lived with bohemian abandon – and recorded in artful

prose – made for a literary work of unique immediacy and authenticity, once safely

distorted and embellished. As Tookey notes, the diarist had begun to conceive of life and

writing as mutually dependent and inextricable by the age of sixteen.24 Her later

experiences with acclaimed semi-autobiographical novels confirmed what she already

knew. Proust made a towering literary edifice of his own memories, and Joyce rose to

prominence by recounting his troubled early life. Nin and Miller believed and invested in

this model of literary living, in which published narrative flowed from private

experiences.25 In Nin’s vision of fiction writing, the lines between truth, embellishment,

confession, and invention fade and become almost irrelevant. Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

23 Helen Tookey, Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 35. In Incest, Nin writes of this pleasure with an eye toward posthumous readings: “[t]his ‘real’ journal that I will write for Hugh – that amuses me as a tour de force. If I should die and both should be read – which one is me?...To Henry: My imagination is all aflame with that ‘real journal’…I would love to die and watch Hugh read them both.” Incest, 271 – emphasis hers. 24 Tookey, Fictionality, 15. 25 For a brief critical exegesis of the relationship between life, selfhood, and writing in Nin’s oeuvre, see the introduction to: Diane Richard-Allerdyce, Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 1998): 3-14. Richard-Allerdyce, following a number of predecessors as well as Nin herself, argues that Nin wrote to overcome the traumas of her early life as much as she lived to supply herself with things to write about. Life and art nurture and inform one another in this scenario, and subjective experience shapes literary output as writing helps to shape and affirm subjective experience. 119

(1934) and Nin’s House of Incest (1936) both hang from frameworks built out of lived experiences. Nin served as an editor and frequent reviser for the former book, Miller’s

famous breakout work.

As the examples of Miller, Joyce, Proust, and other modernists from T.S. Eliot to

Vladimir Nabokov testify, semi-autobiographical writing became vital to male authors in the early twentieth century.26 However, as Domna Stanton has argued, the practice of

self-writing has long occupied a special place in the history of women’s literature.27 A way to assert selfhood in the face of patriarchy – which situates women as objects rather than subjects, without the independence or ability to act that characterizes men – self- writing allows women to center themselves in their own narratives, while complicating the notion of unified subjectivity itself. In addition to social marginalization, countless women in the modern West have also experienced a fragmentation of identity as societal expectations pull them hither and thither, between various private or domestic personae and other, more public roles.

Given this persistent history of difference in lived experience, Sidonie Smith argues that women’s self-writing lends itself to fictions and fictionalizing. Who better to recognize the inherent constructedness of memory and identity than those who learn from early in life that their own lives and characters are subject to societal expectations, demands and desires from others, and inherited narratives and archetypes?28 Who better

26 Tookey, Fictionality, 21. 27 Domna C. Stanton, “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?,” in idem (ed.), The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 14. 28 Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self- Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 17.

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to recognize their own potential for authorial influence over life than those who are told

that their lives have been authored for them in advance? As Smith points out, the fracture

and multiplicity of authorial identity legible in many examples of women’s self-writing

has a name, well known among academics: heteroglossia.29 Nin embraced variety,

variability, and ambiguity within and between narrating voices even in her ostensible

non-fiction work. Mikhail Bakhtin first theorized and wrote on heteroglossia at around

the same time Nin composed the diary entries that became Incest and, later, Andriessen’s

Anaïs Nin: 1933-34.30

Nin coined a special term for the fictions that sustained her parallel lives

(mensonges vitaux); she believed with fierce conviction in the modernist idea of a subject

who presents selected elements of a fragmentary self to others; she came to see her own

diary as an epic literary project, une cousine to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.31

One cannot assume that the unexpurgated diary stands as a lone record of absolute truth

amidst an oeuvre dedicated to every sense of the term artifice. Nin’s writings recall the

Romantic autobiographies of figures like Chateaubriand and Berlioz, in which the

author’s goals never included perfect veracity.32 As Tookey writes of Nin’s work, “[t]he

point is precisely that it is impossible to tell [where diary rewriting and fiction writing

29 Tookey, Fictionality, 19. 30 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 31 At one point, Nin wrote of her frustration as she sought a way to create a publishable version of her diaries, explicitly wondering aloud why the project had not yet come together as a cohesive “Proustian work.” See Deirdre Bair, Anaïs Nin: A Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995): 414. Nin eventually came to see her diary project as similar to À la recherche du temps perdu in scope, but “the opposite way from Proust” in spirit. The difference was one of gender-based aesthetic priorities. See: Robert Scholes, “The Monstrous Personal Chronicles of the Thirties,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 31 no. 3 (Summer 1998): 425. 32 For more on Romantic autobiography as practiced since the early nineteenth century, see: Francesca Brittan, “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography,” 19th-Century Music 29 no. 3 (Spring 2006): 211–39. 121

begin and end]: ‘fiction’ and ‘diary,’ ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ are mutually imbricated.”33

Still, biographers, tasked with the pinning-down of the verifiable, tend to echo

many of Nin’s accounts with a tone of authority. Deirdre Bair, for instance, almost directly paraphrases many anecdotes from the diaries. Though latter-day Nin devotees decry Bair’s occasional editorializing as so much prudish finger-wagging, these anecdotes have, for better or worse, become the official story of Nin’s life. However and wherever lived experience and artifice overlap in Nin’s diaries, the character with whom the reader becomes intimate in Incest approximates the multifaceted self with whom Nin intended to leave us. Her posthumous image has at once grown more complex and come into sharper focus as the unexpurgated volumes have joined the earlier Diary, and as both sets have informed biographical writings and scholarly texts. The question remains: among the narratives of self that Nin advances in her diaries, where did Andriessen find the version of her that appears onstage in his monodrama – and why did Nin create it?

In one entry reproduced in Incest, the reader follows the author as she rushes to conceal Henry Miller in a guest bedroom – just as Guiler, home early, mounts the staircase of his and Nin’s home in the Parisian suburb of Louveciennes.34 In others, one

reads as Nin constructs ruse after ruse in the space of a day, agonizing over the number of

unique accounts of her whereabouts she must invent.35 A Mediterranean getaway,

ostensibly a vacation during which she could bond with her father, indeed served that

33 Tookey, Fictionality, 27. 34 Ibid., 162 (May 14). 35 See Appendix B, 273 n6.

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purpose – but also hid the father-daughter couple’s copulation from friends and family.36

A given week in Anaïs Nin’s recorded life could resemble the farce of Act II, Scene 1 in

Berg’s Lulu, in which the Countess Geschwitz, Schigolch, the Acrobat, and Alwa crowd

into Schö n’s living room, meeting their mutual lover while Lulu’s wealthy husband

conducts business – and scattering to hide behind furniture as he arrives.

In likening these self-reported experiences to the diegetic world of Lulu, I do not

suggest that Nin modeled her life on any one specific work of pre-existing fiction.37

However, just as Alban Berg discovered ideal selves in philosophy and fiction, and cast

himself as a Wagnerian lover-hero in both life and art, Nin immersed herself in existing

art and culture and emerged transfigured.38 Ideas, archetypes, mythoi, and psychoanalytic

profiles mingle and meld to form Nin’s characters, which she acted out in everyday life

and wrote into the diaries. In the epigraph to this chapter, one reads as Nin weighs and

internalizes the insults that Antonin Artaud has flung at her:

“evil…cruelty…seductiveness, trickery, superficiality…an all-powerful temptress.”39 The sort of language that surrounds all the Pandoras, Eves, Liliths, and Lulus of history,

Artaud’s words cram Nin, a real woman, into the archetypal box from which Frank

Wedekind’s earth-spirit springs. Far from rejecting these labels, Nin takes them to heart in the diaries: “I am wreaking a sort of revenge upon men…I am impelled by a satanic force to win and abandon them.”40 The lapsarian dichotomy of sexual essences that casts

36 Nin’s father enjoyed implying to the hotel staff that his daughter was his mistress, before their first sexual experiences. Though Pole dates the entry in question as June 23, 1933, Nin’s pages about this vacation span several days. See Nin, Incest, 202-215, for her graphic account of the experience. 37 There is no evidence to suggest, let alone confirm, that Nin ever became familiar with Wedekind’s work. 38 Silvio dos Santos, Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s Lulu (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 25-42. 39 Said epigraph is located on the first page of this chapter. 40 See the opening epigraph. 123

women as permanent servants of evil, hardly confined to the misogynist claptrap of Otto

Weininger and his ilk, held considerable sway among the men and women of the

European literati in the early twentieth century.41 Nin, who compared both June Miller

and herself to the au courant mythic, literary, and film character Alraune, was no

exception.42 By the time Artaud excoriated Nin for her femme fatale’s callousness and

superficiality, she had already seized upon that identity and begun to behave and write

accordingly.

As reimagined in early twentieth-century media, the figure of Alraune bears a striking resemblance to the archetypal ruinous seducer captured in Lulu at around the

same time. The title character of a 1911 novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers, she embodies the

widespread fears of the author’s cultural moment while remaining rooted in anonymous

myth. In the original folktale, a witch impregnates herself with the root of a mandrake

(Alraun in German), which resembles a homunculus as well as a phallus.43 As Christy

Wampole has pointed out, mandrake iconography – see the pretty flower on the surface,

then the monstrous humanoid form from which it sprouts! – long reinforced the common

Western association between serpentine, subterranean roots and feminine evil. In the

Alraune legend, superficial but seductive beauty springs from Cthonic, invisible horrors.

A creature whose conception involves this plant could only become a walking, talking

version of her vegetal sire: irresistibly beautiful on the surface, but horrific on a deeper

level.

Ewers transplanted the myth into the context of early twentieth-century anxieties

41 Tookey, Fictionality, 120-172. 42 Ibid., and Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune: die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens (Munich: G. Müller, 1911). 43 The English word mandrake crosses man with dragon, Adam/Eve with the serpent.

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over scientific advances, including the burgeoning practice of artificial insemination. The

progeny of a sex worker impregnated with the ejaculate of a hanged murderer, his

Alraune grows up in the care of the amateur scientist whose experiment created her.

Short on emotional love but nonetheless a nymphomaniac, Alraune embarks on a career

of seductions while still a teenager. Every man and boy she consorts with dies soon

thereafter. Her creator, long a holdout, finds himself overcome with desire for the

underage girl he has treated as a daughter. He resorts to having her parade in front of him

in various boyish but provocative costumes, and rapes a friend’s thirteen-year-old

daughter when Alraune rejects his advances. He hangs himself shortly thereafter. After

seducing the man’s nephew, Alraune herself perishes while sleepwalking. Alraune differs

from Wedekind’s Lulu plays more in degree of wretchedness than in kind of tale: the

archetype of feminine evil remains at the rhizomatic heart of this and many similar

narratives.

The legend remained very much in the air between 1911 and 1930, when a string

of silent films introduced cinemagoers to adapted versions of Ewers’s story.44 The

Millers must have seen Henrick Galeen’s famous expressionist adaptation of 1928, which

strikes a compromise between new novel and old legend while incorporating some fresh

plot devices. Galeen restores the mandrake root as the “father,” and Alraune, who gets

away in the end, must escape from her job as a circus performer and her life with her

creator. Franz, the scientist’s dashing nephew, whisks her away. I hesitate to assign too much importance to the introduction of circus imagery and a performer heroine into a

44 Contemporary examples include Eugen Illés’s adaptation of 1918, Alraune, die Henkerstochter, genannt die rote Hanne; Henrik Galeen’s Alraune of 1928, discussed below; and 1930’s Alraune, directed by Richard Oswald. Other adaptations and iterations followed, from midcentury to the turn of the millennium. 125

film that already features evil femininity and a domineering father-figure – Galeen probably did not lift from Wedekind, nor Berg from Galeen. However, the similarities between this Alraune and the contemporary plays, films, and opera about Lulu speak to the fascinations and fears of a shared cultural moment. In 1932, as Berg worked on his opera, June Miller introduced Nin to the legend of Alraune. Nin saw the film, loved it, and seized upon its imagery for inspiration – to the point that she began to refer to June as

Alraune and to herself as Mandra, a contraction of mandragore, the French word for the mandrake.45 At once the sire and the offspring, the masculine- and feminine-gendered personae in the tale, Nin found it easy to map this new double identity onto her own divided self: muse and artist, woman and writer.

Nin’s plans for House of Incest, the first of several short works inspired by her life

in the 1930s, began to emerge in late 1932 and developed further throughout the period

captured in Andriessen’s piece. Nin’s relationship with the Millers had become unsustainable; June would soon storm out of the triangle, never to return. In the dozens of

references that Nin makes to this work-in-progress in Incest, the story has a different name: “Alraune,” her name for June. The affairs depicted in Anaïs Nin furnished much of the diary material that became this extended demonstration of surrealist prose-poetry. At first a veiled exploration of Nin’s relationship with June, it grew in scope as Nin’s affair with her father arose and collapsed. It became a febrile fantasy on Nin’s favorite themes: self-absorption, sexual desire, parental relationships, creativity, the mysteries of the unconscious. By turns narrative and abstract, it aspires to the conditions of dreams and

45 She must have enjoyed the ambiguity of this situation, in which she could figure herself either as a double of June – the second Alraune – or as the magic life-giver who took June on as a sort of experiment, a phallic creator.

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hallucinations.

Otto Rank, the Freud-circle apostate, analyst, and lover for whom Nin would

move back to New York days after the final dates covered in Incest, wrote a preface to

House of Incest. In December 1933, Nin wrote of her fascination with Rank’s work and

appended a strikingly sexist note of self-deprecation:

…at Rank’s age I may be able to write a book like Rank’s [Art and Artist of 1932] – but I am a woman, I know, and woman’s mind is imperfect – or I could say rather that it is insufficient. I should not be so ambitious. My ambition tires me. I want Rank, Henry, and Allendy to do the big tasks. I will do my woman’s task. I will learn enough, understand enough so that Henry can talk to me.46

Like so many in the field of psychoanalysis of the time – with its Jungian archetypes,

Freudian hysteria, and universal desires for phalloi – Nin believed in inherent essences that necessitated separate roles for men and women. As much as she positioned herself as an individual, writer, and artist, she also hedged, reminding herself that, as a woman, she must always play second fiddle to a Great Man. Bair characterizes Nin’s attitudes toward gender roles in stark terms: “…she considered woman’s sole purpose to be a helpmate to a man, ideally one who had a brilliant, creative mind and was successful and famous because of it.”47

Despite this set of beliefs, the Nin of the Incest era seldom regarded the sexist

pronouncements of her time as absolute gospel.48 Bair writes of a minor crisis in Nin’s

46 Nin, Incest, 76-77. 47 Bair, Nin: A Biography, 102. 48 “But when he tells that he finds I am so marvelous to talk to that he almost forgets to fuck me, I experience a strange resigned pang – this acceptance that the mind in me eclipses the woman and places passion in secondary importance. Immediately aspects of Henry's deeper love – concern – protection – worship – follow this statement, and I bow to a fatalism. I have tears in my eyes. Henry talks of this deep tranquility he feels with me, which he has craved, needed. I tell him all women are fundamentally whores, want to be treated like whores. ‘You can throw in a little worship, too!’” Nin, Incest, 47. 127

thought in the last months of 1933, as her affair with her father wore on. The middle-aged

composer, whom she saw as a gender-swapped version of herself, insisted that he was

right to treat others as though they existed to satisfy and affirm him.49 His daughter, a

self-described narcissist, agreed with this basic premise. However, the self-centered

worldview that he preached and she practiced, fused to the younger Nin’s artistic

ambitions, stood opposed to her belief that she belonged to men as their muse and

caregiver. When Allendy branded her a “petite fille littéraire,” the comment made Nin furious, and not only on the grounds of its gleeful, infantilizing misogyny.50

Nin, who held entire alternate selves within her mind without feeling any

particular need to reconcile them, latched onto a particular idea of Rank’s and expanded

it, thus appropriating psychoanalysis as a personal tool for empowerment. According to

Tookey, Rank’s concept of the creative will became a loophole for Nin to exploit, a way for her to wield psychoanalysis as an “oppositional discourse.”51 Among Rank’s

deviations from Freudian orthodoxy, his notion of a controlling force of willpower that

both unites and fractures the individual psyche ranks high. In the book Truth and Reality,

Rank argues that artists, finding the “truth” of the world around them unacceptable, seek

their own personal truths about existence – and then, through their actions and art, create

their own truth, which they then seek to make real for all. For Nin, the self-made writer

who had fixated on the porous boundary between life and fiction since her teenage years,

the concept seemed a natural fit. Rank’s creative will knew no sex; it animated all artists,

irrespective of anatomy. Nin, encouraged by this belief that true power came from within

49 Bair, Nin, 178. 50 Nin, Incest, 135. 51 Tookey, Fictionality, 80.

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– that the potential to change the world began with a willed change in the creative self –

fired her imagination, and coexisted in peace with even her most deterministic views of

sexual difference.52 Anaïs Nin had used psychoanalysis to liberate herself.

Rank’s theories also appealed to Nin for their embrace of unending internal flux

and fracture. For Nin, this validated the concept of a divided, multifaceted self. At the

end of the passage in Incest reproduced as the epigraph to this chapter, Nin writes: “I

seek to be divided – I seek this tension and multilateral flow. It is the true expression of

myself.”53 Hardly a passing bit of poetry, this could serve as Nin’s artistic credo – and it

comes on the heels of a paragraph self-consciously narrated in the voice of a femme

fatale. One senses that Artaud’s harangue of that character leaves Nin weary of playing

Mandra, if only for an evening.

After the success of her first few expurgated diary volumes, Nin would go on to embrace her role as the doyenne of modernist literary self-narration. She attracted a circle of followers in academe, who set up a magazine, Under the Sign of Pisces, devoted to her work and that of her disciples.54 When feminists feted Nin in the 1960s, none knew that

their new heroine had, decades prior, “thought woman’s primary role was handmaiden

and supplicant to a great man.”55 Tookey summarizes Nin’s reception in terms of stark

polarization:

…the rise of the women’s liberation movement provided the context for the publication of Nin’s diaries and her subsequent fame. This context of

52 Ibid., 77. 53 See the epigraph to this chapter. 54 Though her circle appears to have been devoted but not fanatical, one might compare her to a contemporary with a similar cult following: Ayn Rand. Another iconoclast European-American woman whose philosophy of self-love showed through in controversial literary works, Rand wrote and said far more than Nin to alienate feminists of the time. Still, the similarities between the two writers – both of whom came under fire for proclaiming that women should work to improve themselves, rather than advocate for change as part of a collective feminist movement – have not been lost on critics. 55 Bair, Nin, 178. 129

second-wave feminism enabled her to situate herself as a woman artist who had struggled for emancipation, for recognition, for her own identity…[a]nd yet, in terms of feminism, Nin was a highly controversial figure. Radical feminists, working from a strongly empiricist and social- realist point of view, were hostile to her emphasis on artistic creativity, her ideas about (and enactment of) ‘femininity,’ and particularly to her interest in psychoanalysis – the legacies of her years in France[.]…Nin remains…a particularly charged figure, still capable of inspiring extremes of both adulation and hostility – a demi-goddess to some women, a monster to others.56

Nin’s self-centric, bootstraps approach to women’s liberation gave many feminists pause.

However, at least in the early years of Nin’s fame, cheers from readers and feminist

critics handily drowned out any grumbling over her exact strategy. In a 1991

endorsement titled “Anaïs: A Mother to Us All: The Birth of the Artist as a Woman,”

Kate Millett enthused:

[If] I were to say what writer matters to us most now, is spread over crammed miles of bookshelves, coast to coast, in the little women’s bookstores springing up everywhere…is devoured whole in women’s study classes, is carried in ragged denim bags from class to coffeehouse…is both a basic primer and ultimate grace of sophistication, is mother to us all, as well as goddess and elder sister – it would have to be Anaïs Nin.57

Millett advocated for Nin in glowing terms, even as a new era in Nin’s reception

history loomed just ahead: a moment in which literary and personal put-downs of the

author, from backhanded compliments to withering harangues, became the norm. Some of the wittiest and most devastating reviews came from female writers. In her New York

Times review of Incest, Katha Pollitt dismissed Nin’s latest posthumous release as so

much hackwork, “middling autobiographical fiction that sometimes rises to the level of

56 Tookey, Fictionality, 6-7. 57 Kate Millett, “Anaïs: A Mother to Us All: The Birth of the Artist as a Woman,” Anaïs: An International Journal 9 (1991): 3-8.

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first-rate pornography.”58 In her New Yorker review, Claudia Roth Pierpont excoriated

Nin for the habitual deception that the diarist saw as necessary real-world fiction-making

– and that many critics since have seen as plain manipulation and fraud. Though the narrating Nin of Incest inevitably invites the reader’s sympathy, the deceptions that she records – from spontaneous fibs to labyrinthine inventions, all justified as acts of mercy for those who loved a particular version of her – have made it difficult for many to empathize.59 Far from a mysterious, sovereign innovator of écriture feminine driven to

share her story with the world, the late Nin seemed to unmask herself as a privileged

banker’s wife who thrived on subterfuge. In the pages of the unexpurgated diaries,

readers also discovered her early thoughts on sex and gender, which now registered as

outdated, even reactionary. As Heather White has put it:

…neglected for many years of her life in part because she was a woman, Nin now finds herself posthumously dismissed because her thinking about gender often runs counter to philosophical and political bents of academic feminism, which brought about her reconsideration in the first place. To be written off in life as a woman and in death as the wrong kind of woman is an unhappy fate.60

Readers also ran up against a pair of new revelations: that Nin had maintained a brief, consensual affair with her father, and that the traumatic 1934 stillbirth of which she had written with such poignancy and grace had actually been an abortion, likely of Miller’s offspring. It seemed that the world could handle the transgressive Nin of yore, but the ground shifted with the publication of Incest. Taboos had piled up, and patience had run

58 Katha Pollitt, “Sins of the Nins,” New York Times, November 22, 1992, accessed January 12, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/22/books/sins-of-the-nins.html?pagewanted=all. 59 “I revenge myself for my sacrifices, my heroic lies, my charities, my compassions, my indulgences, in this most cruel of all documents [the diary].” Nin, Incest, 228. 60 Heather White, review of Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self by Diane Richard-Allerdyce, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): 364-366. 131

out. Gone was the unalloyed, nigh ecstatic praise of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The world learned much about Nin in the 1990s. Incest also introduced many

readers to a thus far shadowy figure who sometimes lurked between the lines of her

fiction and diaries: her father. Joaquín Nin, the composer and arranger who abandoned

his wife Rosa Culmell and their three children in 1913, thereby prompting his daughter

Anaïs to start a diary as a way to cope, parlayed his Cuban heritage and first language

into a successful musical career in Europe. Sometime in the mid-twentieth century,

copies of his piano pieces and Spanish songs found their way into the collection of the

composer Henrik Andriessen, and, hence, into the hands of his son Louis.61 Thus began

the series of coincidences that led Andriessen, a world-famous composer known for

bracing political works, to immerse himself in Anaïs Nin and her lovers’ writings: through Joaquín Nin’s self-exoticizing songs. He emerged from this process with not only a scenario, but a performer and instrumentation in mind. When the Accademia

Musicale Chigiana and the London Sinfonietta co-commissioned a short music-theatre piece from Andriessen after the debut of his Grawemeyer Award-winning opera La

Commedia, he had only to adapt his favorite passages into a libretto. Thus began the

process by which Anaïs Nin – an artist who meant so much to so many in the late

twentieth century, an intellectual who blazed her own trail in life and literature and

produced one of the most self-consciously literary autobiographical works in Western

history – became, in Andriessen’s piece, a femme fatale whose life story boils down to an

affair with her father.

61 In the making-of documentary that accompanies the performance of Anaïs Nin, an uncredited violinist and pianist play one of Nin’s Vingt chansons populaires espagnols (1923), from some of Andriessen’s inherited sheet music. See: Carine Bijlsma, dir., and Louis Andriessen, Never a Dull Moment: Anaïs Nin (Amsterdam: Attacca Productions, 2012).

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“Never a Dull Moment”

Andriessen’s libretto reflects his subject’s early desire to serve as a muse to male

geniuses, in a double sense. In giving voice to both Nin and the men she consorted with,

he allows her to speak in support of these writers and analysts long after her death – and, in crafting a work around her words, he takes her on as his own source of inspiration. The more one looks into the origins of Anaïs Nin as a project, the less one finds mention of

Nin the writer and thinker. Andriessen became aware of Anaïs Nin’s work in the 1960s, when the first volumes of her expurgated Diary began to emerge. In those seven original volumes, her love affairs, even her marriages to Guiler and Pole, appear only as subtext.

In his liner notes for the audio recording of Anaïs Nin, and in the making-of documentary included with the DVD recording, Andriessen seems to conflate these expurgated volumes with the later, uncensored ones – perhaps even with her erotica from the late

1970s.62 Indeed, the calculated lack of “sexual frankness” in the editions of the 1960s

made the revelations of the 1980s and ‘90s all the more shocking for Nin’s devotees.

Given this misapprehension of the nature of the Diary in its censored form, it is possible

that Andriessen became familiar with her work when the Journal of Love series emerged,

despite becoming aware of Nin’s writings in the 1960s.

The performance that I describe at the beginning of this chapter, with its wigged

mezzo and her affected pronunciations, lacks the human element that prompted

Andriessen to write the piece: Zavalloni, its intended star. A singing actress, composer,

and bandleader whose tall, thin frame, black hair, and Italian accent help her look and

62 Bijlsma and Andriessen, Never a Dull Moment. Nin’s most famous volume of erotica – based on material that she wrote for hire in the 1940s – emerged just after her death: Nin, Delta of Venus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1977). The resonance of Nin’s title with those of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn is no accident. 133 sound like Nin without need for much artifice, Zavalloni has collaborated with

Andriessen on a number of projects (Figure 3.2). She helmed the premiere performances of his opera La Commedia in the role of Dante, in the same year that Andriessen composed Anaïs Nin. Since, she has created the role of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in

Andriessen’s Theatre of the World.63

Figure 3.2, clockwise from top left: Anaïs Nin in the early 1930s; Cristina Zavalloni as Nin in 2010; Zavalloni, still from video recording of Anaïs Nin, 2011; Nin in the 1950s

63 Theatre of the World received its premiere performance in May 2016, in a production directed by Pierre Audi at Walt Disney Hall. The Los Angeles Philharmonic had given the California premiere of Anaïs Nin in 2012. Zachary Woolfe of the New York Times reports the following on the relationship between the protagonist, the seventeenth-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, and Zavalloni’s character: “[t]he mystical Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who knew Kircher’s work, here exists as an angelic presence, the object of his long-distance adoration. Sung beautifully by Cristina Zavalloni, she gets the pure, high lines that have long been a fixture of Mr. Andriessen’s medieval-flavored writing for voices.” Cruz, a lionized scholar and writer in her own right, wrote poetry that the director Peter Sellars included in his libretto for the opera-oratorio El Niño (2000), for which John C. Adams wrote music. For Woolfe’s entire review of Theatre of the World, see: Woolfe, “Theater of the World Journeys With a Polymath,” New York Times, May 8, 2016, accessed May 8, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/arts/music/review- theater-of-the-world-journeys-with-a-polymath.html?_r=0.

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Convinced that Zavalloni was uniquely well-prepared to portray Nin, Andriessen

resolved to set the latter’s words for the former’s voice. Her flexibility and vocal timbre

have made her one of Andriessen’s go-to singers. He has praised her by way of

comparison to a previous collaborator, the avant-garde polystylist Cathy Berberian.64 An outspoken critic of conventional bel canto voices, Andriessen, like many composers associated with American minimalism, seeks out performers from the worlds of pop, jazz, and early music.65 Knowing that Nin had taken dancing lessons for a time,

Andriessen also appreciated Zavalloni’s experience in that world. However, according to

the composer’s own testimony, Zavalloni’s appearance and personality had as much to do

with his decision to create the role for her as anything else. In an interview with Sarah

Mohr-Pietsch, Andriessen devotes a telling amount of time to his thoughts on Zavalloni while explaining why he wanted to base a piece on the figure of Nin:

There are several words for [Nin] – I think what I liked most is the unreliability. You have no idea what she will do [the] next day. And I think also the second most important reason, perhaps, is that I realized that I had the ideal person who could do it, which [sic] is Cristina Zavalloni. And she is a dancer also, so the idea of the elegance and the decadent side of the whole person – I was sure that she could evoke an image also of Anaïs Nin, who was certainly very attractive and very strange and sensual, and that [sic] are things which I really very well see in the performance of Cristina. So the reason which I would like to mention why I did write the piece Anaïs Nin – because I found [Nin] in life: Cristina Zavalloni.66

This explanation bears a striking similarity to many of Nin’s pronouncements

64 Louis Andriessen, Program Note for Letter from Cathy, Boosey & Hawkes Composer Catalogue, 2003, accessed March 20, 2016, http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Louis-Andriessen-Letter-from-Cathy/45162. 65 Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 125. Gregory Bloch notes that, in objecting to operatic vocal timbres, Andriessen tends to speak of women’s voices in particular: Bloch, “The Problem with Andriessen,” Echo 6 no. 2 (Fall 2004), http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume6-issue2/reviews/bloch.html. 66 Louis Andriessen, interview with Sarah Mohr-Pietsch, London Sinfonietta Podcast, April 14, 2011, accessed March 20, 2016, http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/lsfaudio/london-sinfonietta-podcast-13- louis-andriessen. NB: the podcast has since been discontinued and the archives removed from this site; my transcription of the relevant portion is available upon request. 135

about new acquaintances. Ever eager to find a kindred spirit, Nin devotes multi-page

digressions to the similarities between herself and others, none more so than her father.

That Andriessen felt that he knew Nin on a personal level – well enough to notice her qualities in someone else – speaks to the allure of reading a stranger’s diary. The Judge in

Powder Her Face, who confronts reams of testimony and private material in the

Duchess’s divorce case, confesses a sense of involvement in the defendant’s affairs, and

his brush with the mind and deeds of a “Don Juan among women” drives him mad with moral outrage.67 The femme fatale threatens minds, as well as bodies and fortunes.

Andriessen, however, appears to have suffered no such fate. Having become familiar

with the self-described “Dona Juana” of 1930s literary Paris, he speaks of her with

tempered affection.

As much as Andriessen himself appears to identify with Nin, a long-dead stranger

with whom he nonetheless assumes he would share mutual social circles, he also places

himself in the subject position of the male artists who counted her as an alluring muse.68

He has made it clear that her work as such has little to do with his fascination: “I’m not so interested in the psychological or the literary aspects of Nin. What I like is the way she flirts with history and fiction as Nabokov does…[h]er power is that she creates a life through writing.”69 Contradictory though it may seem to profess disinterest in “literary

aspects” and, in the next sentence, compare her to the author of Pale Fire and Lolita,

Andriessen phrases his opinion with perfect clarity. He cares little for such concerns as

67 See pp. 85-86. 68 Andriessen et al., Never a Dull Moment. 69 Andriessen, interview for Boosey & Hawkes Composer News, http://www.boosey.com/cr/news/Andriessen-interview-about-new-monodrama-Ana-s-Nin/12084.

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craft, style, text, and interpretation.70 Rather, the process of fabricating a life story through writing, a creative act all its own, most fires his imagination – and he is eager to praise Nin for her ability to do so. An apolitical artist from the time of her earliest

sketches through her first encounters with American second-wave feminism in the early

1960s, Nin stands as a one-woman cultural rebellion, a sort of anarchist of inner life who wished to broadcast her own feelings of liberation to the world through art. Andriessen,

ever the notenkraker, sympathized.

In multiple interviews, he has indicated a single quality in Nin that fascinates him

above all others: her “unreliability.”71 In saying this, he does not mean to broach the literary idea of the unreliable narrator, though Nin fits that description by her own design.

Rather, Andriessen uses the term to call attention to her tendency to pivot between

divergent moods, personae, opinions, and courses of action without warning. Breaking from Dutch to say the phrase in English, he asserts that, in Nin’s life, there was “never a dull moment.”72 Bair, who worked on her biography of Nin for four years, notes the

“quality of mutability” in Nin’s personality as the most intriguing thing about the

woman.73 Read as a seismograph of Nin’s inner fluctuations, Anaïs Nin, with its modular

form and sudden textural shifts, foregrounds this “unreliability” of character.

Whether or not Andriessen sought to portray Nin as he professes to see her – a

brilliant artist and fascinating human being – his work ends with this character breaking

down in a street, falling silent, and yielding both the stage and the text to her father. The

70 It is significant that Andriessen mentions Nabokov rather than, say, Joyce. One may assume that Andriessen knows of Lolita, a story in which the sexual abuse of a father-figure leads to the silence of the daughter-figure. 71 Andriessen et al., Never a Dull Moment. 72 Ibid. 73 Indeed, in the introduction to her biography of Nin, Bair argues the same of Nin. Bair, Nin, 1. 137

unpredictable Nin extolled by both Andriessen and Bair retains something of her

changeable nature when translated into an operatic character. However, I argue that the

composer’s chosen texts and music cast her as fickle and malicious, rather than complex

or multifaceted. By presenting the disembodied voices of her lovers, Andriessen invites

the audience to question her agency. His music, an admixture of minimalist soundscapes

with wrong-note chamber jazz à la Stravinsky, Weill, Brand, and Berg, creates the same

prevailing mood of decadence, sleaze, and lust that characterizes Die Dreigroschenoper,

Maschinist Hopkins, Lulu, and similar works. Just as Wedekind and Berg’s Lulu exists to

have relationships – by turns friendly, romantic, financial, or paternal, but always already

sexual too – and disappears from her own drama thanks to the actions of a returning

father-figure, so too does Andriessen’s Nin.74 The writer, who in life would go on to fame

and acclaim, is rendered mute at the end of this monodrama, subjected to that which

Andriessen calls the “unavoidable ending.”75 Table 3.1 clarifies the sequence of texts and

musical moments that lead to this denouement.

In the 2011 Amsterdam production captured on DVD – a performance that

Andriessen helped prepare, supervised, and attended, with Zavalloni in the role of Nin –

begins with a film of a brief speech, pulled from a diary entry dated 17 January 1933.

Zavalloni, in character and operating the (anachronistically digital) video apparatus with a remote control, plays a tape of herself speaking about her (Nin’s) feelings of restlessness. In the context of Incest, the text here has a clear meaning.76

74 The fact that Lulu’s Dr. Schön returns as Jack the Ripper somewhat obscures the fact that the title character’s murderer has a quasi-paternal relationship to her, but not completely. The audience knows perfectly well that the same actor plays both – if not by his appearance, then by the repetition of the opera’s most chilling line, Das war ein Stück Arbeit! 75 Andriessen, interview with Sarah Mohr-Pietsch, London Sinfonietta Podcast. 76 See the first text reproduced in Appendix B, p. 273.

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Table 3.1, Graphic synopsis of Anaïs Nin (transitional multimedia interludes italicized)

The force that drives Nin to write, and to seek new lovers, is easily recognizable

as the Rankian creative will, the deep drive that pushes the artist to create worlds and

channel inner conflict and flux into a single persona. The passage comes after a self- reproaching note, in which Nin laments the fact that she told her husband that she wanted children. In its original environment, the text spoken by Zavalloni as prelude to the

monodrama serves as a clear consequent to this regret-laced antecedent. Nin feels driven,

pushed – but to create art and take lovers, rather than to procreate. Presented as a speech

and supplemented with added language, however, the brief statement of purpose becomes a femme fatale’s manifesto. The reference to Nin’s husband drops away in favor of a 139 mention of Antonin Artaud, an additional extramarital love interest, whom Nin had not yet met at the time of writing. This Nin does not mention her feelings of liberation, but she does address her concerns that her urges – unspecified, with the prior text removed – will make others suffer. For good measure, Andriessen ensures that Nin does not just pace: she paces like an animal.

To parse every omission, elision, and added word of this adapted libretto in prose is to invite exhaustion for both reader and hermeneut. A complete analysis of

Andriessen’s changes to Nin’s writings appears in diagrammatic form in Appendix B.

However, this text is a representative example of Andriessen’s editing procedures throughout the libretto: choose the passage, delete the unnecessary language, and add a word or two for clarity, flow, or effect. Even before the piece’s opening unison crescendo pulls listeners into its sound-world, the composer-librettist represents (re-presents) an author, preoccupied with thoughts of childbearing and psychoanalytic concepts, as callous, perhaps monstrous, and thinking only of sex and the men who provide it: driven to unspecified deeds by unspecified desires. The subsequent series of musical vignettes makes it clear that, in Andriessen’s reconstruction of the 1933 Nin, the titular subject’s yearnings are neither complex nor particularly cerebral.

The opening fanfare might sound conventional to the point of tonal, were only a few pitches nudged down by half-step. As written, its melodic intervals consist mostly of semitones, augmented fourths, and minor thirds, with the occasional perfect fourth as a vestige of tradition. The bass-register instruments play in exaggerated leaps, and, only three bars in, the opening figure begins to spill over into the next bar, displacing the next iteration. For a dissonant burst of brassy energy marked forte, the passage may seem an

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odd place to call for a leggiero feel. And yet the marking fits. With its harmonic clashes,

odd intervals, brash timbres, and detached articulations, the fanfare bears more than a

passing resemblance to the overture to Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper, and even recalls

the “jazz” suites of Dmitri Shostakovich – the first of which emerged in 1934. Stravinsky

too contributed much to the genre of wrong-note “jazz” with pieces like the Ragtime for

11 Instruments, Preludium for Jazz Band, and L’Histoire du soldat, and his influence on

Andriessen’s music is amply documented. In any case, the opening instrumental passage, which ends with a loud B-flat minor triad mixed with B- and D-naturals, stands in sharp contrast to that which follows.

The score calls for the singer playing Nin to cut the ensemble off herself, having conducted a few bars’ worth of music at its beginning.77 Another video plays, this one a depiction of Antonin Artaud; in the Amsterdam production, this takes the form of grainy footage of a man and woman strolling through a park. While the images flicker, an

actor’s recorded voice reads a portion of a letter from Artaud to Nin, suffused with

romantic and even erotic language despite the fact that the pair barely knew each other at

the time.78 Over this, playing unaccompanied, the lone violinist delivers a series of

diatonic melodies that slip, by chromatic voice-leading, into new keys every few bars

(Example 3.2). It is a moment of stillness, beauty, and simplicity, an oasis of

Coplandesque openness and simplicity, a world apart from that of the nightmare circus

march that precedes it. Said circus music intrudes again the moment the film and

attendant violin solo end, and the Nin character begins to sing of her own impressions of

77 Andriessen intends for the ensemble to play without a conductor for the remainder of the performance. 78 Thanks to Allendy’s misapprehensions about Artaud, Nin believed that he was gay at the time. Nin, Incest, 159. 141

Example 3.2, end of circus fanfare and beginning of violin solo (with unknown performer’s annotations), Anaïs Nin

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Artaud. The conclusion that the pretty music belongs to poetic, sensitive Artaud – who

murmurs in untranslated French – and that the garish circus tune belongs to Nin, who

sings forte in disjointed English, is unavoidable.

Nin goes on to sing of meeting Artaud for the first time. In the diary entry set by

Andriessen, she expresses excitement at the prospect of meeting not a new lover, but a

colleague with similar stylistic aims. The parts of the text that specify writing as the

source of Nin’s enthusiasm did not make the cut. In effect, Andriessen prepares his

audience to expect a meeting not of the minds, but of bodies. Nin and Artaud, who made

only one frustrated attempt at sex and never quite forged a relationship, become passionate lovers in this first major section of Anaïs Nin. When the singer in the role mentions their spontaneous kiss on the quays of Paris, one may freely assume that more romance followed – for Andriessen deleted Nin’s reference to the café where the evening ended.

The music in this section (mm. 58-120, grouped with the fanfare and violin solo and labeled I. Artaud in the track-divided CD recording) flows seamlessly from the

opening fanfare music. The triplets that saturate the ensemble texture starting in m. 8 run

almost continuously throughout Nin’s narration of the night out with Artaud, in one part

or another. This ostinato figuration – one of many in this jazz- and Stravinsky-informed

work of post-minimalism – allows Andriessen to slip the listener a first reference to a

motive that will dominate much of the piece’s second half. Not yet five minutes in and in

the context of an unrelated incident, Andriessen introduces the seduction-and-sex music

to which Nin will recall her carnal encounter with her father.

The music to which Nin père and Nin fille seduce each other consists largely of a 143

rumbling, octave-jumping triplet figure, prominent in various altered forms from

Rehearsal 31 (IV. Father Story) through the end of the piece. As R. 31 falls at almost the exact midpoint of the monodrama’s duration, the audience member must live with this ostinato and its variants for almost half of the listening experience. Andriessen, whose famous Workers Union (1975) calls for minutes on end of consecutive sixteenth notes,

has never had qualms about writing protracted ostinati. This particular unit varies across

its iterations, but always features an initial three-note group in which the main interval

separating the pitches is the octave – see example 3.3 for its first full appearance as a

texture-dominating figuration, in the middle register of the contrabass clarinet. In its

hidden appearance earlier in the piece, it appears paired with a second triplet that, by

sheer force of repetition, seems to have a pitch-center of E, with the D at the end of each

group serving as a flatted scale degree seven (Example 3.4). The expected resolution up to the “tonic” never comes, however, for the jump back to the lower beginning pitch must come next. The figure therefore rolls along in a potentially infinite loop, with no

conclusion available.

Example 3.3, Contrabass clarinet ostinato in context, Anaïs Nin

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In the context of Nin’s recollection of Artaud, the figure becomes a tool of

characterization. It bursts in as she describes him – “innocent and diabolical, frail,

nervous,” the sickest of all the surrealists by his own assessment.

Example 3.4, First appearance of the father motive, LH piano, Anaïs Nin

Difficult though it might be to connect this moment to the one in which Nin and her father initiate a tryst, the devoted reader of her autobiographical work might recognize the listed traits in the text as among those Nin focused on during her own moments of navel-gazing. Prone to bouts of weakness and ill health, well aware of her own neuroticism, and used to seeing herself as both a spotless caregiver and crafty seductress,

Nin believes that she has found a match in Artaud. If one could ascribe a unified narrative

to Incest, it could well be the story of Nin’s frustrated search for a match, a double, a

lover of truly like mind. The book begins in the midst of her doomed dual relationship

with the Millers; she had seen June as the Alraune to her Mandragore, a beautiful,

dangerous, feminine relative of the more masculine-gendered, creative Nin. She had also

seen herself as a female Henry Miller, at once a lover, caregiver, and muse to a male

genius who could barely keep himself out of Paris’s gutters, and a brilliant, equal

counterpart to the same. The volume ends days before she leaves for New York to

become Otto Rank’s lover and apprentice, hoping against hope that they could become 145 twin soldiers in the avant garde of psychoanalysis. In between these, the strongest candidate of all arrives in her life: her father, who shares not only a similar narcissistic streak and Don Juan’s outlook, but her own physical features and frailties. In spite of the cuts and edits in the libretto of Anaïs Nin that erase this attitude of permanent longing and seeking, traces remain – and Andriessen underscores Nin’s hopes for both Artaud and her father musically, through motivic foreshadowing.

Artaud, however, does not stick around for long in this monodrama, nor does the

Nin character allude to her feelings of kinship toward him in any explicit way. The next lover, René Allendy, awaits. The transition into the film interlude dedicated to Allendy involves a percussive onomatopoeia, though the audience cannot yet know this: the back- and-forth strokes on the guïro here sound, for lack of a better term, like rough sex. The audio consists a male actor reading excerpts from one of Allendy’s lesser-known publications, L’Amour, published in 1942. Though the text dates from almost a decade after the other writings in the libretto, Allendy’s affair with Nin may well have had some bearing on its contents. In the Amsterdam production, the audience sees images of an actor, dressed as Allendy, reading the book in a public lecture. Zavalloni-as-Nin, smirking at the camera with diabolical good humor, comes in late to this address on jealousy, which Allendy dismisses and roundly condemns as an infantile impulse born

(like so many things in psychoanalysis) of the initial separation from the mother’s body at birth (Figure 3.3). It is a clever, if subtle, joke at Nin’s expense that she misses most of a talk on jealousy in romantic relationships, only to walk in when the man with whom she cheats on her husband ridicules the emotion. The rest of the scene concerns one of Nin’s final sexual rendezvous with Allendy, a hotel-room romp in which her analyst, aware of

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her decreasing interest in him relative to Miller, attempted to resuscitate their liaison

while enacting a literal punishment.

Figure 3.3, Zavalloni as Nin watches a film of herself at Allendy’s lecture on jealousy. The ensemble sits at stage left, fully visible to the audience. Anaïs Nin, Amsterdam, 2011 [DVD still]

The sadomasochistic encounter, in which Allendy lashed Nin on her back with a whip prior to sex, failed in the former regard, and indeed succeeded in pushing Nin further away. Within months, she would reject both his love and his theories, transferring both to

Rank. Andriessen embraces the luridness of the scene with further musical onomatopoeia and sonic metaphor, crafting a halting anti-groove in which percussion strikes and loud tutti exclamations issue from the band at unexpected intervals (Example 3.5).

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Example 3.5, A sadomasochistic beating musicalized as Nin and Allendy meet, Anaïs Nin

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These gestures recall the whip cracks in Scene 1 of Strauss’s Elektra, and their presence makes it clear that Andriessen has no intention of exploring the finer points of Allendy’s

(or, for that matter, Nin’s) psychoanalytic theories. The text here, which veers into a pseudo-philosophical digression in Nin’s diary, becomes much more focused in

Andriessen’s libretto. The point, the telos, of the entire incident lies in Nin’s final sentence: “I was fucked by death!”79 This follows on the heels of her lines about enjoying

Allendy’s unusual ferocity. Ever the femme fatale, Andriessen’s Nin does not have minor

existential crises – just sex.

Lest the audience member forget that the Nin character fits the profile of an

Alraune or Lulu, Andriessen reprises the circus fanfare at R. 18, setting Artaud’s

dressing-down of Nin for neglecting Allendy to the dissonant march music.80 Our anti-

heroine stands proud, hollering Artaud’s accusations to a grotesque caricature of heroic

music. The singer’s final words before a ritardando and textural shift comprise Artaud’s

exasperated question to Nin: “is [the femme fatale image] an appearance?” The answer

comes a bar later at m. 240, in which the father motive bubbles up for two short but

telling measures. Andriessen’s score reminds the repeat listener that, in mere minutes, the

protagonist will lust after her father, the ultimate seduction of a true Dona Juana. The

buildup to the “father story” has not yet begun, but Andriessen’s score and libretto have

already defined Nin as the sort of transgressive, hypersexual, vaguely monstrous operatic

heroine that audiences have craved to see since the late nineteenth century.

79 One reviewer, bewildered at the performance at the 2014 21C Festival in Toronto – which included neither supertitles nor printed libretti, and featured a soloist who emulated Nin’s unique accent – mistook this line for “I once fucked my dad.” While amusing, this mishearing underscores the genuine difficulty of gleaning a rich or accurate idea of Nin’s work through Andriessen’s piece. Michael Johnson, “A Challenging Evening of Recent Works,” ConcertoNet, May 22, 2014, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=9912. 80 See the epigraph to this chapter for this text, as well as Appendix B. 149

Having capped off the Artaud and Allendy sections with a recapitulation of the

opening fanfare, Andriessen indulges in a brief slow movement – a lone moment of

reflection for his Nin character, discussed above. “Strange days,” the heroine sings,

“weather bad…so I created my own weather.” One could write an entire opera around

this phrase alone, for here, Nin articulates her extension to Rank’s theory of the creative

will, and her eventual rejoinder to her feminist critics in the 1970s. According to Tookey,

the process of self-liberation that Nin believed in her throughout her life – the one for

which she had a name after reading Rank’s work, and the one at which advocates of

collective political action balked – blossomed into a belief in the almost magical ability

of the artist to change the world by reimagining it in private. For Nin, the goal of the

creator should be to create an inner world that they find habitable, and, by inviting others

into that world through art, avoid solipsism (of which she was frequently accused) and

gradually transform the world from people’s insides out, from the bottom up.81

As theories of social change go, this individualistic view has been and remains

unpopular. However, in every concern, from the political to the personal and artistic, Nin

insisted that the circumstances of the “real” outside world could mean next to nothing for

those eager enough to believe in something better. When Nin writes – and, in Anaïs Nin, sings – that she creates her own weather, she asserts her control over her emotional state, and reimagines the world as a sunny, cheerful place. As a figurative mother and literal artist, Nin conjures up a better world in her mind, and lives as though already in it. The text set here, though brief, is a document of radical empowerment, a rallying cry worthy of a non-skewed, glorious fanfare. Andriessen provides one. But the moment of reverie

81 Tookey, Fictionality, 77.

150 and small triumph cannot last long. By the facing page of the score, Nin has already begun to sing of anticipation; her father will soon arrive (Example 3.6). Anaïs Nin by her pining for father, Nin’s triumphant fanfare, followed Example 3.6, Example

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Andriessen here initiates a gradual crescendo to the thematic crux of the piece, the point

at which Nin finally speaks unprompted by an interlude. In mm. 279-291, Andriessen uses nary a pitch-class other than D, E, F, A, or B; the effect of the off-kilter minor pentatonicism is one of simplicity and clarity.

The low clarinet line here at R. 23 proves a harbinger of things to come. Over the next several bars, the reed players take up bass and contrabass clarinets; this darker,

distinctly less circus-like sonic palette will characterize much of the piece’s back half. It

is at precisely this moment, near the midpoint of the piece’s duration, that Nin begins to sing of her father’s impending arrival. Some thoughts on her concept of the mensonge vital, the necessary lie that allows a relationship and thus a version of oneself to flourish, follow. The music becomes more agitated as Nin lists men in her life who each see a

“fragment” of her divided self, culminating in a melodic peak – and half-step sigh – on the word father. She wonders aloud whether a single man may ever glimpse all that she encompasses: “[w]ill father have the whole, as the journal has?” This line, the libretto’s only gesture toward the Diary that made Nin famous and provided Andriessen with his source material, ends with a high, discordant sixteenth-note arpeggio on the piano and, in quintuplets against this, a similar gesture on found metal chimes of indeterminate pitch.

Whether this jangling, out of phase upward surge refers to the journal itself or for Nin as a unified whole, it stands out – a unique moment of sparkling sonority, all the more jarring in light of the bass and contrabass-heavy clarinet textures of the section to come.

To the sound of a bass clarinet, almost alone at the beginning of the soloist’s reiterative next line – “I await my father with deep joy and impatience” – a video projection of the actor playing Nin’s father appears. Based on this, one might assume that

152 the switch from the saxophone-dominated textures to the sound of low clarinets signals a change in musical emphasis, from daughter to father. The rest of the monodrama bears out this assumption. Having dominated the ensemble sound from the beginning of the piece, the soprano and alto saxophones only reappear when Nin herself begins to narrate the particulars of her sexual encounter with her father. This return to the sonic world of the circus suggests that the truly lurid parts of Nin’s story – those vignettes in which she discusses her conquests, fully inhabiting the femme fatale role and singing of her own agency – have their own distinctively shrill timbral palette, and the portions in which her father’s seductive sexuality looms have another, lower, lusher one.

A striking moment follows Nin’s declaration of impatience at R. 30: to the foursquare beat of a cymbal and the simple chordal accompaniment of piano and double bass, the soloist sings, “[t]omorrow, tomorrow begins another romance!” – the line in

Incest that precedes the writer’s breathless account of her spa-town getaway with her father. She strikes a C-sharp, soon placed in context as the downward-yearning ninth of a

B-minor chord, and continues to play with similarly aching, not-quite-harmonic tones as the trio lays down its unchanging groove. The violinist steals into the texture as well, at first doubling the piano’s top pitch but then leaping up to play a semitone above the soloist’s line, and thereafter slipping into and out of unisons and dissonances with her voice. For a fleeting seven bars, the audience finds itself in the soundscape of a modern jazz club, listening to a gorgeous and erotically charged love ballad full of beautiful tensions and unsatisfying excuses for release. Elsewhere in this piece, the sound of sexual desire tends to have a certain grotesquerie, a harshness of timbre and insistence of rhythmic drive that make the de facto topic of the work sound distinctly unpleasant and a 153

bit frightening. This moment, by contrast, speaks to the quality of sensuality and yearning

that characterizes much of Nin’s most compelling prose.

Resolution does not arrive. Instead, the lights go down and the sound of an actor,

speaking the text of a letter from Henry Miller to Nin, fills the auditorium, along with the

recorded sound of pieces of wood falling onto each other.82 Late in June 1933, Nin

briefly kept Miller in the dark as to her whereabouts. This letter, in which he pleads for

renewed contact, finds Miller powerless, desperate, and at the mercy of the femme fatale whom Nin sometimes decided to become. Little did he know what seductions lay in store for his lover as she got to know her long-lost parent.

See Example 3.3 for the musical moment that follows this multimedia interlude: the eruption of the raucous, contrabass clarinet-driven father material. Marked Father

Story in the tracklist for the audio recording, this passage at R. 31 contains two essential elements, arranged in an expanding wedge of pitches. The violin line at the top of the texture leaps from a low A to a middle B-flat to a high B, rising by semitone in terms of pitch-class, and minor ninth or diminished octave in pitch per se. At the same time, the contrabass clarinet, all the way at the bottom of the ensemble’s range, chugs away at the octave-switching ostinato figure, which drops by first one semitone, then another. From this cell, not quite three bars long, the melodic materials that saturate much of the rest of the monodrama – with the exception of the first half of the sixth section, and the borrowed Joaquín Nin song at the end – emerge and expand. A stack of three pitches separated by semitone: this tiny melodic fragment, subjected to octave displacements, harmonization, rhythmic variation, expansion, extension, and interruption, comprises the

82 This sound effect eludes easy explanation, and the reason for its existence remains obscure.

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basis for the latter twenty minutes of the monodrama. In the sections of the piece devoted

to Nin’s affair with her father, organic integration and developing variation become

prominent, if not continuously dominant, paradigms. These materials do not disappear

with the transition to section V (The Seduction), for the rising version of the motive,

compressed into the space of a whole tone, dominates that texture. At this point, with

anticipation building as the moment of the couple’s encounter draws ever closer, the first

woodwind player sets aside the clarinet for a soprano saxophone; Nin’s agency as seductress returns for a moment.

Even at moments when the father motive appears to have disappeared, it either

waits in the wings for its next entrance or hides in another figuration: see, for example,

the high violin figure at R. 47, in which breaks in the pattern fail to disguise the tune’s

characteristic octave leaps. Just before R. 48, a general pause ensues; no ordinary chance

to breathe, this one lasts for over thirty seconds in the performance captured on DVD.

One senses Nin struggling to move on with the story, interrupting the upward climb to the

climactic moment. However, by the ninth bar of the ensuing passage, the rumbling bass

clarinets begin to intone the father motive’s octaves again, and the soloist sings of her

parent asking her to move nearer. When she mentions the “wave of desire” unleashed by

her father’s caresses in mm. 617-618, the band surges ahead into a forte, and the violinist,

rising above all, plays a three-note tune that descends by half-step – surely generated by

the motivic resources at Andriessen’s disposal throughout this section, but also strikingly

reminiscent of the opening two bars of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde (composers have

long recognized the power of chromatically blooming intervallic wedges to connote

desire). 155

The climax itself comes at R. 56, when the elder Nin cries that he has lost God,

the younger Nin sings of her “immense yielding,” and one of the only tutti passages in

the entire composition ensues, both saxophones now restored and wailing away with the rest of the band. A stinger in m. 709 caps the section with lewdly onomatopoeic emphasis. Eliding Nin’s account of the pair’s first encounter with the text of a letter she

sent to her father months later, Andriessen skips over the part of the former in which she

expresses disgust and regret. Instead, he reprises the diatonic music from Nin’s moment

of solitude, the one in which she expresses her inner power to reshape the world as she

prefers – and abandons it to return to the father motive at R. 65, as the soloist sings with

unnerving calm and devotion of the tender days that she will share with her new lover. If

the end of the second section (Allendy) promised a glimpse of the independent, literary,

contemplative Nin, then the layering of a text addressed to a male lover on top of it

suggests that such matters ultimately have little to do with the piece’s portrayal of its title

character. Sections VII (The Seventh Day) and VIII (Henry was tired) consist largely of

vocal melodies over the father motive, now a more insistent ostinato than ever – an

obsession. In the latter, Nin recounts an incident in which she felt an intense pang of

loneliness while in the apartment of the sleeping Henry Miller; the rising semitones of the

Father Story section recur, with the father ostinato close behind. She leaves Miller’s

apartment unsatisfied, and recalls: “in the street I wept!” In the video recording of

Zavalloni’s performance, she murmurs this line the first time and spits it the second,

allowing her feelings of loneliness to take on a bitter, resentful edge. At R. 83, the extent

of her insatiability and the permanence of her longing become clear: the soloist descends

through an A harmonic minor scale, pausing on the B – and then bending that

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penultimate pitch down to a B-flat, almost but not quite reaching the desired conclusion.

Left weeping, she falls silent.

Her voice sounds again, however – as an acousmatic double. A recording of the actress singing to piano accompaniment plays from offstage as an image of her father fades into view on the video screen. The song in question, the third of Joaquín Nin’s 10

Villancicos Españoles of 1932 – the year before he reintroduced himself to the adult

Anaïs – sets a Yuletide text in bastardized Basque to Nin’s harmonized version of a folk

tune. That text:

Ah come, at last, Into our house, Where we keep the chestnuts To celebrate Christmas So clear and lovely Between your father and your mother moving, You feel a flame in your heart You feel your soul aflame.83

At once tragic and chilling, this innocuous song about a child who comes in from the cold to celebrate a happy Christmas with her or his parents reflects the sort of peaceful domestic life that Joaquín Nin, future seducer of his own daughter, denied both himself and his entire family. Yet his daughter, the literary luminary who ostensibly stars in this monodrama, wanders off weeping as the aging composer takes the stage – present,

after a fashion, in both image and sound, despite having neither a body nor a voice

onstage. Jelena Novak’s notion of postopera, invented in part because of the profusion of

integral multimedia elements in recent works by Andriessen and Michel van der Aa,

applies here; Novak cites this piece in particular as an example.84 Without its films, audio

83 I explain my translation process for this text in Appendix B, on page 277. 84 Novak, Postopera, 125. 157

recordings, and projections, Anaïs Nin would make little sense – but with them in place, it stands as a rich, dynamic, and multifaceted text.

Valerie Buhagiar’s films for the 2014 Toronto performance of the piece, which

departed somewhat from Andriessen’s original vision, hinted at the intellectual life of the

creative, literary Nin that her devotees so admire. Anaïs Nin, though undoubtedly a work

of music theatre in the tradition of the fallen-woman archetype, opens up a world of

further possibilities insofar as it – like most examples of postopera as Novak defines it –

becomes a work with multiple authors the moment a video artist and dramaturg with new

ideas seize upon it. Andriessen’s score, with its propulsive ostinati, compellingly jazz-

inflected turns of phrase, subtleties of timbre, and masterfully paced fluctuations in

temporality, could well serve as the soundscape for an empowering and affirmative

performance. While many of the qualities and experiences that made Nin more than just a

femme fatale remain absent from the libretto, a video presentation could restore them. A

filmmaker might depict Nin writing, or working through her anxieties after her encounter

with her father, or resolving to publish her novel. In contemporary works like this one, in

which any given production might see the drastic alteration of the nature and function of

the multimedia elements, possibilities for interventionist staging abound. While the

original production of the piece placed its protagonist well within the confining frame of

operas past, future interpretations may reinvent it. Like Nin herself, Anaïs Nin – by its

very design – seeks to be divided.

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Chapter Four

Trashy Traviata: Class, Media, and the American Prophecy of Anna Nicole

The story of a 19th-century courtesan is accepted as grist to the mill of opera composers. But because [Anna Nicole Smith] died only in 2007 and is meant to be trailer-trash, it makes people uncomfortable. If it had been about a person who had essentially been approved of, then it would have been fine. But why is she of less value or less suitable as a subject than, say, Marilyn Monroe? We are still dealing with a fascinating human being whose life, however weirdly, reflected the times we all live in.1

In the quotation above, Mark-Anthony Turnage reveals the three archetypal

images that inform the title character of his opera Anna Nicole. His heroine is at once the

operatic fallen woman of yore; the stereotypical impoverished, rural white American,

here as elsewhere referred to by the caustic slur trailer-trash; and as a glamorous, tragic female celebrity akin to Marilyn Monroe, whose life unraveled and ended with a drug overdose amid the constant surveillance of tabloid media. In creating and promoting the opera, Turnage and the librettist Richard Thomas often flaunted its ties to the long and lately reinvigorated tradition of the operatic anti-heroine. Journalists, critics, and both creators have noted this transhistorical connection; the resemblance, unstated in promotional materials around similar recent operas, became a selling point as opera houses ballyhooed this scandalous and topical new work. In drawing the figure and musical framing devices of the operatic fallen woman together with the latter-day media trope of the humiliated female celebrity – or “trainwreck,” to use the critic Sady Doyle’s term, itself derived from tabloids’ standard label for this archetype – Turnage and

1 As noted in Chapter 1 and the Conclusion of this study, three Marilyn Monroe operas, by Ezra Laderman, Robin de Raaff, and Gavin Bryars, premiered between 1993 and 2013. Nicholas Wroe and Mark-Anthony Turnage, “Mark-Anthony Turnage: A Life in Music,” Guardian, January 22, 2011, accessed September 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jan/22/mark-anthony-turnage-opera-composer. 159

Thomas make a canny comparison.2 Anna Nicole demonstrates the role of reality television and entertainment media in making the public undoing of women into a repeatable mass-media spectacle, and thus a timely topic upon which new opera may capitalize to win those most sought-after prizes: pop-cultural relevance and new, younger

audiences.3 At the same time, the modernized fallen woman can only carry the figure of

Anna Nicole so far: eventually, she becomes an image of the mater dolorosa and, in

scenes bookending the opera, a ritual sacrifice in her own right. Though the scene in

which she dies bears the title “Clown Messiah” – a reference to the stupor in which the

real Smith appeared in a widely circulated video not long before her death, her face smeared with paint and her lawyer-lover Howard K. Stern heedless of her distress –

Turnage and Thomas’s Anna Nicole dies not for the redemption of her rotten world, but

because that world demands punctuation to its gossip-rag idea of her human life.

Verdi’s Violetta, whom Turnage mentions above as a model for the character of

Anna Nicole, has transfixed audiences for decades on end – likewise Carmen, Lulu, and

Shostakovich’s Katerina. Sex sells in opera, especially when tragedy follows anon. The

situation of a real, larger-than-life media figure as a protagonist promises both familiarity of narrative and scandalous representation. Lost in all the critical tittering over Anna

Nicole’s crude language, sordid scenario, and sonic proximity to popular musical theatre, the opera’s aggressive satire of the United States, particularly its poverty-stricken rural

2 Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2016), Kindle. 3 Many critical responses to Anna Nicole include references to this marketing strategy. See, for example: Sarah Crompton, “Anna Nicole and a New Way to Attract Young Audiences, The Telegraph, September 23, 2014, accessed December 12, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/11115317/Anna- Nicole-and-a-new-way-to-attract-young-audiences.html; and Kylie Lewis, “Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House,” The Arbuturian, September 20, 2014, accessed January 17, 2017, http://www.arbuturian.com/culture/music/anna-nicole-opera-2.

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white populations, substantially complicates its relationship to operatic history. Barely a

whisper in Powder Her Face and Anaïs Nin, two works about women raised in New York and subsequently unleashed upon Europe, the somehow essentially American inflection of the new fallen woman becomes ear-splittingly audible in Anna Nicole and American

Lulu. In the early 1930s, Alban Berg made his femme fatale Lulu a sort of flapper, a club showgirl who dances to ragtime – reflecting the composer’s own deep, affectionate fascination with the United States. Seven decades later, all of the characters that I consider in this project can claim American nationality to some extent. In this and the following chapter, I seek to lay out some reasons for this association.

“American dream, American dream,” sings the actress portraying Anna Nicole

Smith to an off-kilter burlesque of Broadway style, “I’m gonna rape that goddamn

American dream.”4 This otherwise sympathetic heroine, not content to simply achieve a

goal, intends to conquer her idea of the American dream with extraordinary violence. At the risk of indulging a facile cliché, I contend that Turnage and Thomas – two British men – employ a number of musical and dramatic strategies to make the dream look more like a surrealistic nightmare. From Anna Nicole’s perverse backwater of a hometown to the indifferent hellscape of Houston, and on to a bleak and bloodthirsty Hollywood, dystopian landscapes entrap every character – each with its own signature rock, country, jazz, disco, or pop groove. In Anna Nicole, American popular music becomes much more than a sometime signifier of decadence: it moves to the foreground, to the extent that

4 Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas, Anna Nicole [Full Score] (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 2014), 249. 161

some critics have refused to acknowledge the piece as an opera at all.5 The repetition of these numbers helps contribute to a sense of parallelism in the opera’s plot structure. In this chapter, I focus on two sets of performances, united by common staging but separated by time and the Atlantic: the premiere run at the Royal Opera House, and the subsequent New York City Opera production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Subtle differences in British and American reception bespeak the tensions that animate the piece and fuel its searing satire.

No scholarly writing on Anna Nicole exists as of 2017, though musicologists have contributed incisive reviews of performances.6 Over the course of its several performance

runs, it has attracted an unusual amount of attention from both music-oriented and

general press outlets. I owe much of my understanding of the opera, its pop-culture

references, and its satirical elements to the writings of insightful critics. The current

scarcity of musicological secondary literature on the piece affords an opportunity to fill in

the missing historical and cultural context that have informed its creation and reception.

Studies in the media, popular culture, and sociology of the United States at the turn of the

millennium have flourished; this research helps to clarify how and why Anna Nicole has

made sense to its audiences in its first decade of existence. In order to capture the extent

of the piece’s timely satire, I situate it in the context of televisual entertainment since the

1980s, especially the docu-drama and “reality” television of the 1990s and 2000s – the

media landscape in which Smith moved from litigious widowed pinup to adored and

5 For an example of a review in which the author questions the label opera, see: Andrew Clements, “Anna Nicole – Review, Royal Opera House, London,” The Guardian, February 17, 2011, accessed February 9, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/feb/18/anna-nicole-review. 6 See, for instance: Rebecca Lentjes, “Boob Jobs and Blowjobs at BAM,” Bachtrack, September 19, 2013, accessed January 2, 2017, https://bachtrack.com/review-nyco-anna-nicole.

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derided celebrity trainwreck.

In 1994, New York heralded the United States’s arrival as a “White Trash Nation,”

expressing both contempt and camp appreciation for the rising tide of entertainments

centered on drawling, poverty-stricken, rural white Americans as objects of media

attention and pop-cultural fascination. Smith, pictured on the cover without prior

knowledge of the photograph chosen or of the headline to be associated with it, seemed a

corporeal manifestation of this putative zeitgeist (Figure 4.1).7 However, the era’s broad

fascination with working-class southern whites, along with the phenomenon of the female

trainwreck, arose within a much broader context: a collective turn toward what the Media

Studies scholar Kevin Glynn has called tabloid culture. Glynn’s work, along with a

number of other writers’ studies on the particular manifestation of tabloid culture known

as reality TV, forms the basis of this project.8

I also examine the previous work of both artists involved in Anna Nicole’s

creation, in an effort to trace the genealogies of their characters. I ultimately argue that

the opera offers a caustic critique of American culture at the close of the twentieth

century, portraying not only the American dream – full of false promises in this telling,

beckoning the fallen woman onward to her destruction – but also as a sort of alluring and

consuming femme fatale in itself. Turnage and Thomas transpose this tale of a woman

both buoyed and destroyed by societal forces to a Truman Show-like nightmare world of

artifice and invisible stage-management, pieced together from stereotypes of white rural

poverty and elements from reality TV.

7 Tad Friend, “White Hot Trash!,” New York Magazine, August 22, 1994, accessed November 3, 2016, http://nymag.com/news/features/46608/. 8 Kevin Glynn, Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 163

Figure 4.1, August 22, 1994 cover of New York Magazine, with an outtake from a photo shoot with Smith

Turnage’s music, which controls the pace of Smith’s rise and fall, draws upon the same

American cultural products that have informed much of his musical output: various

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genres of popular music, some associated with the milieux depicted and some not so.

Even a cursory survey of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s work will reveal a persistent

fascination with violence, death, fallen women, and African-American musical forms –

jazz in particular.9 Thomas, however, boasts both a background in popular music and a prior dramatic work devoted to tabloid culture, with heavy emphasis on vulgarity,

sexuality, and the grotesquerie of lowbrow entertainment: his Jerry Springer: The Opera, a pastiche of baroque opera seria and popular musical theatre. Anna Nicole echoes, and even recapitulates, various elements of Jerry Springer, from turns of phrase to staging suggestions. The musical theme associated with the character of Anna may even quote

Thomas’s score.

Just as scholarly attempts to claim authorial intent in works of art have proved dubious at best, the opposite tendency – to ignore what Foucault called the author- function and examine art as a mere index of an episteme – might lead to ignorance of the distinctive creative voices audible in the piece. Moreover, Turnage and Thomas differ somewhat in overall sensibility. Turnage has made much of his working-class background and hailed Miles Davis and Beethoven as personal heroes, while Thomas approaches his projects with irrepressible poptimism and a camp sensibility to rival those of Thomas Adès and Philip Hensher. One has expressed regrets about the opera, and since turned to elegiac chamber compositions; the other remains best known for a show

9 In 1997, for instance, audiences first heard Turnage’s harrowing dramatic scena Twice Through the Heart, a setting of poetry by Jackie Kay in which a jailed murderess describes the threats and violence that she endured from the man she killed: her abusive husband. 165

that features tap-dancing Klansmen.10 At the intersection of these aesthetics lies Anna

Nicole, a bundle of contradictions not unlike Powder Her Face in its ability to play gut-

wrenching horror for laughs and turn impish lines into heartbreaking epitaphs.11

From the perspective of the year 2016 and beyond, the tawdry world of Anna

Nicole looks less like the two-decade period it depicts – the Playmate’s progress begins in

1985, reverses course in 1995, and concludes with her death in 2007 – and more like its future. In Anna Nicole the suffering of the rural, un- and underemployed white American working class assumes central importance. The characters, constantly calling attention to the artifice of the narrative they inhabit, bicker over the veracity of the events depicted, constructing what one might describe as a “post-truth” environment. Despite their constant hovering, television cameras and reporters do nothing to differentiate between actual events and fabricated ones. Crude language and behavior rule the day. Bakhtin’s carnival becomes the permanent state of things. Decency appears to have died before the curtain rose. As political polarization increases across the West, and proliferating media contribute to the rise of conspiracy theories, falsified journalism, and competing narratives so disparate as to resemble alternate realities, the relevance of Anna Nicole can

only increase.

10 Turnage, who oversaw the premiere of his Beethoven-influenced string quartet Shroud late in 2016, gave the following statement to Vulture even before the 2013 New York run and 2014 Royal Opera revival: “If I’m really honest, I’m quite uncomfortable with [Anna Nicole] now…I don’t think we were trying to be cruel. But it’s mocking someone’s real life. I wouldn’t do it again.” Justin Davidson and Mark-Anthony Turnage, “Justin Davidson on Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and His Anna Nicole Opera,” Vulture, September 2, 2013, accessed December 3, 2016, http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/anna-nicole-smith- opera.html. 11 A number of critics have noted the similarities between Powder Her Face and Anna Nicole. Even algorithms recognize their kinship: as of 2017, the American version of the retail website Amazon lists the extant DVD recordings of these pieces as items frequently purchased together. “Turnage: Anna Nicole,” Amazon Movies & TV, last modified January 2, 2017, accessed January 2, 2017, https://www.amazon.com/Turnage-Anna-Nicole-Eva-Maria-Westbroek/dp/B0054KCVNA.

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2016 saw the publication of three polemical books aimed at general audiences, all

of which garnered enough press attention to make them into pop-cultural phenomena:

Doyle’s Trainwreck, on the undoing of real, famous women; Nancy Isenberg’s White

Trash, a history of the category to which critics consigned Anna Nicole Smith; and J.D.

Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir on poverty, despair, and opioid addiction among rural

white Americans.12 As prophetic as these popular books proved to be in the context of

American culture and politics in the year of their release, all speak to matters of central

concern in Anna Nicole. The fictionalized, operatic Anna Nicole Smith may appear to inhabit a world of extreme duplicitousness, fakery, exploitation, and greed, but the terror of watching Anna Nicole after 2016 lies in the possibility that the mirror it brandishes, once thought a funhouse prop, reflects the social conditions of the real Western world perfectly.

---

Anna Nicole Smith is but the latest heroine in a long operatic lineage of courtesans, demimondaines, trollops, tramps, and whores, an erotic sisterhood that includes Verdi’s Violetta Valéry, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Weill’s Jenny, and Berg’s Lulu. Anna Nicole also reminded me of Paul Hindemith’s 1929 satiric opera Neues vom Tage (News of the Day) and Kurt Weill’s 1930 Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), both of which anticipated today’s voracious mass-media cycle, rampant commercialism, and institutionalized greed, all of which figured prominently in the Smith story. Those three contemporary phenomena have coalesced in the prurient degradation fostered by “reality” television, of which Anna Nicole’s rise and fall was an early manifestation.13

12 Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016); J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).

13 Martin Filler, “High Culture Laid Low: A New York Requiem,” New York Review of Books, November 30, 2013, accessed November 28, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2013/11/30/city-opera-new-york- requiem/. 167

I want to blow you all… Blow you all… A kiss!14

As comparisons between the sociopolitical currents of the 1930s and the 2010s

multiply and take on ever-greater tones of urgency, the peril of comparing operas from these two periods increases. Obvious parallels, from post-truth discourse and political division to pop-inflected lampoons thereof, will appear everywhere, and the task will become an exercise in confirmation bias-induced panic in short order. However fraught the process becomes, however, these similarities will nonetheless loom large. Satires and zeitopern like those alluded to above – the Weimar Republic’s precursors to today’s tragicomedies and CNN operas – took theatres by storm in the years before Germany’s slow-motion National Socialist coup. Alban Berg, having chosen a bloody tale of

abjection and despair over a lighter work about the tragic love of a glassmaker’s daughter

(Gerhart Hauptmann’s Und Pippa Tanzt!), died two years after the conflagration at the

Reichstag and three years before the Anschluss. In creating Lulu, a Zeitoper-tinged work

that takes place in a grotesque and rotten universe, Berg foretold calamity.

It seems that, on the brink of institutional collapse and generalized disaster,

composers turn to femmes fatales who live and die amid nightmarish social conditions:

the Woman of Erwartung before the Great War, Lulu before World War II, Piazzolla’s

María mere weeks ahead of the upheavals of 1968. Theodor Adorno saw Berg’s music of melancholy as both predictive and diagnostic, and, decades later, Jacques Attali proclaimed that music holds the unique power to herald coming social relations.15 Susan

14 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole: 29. 15 See: Theodor Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7-8; Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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McClary, writing of Monteverdi’s Nymph, Donizetti’s Lucia, Strauss’s Salome, and

Schoenberg’s Frau, has more recently proposed that madwomen in particular, with their tendencies toward chromatic overflow and formal rupture, frequently precede major societal changes.16

While the categories of madwoman and femme fatale overlap frequently, I

propose that the latter bears a somewhat different Oracular function than the former.

When composers turn to sordid worlds ruled by sirens, tempests and ruin follow in the

real world. Perhaps the latest crop of operas on fallen women will witness the breakdown

of this correlation; audiences should hope as much. To begin my analysis with

intimations of looming disaster after quoting Anna Nicole’s opening line above – a crude

innuendo drawled into a newscaster’s microphone after much self-important chanting by

the chorus – feels absurd. But even Turnage and Thomas demonstrate how their

characters’ wisecracks can turn sour, returning to that line when a dancer dressed as a

television camera – one of dozens hovering over Anna and, in the chilling staging by

director Richard Jones, over the crib of her newborn daughter – zips the dying woman

into a body bag (Figure 4.2).17 Much like Powder Her Face, Anna Nicole insists on

comedy that can lurch suddenly into tragedy. In the tragicomic opera of the anti-heroine, one must sometimes laugh with damp eyes and a heaving stomach.

Over its two hour-long acts and sixteen scenes, Anna Nicole covers a great deal of ground in its effort to ridicule tabloid culture, late capital, lap-dancing, plastic surgery,

16 Susan McClary, “Excess and Frame: The Musical Representation of Madwomen,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 80-111. 17 Jones’s production, complete with the sets by Miriam Buether and costumes by Nicky Gillibrand, has appeared at the Royal Opera House in 2011 and 2014, and at BAM in Brooklyn under the auspices of New York City Opera in 2013. For a 2013 production at Oper Dortmund, Jens-Daniel Herzog opted for a darker, less garish staging that, to judge by available promotional video, looks to have hewed closer to Thomas’s staging suggestions. 169

Hollywood paparazzi, designer shoes and apparel, fast food, junk food, diet fads, the

fossil fuel industry, lawyers, income inequality, and, perhaps most of all, the degradation

of poor, rural America.

Figure 4.2, The death of the protagonist in Act II, Scene 8 of Anna Nicole

(Eva-Marie Westbroek, Anna, London, 2010)

While Turnage and Thomas fall short of advancing a full ninety-five theses on the

corruption of contemporary Western society, there can be little doubt whose golden door

bears this British screed: the United States, as a cultural, economic, and political entity.

During the course of the opera, various characters anthropomorphize the nation itself as a femme fatale.18

18 Anna Nicole herself addresses the United States as a woman twice, and uses violent language both times: in Act I, Scene 6, “American Dreaming,” and Act II Scene 16, “Clown Messiah.”

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Alex Ross has praised the opera’s structure, which tends toward sudden

transitions, bustling ensembles, the occasional solo moment, and tableaux in which

energy builds gradually but inexorably.19 Every so often, time stops for a major number;

in this respect, it resembles both nineteenth-century opera and popular American musical

theatre. Turnage’s music almost always contains some sort of recognizable groove

derived from African-American popular music, and transitions between styles and genres

tend to mark transitions between dramatic situations.

Of all the operas that I discuss in this study, Anna Nicole stands alone as a grand- scale opera with a cast and orchestra to match. The score calls for sixteen distinct roles, though the practice of double-casting singing actors in minor parts has ensured that no opera house has had to hire that many soloists.20 Two- and four-part ensembles appear

onstage frequently, though some of these may double as well; in the Royal Opera House

premiere run, the same four singers played both Anna Nicole’s family and the children of

J. Howard Marshall II. One character, Smith’s son Daniel, requires both a silent child

actor and an older, plausibly teenaged singer. A full chorus backs up this large ensemble,

commenting in the manner of Greek tragedy. The orchestra, a full triple-wind symphonic

group, includes a pair of soprano saxophones and a rock trio of electric guitar, bass

guitar, and drum kit. The guitarists must double on mandolin and, in one case, banjo.

In the Royal Opera House premiere run, a recording of which Opus Arte released

as a commercial video recording, this trio – which, like the bizarre Dixieland band of

Lulu, must detach itself and appear onstage for a dance sequence – included the

19 Alex Ross, “Bombshells,” New Yorker, October 7, 2013, accessed September 20, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/07/bombshells-4. 20 In the 2011 Royal Opera house production, Allison Cook – the Duchess of La Monnaie’s 2015 Powder Her Face – played the part of Blossom, leader of the lap-dancers whose ranks Anna Nicole joins. 171

renowned jazz musicians Peter Erskine and John Parricelli, and John Paul Jones of Led

Zeppelin. The fact that these particular devotees of chamber-scale improvisation and

heady, blues-influenced rock come together to play disco, country, and strip-club swing

has attracted little critical comment, fascinating and complex though the politics of genre

become when three musicians working in sacralized fields find themselves playing

historically denigrated dance music alongside a full classical orchestra. Turnage has

confessed to a youthful disdain toward “white rock,” and demonstrated his fondness for

jazz, funk, and soul throughout his adult career.21

As I have argued in previous chapters, the basic narrative of each contemporary opera of this type can fit into three concise phrases: a woman rises above her initial station in life, transgressing the boundaries of socially acceptable sexual desire and expression on her way up; she experiences a brief moment of fulfillment, stability, and agency; and inevitably, she loses everything through some calamity. On its surface, Anna

Nicole appears to follow this pattern with unerring precision. However, Turnage and

Thomas, aware of the necessity of this arc given their aims, complicate matters from the first. The chorus, fulfilling its role as collective metanarrative prologue, promises a tale with a necessary end: “It’s about a beauty wannabe/ Who was gone from the get-go.”22

Anna Nicole shares much with previous contemporary operas on similar themes, including this implication of inevitable fate. Philip Hensher chose the subject matter of

Powder Her Face because of the potential comedy and power of a doubled silencing of an opera heroine – first by fellatio, then by death – and Louis Andriessen capped his

21 Wroe and Turnage, “Mark-Anthony Turnage: A Life in Music.” 22 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole: 24-25.

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monodrama with a recorded song by Anaïs Nin’s father because he saw his protagonist’s

silence as an “unavoidable ending.”23 Misguided attributions of authorial intent

notwithstanding, the composers and librettists of these operas appear to be well aware

that they till this old field anew. Anna, then, has belonged to death from the moment we

first see her – young, ambitious, eager to make it out of her hometown.

As in Powder Her Face and American Lulu, however, moments set in the diegetic

present bookend a series of flashbacks. All three operas thus partake of temporal norms

more familiar in cinema than in theatre, and this one resembles a particular type of film:

the documentary. As I argue below, the documentary and docu-drama’s late twentieth-

century rise to commercial supremacy in the form of reality TV – a tributary of

documentary, insofar as the discourses of reality and spontaneity attend its sequences of

unscripted events – stands as the inescapable cultural backdrop against which Anna

Nicole projects its hilarious and devastating scenes. The promotional tagline for a DVD

release of The Anna Nicole Show, Smith’s abortive reality program, implies that any

comedic atmosphere in the episodes arises by accident, as a convenient byproduct of the

documentary surveillance of Smith and her friends and family: “It’s not supposed to be

funny, it just is.”24

In truth, of course, producers arranged for many of the predicaments, trips, foibles, and conflicts that gave the show its sense of dramatic narrativity. Playing with

this tension between obvious artifice and claims to veracity, the chorus of Anna Nicole

declares: “This happened/ This actually happened/ Though some of the details are

23 See p. 136. 24 The Anna Nicole Show - The First Season, DVD-ROM (Santa Monica: Lionsgate, 2004). 173

sketchy/ And vary according to who’s [sic] account you read.”25 In 2004, months into the

prosecution of the Iraq War and shortly after the cancellation of The Anna Nicole Show,

an aide to George W. Bush derided a reporter from the New York Times as a member of an outmoded “reality-based community.”26 The adviser went on to imply that only the

passive and passé bother to interpret and discern existing reality – those in power, by

contrast, strive to create realities. In the media-saturated, actuality TV-devoted tabloid

culture of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, objective reality itself becomes

fuzzy, gone from the get-go. Anna Nicole’s chorus declares as much. Powder Her Face

seems to emanate from hazy projections of memory onto the present, and Olga Neuwirth

frames American Lulu as an unsolved murder mystery – a sort of staged crime documentary, complete with dramatic re-enactments. Like both of these other contemporary operas, Anna Nicole represents a dramatic compromise between the classic harlot’s progress paradigm – rise to agency, contentment and catastrophe, fall to silence – and the cinematic or televisual flashback.

Anna Nicole’s entrance, however, looks and sounds less like a lapse into memory than a resurrection. The chorus, after all, narrates from the audience’s present, and in

Turnage and Thomas’s original conception, Anna arrives onstage in a body bag lowered from the flies. Even the characters switch between modes of address, sometimes confining their comments to their fellow characters and immediate situation and, at other times, singing to the audience directly through the fourth wall. In this, too, Anna Nicole resembles a documentary. The first episode of The Anna Nicole Show in particular

25 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole: 17-18. 26 Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times, October 17, 2004, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the- presidency-of-george-w-bush.html?_r=0.

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features a steady alternation between cutaway interviews, in which characters

acknowledge and address the camera, and supposedly spontaneous interactions, in which

the actors’ lack of engagement with the camera allows the viewer to forget its presence

entirely. Reality TV has long drawn this line between mere observation – the gaze of the

voyeur, lent to audiences as they engage with the medium – and frank acknowledgment of artificial framing. Anna Nicole, then, mimics that which it mocks and castigates: spurious, constructed quasi-documentary entertainments that nevertheless claim authenticity, spontaneity, and veracity. It assumes the trappings of tabloid culture in order to satirize the same. “‘Nuff said, on with the show,” cries Anna Nicole as the chorus foretells her demise at the end of Scene 1, eager to retread these fifteen moments in her life – stations, perhaps – which, taken together, trace her story along a clear rise-and-fall trajectory, complete with a roughly central interlude.27 Table 4.1 clarifies the structure

and plot of the piece.

The opening “Scene Zero,” a five-bar stretch of orchestral introduction, bears the

title “Bodybags Descending” – a description of the bold staging option that Richard

Jones, the original director behind the London and New York productions of 2011 and

2013, chose not to follow. As with Powder Her Face, the composer and librettist suggest

scenery, costuming, entrances, and exits throughout the score, but even the opera’s debut

run eschewed these suggestions in favor of Jones’s action, Miriam Buether’s distinctive,

surreal sets, and lurid costumes by Nicky Gillibrand.

27 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole: 36. 175

Table 4.1, Graphic synopsis of Anna Nicole

Where the chorus enters for Scene 1, “America Sings (Choral Cartoon),” Turnage and Thomas envision a mock-solemn vigil populated by a cross-section of the American people. This heterogeneous group should, in their words, include:

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…paparazzi, drag queens (with mascara running down their faces from tears) including a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, a couple of KKK, a group of gospel singers, a few rappers, some lap-dancer [sic] (some with bare breasts), three or four women in full burkahs [sic], some “normals,” a couple of people in wheelchairs, a mum with her severely handicapped child, some Hispanics [sic] pushing some octogenarians, the couple in the classic American portrait, “American Gothic,” George [W.] Bush, Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Heffner, Larry King with his distinctive braces, and maybe two or three trapezing Elvises. We should see the whole of America reflected in the chorus.28

This vision of “the whole of America” has Thomas’s fingerprints all over it. The

Klansmen come directly from Jerry Springer: The Opera, and Oprah Winfrey and Larry

King stand in for Springer as the charismatic hosts of television talk shows. The reference

to “normals” – as opposed to the queer, black, Muslim, disabled, and Latina people

around them – either mocks the social construct of whiteness, that supposed absence of

identity that is in fact particular to the nation’s majority demographic, or participates in it uncritically. The suggestion of having “a few rappers” on stage would, if followed, provide the opera’s only reference to the entire domain of hip-hop, despite the genre’s ever-increasing pop-cultural currency in the period depicted.29 In both Jerry Springer and

Anna Nicole, midcentury American musical theatre and 1960s and ‘70s-era soul figure

much more prominently than any dominant form of music from the 1990s or ‘00s.

Turnage and Thomas, two children of the early 1960s, turn to the music of their own

28 Emphasis mine. Ibid., 32. 29 Hip-Hop also figures prominently in Smith’s attempt to regain fame after the cancellation of her show; she contributed spoken vocals for Kanye West’s single The New Workout Plan in 2004, and starred in the corresponding eight-minute music video. An extended satire of infomercials – yet another form of tabloid TV prevalent in the early 2000s – The New Workout Plan video finds Smith trim again, and hawking a video fitness program alongside West. In the song and video, she plays a stereotypical Southern trailer-park denizen for whom the workout tape has been a panacea: “My name is Ella-May from Mobile, Alabama, and I just want to say, since listening to Kanye’s workout tape, I been able to date outside the family, I got a double wide [trailer], and I rode the plane!” A subsequent appearance at the 2004 Billboard Awards found Smith stammering and slurring her way through her introduction of West, thus confirming her status as a celebrity trainwreck to the tabloid press. 177

formative years, rather than the music of their character’s lifetime, to underscore their

tragicomic pageant.

The presence of President George W. Bush and a group of women in burqas

points to the immediate geopolitical context of Anna Nicole. In a post-9/11 world of

American military campaigns and cultural hegemony, many European authorities

criticized the United States government for its interventions. Conflicts in southwest and

central Asia pulled Westerners’ attention toward the perceived cultural norms of

majority-Muslim countries in the region; when Anna Nicole took the stage of the Royal

Opera House in August 2011, coalition forces remained in force throughout war-torn

Iraq. By uniting such political subtext with obvious gestures toward tabloid culture –

Larry King, paparazzi, Playboy founder Hugh Heffner – Thomas aims to recreate the satirical universe of his Jerry Springer, a vision of America that resembles a Bosch or

Breughel painting more than a Rockwell illustration. While a departure from these instructions, Jones’s staging, in which Gillibrand clothes the chorus as so many circa-

1985 newscasters in identical suits, dresses, and wigs, shifts the emphasis of the opera

away from Thomas’s notorious prior work and toward one of this piece’s strongest

themes. Mediated voyeurism, a national and global source of mass pleasure in the age of

tabloid culture, creates the profit motive that leads these reporters to cover Anna Nicole’s story in the first place. They appear as eager to witness a human sacrifice as the stamping

pre-modern Russians of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps.

The action begins in Smith’s real hometown of Mexia, Texas. Anna Nicole, costumed as her teenage self, skips across the stage, impatiently proclaiming her boredom

with the strange, posthumous documentary that has just begun: “Facts, facts, facts, facts,

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yadda yadda blah-dee blah/ Facts, facts, facts, facts/ Well here’s where it all began.”30

She encounters townspeople, her parents, the aunt who took her in at various points, her

cousin Shelly – the latter trotted out several times on The Anna Nicole Show as a hard-

partying hillbilly foil to the wealthy star. Depicted as toothless and wild on that program,

Shelly’s entire role in Anna Nicole comprises two actions: flashing the chorus members,

and begging Anna Nicole to pay for a dental restoration – her third. Even at this early

point in the opera and Anna’s life story, figures familiar to the public from the much later

Anna Nicole Show make their entrances. Stern, the lawyer and lover who appeared as a regular cast member on the show, emerges from the wings and earns a rebuke from the teenage Anna Nicole for breaking into the narrative too soon; she refers to him as

“Dummy,” an actual pet name that Smith uses for him at times in her reality show. Like

Stern and Anna, the latter’s mother, Virgie, proves capable of coming unmoored from her

designated tableau. She appears repeatedly at key points in Anna’s rise and fall, acting as

a voice of wisdom, reason, and moral clarity. Stern and Virgie are the only characters in the opera who seem able to move between periods in Smith’s life without aging; Anna, despite her awareness of the fact that she exists in a fictional retelling, must move through time in linear fashion. Fate draws her onward while Virgie and Stern float around her, the perpetual angel and devil on her shoulders respectively.

Scene 4 finds Anna in a fast-food service job, and at the beginning of her ill-fated relationship with Billy, a bitter and allegedly violent hometown boy. She marries him and bears his child, but they fall out; her attempt to make it in the big city, Houston, goes pear-shaped when she lands a dispiriting low-wage job at the local “Wall Mart.” She

30 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole, 37-38. 179

becomes a lap dancer, but not a successful one, and her peers give her a single piece of

advice: seek cosmetic surgery. In a delirious show-tune number, Anna receives a breast

augmentation surgery from the leering Dr. Yes. The enhancement proves successful

when J. Howard Marshall II, a near-nonagenarian, descends from the flies in a massive

stair lift chair – a nod to the deus ex machina saviors of baroque opera – and makes his

desire for Anna Nicole clear. The young dancer, now engaged, sings both tenderly and

rabidly of her personal American dream. A wedding scene closes Act I.

Unlike Berg in the case of Lulu, Turnage and Thomas do not locate the turning

point of their opera at its exact midpoint. The opera’s sequence of brief vignettes thus

continues as though uninterrupted in Scene 8, when Anna Nicole celebrates her new

husband’s many glittering gifts but encounters a roadblock: the ranch she wants for

herself and her son Daniel, now a pre-teen, comes with a price-tag. In a possible nod to

Powder Her Face, Anna fellates Marshall to onomatopoetic orchestral accompaniment

before declaring to her son that she has won them the sought-after home. If Anna

resembles the Duchess in this moment, she becomes a latter-day Violetta in the next: a

cocaine-fueled disco dance party, complete with onstage band, ensues, and the hostess

encourages all in attendance to “party ‘til the drug raid.”31 The fun instead ends when

Marshall goes into cardiac arrest, dying intestate. His family declares their intention to keep his entire fortune, leaving Anna Nicole with nothing.32 This crisis leads to the

31 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole vol. 2, 17. 32 Journalists have suggested that Marshall’s turn as a randy, ridiculous old man in Anna Nicole contributed to New York City Opera’s collapse, mere weeks after Anna Nicole’s run at BAM in 2013. David H. Koch, the chemical-company executive and prominent conservative political donor, saw a performance of Anna Nicole and subsequently declined to renew his substantial financial support of NYCO, citing his friendship with the Marshall family as his reason for backing out. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy soon after. Michael Cooper and Robin Pogrebin, “The Frenzied Last-Act Effort to Save City Opera,” New York Times, October 4, 2013, accessed March 7, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/the- frenzied-last-act-effort-to-save-city-opera.html.

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multimedia interlude, the point in the opera at which her condition begins to worsen until

her death.

The violation that precipitates the fallen woman or femme fatale’s downfall

frequently involves some unfortunate choice or another on her part, but men always contribute to the situation wherein the proscribed act occurs. In the case of Anna Nicole, the fallout from Marshall’s failure to create a will cross-fades into another man’s nefarious plotting, and in the intervening period Anna Nicole violates one of the great

taboos of the celebrity trainwreck: gaining weight.33

Figure 4.3, Double-scrim interlude presentation, Act II, Interlude, Anna Nicole

In a visual interlude designed by Jones, a scrim bearing an image of Anna Nicole,

posed as a pinup with a come-hither stare, remains stationary as another gradually unfurls

in front of it. Starting with her feet, this second curtain overlays the first image with one

of Anna after a dramatic weight gain. Cartoon cheeseburgers decorate the curtain behind

this new image, and a timeline on the far right side shows the passage of years (Figure

4.3). As in Lulu, the creators found a way to address a period too long and static to depict

33 Here, Anna Nicole inverts the physical change inscribed upon Violetta in La traviata; where the latter wastes away, the former becomes obese because of depression and dispossession. 181 with staged action. Unlike any previous opera, Anna Nicole aligns this crucial moment of mid-narrative crisis with a cruel body-shaming joke.34

Things fall apart in short order. Addicted to the painkillers she takes in order to quell her back pain – a consequence of the implants – she appears (as in life, frequently) on the Larry King Live show: literal CNN opera. The next scene, “Good Morning

Hollywood,” brings a radical shift in tone and emphasis as Stern briefs a crowd of assembled paparazzi, apprising them of the staged mishaps that will plague his client, lover, and meal ticket that day. In Richard Jones’s productions for the Royal Opera

House and BAM, the baritone who plays Stern addresses the audience directly while chorus members, clad in black bodysuits and enormous television-camera masks, stalk down the aisles. As in Mariusz Trelínski’s production of Powder Her Face for La

Monnaie, the already-implicit message that the audience, as media consumers, should recognize their complicity in the undoing of the scandalous woman resounds with added emphasis. Stern, now serving as a clear, embodied villain in place of the general folly and vice of the opera’s first half, arranges for television cameras to film the birth of Anna

Nicole’s second child and – the opera heavily implies – gives her camera-shy son Daniel, silent thus far, a number of prescription and illegal drugs. Daniel dies, just as this fictionalized Stern intends. The young man finally sings, albeit postmortem, listing all of the chemicals found in his system from inside a half-zipped body bag. Anna Nicole’s own death follows shortly. Alone but for the overwhelming swarm of television cameras

– Act II begins with only one onstage, and ends with the entire chorus pressing in – she

34 For more on the scrim interlude, see: Marina Kifferstein, “‘I want to blow you all… a kiss:’ Anna Nicole by the New York City Opera at BAM,” I Care if You Listen, September 24, 2013, accessed December 15, 2016, https://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/09/anna-nicole-new-york-city-opera-bam/.

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rails against the American dream that pulled her so high only to leave her laid low. Her

final line, identical to her first in text but unmoored from its original bluesy tonality, trails

off into silence, and the arc of the fallen woman stands completed. In the 2011 Richard

Jones production captured on the commercial video recording, the flash of blinding light

that had followed the line in Act I occurs again – the final burst of the flashbulb, or

perhaps a visible trace of a transmigration as the briefly resurrected Anna Nicole returns whence she came.

---

In 2009, two years after Anna Nicole Smith’s death and two before the premiere of Anna Nicole, Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray attempted to define the term reality

TV: “an unabashedly commercial genre united less by aesthetic rules or certainties than by the fusion of popular entertainment with a self-conscious claim to the discourse of the

real…access to the real is presented in the name of dramatic uncertainty, voyeurism, and

popular pleasure[.]”35 As opposed to documentary film per se, reality TV seldom claims

to exist for the betterment of society and enrichment of the viewing public. It sells itself

as more authentic than scripted entertainment, but also does not claim to establish truth.

Its creators disregard the ethics of presenting living human subjects as objects of an

invasive media apparatus, instead assuming – correctly – that, for a substantial share of

the viewing public, the voyeuristic impulse trumps any reservations. Ouellette and

Murray proceed to lay out some prevailing subgenres, including the dating program, the

makeover program, the docusoap, the talent contest, court programs, and reality

35 Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, “Introduction,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 3-4. 183

sitcoms.36 At various points, The Anna Nicole Show attempts to mimic each of the five

former formats while remaining rooted in its true home turf: the latter.

Sitcom – a portmanteau for situational comedy – describes the majority of comedy programs in American television as of the 2010s. Paradoxical though the term reality

sitcom may appear, the term only presents semantic problems when the usual sense of the

word reality holds. Since the rise of the televisual genre in the 1990s, the first half of the phrase reality television has undergone a transformation of meaning. In 2008, truTV – the

successor to Court TV, which memorably broadcast the sensational People of the State of

California v. Orenthal James Simpson to a paying, national audience in 1995 – sought to

make a name for itself among a crowded field of competitors, choosing the apparently

nonsensical motto “Not reality. Actuality.” In explaining this tagline, the network’s

executive Vice President, Marc Juris, declared: “Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony…[w]e felt that because [our programming] was real, we couldn’t call it reality.”37 In the world of television, reality the programming category and reality

the realm of common human experience stopped meaning the same thing long ago. Thus

terms like reality sitcom, a perfect description for The Anna Nicole Show. Its episode

titles – “House Hunting,” “Introduction of Bobby Trendy,” “The Date,” “The Camping

Trip” – always betrayed the situation to be clumsily navigated and imperfectly (or never)

resolved, a preset maze for human subjects to blunder through.

Ouelette and Murray’s definition dovetails with Kevin Glynn’s discussion of

tabloid television, published nearly a decade earlier. Responding to a pre-millennial

36 Ibid., 5. 37 David Bauder, “New truTV Makes Appeal for “Actuality,” Seattle Times, January 1, 2008, accessed January 1, 2017, http://old.seattletimes.com/html/television/2004097354_trutv01.html.

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decade rife with programs that the former scholars would later recognize as subgenres

beneath reality TV’s umbrella, Glynn cites the ostensible crime-fighting program

America’s Most Wanted as a central example of the televisual tabloid. An “infotainment”

program positioned as a public service, a purposefully alarming look at real-world

criminals sutured together by sensational dramatic re-enactments of horrific scenarios,

the program – in Glynn’s words – bespoke the stirrings of a general shift in attitudes among the program’s viewers: “popular dissatisfaction with institutions perceived as incapable of fulfilling the great promises of liberal democracy.”38 As Glynn goes on to argue throughout the book, this softening of faith in institutions, such as the impartial and independent press, the political establishment, and others, continued through the 1990s.

One can hear the growing roar of this wave in the Duchess’s ravings about the dangers of

going outside in Powder Her Face, and in the questioning of fact threaded throughout

Anna Nicole. It is audible in the ever-escalating, often counterfactual assertions of imminent and pervasive danger common in political discourse since September of 2001 –

an event that Glynn could not have foreseen, though his warnings about a media culture

organized around surveillance and fear proved prophetic.

In place of ethically invested documentary and fact-based communities of journalists and scholars, Western television saturates itself with the stuff of the formerly physical tabloid: fantastic conspiracies, real-world grotesquerie, eternal scandal, permanent chaos. In this new paradigm, the boundaries between the real, the stage- managed, and the wholly fabricated become porous. Melodrama becomes the norm, ironic and camp appreciations easy, and private dysfunction the most lucrative source of

38 Glynn, Tabloid Culture, 6. 185

public spectacle. The moment a willing object of the media consumer’s gaze reveals their outrageous, transgressive, sensational ways of being in the world, a mass audience divides itself: some feel disgust and contempt, others deep amusement, still others

genuine investment in the fate of this marginalized presence made visible and audible. At

this intersection of real people and part- or fully-fabricated stories emerge the founding

premises of programs like Jerry Springer and The Anna Nicole Show, disparate examples

of a single phenomenon in which, as Glynn puts it, producers “defamiliarize the ordinary

and banalize the exotic.”39

Just as this broad shift in televisual aesthetics began to accelerate – in the same

narrow historical window as the O.J. Simpson trial, the continued backlashes to political

correctness and feminism, the overtaking of rock music by pop styles, and the premieres

of Ezra Laderman’s Marilyn and Adès’s Powder Her Face – New York declared the

1990s the decade of White Trash. Though Anna Nicole Smith, by then a world-famous

model, Playboy playmate, and the wife of J. Howard Marshall II for two months, serves

as the face of the trash turn in the cover illustration, Tad Friend’s splashy story never

mentions her by name. Instead, Friend focuses on various other manifestations the rural,

tacky, dysfunctional, and vulgar in mass media: his first example involves the then-

ongoing litigation between Paula Jones, a former employee of the State of Arkansas, and

her alleged sexual harasser, President of the United States Bill Clinton. Over several

pages of critical dot-connecting, Friend argues that the sort of crass, lewd, uncouth

atmosphere that surrounded coverage of Jones’s case and other contemporary cultural

phenomena, from a notable Guess? apparel campaign (in which Smith figured

39 Ibid., 7.

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prominently) to the rise of gentleman’s clubs (in which Smith danced, and met Marshall)

had, in his turn of phrase, metastasized. He also cites the sensationalist crime-doc

program Cops, a tabloid news program, two daytime talk shows, and a game-doc – the

then-current forms of reality TV – as nodes from which the phenomenon, implicitly

compared to a cancer, had spread.40

Whither white trash and the variant at play in Anna Nicole, trailer-trash, as stock identities in American popular culture? At midcentury, scripted television programs had dramatized the differences between urban and rural Americans of the same broad ethnic category; The Beverly Hillbillies in particular juxtaposed the wealth, extravagance, and artifice of Los Angeles with the down-home charm of the nouveau riche Clampett family.

The program portrayed these rural Americans as stereotypical comic characters, often

puzzled by Hollywood customs – but in the end, the “hillbillies” at the core of the

narrative served as its collective warm, beating heart and moral compass. The tropes of idleness, self-sabotage, and degeneracy that attend the contemporary white-trash

archetype have no place in such a program, as the honest Clampetts serve as the primary

objects of empathy and identification among its target audience of suburban whites. The

contrast between this depiction of rural Southerners in the midst of urban, coastal

opulence and that of The Anna Nicole Show could scarcely be starker. One of the first

steps on the three-decade cultural journey between these two televisual artifacts came at

the beginning of the 1970s, when The Beverly Hillbillies fell victim to the so-labeled

“rural purge” that transformed American television across all of its major networks.41

40 Friend, “White Hot Trash!” 41 Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 202-204.

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Seeking the loyalty of a young audience that, in the midst of social upheaval, remained

unamused and unconvinced by the dozens of programs devoted to country and western

music, pastoral imagery, and rural characters at the time, executives canceled almost all

such programs en masse between 1969 and 1975. A different sort of stereotype, rooted in

old prejudices, thus began to creep in over the 1970s and ‘80s.

As Isenberg writes, another cultural shift had begun in the late 1960s: the rise of

identity politics. Given the now-prevailing notion of the personal as political, the eventual

consolidation of “white trash” as the name of a self-aware community and as a reclaimed

slur – even as it remains a pejorative as well – looks like an inevitable outcome in

hindsight. White trash would become a sort of ethnicity, distinct from suburban and elite

metropolitan classes of American whites. According to Isenberg, the popular culture of

the 1970s, now free of Clampetts and kin, pulled American media consumers hither and

thither on the question of rural whiteness. On the one hand, the film Deliverance depicted

Appalachians as borderline subhuman; on the other, dissatisfaction with the supposed utopia of middle-class suburbia began to spread, and discourses of cultural authenticity and family heritage began to rise in the national media landscape. The term redneck spread and became a badge of pride, and Dolly Parton – a key figure, insofar as she bridged the gap between Marilyn Monroe’s smoldering glamour and poor, rural, white, southern identity, decades before Smith tackled the same project – moved to the center of the country’s musical landscape. Jimmy Carter became President for a time. And, to the titillation of those invested in the tabloids of the day, the public disgrace of the corrupt

Reverend Jim Bakker of North Carolina went national, providing readers with the story of a man who had, by preaching to a congregation of rural whites and fleecing them all,

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moved from a trailer to a mansion to a prison cell. His secret dalliances with various men

and women only added to the mass Schadenfeude. Isenberg, attentive to mass-mediated depictions of poor rural whites, posits a direct relationship between the Bakker scandal

and the reality TV of the present:

The tabloid exploitation of the Bakker affair may have augured the official birth of ‘reality TV.’ One can directly trace the unholy line from the out- of-control Bakkers to the gawking at rural white trash-dom in TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Both the preacher’s perversions and the underage beauty contestant’s shenanigans tapped into the public’s attachment to the tawdry behavior of the American underclass.42

Though Isenberg’s perfunctory tone and uncharitable view of both the viewing public and the so-labeled “underclass” give me pause, I propose two missing links in this chain from the gossip rag to The Learning Channel: the shock-driven daytime talk shows of Jerry

Springer and others, and the rise and fall of Smith, a woman who considered Jerry

Springer a personal favorite.43

Richard Thomas, whose feelings about The Jerry Springer Show appear to range

from camp-inflected affection to mild moral outrage, sought to capture the seedy ethos of

the program in his Jerry Springer: The Opera – a title that suggests an adaptation across

media, rather than an original work. A number of striking similarities tie it to Anna

Nicole. “Fuck you,” yells a member of the titular program’s studio audience, immediately

after the work’s grandiose opening chorus; “fuck you back,” another replies. The same

exchange occurs between Anna’s mother and father in Act I, Scene 3 of Anna Nicole.

The general mood of vulgarity, profanity, and resentment animates both pieces, and the

42 Isenberg, White Trash, 282-287. 43 Kathleen Lebesco, “Fatness as the Embodiment of Working-Class Rhetoric,” in Who Says? Working Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community, ed. William DeGenaro (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 238-255. 189

same class-based epithets find their way into both libretti – the warm-up man for the

Springer program dismisses his audience as “trailer trash”. Southern accents abound,

characters with drug problems appear as guests, and a commercial for a plastic surgery

outfit interrupts the action at one point. When Jesus takes the stage during the infernal second half of Springer, he addresses Satan with the phrase “old friend, old foe” – to a tune that, in its first bar, sounds almost identical to the melody of Anna’s aria in Act I,

Scene 6 of Anna Nicole. Satan’s quasi-baroque coloratura passages, set in the middle of the singing actor’s baritone range, presage the melismatic line that Howard K. Stern fires off upon his entrance in Act I, Scene 3 of the later piece. Turnage must have paid close attention to Thomas’s work, and their collaboration recycled some of its details. Crucially for the purposes of my argument, both works place emphasis on class – a lower class – in characterizing the works’ subjects as trashy and vulgar.

Smith, whose long legal fight for a share of Marshall’s estate involved both the

Supreme Court and the administration of President George W. Bush, arrived at the new millennium without the fortune she had briefly enjoyed, but poised to become a star in the reality TV firmament. If 1990s pop culture came to revolve around tabloid aesthetics, which thrived on pervasive white-trash stereotypy and perpetual Rabelaisian chaos, and sired reality TV in all its sensational tackiness, then Anna Nicole Smith appeared as the reviled and adored embodiment of the age, a foul-mouthed Lola Montez for the new millennium. She had the humble, troubled upbringing with the requisitely trailer-bound family, the archetypically “toothless” relatives, the shortage of formal education, the unbridled sexuality, the history of disreputable occupations and alleged gold-digging, the liquor and junk food consumption – everything.

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Hence The Anna Nicole Show, a sort of extended response to the history of reality

TV in which she and her entourage explored the dominant tabloid formats of the day on

an episode-by-episode basis. Self-aware and even self-parodic from early in its run, The

Anna Nicole Show, despite its limited relationship with the storyline of Anna Nicole,

serves as the aesthetic and narrative foundation upon which Turnage and Thomas’s work

rests.

Anna Anna Glam’rous Anna, Anna Nicole/ Born poor in Texas, strugglin’, slavin’, tryin’ to get some fame/ Then you used what you got, and that was a lot, you became a household name/ Married a billionaire/ So he was 88, you didn’t care/ It all disappeared as fast as it came…Anna Anna Fabulous Anna, Anna Nicole, you’re so outrageous!/ Anna Nicole!44

Note the reference to her good fortune arriving and evaporating quickly, a line that could just as well apply to Lulu or any operatic femme fatale. This theme song for

The Anna Nicole Show consists largely of repetitions of the first half of Smith’s double name. Like a ballad, it recounts the travails of her life. In the first episode of the show, which finds a stumbling, slurring, sex-hungry Smith shopping for the home from which future episodes will be based, the former Vicki Lee Hogan confesses during a cutaway interview that she loves to hear paparazzi shouting the name Anna repeatedly as she traverses red carpets. Accordingly, Anna Nicole begins with a textual near-quotation of this theme song, the sound of dozens chanting her name, first in hocket and then in unison: “Anna Anna Anna Anna Anna Nicole!”45 In its attempt to summarize Smith’s rise

and fall in advance, Turnage and Thomas’s Scene 1, “America Sings,” puts a nightmare

version of the Anna Nicole Show theme into the mouths of either the outcast and Othered

44 David Baron wrote the song, with assistance on lyrics from Jill Taffet, an executive at the television network E! Paris Hampton, who appears to have left her career in music and the public eye altogether, performed the song. 45 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole: 10. 191

stars of tabloid media (in Thomas’s recommended staging), or in those of tabloid-news infotainers (in Jones’s production). Either way, the prologue hauls the audience into the trashy, titillating, sensational world of The Anna Nicole Show and its reality-TV peers from the first.

By no means does Anna Nicole mirror The Anna Nicole Show in its dramatis personae. Among the leading characters of the latter, only Smith, her cousin Shelly, her son Daniel, and Stern appear in the former. Her personal assistant Kim Walther never shows up, nor does the chief antagonist of the show’s first season, the flamboyant and conflict-prone home decorator Bobby Trendy. A collection of dogs substitutes for

Smith’s beloved Sugar Pie. Even the city of Los Angeles, so thematically and dramatically essential to the program as to become a character in itself, recedes in favor of vignettes from Smith’s Texan adolescence. Turnage and Thomas have good reason to simplify, as their tight narrative focus on the Marshall family and Stern as antagonists helps to keep the opera taut in structure and simple in story.46 Despite these differences,

even a cursory glance at The Anna Nicole Show reveals subtle connections: signs that

Turnage, Thomas, Jones, and Gillibrand paid close attention to their subject’s all-too-

brief career as a TV trainwreck. As on the program, Smith’s teenage son Daniel appears

rarely, remains silent when he does, and constantly wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the rock band Nirvana, the voice of a generation of disaffected youth in the 1990s

– a sad and prophetic wardrobe choice, given the early death of that group’s lead singer,

Kurt Cobain. Anna appears on Larry King Live, refers to her son by pet names such as

46 Had they chosen to include Kim, however, their opera might have resembled Berg’s Lulu even more than it already does: one of the more controversial narrative threads of The Anna Nicole Show involved the implied attraction between the star and her PA, and Anna Nicole could therefore have had its own answer to Countess Geschwitz.

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“pooter-scooter,” attends wild parties, and attempts to rein in her marauding, topless

cousin Shelly – all events replicated in the opera.

As mentioned above, The Anna Nicole Show served as a microcosmic reflection

of the tabloid and reality-TV universe of its time. Its first episode, “House Hunting,” apes

the title and format of the evergreen program House Hunters, in which families and

individuals who, in reality, already own a house reenact their searches as though in real

time. The Season 2 premiere, a bizarre patchwork of live segments alternate pre-taped

ones, riffs on dating programs The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. As the program

becomes more self-conscious in narrative technique and less plausibly spontaneous over

the duration of its run, the scenarios become even more obviously referential. The

second-season episode “Trading Spaces” draws its title and premise from a then-popular

hybrid between the game-doc and makeover show, and “Courting Disaster/Judge Anna”

sees Anna Nicole substituting for a television small-claims judge. This latter subgenre of

tabloid TV, which features stern, authoritative figures haranguing poor people for their

alleged deficits of moral fiber and intelligence, resembles The Anna Nicole Show in itself

– insofar as much of its drama and humor flows from humiliations. The difference, of course, is that Anna Nicole remained visible to the public for more than a few precious minutes.

Some specters have haunted this discussion: those of classism, elitism, taste, and cultural hierarchy. Even the author of New York’s piece on “white trash” culture acknowledged, in one of its early paragraphs, that the literally dehumanizing term in question seemed outdated, demeaning, and offensive, and predicted that it would become an unsayable slur in short order. It has not. See, for example, the title of Isenberg’s tome 193

on this historical underclass, or the headline for a recent article in the Telegraph revisiting Smith’s pop-cultural and televisual ascendancy: “America’s Last White Trash

Cinderella.”47 Glynn, invoking Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall, notes the perils of

writing about such routinely devalued cultural objects as reality programs on several occasions in the opening pages of Tabloid Culture. Using Hall’s notion of the power-bloc

and the people in a society, Glynn pushes back on the perhaps automatic instinct to

ridicule or dismiss these forms of entertainment. As Janice Radway peered into the fan

culture surrounding the romance novel in order to account for the pleasures offered

therein, so does Glynn delve into tabloidism in order to understand its ubiquity without

belittling its adherents.48 After all, the swaths of British and American society that

embraced these forms and genres in the 1990s tended to come from the same

marginalized groups whose life experiences all too often form the grist for the trash-

televisual mill.49 To critique the fraught ethics, dubious authenticity, rampant vulgarity,

and “poor” (in more than one sense) taste of tabloid TV without acknowledging its

potential appeal is to willfully denigrate a phenomenon from which a heterogeneous mass

of diverse individuals draw pleasure and meaning. “America’s Guiltiest Pleasure!”

declares the cover of the DVD edition of The Anna Nicole Show’s first season, not merely

endorsing the idea that the entertainments offered within lie beneath the dignity of decent

consumers, but wielding the program’s status as tabloid-culture trash as a selling point.

Through Anna Nicole’s reality TV performances, any respectable American may slum it.

47 Jonathan Bernstein, “America’s Last White Trash Cinderella: Why the Kardashians have Nothing on Anna Nicole Smith,” Telegraph, February 9, 2017, accessed February 10, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/anna-nicole-smith-rags-riches-saga-americas-last-white-trash/. 48 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 49 Glynn, Tabloid Culture, 9-10.

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Smith’s status as “white trash” emerged at the intersection of racial, regional,

bodily, sexual, class, and gendered conceptions of identity and caste. Individuals thus

labeled lack easy access to whiteness, the socially constructed identity wherein the

patterns of speech, behavior, appearance, and cultural participation characteristic of

affluent, cis- and heterosexual, suburban, white consumers appear in media and everyday

discourses as neutral, normal, unbiased, and unmarked. Anna Nicole Smith, for one, had

a pronounced rural Texan accent – a drawl painstakingly reproduced by those singers in

Anna Nicole who play characters from Mexia. Jennifer Stoever’s concept of the “sonic

color-line,” the difference in voice and vocality that marks one as either white or

racialized, has resonated throughout the field of sound studies of late.50 Stoever conceived of the term in order to describe the sonic difference inscribed in recordings of

New York’s Puertorriqueños, but the concept obtains even with ostensibly white

Americans whose regional dialects, lower linguistic registers, and casual recourse to

obscenity mark them as Other – not white enough to earn the dominant group’s

acceptance. At times, Anna Nicole itself resembles exoticist nineteenth-century opera, or

a balletic divertissement of nations; mainstream American pop culture sets people like

Smith apart as regional and behavioral Others, and, compounding this, Turnage and

Thomas – two highly-educated British men – set Americans apart en masse as craven

consumers across lines of class and culture.

Even perceptions of Smith’s body contribute to her outcast status. Kathleen

Lebesco, upon examining press coverage of Smith during The Anna Nicole Show’s run,

50 Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York,” Social Text 28, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 59-85.

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has found many an outraged writer railing at the former model who, having won wealth

and fame with her figure, remained visible after the noticeable weight gain that she

experienced in the wake of Marshall’s death in 1995. As Lebesco point out, obesity itself

became a marker of class near the end of the twentieth century, when the old polarity of

well-fed elites and starving masses capsized. Over a span of a few decades, thin

physiques came to betoken wealth and heavier ones came to signify junk food

consumption, heavy drinking, and lack of exercise.51 Suddenly, legends of white-trash

sloth, irresponsibility, and poor self-control found a visual signifier – as unfair a stereotype as any, but a powerful and persistent one as of the 2010s. In The Anna Nicole

Show, the titular star and her cousin Shelly represented two sides of the same coin: one

rail-thin and toothless, the other heavy, both representative of American archetypes of

“trailer-trash.”

Though both Turnage and Thomas have repeatedly insisted that they hoped not to

mock Smith through their work, their acceptance of Jones and Buether’s descending-

scrim interlude, with its floating cheeseburgers and implication that no woman so

overweight should pose as a pinup, may indicate some ambivalence on their parts about

this basic question of respectful representation.52 Their character also sings an ode to junk

food shortly before a faux commercial for the weight-loss pill that the real Smith

promoted, Trimspa, blares from an onstage television. The shaming of this rich, famous

51 Lebesco, “Fatness as Working-Class Rhetoric.” 52 Turnage: “Hopefully you’ll fall in love with [Anna Nicole], and you’re very sad when all the events turn wrong for her. So I hope people are sympathetic. I mean we’ve failed in a way if you’re not – if you come out of there thinking: ‘oh, she’s just a cartoon character, she’s a bit of an idiot,’ then we’ve totally failed.” Mark-Anthony Turnage, Richard Thomas, and Matt Wolf, interview with Philip Reeves, NPR: Morning Edition, March 3, 2011, accessed March 2, 2017, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=134195648.

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woman with the white-trash body migrates from the jeremiads of critics to the score and

libretto of Anna Nicole. That Smith took her lower-class voice, body, and behavior with

her into the realm of celebrity while also remaining a woman with discernible sexual desires only exacerbated her transgression in the eyes of critics.53

As Sady Doyle argues in Trainwreck, any young woman who dares to attain

celebrity status will attract the gaze of the tabloid media, which will seek to expose her as

a scandalous party girl incapable of managing her own life – thus destined to one or more

silences due to drug rehabilitation stints, seclusion, and death. In this sense, even Amy

Winehouse may qualify as one of Lulu’s many daughters. Since before the lifetime of

Barbara Strozzi, female actors, musicians, dancers, and performing artists across the

West have found themselves accused of whoredom. Yet Doyle dispels a false conclusion

that her reader may easily draw: that the primary audience for the specific tabloid-culture

phenomenon under her consideration – the chronicle of female celebrities’ public

humiliation and abasement – has nothing in common with the celebrity trainwreck

herself. Indeed, some of the stigma surrounding reality and tabloid media involves its

status as a feminized form of entertainment, consumed primarily by women.54 Glynn

notes this latter demographic tilt, and provides viewership figures from throughout the

1990s as proof. His graphs consistently show strong interest in crime-oriented programs

like Cops and America’s Most Wanted among men – but on average, and especially in the

cases of daytime talk shows, America’s women tuned in to tabloid TV at a reliably higher

rate.55 In the case of news coverage following Smith’s death, researchers found that most

53 Lebesco, “Fatness as Working-Class Rhetoric,” 243-254. 54 Glynn, Tabloid Culture, 7. 55 Ibid., 249-253. 197

consumers surveyed thought that the media had devoted too much coverage to the tragic

circumstance – but for a dedicated cohort centered on young women, who devoted more

viewing time to the postmortem discussion of Smith than any other demographic group.56

Patriarchy seldom looks so clear-cut as a horde of primarily male voyeurs gawking at a woman’s downfall as they might a horrific transit accident (hence the term trainwreck).

Gillibrand’s black bodysuits, which render Anna Nicole’s camera-choristers inhuman and thus sexless, seem doubly poetic given this context.

Still, the prevalence of the trainwreck as archetype no doubt points to the continuation of Western patriarchal society’s structural devaluation and suppression of both femininity and women. Doyle makes the same case for undoing-of-women narratives involving real women and mass-mediated pop culture that I do for the operas of the same period, which feature representations of real female celebrity trainwrecks felled by tabloid scandal. A creative production of Powder Her Face could easily convert the Duchess into a reality TV star or hacking victim. Only the precise media involved, the occupations of the characters, and the dates of the occurrences separate Margaret

Campbell’s ordeal from that of any paparazzi-swarmed movie star. Anaïs Nin became a celebrity trainwreck posthumously, with the cinematic succès de scandale of Henry &

June and the publication of her unexpurgated diaries prompting critical tut-tutting from even the progressive likes of The New Yorker.57 In addition to providing an indispensable guide to the process by which a famous young woman loses control of her own public narrative and becomes an object of mass-media mockery, Doyle’s Trainwreck

56 Pew Research Center Staff, “Anna Nicole Smith,” Pew Analysis, May 25, 2007, accessed February 16, 2017, http://www.journalism.org/2007/05/25/anna-nicole-smith/. 57 Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Sex, Lies, and Thirty-Five Thousand Pages,” New Yorker (March 1, 1993): 74- 90.

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demonstrates the timeliness of these operas, as well as the need for critical intervention as

their numbers and popularity grow. Doyle notes, in the context of a discussion of media coverage of the pop singer Britney Spears:

We rarely love or hate public figures for who they are. We can’t; we don’t know them. At a certain point, the media narrative surrounding celebrities stops being about the specifics of their lives or personalities and enters the realm of myth. Stars are only stars because they represent something larger than themselves, some archetype, or a story we enjoy telling.58

“Do you wanna learn how to fly…high like Icarus?” crows the operatic version of J.

Howard Marshall II, asking his young bride about the figure from Greek mythology, whose name she does not recognize.59 She assents nonetheless. Per Doyle, Western

society does enjoy telling and retelling the story of Icarus, and enjoys it even more when the doomed, overambitious figure at its center becomes a woman with the temerity to have a body, let alone become publicly visible and audible in it. In Powder Her Face, this message rings loud, but distorted; Anaïs Nin fits into the pattern but never announces its connection to the present. Anna Nicole, by contrast, makes its debts to operatic history, various rise-and-fall mythic archetypes, and the contemporary celebrity trainwreck narrative explicit.

In the episode “Britney’s New Look,” the animated sitcom South Park – itself an outgrowth of the white-trash turn in 1990s American pop culture, along with media depictions of Spears as a redneck-to-riches star – the show’s creators reinforce this point in gruesome, gallows-humor terms.60 After an attempt to take her own life with a

handgun, Spears survives. The tabloid media and paparazzi, somehow not noticing her

58 Doyle, Trainwreck, loc. 2144-54. 59 Turnage and Thomas, Anna Nicole vol. 2: 8-9. 60 Many thanks to Daniel Goldmark for pointing out the relevance of this episode of South Park. 199

implausibly catastrophic head injury, continue to cover her whereabouts exactly they did

before: as those of a wild, unpredictable trainwreck whose omnipresence in their

programming provides the public with harmless entertainment. In a denouement

reminiscent of both Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” and Stravinsky’s Rite of

Spring, the residents of the titular small town finally surround Spears and, in ritual fashion, photograph the prone pop star to death. The resemblance between this grim tableau and the final image of Jones’s Anna Nicole production is striking. After this ceremony, the townspeople find themselves drawn to their televisions again: the actor

Lindsay Lohan’s erratic behavior has drawn the tabloid media’s attention. The implied cycle renews itself. To musicological discourse, I submit the contention that contemporary opera has absorbed both the history of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century operatic anti-heroine image and its equivalent in tabloid media, fusing the two in artworks that re-present real women as fallen harlots along the lines of sophisticated, canonic archetypes. In response to pop-cultural polemics like Doyle’s, I

seek to show how such phenomena waft into the rarefied air of the opera scene, doubly sanctioned by past and present preoccupations – in other words, how opera has come to

perform the same cultural work as South Park.61

Critiques such as Doyle’s exclude something essential, however: the sympathy,

even empathy, that both operatic fallen women and tabloid trainwrecks have attracted for

decades running in one particular context. Across contemporary Britain and North

America, and elsewhere in the opera- and media-consuming world, members of one

61 Indeed, the comedic sensibility that Thomas communicates in Jerry Springer: The Opera and Anna Nicole bears a striking resemblance to that of South Park, with its unprintable language, over-the-top violence, bizarre characters, and mix of sly satire with unsubtle, politically incorrect button-pushing and blue humor.

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community have demonstrated deep investments in the tragedy of the humiliated and

abased woman, from Violetta and Lulu to Judy Garland and Anna Nicole Smith: gay

men. In an interview with Out, Richard Thomas explains his own feelings about Smith,

her story, and his own presentation thereof:

…as a gay writer, as a writer of opera and musicals, when I see a story like [Smith’s], I’m gonna pounce! Her story appeals because it’s very messy. I think as gay men, we certainly empathize with the marginalized. I think you understand the messiness that life can become. We don’t shy away from that[:] Anna Nicole the mythology. It’s not a like a [sic] made for TV movie. In the opera we earn the tears. I don’t want it to seem phony. It’s not a documentary, even if you did a documentary, you’re telling a version…Everyone has a story, [all of the characters are] trying to defend themselves.62

Like Powder Her Face, in which the exposure of the secret, coded-queer sexual

practices of the Duchess lead to her public humiliation and downfall – an allegory of

involuntary outing – Anna Nicole did not originate as a mere rehearsal of either the

fallen-woman opera narrative or the tabloid trainwreck trope. Its text, along with

significant portions of its dramaturgy, bears the stamp of a camp sensibility, along with

the long-audible lament for the undone woman collectively issued by many gay men across the twentieth century. From Wayne Koestenbaum to Mitchell Morris, scholars have documented the tradition of the opera queen, who, among other tendencies, finds meaning and identification in the liberated woman laid low.63 Yet this phenomenon has

never remained confined to the realm of art music. In 2007, mere months after the grisly

62 Jerry Portwood and Richard Thomas, “Is America Ready for Anna Nicole?,” Out, September 17, 2013, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.out.com/entertainment/music/2013/09/17/anna-nicole-opera- librettist-richard-thomas-gay-men-operas-power. 63 Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993); and Mitchell Morris, “Admiring the Countess Geschwitz,” in En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, eds. Corinne E. Blackner and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 348-370. 201

media spectacle of Smith’s death, the cry of Chris Crocker, a popular personality on the video-sharing website YouTube.com, rent the internet with his signature keen, “leave

Britney alone!” The troubles of prominent female entertainers loom so large in American

gay culture that even the death of Judy Garland in 1969 still resonates.64 The presence of

drag queens dressed as Smith in the America Sings prologue of Anna Nicole makes perfect sense, beyond the fact that the real Smith attended a performance by some of her drag impersonators on The Anna Nicole Show. In Thomas and Turnage’s ideal staging, gay grief at the death of this female celebrity icon takes center stage. Note the fact that only the drag queens cry in his stage direction; as the rest of the crowd, “normals” included, simply shout about the entertaining show to which they will treat the audience, the explicitly queer figures onstage show signs of genuine emotional investment.65

In the quotation above, Thomas stresses his own perspective on the thorny question of “reality,” contrasting the aesthetics and authenticity of both made-for-TV and documentary films to those of his and Turnage’s stage spectacle. He thinks of his work as at once messy and mythic, thus unlike the tearjerker films made in the 1990s and 2000s by American television networks such as Lifetime. Thomas wants to “earn” the audiences’ tears, presumably as opposed to coaxing them out with cheap sentimental effusion; this apparently makes the opera less “phony,” and less like a documentary. Each character has a different story to tell, and for Thomas, this defeats the tendency of forms like documentary and dramatization to impose singular perspectives on a true story

64 See: Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1986), 137- 191; and David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 401-420. 65 Despite Thomas’s obvious investments in gay culture, one cannot safely describe his work as pro- LGBTQ. Jerry Springer: The Opera, for instance, includes an entire musical number in which the text consists almost exclusively of a transphobic epithet.

202 involving multiple agents. While this may look like a parade of non-sequiturs, a single, unified message emerges. Thomas implies that he aimed for authenticity above all else as he wrote the libretto for Anna Nicole – a version of authenticity in which the work conveys pathos without melodrama, and offers multiple, conflicting accounts of the events depicted. Given the fact that his opera depicts Howard K. Stern, a still-living individual never found culpable for any deaths in Smith’s family, as a soulless murderer

– among other things – this assertion of ambiguity and objective distance seems questionable.66 Rather than valorizing verifiable fact, Thomas insists that truth emerges in the space between diverse perspectives and conflicting narratives. This construction of truth resembles a contested model of contemporary cable-TV journalism in circulation in the same period, hailed by some as ideological balance and dismissed by others as false equivalence between voices with differing levels of credibility. Though Thomas denies any resemblance between Anna Nicole, made-for-TV dramatizations of real events, and documentaries, the former work does contain elements that smack of the latter media.

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For Turnage, a British composer working in the wake of the second gulf war and

2008 financial crisis, America, though diverse, stands united in its devotion to the tawdry, tacky, sensational, and exploitative. His is a debased and debauched American citizenry, cheerfully proclaiming that the tragedy they usher in will, at the very least, be entertaining. The line “gone from the get-go” reinforces the unwritten central premise of any opera about the rise and fall of a transgressive woman: that her punishment and

66 At the time of Anna Nicole’s premiere, a judge had recently set aside charges on which Stern had previously been found guilty – charges involving a conspiracy to supply drugs to Smith under assumed names. In 2015, the same judge ruled that Stern bore no responsibility for Smith’s drug possession or use. 203 demise are inevitable. In overall tone, the choral prologue resembles the circus prelude of

Berg’s Lulu, in which an animal tamer similarly promises the crowd a great show, and reveals the most dangerous animal in his menagerie: the serpent, Lulu. Note the fact that the collective narrating voice of Turnage’s chorus – here deployed in the ancient Greek as well as the operatic mode – sings along to the dissonant sounds of twentieth-century modern art music, and even switch from English to Latin for a few bars. But, when Anna sings, she sings the Blues. This pinging back and forth between musical idioms and even linguistic registers continues throughout the opera. Anna tends to sing in pastiche pop tunes. At the beginning of the opera, a flash of white light follows Anna’s quip about blowing her audience a kiss. Two hours later, at the opera’s bitter end, Anna – the only singing character left onstage – issues a response to the anthropomorphized America that facilitated both her rise and precipitous fall. She then quotes her own opening pun, identical but for its transposition up by a minor third (Example 4.1). The cameras, who close in as she dies, stand in for several parties at once: the reality television industry that helped make Smith’s name a household one; the predatory tabloid paparazzi that followed her every foible; and the audience itself, implicated as the viewers who paid to watch Smith suffer in real life and who have done so again in the opera house. It is an embodiment of televisual media, and, by extension, of the complicit consumers of said media who literally zips her into a body bag. Such moments of musical and visual parallelism, often ironic inversions of one another, constitute much of the piece’s score.

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Example 4.1a, Anna Nicole’s opening line, Act I, Scene 1, Anna Nicole

Example 4.1b, Anna Nicole’s final line, Act II, Scene 9, Anna Nicole

A plodding, repetitive Blues, which first appears when Anna leaves her rural trailer-park hometown for the promise of urban Houston, recurs as well – and in both

instances, it underscores bleak messages. Anna finds work at “Wall Mart,” a thinly veiled

substitute for a certain retailer that, for a European leftist like Turnage, serves as a

synecdoche for a rapacious and exploitative American economy. Later on in the opera,

the same music underscores a so-called drug ballad, delivered by the corpse of her son

Daniel (Example 4.2). Crucially, a non-operatic singer – in the case of the Royal Opera

House premiere, Dominic Rowntree, a performer trained in popular musical theater –

plays the role of the older Daniel. Operatic voices sound the way they do because the

singer must project over an orchestra without amplification. Daniel, heretofore silent,

sings the names of the drugs found in his system without the aid of a microphone, and

thus sounds distant and weak compared to every other character in the opera – dead in a

double sense.

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Example 4.2a, Low wage blues, Act I, Scene 3, Anna Nicole

Example 4.2b, Daniel’s drug ballad, Act II, Scene 8, Anna Nicole

The most important melody in the opera emerges as Anna finds her way to financial security through marriage to Marhsall. The first, a Broadway-style ballad, recurs several times throughout the course of the opera (Example 4.3). The difference between its first and final iterations is stark; the former serves as an opportunity for Anna to gloat over her catch, and the latter finds her unable to speak for herself – her attorney, lover, and de facto publicist Howard K. Stern takes over the tune. Stern, played as a cold and

206 manipulative villain by the baritone Gerald Finley, appropriates and twists Anna’s song of triumph; the exploiter becomes the cruelly exploited as Stern sells an addled Smith out to the unrelenting paparazzi. Among the many other male characters who seek to control opera’s fallen women, Stern resembles the newspaper tycoon and de facto pimp Dr.

Schön in Berg’s Lulu.

Example 4.3a, Anna Nicole’s dream aria, Act I, Scene 6, Anna Nicole

Ex. 4.3b, Stern’s final lines, Act II, Scene 9, Anna Nicole

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Anna Nicole, then, gathers up threads from various periods, registers, media, milieux, and areas of cultural production in order to retell the story of the fallen woman.

It absorbs the trope of the struggling single mother who tries to make it in a hostile world, attaching it to the mournful image of the archetypal mater dolorosa. Anna becomes

Mary, in a Pietà that finds the paschal sacrifice listing drugs rather than redeeming anyone – let alone the entire world. The opera keys into and satirizes a dizzying array of contemporary phenomena, thus using the old anti-heroine story as Verdi, Bizet, and Berg did: as a basis for commentary on the social problems of the immediate past, which persist into the audience’s present. A litany of social ills such as junk food, consumerism, tabloid culture, excessive litigation, plastic surgery, fame, poverty, and addiction, it sends up the United States of the Clinton and Bush presidencies but remains relevant past its chronological limits by design. American popular music, beloved by both creators, becomes the lingua franca of an opera to acclaimed effect, but also resounds in a base and indecent society like that of Lulu.

Turnage and Thomas capture despair and decadence across lines of class: the hopeless dreaming of the naïve and poor, the abjection of those dismissed as trash, the hedonism of a billionaire, the cynical, profit-driven scheming of a surgeon, a lawyer, and hordes of reporters. It makes a tragicomic spectacle of reality TV and tabloid media, reflecting both the historical transformation of televisual entertainment in the 1990s and the consuming public’s complicity therein. However, since its premiere, Anna Nicole has taken on new meaning. The encoded work remains, but audience members who decode it after 2016 inhabit a world even less stable than that depicted in the opera, in which the

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apparent decadence that Turnage and Thomas satirize has persisted. Like Powder Her

Face, Anna Nicole situates a point of cataclysm around 1995; unlike the earlier work,

Anna Nicole shows us what happened next. If Powder Her Face left a question hanging in the air – will the new millennium bring a better, happier, more humane world than the one the Duchess lived in? – then Anna Nicole offers the answer that no-one wanted to hear. 209

Chapter Five

Berg, Billie, and Blue Velvet: American Lulu and its Catastrophic Stage(s)

…it was not my aim to recreate an authentic Alban Berg, but to take a fresh look from the perspective of a woman, a composer of my generation, at this mystical female figure…[t]he female character of Lulu has always been seen through the eyes of men.

My Act Three takes place in 1970s New York. Lulu has come up in the world and is now a high-class whore…I have always found Berg’s deus- ex-machina ending with Jack the Ripper rather silly: after great trials and tribulations, two women are simply slaughtered by a serial killer and: The End. Which is why I decided to conceive my new Act Three as an unresolved murder case...

Perhaps I see the female figure of Lulu less exaltedly and romantically than the men who “conceived” her or those who have reinterpreted her over the years.1

An original completion and radical revision of Alban Berg’s Lulu, Olga

Neuwirth’s American Lulu freights the already overdetermined original with even more

cultural and historical baggage. All of the characters retain their flaws. Their home cities

– now New Orleans and New York rather than Vienna, Paris, and London – remain

cesspools of vice and inequality, and the music of bars and clubs still fills the air. A series

of bracing, at times shockingly violent multimedia projections joins the original Act II

film interlude of Berg’s work, and Lulu still lies lifeless in the end. Rather than scrub the

familiar power imbalances and gory conclusions of the fallen woman’s opera, Neuwirth

instead challenges these elements by amplifying and intensifying all of them. She

redirects the musical and dramatic energies of the work toward a different outcome, and

refracts the image of the femme fatale through its own later iterations: American

cinematic anti-heroines of the late twentieth century.

1 Olga Neuwirth, “Notes on American Lulu,” trans. Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon, Olga Neuwirth: Texts and Photos, March 2011, accessed February 1, 2017, http://www.olganeuwirth.com/text29lulue.php.

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Neuwirth appropriates the operatic fallen woman and her story without sacrificing the sordid, muting the vernacular, or expurgating sex and violence. She transforms the tale of the femme fatale without portraying her title character as heroic, and transcends a familiar archetype without allowing said protagonist to live. Accounting for these contradictions, I draw new connections between Neuwirth’s stated influences to find meaning at their points of intersection, constructing a topography of the world she creates in American Lulu. Though a number of German, Austrian, and American artists come up in Neuwirth’s writings – from Berg to Billie Holiday, Otto Preminger to Melvin Van

Peebles – the composer’s own sensibility predominates. The keys to understanding

American Lulu, and Neuwirth’s art in general, lie close at hand: in her unique and oft- expressed views on music-theatrical construction, and in her refusal to convert Lulu into a straightforwardly emancipatory tale of struggle to triumph. The subtlety of the methods by which she confronts the femme fatale archetype could, at first glance, lead an observer to wonder what difference American Lulu makes at all. However, I argue that a particular turn of phrase – one that Neuwirth attributes to David Lynch, despite the nonexistence of any record of his using it – opens the door to a more sensitive analysis of the work: “the stage as catastrophe.” In this chapter, I focus on the various catastrophic stages in and around the piece, taking liberties with Neuwirth’s usage in order to form a clearer image of her piece and the cultural work it performs.

Discussing her reluctance to give her dramatic works purely feminist messages,

Neuwirth once elaborated on her approach to theatre:

…complex issues have to be made recognizable and understandable for many observers, that’s really important. But then I need, at least in a music theater work, to let things collide like in a lab experiment. Like with David Lynch: “the stage as catastrophe.” But from the critics there has never 211

been an attempt to examine this aspect of my work in any depth. And so the female composer disappears behind her male colleagues in terms of how her works are received[.]2

A composer trained during the heyday of postmodernism, Neuwirth practices something

akin to collage in her music-theatre, forcing various cultural references, political

messages, musical elements, and aesthetic orientations together into a bizarre, complex,

and contradictory whole. The stage becomes a site of catastrophe: of aesthetic chaos and collisions of meaning, produced by video, actors, music, audio samples, and projected images. The reference to Lynch as a source makes sense, as his signature blends of genre fiction, obscure symbolism, paranormal elements, and grotesquerie similarly pack disparate remnants of pop culture and high art into the running blender of the director’s dark imagination. In the early 2000s, Neuwirth turned Lynch’s film Lost Highway into a bracing and eclectic opera, just before turning to her revision and completion of Lulu. Her decision to compose the latter piece’s third act as an “unresolved murder mystery” may reflect her deep engagement with Lynch’s work, for the director has shown a penchant for nightmarish neo-noir.3 American Lulu shares as much DNA with Lynch’s Blue Velvet

or the television series Twin Peaks as with the mythos of the Civil Rights era in which she sets her opera. This said, Neuwirth lacks Lynch’s almost Romantic predilection for the spiritual and supernatural. She banishes all hints of mythology and Wagnerian transcendence when she adapts Lulu. Instead of Geschwitz’s concluding Liebestod,

2 Olga Neuwirth, interview with Stefan Drees (“Patriarchal Structures”), trans. Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon, Van Magazine, March 16, 2016, accessed January 12, 2017, https://van-us.atavist.com/olga-neuwirth. 3 Neuwirth, “Notes.”

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audiences receive a look at bloody viscera: a slap upside the head rather than an ecstatic

gesture heavenward.4

The composer also revises the denouement of Berg’s work by tampering with its

catastrophic (final) stage of musical and dramatic development: the downward slide into abjection that leads, with unflagging momentum, to Lulu’s death. Instead, Lulu dies in a sudden, last-minute act of violence, and a graphic image of her mutilated corpse appears, daring the audience to look not at the closed bedroom door or a still-breathing soprano

splashed with red corn syrup, but a gruesome and convincing mock-up of a fate that

opera has long normalized. Neuwirth interrupts the usual teleology of the harlot’s

progress narrative, depicting Lulu as a successful and independent, albeit cruel, person

throughout her third act and saving all the darkness for the last second. As Susan

McClary has argued, the endings of operas matter. No matter how dignified or powerful

the resonating female body may appear during the course of the action, a cathartic murder

tends to cancel out such moments of empowerment and identification.5 However, with

the usual teleological drive subtracted, the audience may perceive this murder the way

they might in the real world: as a horrific, unnecessary crime.

I do not dispute the fact that Berg’s Lulu, one of the great tragedies in the history of the genre, invites its audience to feel devastated at the loss of the title character.6

However, Neuwirth skips the step in the process that provides a dramatic reason for her

4 On Geschwitz’s final moments, see Silvio dos Santos, Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s Lulu (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 175-182. 5 Susan McClary, foreword to Georges Bizet. Carmen, ed. and trans. Annamaria Cecconi (Milan: Rugginenti, 2007), i-vi. 6 Anthony Tommasini, “From ‘Lulu’ to ‘Madama Butterfly,’ Tragedy Transcended by a Visceral Truth,” New York Times, January 6, 2016, accessed Febraury 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/arts/music/from-lulu-to-madama-butterfly-tragedy-transcended-by-a- visceral-truth.html?_r=0.

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demise – her terminal loss of status – and thus renders the death shocking in a way that

those of Carmen and Lulu have seldom felt after the century of slasher horror. No mere

revisionist production could have the same effect, for Lulu’s downward spiral provides

the entire dramatic sanction for Act III’s existence. Neuwirth takes advantage of the fact

that, due to an unfortunately timed case of blood poisoning, the catastrophic stage of Lulu

will always come with an asterisk and completer’s name. She opted to redraw the tale as

a prematurely halted upward arrow rather than a parabolic arc.

She also reset the story in a catastrophic (calamitous, chaotic) stage in the unfolding of the twentieth century, exploring the repressive 1950s and radical 1970s in her drama while reminding the audience of the turbulent 1960s through acousmatic renderings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Neuwirth surely expected that the overlapping generations in her audience – the oldest full of firsthand memories, and the youngest schooled in mythologies of a contentious past – would make the second decade of the twenty-first century a particularly resonant time to address the era of the American Civil

Rights movement. She also uses this social backdrop to amplify Berg’s messages about his characters’ self-centered ways. Her Lulu may hear the speeches and marches, but she does not listen. By the 1970s, she appears just as solipsistic as ever.

I approach American Lulu as both apologist and critic, exegete and cross- examiner. I argue that the oft-maligned opera offers levels of meaning heretofore missed by its detractors, who have pointed to the exposed seams, stark paradoxes, and unlikely juxtapositions in the piece as signs of the composer-adaptor’s supposed incompetence. A more charitable reading, however – one that accounts for Neuwirth’s own statements about the project, along with her overall aesthetic orientation and history as a composer –

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reveals a rich, thoroughly argued line of musical and dramatic rhetoric. When she speaks

of her attraction to extremes, her urge to depict both sides of any given conflict in a drama, or even the “incredible discrepancies” inherent in the social and economic structures of the United States, Neuwirth reveals that her fascination with colliding meanings has roots in principles of dialectic and synthesis. This too helps explain the unabashed messiness of American Lulu. An artist trained in filmmaking and painting as well as composition, Neuwirth knows perfectly well how to portray the femme fatale in

multiple visual and aural media at once.

However, American Lulu – an artwork defined in large part by its identity-

political revisions and references – introduces some worrisome complications along with

its provocative challenges to tradition. It aims to represent the experiences of African-

Americans in the mid- to late twentieth century, despite the fact that its young, white

Austrian composer forged it from an alloy of depression-era Germanic serialist opera and

postwar American crime film. Despite her oft-professed and demonstrated love for

American jazz, Neuwirth’s answer to Berg’s opera still uses this music as a sonic marker

of a dangerous underworld. In addition, the opera premiered under a cloud of authorial

dispute as a legal injunction filed by the Canadian installation artist Stan Douglas, who

claims to have developed the idea behind the piece, threatened but ultimately failed to

delay its production. An Austrian court found that Douglas’s accusations had too little

merit to act upon, but the specter of this dispute – and the plain fact that Neuwirth’s

collaboration with a black artist on this project broke down, leaving her to complete the 215

work with little obvious input from any other collaborator of color – haunts the work.7

Problems of racial representation plague American Lulu, and few European critics, let alone the composer or any houses, appear to have foreseen the challenges that will emerge should the piece receive its stateside debut.

Neuwirth’s attempt to render Lulu’s struggle as an intersectional one, with racial prejudice added to a familiar tale of gender- and class-based oppressions, involves the appropriation of black American poetry, rhetoric, imagery, history, and vernacular language, as well as the appropriation, in an art-historical sense, of Berg’s work. The piece had its premiere mere months before the former sense of the word rose above its theoretical roots to become a major subject of pop-cultural and political discourse in the mid-2010s. Like Carmen before it, American Lulu claims to offer access to a cultural milieu and marginalized population to which the author does not belong, and does so by echoing mass-mediated, stereotype-laden texts. American Lulu presents vast improvements in racial representation over Lulu itself, of course. The latter’s murderous, pidgin-speaking penultimate john, referred to only as “the Negro,” would surely have required the singing actor, who must also play the white Painter of Act I, to cork up.

However, the time in which American Lulu has crisscrossed Europe – starting in 2012 – coincides almost exactly with both the rise of new anti-racist protest movements across the United States and other countries, and the installation of openly ethno-nationalist politicians across the Western world. Conversations around racial representation have

7 Stefan Kirschner, “Kein Plagiat: Komponistin siegt im Opernstreit um nackte Lulu,” September 27, 2012, accessed January 20, 2017, https://www.welt.de/kultur/buehne-konzert/article109511292/Komponistin- siegt-im-Opernstreit-um-nackte-Lulu.html. See also: Heidi Hart, “Silent Opera: Visual Recycling in Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu,” Ekphrasis 2 (2013): 126-7.

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shifted considerably and gained in urgency, and questions that few might have asked in

the early 2010s look unavoidable from the perspective of the decade’s latter half.

Though unquestionably affectionate towards African-American art and culture,

and unabashedly activist in her stance against racial discrimination, Neuwirth traffics in a

form of Orientalism (Occidentalism?) in American Lulu. Her New Orleans becomes a site

of oppression and injustice, but also a strange, seedy, and stereotypical locale, populated

by stock characters.8 Neuwirth has cited both Jack Hill’s Coffy and Melvin Van Peebles’s

Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song as influences, despite the controversy that has

attended such films since their debuts. Respectively a gory vehicle for the action star Pam

Grier and an indie legend propelled by sex and violence, these films both serve up

bewildering cocktails of empowerment and exploitation. Even if Neuwirth had more

actively sought to distance her characters from stereotypes, questions might nevertheless

have arisen. As debates surrounding the white American painter Dana Schutz’s Open

Casket – a semi-abstracted rendering of the mutilated face of Emmett Till, exhibited at

the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York – have proved, the question of how and whether

white artists should ever attempt to aestheticize black suffering remains a sore and

unresolved one.9 The contours of this far-reaching academic and cultural discourse lie

beyond the scope of this chapter, but any consideration of a work like American Lulu in

social and cultural context must acknowledge the inevitable charge of appropriation. If

Neuwirth aimed to provoke with her audiovisual retouching and partial replacement of

Lulu – and she certainly did – then she succeeded, and will continue to do so.

8 Alexander Cowan, “American Lulu?,” Words and Music, July 25, 2015, accessed February 9, 2017, https://cowanaw.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/american-lulu/. 9 Adam Shatz, “Raw Material,” London Review of Books Blog, March 24, 2017, accessed March 25, 2017, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/03/24/adam-shatz/raw-material/. 217

Neuwirth’s essays and interviews on the relationship between Lulu and her own

piece, one of which I quote as the epigraph to this chapter, have helped to determine the

foci not only of this chapter, but also of the study as a whole. Neuwirth addresses the

male gaze, and its framing of a woman as archetypal manifestation of fears and fantasies;

the mediated gaze of the public, with its surveillance of the transgressing woman; the use

of multimedia in this type of opera, as a literal echo of a conceptual preoccupation with

surfaces and projections; and the incursion of tawdry subject matter and popular musics

onto the operatic stage. Neuwirth’s writing has thus lent shape to my examinations of

Powder Her Face, Anaïs Nin, and Anna Nicole. She becomes a music-historical critic whose analysis of the fallen woman phenomenon I address, as well as a creator whose work I examine.

Despite having yielded a higher number of scathing reviews, appeared in fewer production runs, and emerged more recently than any other opera covered in this study,

American Lulu has attracted more scholarly scrutiny than almost all others, save Powder

Her Face. A cluster of chapters, articles, and conference talks has emerged despite the fact that no commercial recording of the piece existed at the times of their publication.

Heidi Hart has treated American Lulu as an image-rich, multivalent work in its own right, inseparable from its surfeit of multimedia projections. Hart has also productively compared Neuwirth’s dramaturgical aesthetic to that of Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty,” in an analysis that has informed my own.10 Jennifer Tullmann, by contrast, has treated it as one of the many radical productions of Berg’s piece since its putative

10 Hart, “Silent Opera,” 131-132.

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completion by Friedrich Cerha in 1979.11 Clara Latham has questioned the piece’s title,

asking what makes the piece uniquely American, and Mark Berry, in his monograph After

Wagner, situates American Lulu as a latter-day manifestation of modernist music- drama.12 Many critics have praised the piece, and attempted to interpret it with open

minds – but many more have made no secret of their perplexity, asserting that Neuwirth

failed to follow through on the promise of her premise. Their ranks include journalists as

well as musicologists, avowed feminists as well as skeptics of activism in art. Many have

characterized the piece as a hodgepodge heaped atop the gutted remains of a masterpiece, a would-be morality play that claims to tackle serious problems but instead replicates and

magnifies them. The critic Alexandra Coghlan and musicologist Alexander Cowan in

particular have submitted nuanced but unsparing reviews of the piece; below, I devote

particular attention to their criticisms. While I acknowledge the obvious representational

problems posed by the piece and will contend with them at length, I challenge the notion

that the piece’s paradoxes and disjunctions add up to any sort of failure on its composer’s

part.

To ask what Neuwirth’s revisions add to the already powerful Lulu, as many

have, is to miss the act of historical bridging that the composer performs. Though I have

suggested a number of phenomena as contributing factors in the return of the femme

fatale to opera composition at the turn of the twenty-first century, I have thus far

refrained from mentioning a vital missing piece of this puzzle: the fact that femmes

11 Jennifer Tullmann, “Confronting the Composer: Operatic Innovations in Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu” (paper presented at the 80th annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Milwaukee, WI, November 6-9, 2014). 12 Clara Latham, “What Makes American Lulu American?” (paper presented at the 42nd annual conference of the Society for American Music, Boston, MA, March 9-13, 2016); Mark Berry, After Wagner: Histories of Modern Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 264-266. 219 fatales never actually went out of style in the West’s performing arts. Opera temporarily lost its fixation with the archetype, but even as Lulu premiered in its truncated form, a new style of cinema, based in the dark German expressionist films of the time, waited in the wings for its moment to arrive. Film noir, the distinctive, gritty sort of crime film that saw women portrayed as dangerous dames prowling certain half-deserted streets, picked up where Berg, Shostakovich, and their peers in Zeitoper left off. From the peak of noir film in the 1950s, only a few years remained before the turbulent late ‘60s bore strange audiovisual fruit: Blaxploitation films, similarly and controversially oriented toward depictions of criminal underworlds, and packed with anti-heroines who fight pimps and pushers by infiltrating and destroying their seamy environments from the inside. In the

1980s and ‘90s, concurrent with a glut of new Carmen films and a broad anti-feminist backlash in the West, Lynch arrived, adopting and upending the usual plot structures and character types of crime and horror films.

I ultimately arrive at a broader dilemma that lingers after American Lulu’s final bloody tableau, an uncertainty that haunts every opera that I discuss in this study. At what cost does any composer, regardless of intentions or personal identity, appropriate the archetypes and conventions of the harlot’s progress narrative in opera? Can any amount of ameliorative staging or re-composition cancel this moral debt? In order to demonstrate how Neuwirth confronts these problems, I will provide vital context on American Lulu itself, from its ties to and divergences from Lulu to its fraught reception. An analysis of the piece in this rich context follows, and I conclude the chapter by situating it in the context of both contemporary opera and recent changes in the reception of Berg’s piece.

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Though American Lulu retains the structure of Berg’s Lulu – three acts, plus a prologue – it takes half the time to perform. Acts I and II, each an hour long in the original, become thirty- and forty-five minute tableaux respectively thanks to a series of cuts, detailed in Appendix C. Most of these eliminate dialogue, rather than major events.

Neuwirth’s new third act rounds out the drama at thirty additional minutes. The prologue, an original composition by Neuwirth, pulls the audience into the opera’s diegetic present:

New York in the 1970s, in the well-appointed apartment where Lulu lives and does business as an elite sex worker. The first two acts, with music by Berg, thus become recollections – flashbacks to the 1950s in New Orleans, when Lulu struggles for a better life and instead ends up with three dead husbands. Like Powder Her Face and Anna

Nicole, American Lulu frames memories of the past with glimpses of a narrative present, in this case the date of Lulu’s murder.

The change in decade between the borrowed acts and the new sections provides a dramatic motivation for the abrupt transition in musical language between the two periods. American music in the 1950s tended toward serialism in the world of academic art-music and heady jazz in the realm of adult pop. Stateside successors to Berg at the time included Milton Babbitt, who on occasion composed works that mingled the two, such as All Set (1957), a groovy dodecaphonic number for jazz combo. The minimalist musical language of Neuwirth’s Act III, however, first circulated in the 1970s, precisely the decade in which she sets said act. Audience members in attendance at American Lulu thus receive a shorter edition of the tour of twentieth-century art music that Powder Her

Face offers, as well as a glance at the figures and milieux – Miles Davis, the Second

Viennese School, downtown and uptown experimentalists alike – that Neuwirth herself 221

counts as essential influences. Though neither Neuwirth nor any critic has noted the

correspondence, the composer’s transposition of setting for Act III to the decade of

Cerha’s completion rings poetic. Neuwirth ends her emended vision of a twentieth-

century operatic monument in the very period that saw Pierre Boulez conducting the

same for a rapt global audience – the half-decade in which the landmark debut of Glass’s

Einstein on the Beach demonstrated the viability of opera as a vehicle for powerful,

memorable new composition. American Lulu thus pulls the last great experimental opera

of the early twentieth century forward in time to it and the entire genre’s common

moment of renaissance, the starting point of the post-Britten modernist revival that would

eventually lead to Powder Her Face and its successors.

Inspired by the offstage jazz band of Act I, Scene 2 of Lulu, Neuwirth

reorchestrated the first two acts of Lulu for a similar, if slightly expanded, chamber

orchestra. As in Powder Her Face and Anaïs Nin – even, to a degree, in Anna Nicole,

despite its full-orchestra scoring – the dominance of the winds, percussion, and keyboards

over the strings recalls both the music of Stravinsky and the traditional sound-world of

jazz. The ensemble for American Lulu, with its added saxophones and small but

substantial string group, could more easily pass as one of the grander iterations of Paul

Whiteman’s Orchestra than as the Wiener Philharmoniker. Neuwirth also removes a

number of minor singing roles, and asks that an actual popular musician, rather than an operatic mezzo, play her answer to Countess Geschwitz, the blues singer Eleanor. Table

5.1 summarizes the changes that Neuwirth made to the orchestration and dramatis

personae of Lulu.

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Table 5.1, Berg’s jazz band and roles in Lulu; Neuwirth’s orchestra and roles in American Lulu

Lulu: dramatis personae American Lulu: dramatis personae

Lulu Lulu Gräfin Geschwitz Eleanor (blues singer) Theater-Gardierobe/Gymnasist/Groom [eliminated] Medizinalrat (I, speaking)/Professor (III) Professor (I, speaking)/Banker (III) Maler/Neger Painter Dr. Schön/Jack Dr. Bloom Alwa Jimmy/Young Man Schigolch Clarence Tierbändiger/Athlet Athlete Prinz/Kammerdiener/Marquis [eliminated] Theaterdirektor/Bankier [eliminated] Polizeikommisär (speaking) Commissioner (speaking) [Prologue: Clown and Bühnenarbeiter] [eliminated] [Act III: Gesellschafts-Szene Characters] [eliminated]

Act I, Scene 3 Jazz Band Orchestra

Flute 3 clarinets (3=tenor sax.) 2 clarinets (E-flat/B-flat and bass) Alto saxophone Sax. quartet (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone) 2 “jazz” trumpets 2 trumpets in C (1=piccolo) 2 “jazz” trombones 2 trombones (tenor and bass) Sousaphone Tuba Percussion (trap kit) Percussion (2 players) and drum kit Banjo Electric guitar Piano Synthesizer* 3 violins with “jazz horns” Strings (22222) Double bass Sampler (recorded speech, theatre organ)

*Synthesizer must have Fender Rhodes electric piano, Hammond electric organ, and steel drum patches

Left without a detachable small ensemble to play the Act II jazz band music,

Neuwirth reached into the history of pre-synchronized-sound film for a substitute. She rescored the relevant passages for a particular late-1920s theatre organ, the American

Robert Morton Organ Company’s Wonder Morton model. The sort of grand, immobile 223

instrument that few theatres could afford after 1929 (the company folded in 1931), the

Wonder Morton organ survives in a number of theatres across the United States. Even if

Neuwirth could have somehow obtained one, she would not have been able to transport

it. Instead, she played and recorded her arrangements of Berg’s jazz-band and film interlude music on the functioning specimen at Loew’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City, and has made this recording available to any company with plans to mount a production. Her score instructs a player in the orchestra to trigger this recording from a sampler during performances of American Lulu.

Scholarship around the piece has flourished in spite of the difficulty of seeing or hearing any element of the piece in print or audiovisual media. Previous publications on the piece have relied on rented scores, promotional clips, images of stage elements, and knowledge of Berg’s first two acts. My analysis and commentary in this chapter is based

on a recording that the Komische Oper Berlin made for its own records during the 2012

premiere run there, along with a full perusal score from Ricordi.13 Five years after its first

appearance and four after its tour to the Bregenz Festspiele, Edinburgh International

Festival, and Young Vic theatre of London, few rumors of future performances have

emerged.14 I write in the hope that opportunities to see and hear the piece become more

accessible to audiences in the future. In the interest of clarity, I provide a particularly

detailed description of the opera’s action below. In addition, Table 5.2 condenses and

summarizes the plot of the piece.

13 Olga Neuwirth and Alban Berg, American Lulu [Full Score] (Milan and New York: Casa Ricordi, 2012). 14 The UK’s Mahogany Opera Group mounted this tour of American Lulu, as a co-production with the Bregenzer Festspiele, the Scottish Opera, and the Young Vic theatre of London, in association with the London Sinfonietta. The company’s website outlines their interpretation and aims for the production, and offers an interview with Neuwirth about her aims for the project: https://www.mahoganyoperagroup.co.uk/past-productions/american-lulu/.

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Table 5.2, Graphic synopsis of American Lulu

Act/Scene/Interlude Events Prelude Clarence, Lulu’s pimp and protective father-figure, asks why she (1970s) seems dissatisfied despite her wealth. She hopes to retire from sex work. BLACK 1 Audio excerpt of actor reading a portion of MLK’s “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness” (1960), 1’23”; video of Mississippi steamboat with audio of rag played on calliope, 1’12”; electronic noise, 23” Act I/Scene 1 A Painter, having begun a portrait of Lulu, chases her around his studio (1954) out of lust. Lulu’s husband, a Professor, bursts in and dies of a heart attack. BLACK 2 Video of a man sneaking up on a little girl, with audio of actor reading lines from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) and June Jordan’s “Rape is Not a Poem” from Passion (1977-80), 44” Act I/Scene 2, with The Painter and Lulu, now married, interact in their home. Clarence BLACK 3 (1954) visits Lulu, as does Dr. Bloom. Bloom tells the Painter of Lulu’s upbringing and sexual history; BLACK 3 interrupts with lines from another poem by Jordan, “One Minus One Minus One” (1977). The horrified Painter shoots himself. Jimmy enters. BLACK 4 Audio excerpt of actor reading a portion of MLK’s “The Only Road to Freedom” (1966), 1’05” Act I/Scene 3 (1954) Jimmy and Lulu converse in her dressing room at the club where she performs. Making a scene in protest of Bloom’s attendance with his new fiancée, Lulu collapses while dancing and returns backstage. Bloom resolves to leave his betrothed for Lulu. BLACK 5 Video of a man sneaking up on a little girl, with audio of actor reading lines from Jordan’s “Rape is Not a Poem” (1977-80), 28” Act II/Scene I (late Eleanor, a blues singer, flirts with Lulu in the home she now shares 1950s) with her husband Dr. Bloom. Bloom leaves, and Clarence and the Athlete enter. Jimmy, who confesses his love to Lulu, interrupts. Bloom returns and orders Lulu to shoot herself; she shoots him instead. BLACK 7 Audio excerpt of an actor reading a portion of MLK’s “The Current Crisis in Race Relations” (1958), 1’30”; Berg’s film interlude, in which Lulu goes to jail, and the police commissioner rapes Eleanor but agrees to release Lulu Act II, Scene 2 (late Lulu returns from prison; the Athlete leaves. Lulu will leave for New 1950s) York with Clarence, and she encourages Jimmy to come along as well. BLACK 8 Images of the Black Panther posters of Emory Douglas appear on screen. Audio excerpt of an actor reading a portion of MLK’s “I See the Promised Land” (1968), 57” Act III (no scenic Clarence asks Lulu why she remains dissatisfied despite her wealth. divisions; 1970s) She reveals that she hopes to retire from sex work. Three people come to visit her: a Banker and regular john, whose threats she ridicules; Eleanor, whose attempts at genuine emotional conversation Lulu mocks; and a Young Man, whose advances Lulu rebuffs. A mystery figure comes to the door and kills Lulu. An image of her dead body appears.

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Though later productions hewed close to Neuwirth’s vision for the stage setting

and action, the premiere performances – with stage and costume design by Kirill

Serebrennikov, dramaturgy by Johanna Wall and Sergej Newski, and video projections

by Gonduras Jitomirsky – departed from her vision somewhat. For instance, Neuwirth

asks that the orchestra appear onstage, visible but obscured behind a sheer curtain and

seated at podiums labeled AL, in the style of a midcentury big band.15 John Fulljames, the

stage director for a series of productions around the United Kingdom in 2013, honored

this unusual arrangement, at once Brechtian in its disruption of the dramatic frame and

Lynchian in its air of surrealistic kitsch. Serebrennikov, however, opted to keep the band

in the pit, instead placing a modular windowed room, modeled on the diner from Edward

Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, at center stage. Instead of the word “Phillies,” the top of

the building bears the alternating letters L and U. Clever tricks of lighting (by Diego

Leetz), costuming, and stage setting ensure that this first Act has all the chiaroscuro of an

American film noir, or a German expressionist film.

American Lulu opens with seventy bars of music that anticipate the opening

portion of Act III; the two passages share nearly identical texts and music (Example 5.1).

Repeated chords in triplets fly by for twenty-nine measures before Clarence, the pimp

who substitutes for Schigolch, speaks – not sings – to the fifty-year-old Lulu, whose face

“is spoiled by a smug, condescending expression.”16 Lulu, for all her success, has not become likable in this adaptation. Clarence demands to know why she still seems unsatisfied, despite her obvious wealth – we learn that she keeps a second home in the

15 “As common for the 1970s, the musicians are sitting behind a half-open, glitzy but sheer curtain that can be lit in various ways. Their individual stands are decorated with the logo AL.” Neuwirth et al., American Lulu [Full], 1. 16 Ibid.

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South – and she responds, speaking as well, that she has grown tired of her career as a sex worker. A soft groove, animated by choked vibraphone chords and siren-like electric guitar glissandi, underscores her monologue (Example 5.2).

Example 5.1, The “rhythm section” and post-minimal motor of American Lulu, mm. 8-10

Example 5.2, Lulu describes her earlier life, Act III, American Lulu (percussion staves: glockenspiel and vibraphone)

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As the introductory segment ends, a percussionist rolls between A and B-flat on a

marimba, and the guitarist sustains a D with an e-bow. The first of the audiovisual interludes – all of which Neuwirth labels BLACKs in the score, referring to the lights onstage dimming to accommodate the video – begins. This paradigm, in which a subgroup within the orchestra holds out a drone or chord extrapolated from a given section’s final sonority through the ensuing interlude, holds for the rest of Acts I and II.

In practice, this means that Neuwirth chooses one or more pitches from the measure of

Berg’s music at which she makes her cut, and instructs the players of those respective pitches to hold them until the end of the interlude. These groups tend to consist of consonant intervals. American Lulu thus contains eight BLACK moments in which diatonic clusters, perfect fourths, triads, and even seventh chords suddenly blossom from amid the dissonance as the words of Martin Luther King Jr. or June Jordan resound in the auditorium – an uncanny and gorgeous effect, reminiscent of the harmonic halos around

Jesus’s recitatives in Bach’s Matthew Passion. Electronic sounds enter during the

BLACK moments as well, adding shimmering clouds of noise to the held pitches and speaking voices.

This said, BLACK 1 presents a counterintuitive selection of text, and an astonishing musical sample in its second half. The speech, excerpted from Dr. King’s

“The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness,” features a critique of African-Americans.

King, taking time to note that he could be “misquoted by the enemy” – i.e., segregationists – in the passage that Neuwirth selects, laments the low initiative, poor spending habits, and general “mediocrity” that he perceives among some members of his

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community.17 This may seem an odd way to begin a piece set in the Civil Rights era, but,

in the Komische Oper production, Lulu stands onstage in furs during the interlude.

Neuwirth means for the speech to refer to her title character. Far from a “freedom

fighter,” as one reviewer has mistakenly assumed, Lulu exerts no particular effort to

advance any cause, nor does she show any signs of caring for others at all.18 The speech

sample ends, and a projected image of a steamboat’s smokestacks appears. To the certain

bafflement of any audience member familiar with the original Lulu, a sampled calliope plays a jaunty rag as Lulu stands silently, and, inside the Nighthawks diner, a bartender

merrily juggles a cocktail shaker (Figure 5.1). The startling collisions of register, image, sound, and cultural reference have only just begun. Though Neuwirth tends to remove the more circus-like elements of Lulu, from the ballyhooing animal tamer of the prologue to the Athlete’s plan to make an acrobat of Lulu, this moment may sound, to American ears, more like a visit to the fairgrounds than a trip aboard a showboat.

The music of Act I, Scene 1 of Berg’s Lulu then takes over, but not from its beginning –

Neuwirth cuts the opening portion, in which Alwa and Dr. Schön (here Jimmy and Dr.

Bloom) converse with Lulu and the Painter. The scene therefore begins with the Painter chasing Lulu around his studio, pleading for sex. The entrance and death of the Professor

– Berg’s Medizinalrat, Dr. Goll – follows soon thereafter. Neuwirth cuts the portions of the dialogue in which the Painter questions Lulu’s name, a more consequential change than it may seem. In Lulu, the fact that each of the title character’s lovers has a different

17 Martin Luther King Jr., “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness” (address given at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League, New York, NY, September 6, 1960), 7-8, accessed March 10, 2017, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol5/6Sept1960_TheRisingTideofRacialConsciou snessAddressattheGold.pdf. 18 Tom Service, “Alban Berg’s Lulu Turns Freedom Fighter,” Guardian, August 18, 2013, accessed February 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/18/american-lulu-alban-berg-neuwirth. 229

name for her (Eva, Mignon, Nelly) contributes to the sense that she lacks a stable

identity. Neuwirth, by contrast, makes it clear that, no matter who addresses her, Lulu is

always simply Lulu, a human being with a name.

Figure 5.1, BLACK 1 of American Lulu at the Komische Oper Berlin, 2012

The Painter and Lulu panic over the Professor’s dead body, and another BLACK

interrupts, featuring a combination of texts by Djuna Barnes and June Jordan. Neuwirth

requests a video of a man sneaking up to and surprising a little girl; taken together, the

poetry and images of BLACK 2 gesture toward the horror of child rape, the topic of

Jordan’s poem.19 Berg found inspiration in the expressionist films of Fritz Lang, such as

M, the tale of a hunt for a murderer who preys on children. Neuwirth channels this scenario here. The action advances to Berg’s Scene 2, in which the Painter and Lulu enjoy their new life as a prosperous married couple. As in Lulu, this cannot last. Clarence

19 June Jordan, “Rape is Not a Poem,” in Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), 79.

230 comes calling, his every utterance surrounded by tuba obbligato – a substitute for

Schigolch’s contrabassoon. Before long, Dr. Bloom arrives, and informs the Painter of his sordid history with Lulu. It may dawn on the audience at this point that the previous

BLACK, with its terrifying implication of child abduction and sexual assault, foreshadowed the revelation that Bloom took Lulu in – so to speak – when she was twelve years old. To underscore the point, BLACK 3, with more mournful poetry by

Jordan, follows Bloom’s winking acknowledgment of the fact that he turned the still- underage Lulu over to a Madam for training as a prostitute.

As in Lulu, the Painter kills himself offstage. Jimmy arrives, announcing not a revolution in Paris but the testing of a hydrogen bomb. The United States tested its first fully functional thermonuclear weapon in 1952, but kept this test as secret as possible until 1954 – the year of the more widely covered detonation over Bikini Atoll. This means that, unlike the following two, Act I of American Lulu takes place in a specific year: the year of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the first wave of school desegregation, an unofficial starting point for the Civil Rights movement writ large.

Throughout Acts I and II, King’s voice emanates from the future. BLACK 4, which features a portion of his address “The Only Road to Freedom” of 1966, presents a decidedly more uplifting message than BLACK 1, and provides a bridge between Scenes

2 and 3.

In the Komische Oper production, an anachronistic disco ball rests behind Lulu and Jimmy as they discuss Bloom’s impending marriage in her dressing room at a sleazy club; she wears a revealing costume. (Future productions would see Lulu costumed in a 231

banana skirt, à la Josephine Baker.)20 Berg’s ragtime music, frenetic and expressionist enough to begin with, registers as yet more febrile when transferred to Neuwirth’s phantom theatre organ. The Prince and theatre staff of the original never appear, although

Jimmy takes on some of the former’s leering lines – thereby revealing his infatuation with Lulu much earlier than Berg’s Alwa does. The speaking police Commissioner remains, however. Lulu collapses onstage, to Bloom’s outrage. In Neuwirth’s adaptation, the text – translated by Richard Stokes and Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon, then adapted by

Neuwirth and the musicologist Helga Utz – sometimes comes unmoored from the

Wedekind-via-Berg original. One such example of this occurs here, when Lulu sings that the Commissioner’s sole reason for allowing a black woman to dance for a white audience has come from Bloom’s ample wallet. Bloom realizes that he cannot let go of

his lover, and, of his own volition – as opposed to taking dictation from Lulu, as in the

original – writes a letter to his fiancée to break off his engagement. BLACK 5, which features a variation on the video of BLACK 2, follows, with another portion of Jordan’s meditation on rape in the audio track. This stands in place of Berg’s terminal statement of the Hauptrhythmus, that long-long-short-long rhythmic sequence of A major triads over a bass F that ends his Act I and, in a chromatically altered version, Act II as well. Instead of a portent of doom to warn the listener that Bloom’s marriage to Lulu will end in tragedy, the audience receives a reminder of the nauseating circumstances under which their relationship began. Neuwirth has already begun to tamper with Berg’s hardwired musical and dramatic trajectory.

20 Cowan, “American Lulu?”

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Neuwirth keeps much more of Berg’s second act than of his first, and retains the opening portion of Act II, Scene 1. However, the first voice to emanate from the stage makes this scene’s primary difference from its model obvious. Eleanor, intended as an echo of Billie Holiday (née Eleanora Fagan), replaces Countess Geschwitz.21 In terms of

persona and social awareness, Eleanor stands opposite Lulu; of the two, the former is the

one we might expect to see protesting, or hear singing Strange Fruit. She flirts with Lulu

just as much as her predecessor did, but sings her suggestive compliments and questions

into a microphone. In addition to Geschwitz’s operatic mezzo-soprano voice, Neuwirth

also eschews her melodic lines, instead giving Eleanor tunes that consist largely of minor

thirds, raised fourths, fifths, and flat sevenths above a selected home pitch – blue notes,

along with the diatonic frame pitches toward which they bend. In addition, Eleanor

almost never sings without the accompaniment, however soft and inconspicuous, of the

drum kit, playing Neuwirth’s approximations of standard swing patterns. Like Audrey

Horne, the initial quasi-femme fatale figure of Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Eleanor cannot

appear without audiences hearing the sound of slinking, seductive jazz. Here, she invites

Lulu to a party, and pointedly declines to invite her husband.

Bloom leaves, and Clarence drops by with his friend, the Athlete. Neuwirth

deletes the Gymnasiast (schoolboy) who, in Lulu, comes to the Schön residence to

receive a sexual initiation from the lady of the house. Had Neuwirth kept Berg’s boy

novice in place, her messages about child rape in BLACKs 2 and 5 might have lost some

21 Neuwirth’s extended musical homage to Holiday has not confined itself to American Lulu, nor is she the only living composer to have drawn inspiration from her voice and performance style. In 2015, Della Miles, the singer who created the role of American Lulu’s Eleanor, sang in the premiere performance of Eleanor, an extended scena that features the exact same audio samples of King and Jordan as American Lulu. In addition, Thomas Adès’s song Life Story (1993) asks its vocal soloist to sing its text, a poem by Tennessee Williams, in the style of Holiday. 233 of their moral punch. Shortly after Clarence’s arrival, BLACK 6 ensues: over a cluster of all seven diatonic “white notes,” the words of King’s “The Current Crisis in Race

Relations,” a dire warning about the dangers of activism in times of segregationist hostility, ring out. Faced with a scene that Adorno characterized as a clown routine,

Neuwirth eliminates minor characters and preemptively clamps down on Berg’s macabre hilarity with a dead-serious message from the world outside.22

Free to dispose of all the material involving the schoolboy, Neuwirth advances the action to the moment when the Athlete, here an American football player, brags of his physique – just before Jimmy arrives at his father’s home. Another cut, eliminating

Berg’s Kammerdiener, pulls events forward to the moment of Jimmy’s confession of attraction to Lulu. Bloom arrives, revolver in hand, and his confrontation with Lulu turns violent. Lulu reminds Bloom of all the folly and scheming that led him to this point, and makes her infamous assertion: that she has never tried to be anything other than what she is. Ordered to shoot herself, she shoots Bloom instead.

BLACK 7 comprises two multimedia events: another excerpt from King’s “Crisis in Race Relations,” played without video accompaniment, and then Neuwirth and a video artist’s take on Berg’s silent film interlude. Marc Weiner has noted the symmetrical design of both the music and the film in Berg’s conception of this multimedia moment.23

The mirror structure of this three-minute span serves as a microcosm of and hinge for the larger arch structure of the opera, a stricter formal evocation of the femme fatale’s rise and fall than that of any prior work. Neuwirth, who breaks the arc of the original Lulu by

22 Adorno, Alban Berg, 128-129. 23 Marc Weiner, “Alban Berg, Lulu, and the Silent Film,” in Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR, eds. Robynn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 56-58.

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design, preserves the palindromic film music – reassigned to the Wonder Morton organ –

but specifies a violent and teleological series of images for the film itself. The

Commissioner, reveling in an opportunity to punish a black woman he had once been

paid to leave alone, throws Lulu in prison and orders the guards to mistreat her. She

manages to write and send a letter to Eleanor, who comes to her aid by attempting to flirt

her way into the Commissioner’s good graces; this cannot and does not end well. The

Commissioner agrees to release Lulu, but, expecting something in return, brutally rapes

Eleanor.

Act II, Scene 2 finds Jimmy, the Athlete, and Eleanor sprawled in Bloom’s house, waiting for Lulu to return. A cut removes much of the Athlete’s carrying-on about his plans for her, but, in an inspired and simple revision of the text, Neuwirth preserves his line about knowing of a safe hotel to patronize on the coming journey, making its owners not Germans, but Atlantans. In the context of midcentury segregation, the question of where African-American road-trippers could stay without fear of discrimination and worse remained acutely relevant. Victor Hugo Green’s Negro Motorist Green Book, a list

of safe hotels, restaurants, and gas stations for black travelers to patronize, circulated

widely among African-Americans of means.24 Lulu enters, and the Athlete, disappointed

in her weak and ravaged appearance, departs. Imprisonment has drained her, but not

made her more sympathetic to the plight of others. Of her rescue by Eleanor, she remarks:

The foolish girl thought she could settle things simply by using a little charm. Boy[,] was she wrong! The Commissioner tore her apart. He did

24 “The Green Book,” New York Public Library Collections, last modified January 1, 2017, accessed March 20, 2017, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green- book?&keywords=&sort=keyDate_st+desc#/?tab=about. 235

her in! They all tore her apart. Afterwards she was more dead than alive! Incredibly stupid! And to top it all off, they all took advantage of her! And now she’s completely pooped. And for whom did she do this? For me! Ha!25

Racial overtones become audible again when Lulu invites Jimmy to move to New York with her, noting that the pair can see each other whenever they want there – in contrast, one assumes, to the conditions of their existence in New Orleans. The ecstatic passage in which Alwa compares Lulu’s body to musical types falls to the cutting-room floor;

Neuwirth has little time for such male Romantic effusion, and none at all for unchecked objectification.

The act ends as it does in Berg’s opera, albeit with a video – the first component of BLACK 8 – playing over the orchestra’s foreboding terminal statement of the

Hauptrhythmus. The transition from the 1950s to the 1970s begins here, with collages of

Emory Douglas’s posters for the Black Panther party on the screen. Moments after the

end of Berg’s Act II score, a tutti chord blares from the orchestra. An extrapolation of the

twelve-tone chord that closes Lulu, it includes every chromatic pitch but B-flat. After this

brief eruption fades, a final message from Dr. King sounds: a portion of his final speech,

“I See the Promised Land,” in which he declares his fearlessness. A note from Neuwirth

signals a return to Lulu’s apartment in New York, set at the exact moment when the

opening scene began. Electronic noises, evocative of train whistles and brass instruments,

cede to the electric guitar triplets of the opera’s beginning.

Despite the close correspondence between the prologue and this opening portion

of Act III, some differences emerge. For one, Lulu did not refer to herself as “the queen

25 Neuwirth et al., American Lulu [Full], 238.

236 bitch, supreme bitch” earlier.26 She does now, evoking a Blaxploitation heroine or contemporary hip-hop artist and, perhaps, forcing the audience to experience feelings of déjà vu. Having filled the audience in on Lulu’s background, Neuwirth finds vivid ways to depict her in the diegetic present. In the Komische Oper production, Lulu strides back and forth in front of a row of johns, a Venus in furs who speaks into a microphone as though participating in a television interview. The orchestra fluctuates in both volume and pitch under her speech, with the guitar sustaining continuous glissandi as at the beginning, and the strings coming into and out of focus with brief yet drastic dynamic hairpins. Free to repeat pitches at will now that she has abandoned the constraints of dodecaphony, Neuwirth displays a minimalist’s sense of pacing and texture, but a continental modernist’s taste in harmony.

Raucous wrong-note ragtime breaks out as Lulu reveals that her success has brought her nothing but loneliness and pain. Over static, wrenching dissonances, she declares – at the top of her coloratura range, creeping between pitches by half and whole- step – that she has learned many secrets from the captains of industry and politicians she services (Example 5.3). At moments, the Lulu of Neuwirth’s third act resembles both the arrogant Duchess of Powder Her Face and the squealing Maid of the same. As I have argued, Adès’s female characters in that opera evoke a doubled image of the femme fatale: one Lulu who aged but never forgot her heyday, and another who remains perpetually vital and alluring. Neuwirth reminds us that, in a telling of this basic story with less built-in ageism, the operatic siren might grow older and continue in her career of seductions.

26 Ibid., 271-272. 237

Example 5.3, Lulu sings of her johns in her highest register, Act III, American Lulu

In general, the music of the third act lurches back and forth between pop grooves

and stretches of tense, dissonant music. When a stammering banker comes to partake of

Lulu’s services – and to cajole her into keeping all of the secrets he has spilled to her in bed – patches of uneasy harmony alternate with frenzied rhythms. Lulu, an eminently confident and even fearless figure, laughs at his blustering; his threats all ring hollow as

he bellows and grovels his way through a part that seldom completely leaves the domain

of Sprechstimme. He hurls epithets at her without relent – “bitch,” “bloodsucking whore”

– but storms out huffing and puffing in the end. The murder mystery begins here: a

potential suspect, meant to stand in for any number of powerful and compromised men,

exits the stage with a reason to want Lulu dead. Eleanor visits next, and the ensuing fight

between the old friends sends the orchestra reeling between (Eleanor’s) lush swing and

(Lulu’s) needling upper-string chords. The two women hurl accusations and insults back

and forth. Eleanor has developed a rich inner life, and demands dignity and respect. Lulu,

cold and haughty as ever, taunts her onetime savior for her self-serious ways. Marisol

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Montsalvo, grinning between her volleys of coloratura in the Komische Oper production, comes across as a cruel and fundamentally mean-spirited Lulu, glancing at Eleanor (Della

Miles) only to deliver barbs, and otherwise ignoring her in favor of the johns floating around the stage.

“You will not kill my free spirit!” cries the idealistic Eleanor to the uncaring Lulu, prompting the singing actors who played Jimmy, Bloom, the Painter, the Athlete, and

Clarence to begin singing “We Shall Overcome” in a penultimate gesture toward the sociopolitical currents of the time. In Neuwirth’s instructions, these singers – four of them white – remain offstage. In the Komische Oper production, however, they stride merrily across the apartment in gold sequined jackets and sunglasses, play-acting as a pop vocal group in the vein of the Temptations. American jaws will drop if this particular bit of choreography makes its way into any future stateside productions; if any song remains sacred in American culture, “We Shall Overcome” may be the one. In a callback to the conclusion of Berg’s Act III, Eleanor takes her leave of Lulu by referring to her as “my angel.” Neuwirth’s empowered but unpleasant title character responds, speaking with unromantic contempt: “run, you fucking bitch.” Eleanor meanders off stage, “freies scatting” per Neuwirth’s direction. The final audio sample sounds at the same time, with multiple voices speaking the final lines of June Jordan’s “Poem for South African

Women” of 1978.

In Berg’s opera, the final john to visit Lulu before the arrival of her murderer had no name, no occupation, and no signs of an inner life, only a racial category: the Negro.

In American Lulu, this penultimate visitor in Lulu’s life becomes a buffoonish white man, infatuated with the escort and convinced that he can become her sole lover. The singing 239 actor who portrayed Jimmy doubles as this unnamed Young Man, whose advances Lulu dismisses in short order. Clarence, exiting himself, kicks all of the other lingering Johns out of the apartment. Lulu hears a knock at the door and, as always, expresses exasperation at the idea of seeing another human being: “Here we go again, someone’s coming – let’s see who it is!” The static texture over which she proclaimed her exhaustion with her career returns, with its siren sounds from the guitar and Reichesque vibraphone patterns. She walks slowly to her door as the orchestra jacks up harmonic tension, and, in the Komische Oper production, the faces of all the male characters flash onto the screen in sequence. The curtain drops, and, upon the unpitched percussive stroke that ends the piece – a chilling response to Berg’s twelve-tone chord – a car-sized projection of Lulu’s nude, eviscerated torso flashes onto the closed curtain in silence. In the reference recording furnished by the Komische Oper, audience members gasp audibly. In reimagining an opera rather than merely restaging one, Neuwirth produces a greater shock than even the most audacious examples of Regietheater.

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In presenting complex collisions of ideas, images, referents, and symbols through multiple media at once, Neuwirth places her work within the conceptual boundaries of

Jelena Novak’s notion of postopera.27 An alternative to the generic term music-theatre – in use across the Western art world throughout the twenty-first century, despite the ease with which one might conflate it with popular musical theatre – postopera seeks to embrace those contemporary multimedia pieces for which the term opera seems both anachronistic and inadequate. Neuwirth refers to American Lulu, with its indispensable

27 Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015).

240 multimedia elements, blues singer, and debts to cinema, as “Musiktheater,” a distinction that many critics appear to have missed. The piece thus violates critical expectations not only for a production of Lulu, but for opera as a genre. In considering the fraught reception history of American Lulu, I seek to account for the gap between its tremendous signifying potential as postopera and its reception as a failed opera or, worse, a failed production of one of the great operas.

That her work elicits such confusion from critics speaks to the continued relevance of Stuart Hall’s theories on the encoding and decoding of cultural texts; the messages that authors bake into a work will seldom register for audiences in precisely the same fashion, if at all. As I argued of Powder Her Face, American Lulu presents a text so richly encoded and full of internal contradiction that those who must decode the piece may quickly lose sight of the proverbial forest. Far be it from me to castigate either

Neuwirth or her critics; rather, I seek to make sense of the disconnect between the former’s stated goals on the one hand, journalistic bewilderment on the other, and, suspended somewhere in between, a controversial piece of music-theatre laden with signs.

In the opera house, time passes quickly. Those not intimately acquainted with the

Socialist pedagogical plays of Brecht, the grotesquerie of Lynch, the theatre of cruelty of

Artaud, the language of Blaxploitation film, the timeline of the American Civil Rights movement, the latest scholarship on Berg’s Lulu, and the myriad other pieces of cultural history upon which Neuwirth draws may find themselves at sea. While a number of critics have praised Neuwirth’s audacity, many more have taken obvious pleasure in panning performances. Consistently colorful though the reception history of American 241

Lulu has been, three reviews in particular, all by musicologists or critics with advanced

training in music history, stand out for their sensitivity to particulars. Alexander Cowan

has questioned the piece’s depiction of African-Americans; Alexandra Coghlan has taken

Neuwirth’s stated feminist intentions seriously, the better to hand down a scathing

verdict; and Mark Berry has defended the piece as a worthy successor to the twentieth-

century and contemporary operas that his monograph, After Wagner, examines in detail.

Each walked away with a distinct impression of the piece.

Berry, taken aback by friends and colleagues’ negative reactions to the Komische

Oper production, found himself intrigued rather than scandalized at the idea of such a radical revision of twentieth-century opera’s most venerated modernist work.28 Although

disturbed by Neuwirth’s writing for Eleanor in such a straightforward and, in his turn of

phrase, “uncritical” way – as though Neuwirth intentionally thumbs her nose at Adorno –

Berry praises the acousmatic interruptions from Martin Luther King for their power as

commentaries on the existential self-involvement of Berg’s characters. As Neuwirth has

implied, if not quite stated, this was the point of the BLACK sequences. They break in not merely to fill in spaces where she makes cuts, but also, in a specific evocation of the choruses in Bertold Brecht’s Lehrstücke of the 1920s and ‘30s, to make the audience more acutely aware of the contrasts between the thoughts and actions of characters and the pressing social issues to which they might pay attention instead.29 Though Brecht

himself participated in the creation of operas alongside Kurt Weill, and his alienating

production techniques have long influenced both the composition and staging of operas

28 Mark Berry, “Olga Neuwirth, American Lulu,” Opera Today, September 24, 2013, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.operatoday.com/content/2013/09/olga_neuwirth_a.php. 29 Olga Neuwirth, interview with Caitlin Smith, I Care if you Listen, December 4, 2012, accessed March 5, 2017, https://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2012/12/5-questions-to-olga-neuwirth-composer/.

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from all eras, this specific tactic has few precedents in the genre that gave the world

Gesamtkunstwerken. Neuwirth periodically ruptures the diegesis, freezes dramatic time,

and snaps the audience out of its state of rapt attention, all for the purpose of introducing

voices of moral authority that have little obvious bearing on the action onstage. Critics

familiar with postopera and epic theatre might embrace this. Those in opera, steeped in

tradition, may not.

Alexandra Coghlan, by contrast, finds little to praise when considering

Neuwirth’s new dramatis personae, having seen the same production as Berry at

London’s Young Vic:

Meaner and more nakedly manipulative than her original, [Lulu] has nothing to redeem her. Whether we learn more from a wicked woman who vanquishes her male foes than a victimised woman ultimately destroyed by them is moot. Transforming Geschwitz into a jazz singer…condemned to sing every line into a Brechtian microphone, trailing its flaccid little tail around the stage[,] allows Neuwirth to incorporate the bluesy sensibility that becomes the most American thing about the show, but meshes poorly with the rest of the musical fabric. […] American Lulu hasn’t much to say about Lulu, and still less to say about America.30

Coghlan’s rejection of Lulu as an irredeemable monster speaks volumes. While I dispute the idea that the change of Lulu’s status from abased, humble, and broken to

empowered, cruel, and commanding makes no difference, I acknowledge the critic’s

contention that the point of this revision can remain obscure. Among all the various

running themes in the reception of the piece, this one counts among the most consistent

and powerful: without a great deal of explication, the value and meaning of Neuwirth’s

changes can seem ham-handed or, worse yet, ineffective in their task of presenting Lulu

30 Alexandra Coghlan, “American Lulu, Young Vic,” Arts Desk, September 19, 2013, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.theartsdesk.com/opera/american-lulu-young-vic. 243 from the much-ballyhooed woman’s perspective that the composer treats as a selling point.31 The interjections from King, for example, will always appear incongruous with the drama onstage – by design – but, without background knowledge of Neuwirth’s

Brechtian intent, they can read as hasty insertions, slapped onto the surface of the opera as facile attempts at historical situation. The incongruity of Eleanor’s blues singing, which Coghlan homes in on, may also seem too easy – a concern that Berry shares.

However, as Silvio dos Santos has argued, Lulu itself, along with Berg’s other late works, tends toward citation and eclecticism – scholarly attempts to anoint the composer as a prophet-hero of the ascetic avant-garde notwithstanding.32 Neuwirth follows Berg in this willingness to juxtapose not merely idioms, but also entire musical languages and systems in a single passage.

Alexander Cowan, less concerned with aesthetics than with problems of racial representation, has raised a number of issues when it comes to American Lulu’s use of black music and black bodies to convey a mixed political message on behalf of a white composer. Decrying Neuwirth’s deployment of jazz, blues, and soul idioms – “the sort of

‘jazz’ that only a classically-trained composer could write” – Cowan, having watched the same production as Coghlan and Berry, writes:

Neuwirth’s score, using jazz as little more than a musical shorthand for ‘Black America’, falls back on [the] same racial essentialism that has plagued jazz from its very beginning – if the audience are guilty of ‘othering’ Lulu, Neuwirth ‘others’ an entire culture.

…part of what drove Black prostitution and objectification in the early twentieth century was a belief (among white men, of course) that Black women were supremely erotic beings, with unmatched sexual appetite – part of Josephine Baker’s fame rested on her reputation as a voracious lover. Presenting Lulu as a sexual and racial being, and presenting…race

31 Neuwirth, “Notes” (see also: the epigraph to this chapter). 32 dos Santos, Narratives of Identity, 183-186.

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and sexuality as being linked is hugely problematic, especially in a production that mimics Baker’s dance itself. The only other black character is the Pimp, another being defined in relation to sexuality (even the jazz singer is white). Calling out the audience for their role in Lulu’s demise seems something of a double standard when the play itself is just as guilty of racial essentialism.33

On a number of occasions, Neuwirth has listed the cultural objects that inspired

her as she reworked Lulu, from the musical film Carmen Jones, itself a noir-era

adaptation of Bizet’s piece by the filmmaker Otto Preminger with Dorothy Dandridge in

the iconic title role, to the Blaxploitation revenge fantasies of the 1970s. These points of

reference make a sort of sense as influences, until one asks – as Cowan has – why these

cultural objects, themselves controversial for their depictions of African-Americans as always already trapped in underworlds full of crime, poverty, and sexual excess, should inspire new work along similar lines in the 2010s. Carmen Jones proved a powerful vehicle for Dandridge and landmark for racial representation for its time, though the revelation of the intimate relationship between director and leading lady – one marked by a vast imbalance in power – has since complicated its reception. As Stephane Dunn has argued, the emergence of the archetypal “baad bitch” of 1970s crime films aimed at

African-American audiences, such as Coffy and Foxy Brown, subverted the misogyny of

earlier examples of the subgenre, such as Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback – the first film

to attract the then-neologism “Blaxploitation,” and another stated influence for

Neuwirth.34 Twentieth-century films helmed by heroic black women presented

unprecedented images to mass audiences, and merit praise for doing so.

33 Cowan, “American Lulu?” 34 Stephane Dunn, “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). See also: Neuwirth, “Notes.” 245

However, four decades have passed since Pam Grier disrobed in order to entrap

the drug dealers her characters so despised, and the stakes of racial representation have

changed drastically. At a time when rich depictions of black American life become ever

more visible, and garner ever more of the praise they deserve – Claudia Rankine’s

Citizen: An American Lyric, for instance, or Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight – the notion of a

white artist swooping in to tell a tale so rooted in hoary stereotypes registers as outdated

at best. For all her obvious good intentions, Neuwirth calls for charged imagery and

language in her depiction of hardened pimps and their sultry, hypersexual butterflies;

why listen to her American Lulu when one could instead listen to the work of Kendrick

Lamar? Why watch this new Lulu crisscross the stage in a banana skirt after the 2016

premiere of Tyshawn Sorey’s Josephine Baker: A Portrait, a harrowing song cycle in

which a living soprano envoices the late dancer through Rankine’s incisive poetry?

In a time when the world awaits the premiere of Tania León’s Little Rock Nine, a forthcoming opera with libretto by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the idea of a white composer

reinforcing images of black Americans as depraved gangsters and bloodied victims

evinces a cringe. I argue that many critics have misconstrued American Lulu’s

dramaturgy, and given its composer far too little credit for the subtle and powerful

changes that disrupt Berg’s original narrative trajectory. However, Cowan is right to

express concerns about the viability of this piece in an age of increased recognition for

expressions of black American experience and identity across genres and backgrounds,

from Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Threadgill’s structured group improvisations to the

multimedia projects of the Knowles sisters – and far beyond.

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Still, I contend that, in allowing accretions of meaning and historical resonance to

grow into the fabric of Lulu, Neuwirth adds a vital missing link between Berg’s deadly

flapper and the celebrity trainwreck narrative of the present: sixty years’ worth of

cinematic, all-American femme fatale stories, some with protagonists doubly

marginalized for their gender and color. She updates the operatic tale of the fallen woman

by re-tuning it to resonate with subsequent developments in the character type – new

iterations and images that Berg never lived to see. In the 1950s, for instance, American

film took a turn for the dark and sordid. Crime films of the era, casually known as film

noir, replaced the sunny topics and characters of yore with hardboiled heroes and sultry,

dangerous femmes fatales.35 Film scores of the time frequently mixed the jazzy sounds of

the cityscape with the dissonances of expressionist horror, and some of the United

States’s avant-garde composers defected to Hollywood just to ride this aesthetic wave.36

Even amid the grit, violence, and mystery of these films, romances blossomed and erotic longings proliferated: Elisabeth Bronfen has found gestures toward Tristan und Isolde in a number of noir soundtracks and scenarios.37 Lulu, of course, counts among the many

works in which the Wiener Schule’s principal dramatist cites Tristan – and, as dos Santos

has argued, Berg fancied himself an heir to Wagner, tasked with modernizing the

erotically charged music-drama for a post-tonal world.38 Lulu is a voiceover, a cynical

35 Richard Ness, “A Lotta Night Music: The Sound of Film Noir,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 52-53. 36 Nicholas Stevens, “The ‘Bad Boy’ and the Tough Guys: George Antheil and Noir Aesthetics, 1940-50” (paper presented at Music and the Moving Image X, New York, NY, May 26, 2015). 37 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Nocturnal Wagner: The Cultural Survival of Tristan und Isolde in Hollywood,” in Wagner and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 38 dos Santos, Narratives, 25-78. 247 detective, and a production studio away from noir, even without Neuwirth’s updates. Her changes make the connection clearer.

According to Ian Brookes, the particular 1950s film that inspired Neuwirth to produce an updated, Americanized Lulu, Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones of 1954, fits comfortably aside true noir films of the same time; the plot of Carmen involves so much sex, violence, and underworld imagery that it echoes that cinematic ethos without much straining.39 Still, Dandridge’s Carmen, for all her agency, still dies at the hands of her onetime lover Joe. In the 1970s, however, the rise of Blaxploitation action films led to new and specifically black femme fatale archetypes, the titular “baad bitches and sassy supermamas” of Stephane Dunn’s monograph on the subject – dangerous women who took down men and lived to tell the tale. In the film that Neuwirth cites as a direct influence on American Lulu, Jack Hill’s Coffy, the filmmaker both eroticizes and exoticizes the heroine, depicts the lynching of a black man with a car in gory detail, and freely draws upon tropes of African-American depravity, going so far as to acknowledge the racism of the film in frank terms. As Dunn points out, Hill treated the star of the show, Pam Grier, as a latter-day answer to popular images of Dandridge: mostly sexy, incidentally tragic or heroic. Yet Coffy, the title character, succeeds in her quest to take down the drug ring that peddled dope to her sister, dead from an overdose before the film’s plot begins. In a twist that could add substantial interest to a production of Lulu,

Coffy shoots her (white) lover, a city councilman with secret ties to the drug dealers – the film’s closest equivalent to Schön – in the groin, and walks off toward the rising sun. If

39 Ian Brookes, Film Noir: A Critical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 14.

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Neuwirth sends intentionally mixed messages about her heroine, then we might find

anticipations of this paradoxical treatment in her models.40

With the neo-noir films of David Lynch, a final puzzle piece falls into place. In an

interview, Neuwirth commented on her decision to adapt Lost Highway as an opera rather

than Blue Velvet, emphasizing temporality, teleology, and comprehensibility:

…in Blue Velvet gibt es eher einen geraden Strang, und der ist eben in Lost Highway aufgrund von Lynchs Bekanntschaft und Zusammenarbeit mit dem amerikanischen Dichter Barry Gifford durch eine wesentlich komplexere Erzählstruktur ersetzst worden. Die Doppelbödigkeit ist viel spannender. Es gibt zwar eine Gesichte, aber im Grunde versteht man ja nicht unmittelbar, worum es wirklich geht.41

Considering the treatment of femme fatale archetypes in both named Lynch films, Frida

Beckman argues that each twists and subverts expectations in its own way.42 At first, it

appears that Blue Velvet’s hero, the detective Jeffrey Beaumont, must – as in most typical

noir films – choose between a dark-haired, hypersexual siren, the nightclub singer

Dorothy Vallens, and an innocent blonde angel, Sandy. (Bizet’s Carmen has these types

as well: their names are Carmen and Micaëla, respectively. Archetypes, as I have argued, have long histories.) However, these exaggerated, obvious archetypes refuse to function

in the ways that viewers might expect them to after years of conditioning. Dorothy loses

all of her power over the situation well before the denouement, and lives to reunite with

her child in the end. Lynch offers part of the conventional narrative closure when

40 Dunn, “Baad Bitches”, 107-113. 41 “…in Blue Velvet, there is more of a straight line, which is replaced by a much more complex narrative structure in Lost Highway due to Lynch’s friendship and collaboration with the American poet Barry Gifford. The ambiguity is much more exciting. There is indeed a vision, but basically, one does not understand directly what is really at stake.” Olga Neuwirth, interview with Stefan Drees (“Auf dem Weg zu Lost Highway (2002/03)”), in Olga Neuwirth zwischen den Stuehlen: A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen Klang (Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 2008), 176-177. 42 Frida Beckman, “From Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynch,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 25-44. 249

Beaumont takes up with Sandy, but as ironic commentary on the genre’s ingrained mechanisms – even as he subverts the femme fatale archetype by allowing the seductive woman to also be a mother. In Lost Highway, Lynch destabilizes the figure of the femme fatale by doubling her, and by removing any semblance of a traditional forward-driving plot. Neuwirth, who demonstrates an intimate knowledge of Lynch’s filmic aesthetics and play with time and narrative, turned directly from her Lost Highway opera to a neo- noir of her own. American Lulu draws images and ideas from across the latter half of the twentieth century and, as in Lynch’s films, disrupts the typical arc of the femme fatale’s rise and fall through a clever formal intervention – albeit one that cannot prevent the death of her anti-heroine. As with Lost Highway itself, the audience member of American

Lulu may revel in this subversion, but must still face the image of a dismembered and bloody body, the consequence of the patriarchal violence that opera tended, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to paper over.

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A self-serving narcissist unmoved by the hardships of others, Neuwirth’s Lulu cares little for politics but runs up against systems of oppression and symptoms of structural inequality as she pursues her own sordid version of happiness. In her single- minded pursuit of social and economic advancement, she mirrors Turnage’s Anna Nicole

– one thing, aside from location and racial politics, that helps make American Lulu feel so

American, at least in the designs of its European creator. In her near-solipsism,

Neuwirth’s anti-heroine also shares some DNA with the Duchess of Powder Her Face – and if Andriessen’s monodrama Anaïs Nin has made the real Nin look and sound more like Berg’s Lulu, then Neuwirth has done the opposite. Despite this unwitting affront to

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patriarchy – does anything vex the powerful more than a lack of worshipful attention? –

this version of Lulu serves part of her sentence and then recovers.

As Neuwirth understands, Lulu has never been the hero of Lulu. Countess

Geschwitz, of all characters, has by far the best claim to this title. By remaking the

character of the Countess as the more socially aware of the two women, Neuwirth

demonstrates a deep understanding of her source materials and their historical context. As

dos Santos has explained, Geschwitz – a character at least partly inspired by Berg’s own

gay-rights activist sister, Smaragda – holds the stage alone at the bloody end of his final

work, the one truly redemptive and innocent figure amid a cast of monsters.43 Lulu,

however, in Berg’s opera as well as Neuwirth’s version of it, remains a dubious character

at best. Given the fact that Neuwirth has made her refusal to write from a single,

polemical perspective clear, the fact that American Lulu features too many changes to

closely resemble the original and too few to look like a vindication of the title character

becomes even less of a surprise. Neuwirth preserves the elements of Monstertragodie that

Berg inherited from Wedekind, but adjusts the plot and characters just enough to remind

her audiences that the fallen woman need not appear as a consuming femme fatale, nor a

redeemed angel.44

To take Neuwirth at her word – to consider her work as itself a point in the

reception history of Berg’s Lulu – is to register the tectonic shift in meaning that her operatic retelling attempts to effect around its title character. In Berg’s opera, various

characters call Lulu an animal, a mystical force, an angel, and the devil. However, as

Claire Taylor-Jay has argued, many of the qualities that critics take as inherent to Lulu’s

43 dos Santos, Narratives, 150-182. 44 Neuwirth, “Notes.” 251

character originate as misogynistic insults from the opera’s blustering, morally compromised men.45 Lulu herself observes at gunpoint that her first two husbands died of

their own accord – for her, perhaps, but not by her hand. She shoots Schön only because

he had, seconds before, held the loaded gun in her face. Commentators who take the old

labels for Lulu at face value miss this crucial point.46 In the meantime, however, many

have taken Lulu for a sign, a cipher, a mythic goddess, or, per Neuwirth, an

“exterminating angel.”47 Neuwirth has stepped back from this traditional interpretation,

posing a new and radical answer to the question of the character’s identity: perhaps Lulu

is, in the end, human.

45 Claire Taylor-Jay, “Towards a Feminist Reading of Lulu: A Woman’s Place in a Man’s Opera,” in Gender Studies und Musik: Geschlecterrollen und ihre Bedeutung für die Musikwissenschaft, ed. Stefan Fragner, Jan Hemming, and Beate Kutschke (Regensburg: Con Brio, 1998), 161-171. 46 Philip Hensher, “Murder Most Fabulous,” Guardian, May 31, 2009, accessed December 23, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jun/01/opera-lulu-alban-berg. 47 Neuwirth undoubtedly intended the reference to Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel, but could not have been alluding to Thomas Adès’s operatic project after the same; news of the subject of Adès’s third opera broke six months after Neuwirth penned her program essay on American Lulu. See: Neuwirth, “Notes.”

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Conclusion

The Marilyn Triptych and the Cracked Killing Jar: Ways Forward for Opera and Scholarship

The New York City Opera had suffered setbacks, but hopes were high for its

newest production. The contemporary opera slated for the beginning of the season came

from an acclaimed composer, whose work drew upon twentieth-century modernism and

jazz. His piece, a grand account of the rise and fall of a world-famous blonde bombshell,

held great promise. It joined a glut of recent operas that depicted real, recently-living

figures, and it did not lack for drama: several of the heroine’s lovers, including rich and

famous men, put in appearances over the course of its duration. Its score blended African-

American popular grooves with high-expressionist angst. At its tragic end, the

protagonist lay dead, framed by a surreal tableau. Critics praised the singers for their fine

voices and convincing portrayals, but faulted the score for its eclecticism, and its libretto

for swaths of vulgarity. Audiences, however, found the opera compelling, and several of

the performances in that season-opening run sold out. The year was 1993 – and 2013; the

composer was Ezra Laderman – and Mark-Anthony Turnage; the opera was Marilyn –

and Anna Nicole.1

NYCO survived its troubles in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but filed for

Chapter 11 bankruptcy status after mounting its first and final opera production in the

2013-2014 season: Turnage and Thomas’s tale of a woman who was “gone from the get-

1 Edward Rothstein, “New Milieu for Monroe: City Opera’s Marilyn,” New York Times, October 8, 1993, accessed March 4, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/08/arts/review-music-new-milieu-for-monroe- city-opera-s-marilyn.html. 253

go.” The company later returned to life, with its indefatigable orchestra still playing and its 2016-2017 season brimming with neglected and contemporary works, alongside repertory staples like Pagliacci and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. In the twenty-year period between the company’s productions of Marilyn and Anna Nicole, similar works proliferated across Europe and North America, from Powder Her Face and Anaïs Nin to two additional jazz-inflected, tragic operas about the death of Marilyn Monroe: Robin de

Raaff’s Waiting for Miss Monroe (2012) and Gavin Bryars’s Marilyn Forever (2013).

Neuwirth’s American Lulu remains something of an outlier, as one of the few recent works in this vein that eschews the depiction of a real person.

Any given two-decade period in which three artists independently write three separate operas on the same subject (Monroe), with the same telos (her death) and similar musical strategies (the incorporation of jazz), merits deep scrutiny. Andy Warhol might have found humor in the situation; the point that he made with his repetitions of

Monroe’s image still stands. At the turn of the twenty-first century, composers continue to paint radically diverse pictures of closely related figures, changing hues but preserving the general shape. They may intend their portrayals of the femme fatale and fallen woman as memorial pieces, social commentaries, satires, black comedy, or cautionary tales – but regardless of stated intentions, the artists behind both this operatic Marilyn triptych and the operas I have considered in this study all leave us with dead heroines. Déjà vu can set in despite difference, as one watches yet another group of men engineer yet another cataclysmic fate for yet another woman. As Peter Morris, the Mozart in the Jungle writer quoted in the epigraph to Chapter One, unwittingly revealed, the historical trope has lately begun to capsize into an in-joke: of course the contemporary piece is about the

254 disgrace of a real woman, taken for a wily seductress in the midst of a mass-media circus.

Any genre so persistently fixated on its own history – and on a particular, perilous storyline within said history – merits considerate critique from those who love it most.

Yet as of the late 2010s, the trend that Laderman’s opera presaged, and that the wildly successful Powder Her Face touched off in earnest, has shown no signs of abating – on the contrary.

In 2017, the Prototype Festival of new opera and music-theatre presented three central works: Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, David Lang’s anatomy theater, and

Matt Marks’s Mata Hari. All three feature fallen woman, after a fashion. Mazzoli’s opera, an adaptation of the eponymous Lars von Trier film with a libretto by Royce

Vavrek, centers around the existential dilemma of a pious wife named Bess, whose new husband Jan has an accident on an oilrig that leaves him paralyzed. Jan asks Bess to sleep with other men and recount her experiences to him, to compensate for his own sexual inability. In short order, Bess’s encounters with strangers take a turn for the dangerous.

As she further abases herself, Jan begins to recover; Bess comes to believe that she can cure him, if she allows her newly sordid life to consume her. By some miracle, it works.

She dies, and he walks again. The piece’s score recalls the operas of Britten and the minimalism of Mazzoli’s mentor Meredith Monk, and subsumes both into the composer’s distinctive rock-influenced sensibility.

Lang’s piece, with a libretto partially adapted from eighteenth-century medical texts by the composer and Mark Dion, opens with the execution of a murderess by hanging. Over the course of the opera, the audience learns that she killed her husband- cum-pimp and children out of desperation, having lived a traumatic and hopeless life of 255 poverty. In the latter portion of the piece, a traveling medical specialist dissects her nude body onstage for a paying crowd: the audience of the performance. Searching for the source of the woman’s evil among her organs and coming up short, the surgeon proclaims that her soul must have been the culprit. As operatic undoings of women go, few have ever followed the process of punishing and humiliating the femme fatale so far, and none have required so much gore. Like Neuwirth, Lang thrusts the physical reality of the woman’s death into the faces of onlookers – implicitly complicit.

Of the three pieces, however, Matt Marks’s Mata Hari most closely resembles the operas that I have considered in this study. Based on the life and death of the titular early twentieth-century dancer, international traveler, and alleged spy, Marks’s collaboration with the librettist Paul Peers features an array of popular and post-minimal styles and idioms. A speaking actor takes the title role, a jazz singer assumes the part of one of her lovers, and a four-member male chorus – all cast in multiple roles – sing with operatic technique. The orchestra comprises a keyboardist, a guitarist who doubles on banjo, a violinist, and an accordion player. At the end of the piece, the title character, née

Margaretha MacLeod, stands defiant before a firing squad – heroic at the bitter end.

The critic Alex Ross, presented with synopses of the Prototype Festival’s 2017 offerings, cited a text that, almost four decades after its publication, remains as relevant as ever:

Several decades after Catherine Clément wrote Opera, or the Undoing of Women, a classic feminist critique, women still frequently come to grief on opera stages. The form can’t seem to dispense with what Clément describes as a punitive adoration of female singers: “They suffer, they cry, they die.” Yet modern tales of doomed heroines tend to reflect a more

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progressive, critical sensibility, particularly when female composers take the helm.2

Ross goes on to describe the redemptive quality of Mazzoli’s work in particular. As

Breaking the Waves moves on to new productions – and it certainly will, given the near- universal praise it has received – critics, audiences, and scholars will continue to ponder its message and those of similar works. As I have argued throughout this study, the genre’s old habits have proved tenacious, even in an ostensibly more humane age.

Various works and productions thereof have troubled the thin line between critique of convention and replication of the same. Perhaps the success of Breaking the Waves will help opera break its cycle, at last banishing Wedekind’s animal-tamer and his rhetoric of feminine evil to the past – or at least placing it between permanent quotation marks.

I have focused on composers, librettists, and directors in this study – the very figures on whom music scholars and critics have, from the earliest efforts to write about the art form, maintained a steady focus. In discussing characters, I have examined those elements of text, music, and dramaturgy that invite audiences to think of these concatenations of name, embodied presence, language, and sound as ersatz human beings. To conclude, however, I turn briefly to another indispensable figure in the creation of opera: the prima donna. These sopranos and mezzos must bear the burdens of signification on behalf of an opera’s other creative figures. They must live in their role for the duration of a performance run. Many of the performers who have sung these contemporary fallen-woman roles have spoken openly about their coming to terms with

2 Alex Ross, “Prototype Festival’s Striking Heroines,” New Yorker: Goings On About Town, January 9, 2017, accessed January 9, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/prototype-festivals- striking-heroines. 257

this storyline, including Allison Cook (the Duchess, La Monnaie, 2015), Sarah Joy Miller

(Anna Nicole, New York City Opera, 2013), and Angel Blue (Lulu, Edinburgh Festival

2013).3 Despite the brutal denouements to which these operas subject their characters,

many singers find ways to identify with their role, and to feel empowered even as the

final silence approaches night after night.

Few performers have made the femme fatale and fallen woman into pillars of their

careers in the way that Barbara Hannigan has, from her much-hailed turn as Ophelia in

Hans Abrahamsen’s song cycle let me tell you (2013) to her performances as

simultaneous whip-bearing singer and conductor of György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the

Macabre (1994). In 2013, during a set of performances of the composer George

Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp’s opera Written on Skin (2012), Hannigan delivered

a public lecture on her love for a heroine not unlike the defiant, sexually awakened,

doomed wife of that opera, Agnès:

What does it feel like to sing Lulu? It feels like my whole body is shaking with resonance. It feels like I’ve become the sound of humanity. It is exhilarating and it’s extremely satisfying, in a physical way. In late spring of last year, I closed my Lulu scores and I committed myself to another opera for a few months: Written on Skin, which premiered last summer in Aix-en-Provence and which opened two nights ago at the Royal Opera House here in London. The brilliant Katie Mitchell directed this incredible opera by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. I sing the central role of Agnès…[Written on Skin is] about a thirteenth-century woman who liberates herself from an oppressive marriage by way of an illicit love affair. I spend most of my life singing text and music written by men. I am a muse to many, many composers, most of them male – they work out their demons on me, or so we hope, and Alban Berg certainly did so with

3 Allison Cook, interview with staff of La Monnaie, YouTube video, 1:11, posted by “La Monnaie De Munt,” September 22, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JyMZ3t6pK4; Sarah Joy Miller, “Beyond the Scenes: Anna Nicole at BAM” (interview with staff of BAM), YouTube video, 2:05, posted by “BAMorg,” September 12, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXqY6ObX_VQ&list=PL6jL07upVuqXSR913zZzDIfDAkopUVBq3; Angel Blue, “Behind the Scenes of American Lulu” (interview with Kenan Malik), YouTube video, 5:59, posted by “Mahogany Opera Group,” April 29, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BC09Ui7H40.

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Lulu. I feel like, when I am singing those female characters, I am not just that character – I am also the composer, I am their voice.4

Written on Skin does not follow the exact pattern that I have heretofore laid out. A

tragedy set in medieval France, it includes no references to popular music. Despite its

thematic and titular relationship to visual media – Agnès has an affair with an illuminator

of manuscripts, and the images he creates become indispensable to the plot – it does not call for any specific audiovisual components. However, Agnès starts out as a subservient wife and then develops, over time, into a figure of absolute refusal and resistance – so

unimpressed by her husband’s macabre threats that, challenged to cannibalize her dead

lover, she goes ahead and does so out of spite. She is a protagonist who has a heart and

eats one too, unbowed and truly heroic in the face of death and repression. Hannigan,

who plays Lulu with a similar attitude of defiance, created and has so far owned the role

of Agnès. In Katie Mitchell’s production, Hannigan makes her exit by climbing a

staircase, moving beyond the frame of the stage to jump from a tower, as her husband

trips and stumbles behind her – we know that she dies, but we do not watch her jump.

Further research in depictions of women in contemporary opera should consider the perspective afforded by performers, such as Hannigan and her colleagues. Possible ways forward for scholarship in new opera lie all around, and, in this moment of profound change throughout the Western world – including in its music scenes,

journalism, and academic establishment – such direct engagements hold promise. I

suggest that the way forward for the fallen woman of opera looks rather like the staircase

of Written on Skin, an opera in which death becomes not an abasement and annihilation,

4 Barbara Hannigan, “Opera Singer Barbara Hannigan on Why She Loves Lulu” (video of lecture, Women of the World WOW Bites 2013, Southbank Centre London, March 10, 2013), accessed March 13, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AhnOFwfBnM. 259

but an act of heroism in the midst of intolerable and horrific conditions. Even this

modification leaves the character dead, however.

A question remains: why do so many composers, even those who depict their

characters as defiant and bold, lean toward the tragedy of the anti-heroine? Why must

opera’s women fall so far, so frequently? Further study might seek out the reasons, no

doubt rooted in late-Romantic and modernist notions of seriousness and weight, for the

more general dearth of comic or triumphal opera since the late nineteenth century. Since

at least the time of Puccini, Schreker, and Berg, few operas have both afforded their

protagonists happy endings and ascended to canonic status. Even the more humor-infused

operas I have examined in this study end with harrowing images of death and absence. In

order for opera to arrive as an art form worthy of the adjective “contemporary,” it must

welcome compelling new ideas about content and themes. From explorations of the

multifaceted human condition like David Lang’s monodrama the loser to post-human,

post-narrative works such as The Force of Things, an opera for sculptures and set pieces by the American composer Ashley Fure, contemporary opera has shown itself more than capable of moving past its vintage fixations on love, seduction, tragedy, and vengeance.

However, the urge to decant old wines from new bottles will persist, given the

persistence of adaptation and updating in popular and high-art cultural circles alike.

Many of the twenty-first century’s most prominent composers choose to tally debts to

dead predecessors through creative homage. So frequently have commissioning

institutions requested responses or sequels to canonic masterworks in recent years – and

so frequently have composers jumped at the chance – that the phenomenon merited a full

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column in the New York Times in 2016.5 Composers, as eager as ever to position

themselves relative to the classical pantheon, have shown a particular eagerness to revisit

and revise works like Lulu. I therefore close with two additional suggestions for other

directions in contemporary research. Though various scholars have begun this work,

researchers might pursue further analysis and contextual situation of operas that end with

affirmation amid tragedy, rather than murder or suicide – such as those of Kaija Saariaho.

From martyrs and mothers to mathematicians, her heroines sometimes face death, but

seldom if ever die onstage for the gaze of the paying customer. Some of her heroines, such as the titular mother of Adriana Mater and Clémence in L’Amour de loin, emerge from intersections of myth, history, and invention. Others, such as the Marquise Émilie du Châtelet of Émilie and Simone Weil of La Passion de Simone, lived and breathed.

These heroines’ demises invariably invite the listener to regret that their fascinating lives could not have lasted longer. Saariaho, among the most prominent composers of art music in the early years of the twenty-first century, has set a formidable example.

Scholars and critics might also consider less tradition-bound forms of music theatre or postopera, including monodrama, at length. Kate Soper, whose metaphor of the killing jar I have drawn upon, writes material for her own vocal and instrumental performance – thus determining, from the level of text and music to that of gesture and comportment, how her characters will look, sound, and express themselves in language.

In 2017, Soper was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for Music Composition, an honor for which the other two finalists were Fure – winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the

5 David Allen, “Got a Classic Piece? Here Comes the Sequel,” New York Times, August 19, 2016, accessed August 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/arts/music/got-a-classic-piece-here-comes-the- sequel-composers-write-responses-to-old-masters-works.html?_r=0. 261

Rome Prize – and Du Yun, who won the United States’s highest honor in new music for

her opera Angel’s Bone. As the musicologist and critic Will Robin has written, the hailing

of these three women as the preeminent American composers of the moment “should be

treated not as a victory[,] but as a clarion call.”6 Forward motion must continue. Taken

together, Soper’s acclaimed performances, penchants for both wit and poignancy, and

close attention to the ways in which the arts have portrayed women almost guarantee that

the world has not heard her last on the ideas that animate Voices from the Killing Jar.

Fure, whose music has consistently thrilled critics, spurred an open dialogue on gender bias in composition that lent remarkable new energy to the Darmstadt Ferienkurse of

2016.7 Du Yun has spoken to issues of representation in the field in matters of ethnicity

as well as gender – and Angel’s Bone itself is a harrowing nightmare vision of abasement,

cruelty, and sexual abuse that makes its substantial points about human depravity while

refraining from conventional punishments of feminine agency.8 In opera itself as well as

criticism and scholarship, it behooves all composers and writers to listen to women at

6 William Robin, “What Du Yun’s Pulitzer Win Means for Women in Classical Music,” New Yorker, April 13, 2017, accessed April 14, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-du-yuns-pulitzer- win-means-for-women-in-classical-music. 7 Ashley Fure, “Reflections on Risk,” GRID: Feminist Activism During Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2016, August 13, 2016, accessed March 14, 2017, https://griddarmstadt.wordpress.com/2016/08/14/reflections- on-risk-by-ashley-fure/. 8 Du Yun, interview with Steve Smith, Log Journal, April 24, 2017, accessed April 16, 2017, http://thelogjournal.com/2017/04/24/du-yun-pulitzer-prize/.

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last, breaking the silence that has all too often descended over creators and critics as well

as operatic characters.9

A set of central questions has driven this study: why fallen women, why once-

living people, and why the mid-1990s – in Campbell’s analysis, the dawn of a new epoch

– through the second decade of the twenty-first century?10 As with any historical inquiry,

the answer contains multitudes, from shifting sociopolitical winds and ever-crasser mass

media offerings to a broader cultural imperative to revisit, remake, and remix the past

according to contemporary perspectives and concerns. To assume that opera can only tell

a limited number of well-worn storylines is to do a profound disservice to the art form,

and to the audience members who wait, all too often in vain, for the genre they adore to

move past centuries-old traditions and fixations. In conclusion, then, I pose a new set of

questions, aimed at composers, scholars, musicians, operagoers, and the new-music

community writ large. Why not complex, compelling female protagonists who live to tell

their tales? Why not once-living women who experienced conflict and achievement,

distinguishing themselves in the process? Why not more women composers, librettists,

directors, and multimedia artists? And why – in a time of urgent challenges and

extraordinary opportunities in the field of art music – not now?

9 As the musicologist and critic Rebecca Lentjes wrote in 2017, after receiving hate mail for authoring a list of ten leading female composers for a classical music blog: “Historically, women have been condemned to be vessels of sound, never its architects. The female voice has been associated with emotional volatility, while the male voice has been accorded power and authority. The voice is the link between body and disposition, the inner made outer. The Homeric figure of the Siren has perpetuated, across the centuries, the conception of female voices as shrill, dangerous, and sexual…[S]paces become gendered when female voices are shouted over and silenced, whether on a public sidewalk or in a concert hall. And when women composers are silenced, women critics can be silenced as well.” Rebecca Lentjes, “#HearAllComposers: Straining Our Ears, Amplifying Our Voices,” Log Journal, June 8, 2017, accessed June 9, 2017, http://thelogjournal.com/2017/06/09/hearallcomposers-straining-our-ears-amplifying-our-voices/. 10 W. Joseph Campbell, 1995: The Year the Future Began (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 263

Appendix A

Selected Notable Events, Premieres, and Publications, 1835-2017

1835: Lucia di Lammermoor (Gaetano Donizetti; Salvadore Cammarano, after Walter Scott) premieres in Naples

1845: Prosper Mérimée publishes the novella Carmen

1847: Lola Montez (née Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert), the dancer, courtesan, and mistress of Ludwig I of Bavaria, becomes Countess of Landsfeld and begins to govern, to the chagrin of subjects; death of Marie Duplessis, the courtesan and mistress of Alexandre Dumas fils, whose life and death inspired his novel La Dame aux Camélias

1848: European revolutions; Montez flees Bavaria, hounded by resentful subjects; publication of La Dame aux Camélias

1853: A year after La Dame becomes a stage sensation in Paris, La traviata (Giuseppe Verdi; Francesco Maria Piave, after Dumas fils) premieres in Venice

1875: Carmen (Georges Bizet; Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, after Mérimée) premieres in Paris

1880: Émile Zola’s novel Nana, which outlines the rise and fall of the titular consuming, monstrous femme fatale and courtesan, emerges

1888: Félicien Champsaur’s publishes his one-act pantomime Lulu, a “roman clownesque” without the pathos, horror, or social commentary of Wedekind’s later plays

1889: Nellie Melba sings Mathilde Marchesi’s cadenza in the mad scene of Lucia, stoking new popularity for the opera – and leading to new interpretations thereof, vis-à- vis contemporary theories of hysteria1

1890: Oscar Wilde publishes the expurgated Picture of Dorian Gray, with Salomé following a year later

1893: Manon Lescaut (Giacomo Puccini; Ruggero Leoncavallo, Marco Praga, Giuseppe Giacosa, Domenico Oliva, Luigi Illica, and Giulio Ricordi, after the Abbé Prévost) premieres in Turin

1895: Frank Wedekind, inspired in part by Champsaur’s Lulu, publishes Erdgeist, the first of the two Lulu plays

1903: Otto Weininger publishes Geschlecht und Charakter

1 Romana Margherita Pugliese, “The Origins of Lucia di Lammermoor’s Cadenza,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 1 (March 2004): 23-42.

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1904: Wedekind publishes Der Buchse der Pandora; Sigmund Freud publishes Studies on Hysteria

1905: Salome (Richard Strauss, after Hedwig Lachmann’s translation of Wilde) premieres in Dresden, and arrives in Graz the next year – where Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg all attend

1909: Elektra (Strauss; Hugo von Hofmannsthal) premieres in Dresden; Arnold Schoenberg completes Erwartung, to a text by Marie Pappenheim

1910: Book of the Hanging Gardens (Schoenberg, to texts by Stefan George) premieres in Vienna, in the wake of Mathilde Schoenberg’s affair with Richard Gerstl (and the latter’s subsequent suicide)

1911: Hanns Heinz Ewers publishes Alraune, a novel about the titular artificial woman’s brief life as an inherently evil, insatiably sexual femme fatale

1912: Albertine Zehme first performs Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin

1918: Die Gezeichneten (Franz Schreker; after Wedekind’s Hidalla, 1904) premieres in Frankfurt; Bluebeard’s Castle (Béla Bartók; Béla Balázs, after Charles Perrault) premieres in Budapest

1927: Notable Zeitoper premieres include Paul Hindemith and Marcellus Schiffer’s Hin und züruck (a dramatic and textual palindrome); Kurt Weill and Iwan Goll’s Royal Palace (a tale of a femme fatale, featuring a film scene); and Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (about an African-American jazz violinist who wins over a group of Europeans, including a stereotypical late-Romantic composer)

1928: Die Dreigroschenoper (Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht) premieres in Berlin

1929: G.W. Pabst’s film version of Pandora’s Box, starring Louise Brooks, comes to theatres; Neues vom Tage (Hindemith; Schiffer) premieres in Berlin; at the Duisberg new music festival, curated by Berg, Max Brand’s Mascinist Hopkins – likely a direct influence on Lulu – premieres to extraordinary acclaim2

1930: Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel, another film influenced by Wedekind’s Lulu plays, opens, starring Marlene Dietrich as Lola; Transatlantic (George Antheil), a Zeitoper with a film interlude, premieres in Frankfurt; Aufsteig und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Weill and Brecht) premieres in Leipzig; Von heute auf morgen (Arnold and Gertrud Schoenberg), a twelve-tone Zeitoper, premieres in Frankfurt; Margaret Whigham, future Duchess of Argyll, is presented at Court in London and becomes debutante of the year

2 Clive Bennett, “Maschinist Hopkins: a Father for Lulu?,” Musical Times 127, no. 1722 (September 1986): 481-484. 265

1933-4: Anaïs Nin writes the diary entries that will become Incest, and, decades later, the libretto of Louis Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin (2010)

1934: Berg creates his Lulu Suite, out of fear that the opera would never make it through censors; Erich Kleiber premieres Berg’s piece, is swiftly denounced by the Nazis, and leaves Germany as a direct result of the incident; Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Dmitri Shostakovich; Alexander Preys) premieres in Leningrad

December 1935: Death of Alban Berg

January 1936: The unsigned review “Muddle Instead of Music” appears in Pravda, denouncing Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth

1936: Anaïs Nin publishes her novella-length prose poem House of Incest

1937: The completed two-act torso of Berg’s Lulu premieres in Zurich

1945-1973: The operas of Benjamin Britten, from Peter Grimes to Death in Venice

1950: Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s Sunset Boulevard depicts a forgotten, deranged silent film star as a camp old woman and dangerous femme fatale

1951: The Rake’s Progress (Igor Stravinsky; W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman) premieres in Venice

1954: Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, starring Dorothy Dandridge as an African- American Carmen, debuts in theatres

1955: Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita depicts a pedophile, serial rapist, and murderer who abducts a girl and keeps her as his prisoner, echoing the “relationship” between Schön and Lulu

1959: Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine (after Jean Cocteau) premieres in Paris

1962: Death of Marilyn Monroe

1963: Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, challenging midcentury gender roles and helping prompt the rise of second-wave feminism; British tabloids cover the lurid, acrimonious divorce case that parts Margaret, Duchess of Argyll from Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll

1967: Extreme violence comes to the operatic stage via Punch and Judy (Harrison Birtwistle; Stephen Pruslin)

1968: Theodor Adorno publishes Alban Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs

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1969: María de Buenos Aires (Astor Piazzolla; Horacio Ferrer) premieres in Buenos Aires; Eight Songs for a Mad King (Peter Maxwell Davies; Randolph Stow, after George III) premieres in London

Early 1970s: In New York, Meredith Monk begins to refer to some of her works as Operas

1971: Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer (Hans Werner Henze; Gaston Salvatore) premieres in Berlin

1973: Jack Hill’s Coffy, starring Pam Grier as an heroic African-American femme fatale, debuts

1976: Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs’s Einstein on the Beach (with texts by Childs, Christopher Knowles, and Samuel M. Johnson) premieres in Avignon; death of Helene Berg

1978: Le Grand Macabre (György Ligeti; Michael Meschke) premieres in Stockholm

1979: Pierre Boulez conducts the premiere of Friedrich Cerha’s completion of Lulu in Paris, with Teresa Stratas as Lulu; Catherine Clément publishes L’ópera ou le défaite des femmes; Rostropovich records Lady Macbeth in its original form

1986: Rupert Pole, Anaïs Nin’s ex-husband and executor, releases Henry and June, the first installment in a series of “unexpurgated” editions of the writer’s diaries

1987: Nixon in China (John C. Adams; Alice Goodman) premieres in Houston, initiating a wave of “CNN operas”

1988: Betsy Wing’s translation of Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women emerges, with a foreword by Susan McClary

1990: Philip Kaufman’s Henry and June depicts Henry and June Miller and Anaïs Nin in the first NC-17 film in American cinema; Garry Marshall and J.F. Lawton’s Pretty Woman, inspired by and featuring La traviata, debuts; Margaret, Duchess of Argyll is evicted from her hotel; a wave of negative media depictions of political correctness begins, and continues through the next year3

1991: The Jerry Springer Show debuts in the US; The Death of Klinghoffer (J.C. Adams; Goodman) premieres in Brussels; Ghosts of Versailles (John Corigliano; William M.

3 Moira Weigel has traced the history of this backlash to political correctness, spurred by the concept’s continued, perhaps even increased unpopularity in the twenty-first century: Weigel, “Political Correctness: How the Right Invented a Phantom Enemy,” Guardian, November 30, 2016, accessed December 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom- enemy-donald-trump 267

Hoffman) premieres in New York; J. Howard Marshall II meets the young Anna Nicole Smith; landmark texts in the humanities include Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, McClary’s Feminine Endings, Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices, Rose Rosengard Subotnik’s Developing Variations, and Susan Faludi’s Backlash

1992: Pole releases Incest, the next volume of unexpurgated diary entries by Nin, to widespread critical disdain; McClary publishes Georges Bizet: Carmen; Lydia Goehr publishes The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works; The tabloid scandal of Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita,” captures media attention

1993: Margaret, Duchess of Argyll dies; Anna Nicole Smith rockets to fame as Playboy Magazine’s Playmate of the Year; Marilyn (Ezra Laderman; Norman Rosten) premieres at New York City Opera

1994: Anna Nicole Smith marries J. Howard Marshall II; Tad Friend’s feature “White Trash Nation” renders Smith an emblem of a broad shift in American entertainment, media, and culture

1995: Powder Her Face (Thomas Adès; Philip Hensher) premieres in Cheltenham; the murder trial of O.J. Simpson dominates media; J. Howard Marshall II dies intestate; Rita Felski publishes The Gender of Modernity, a look back at the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and conceptions of gender; Deirdre Bair publishes a putatively authoritative biography of Anaïs Nin, taking many accounts of events from the unexpurgated diaries as a major source; the turn from twentieth-century cultural and technological norms toward those of the contemporary world begins, according to W. Joseph Campbell’s analysis4

2002-4: The Anna Nicole Show airs

2003: Jerry Springer: The Opera (Richard Thomas; Stewart Lee) premieres in London

2010: Anaïs Nin (Louis Andriessen, after texts by Nin, René Allendy, Henry Miller, and Antonin Aratud, with interpolated music and text by Joaquín Nin y Castellanos) premieres in Siena

2011: Anna Nicole (Mark-Anthony Turnage; Richard Thomas) premieres in London

2012: American Lulu (Olga Neuwirth, with texts by Wedekind, Berg, Neuwirth, and Helga Utz translated by Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon and Richard Stokes) premieres in Berlin; Written on Skin (George Benjamin; Martin Crimp) premieres in Aix-en-Provence; Waiting for Miss Monroe (Robin de Raaff; Janine Brogt) premieres in Amsterdam

2013: A Harlot’s Progress (Iain Bell; Peter Ackroyd) premieres in Vienna; Marilyn Forever (Gavin Bryars; Marilyn Bowering) premieres in Victoria

4 W. Joseph Campbell, 1995: The Year the Future Began (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

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2016: Breaking the Waves (Missy Mazzoli; Royce Vavrek) premieres in Philadelphia; anatomy theater (David Lang; Mark Dion) premieres in Los Angeles; Nico Muhly composes an aria for the Amy Fisher character in a fictional contemporary opera for the streaming television series Mozart in the Jungle

2017: Mata Hari (Matt Marks; Paul Peers) premieres in New York 269

Appendix B

A Monodrama and its Libretto in Context: Anaïs Nin (2010) vs. Incest (1932-34)

In the following summary, bracketed elements, including ellipses of omission, are all mine. Andriessen’s additions are in bold text; words that he deleted are struck through.

All other text comes from the English-language edition of Incest that the composer-

librettist consulted, or the book by Allendy and letter by Artaud cited below. Unless

otherwise noted, the vocal soloist sings all lines that appear as quotations in the text.

Italicized, bolded, and underlined titles appear as track names in the commercial audio recording of Anaïs Nin, and reflect neither the score nor Nin’s writings.

[The following text, spoken in a film by the actress playing Nin, comes from the entry dated 17

January. Nin has just reproached herself for expressing a desire to have children during a

conversation with her husband, Hugh Guiler, the previous evening. The thoughts presented here

appear to follow from her thoughts about artistic creation as an alternative to child-bearing. The

actress in the film, watched by her live double onstage, speaks this text:]

Even –

Even when I possess all – love, devotion, a match, Henry, Hugh, Allendy, Antonin – I still feel myself possessed by a great demon of restlessness driving me on and on.1 I am rushing on, and I know I am going to cause suffering, nobody can enchain me, I am a force, and but all day I feel pushed, pushed. I cover pages and pages with my fever, with this superabundance of ecstasy, and it is not enough. I pace up and down the cave, just like an animal. I have Henry, and I am still

hungry, still searching, still moving – I cannot stop moving. Allendy will be a lucky man to

1 The mention of “Antonin” (Artaud, the playwright and actor) is an intentional anachronism on the composer-librettist’s part; as of the date of this entry, Nin had never even heard of Artaud.

270 escape real pain from me. His wisdom has saved him from a woman he does not know – the woman with sudden destructive impulses – sudden outbreaks. He knows the beautiful me, not the dangerous me. Now Only Henry senses the monster, because he too is possessed. I too will leave a scar upon the world.2

I. Artaud

[Opening fanfare begins, actress conducting. Video ends after a few bars. The following text, delivered in the recorded voice of a male actor as part of a film interlude (and accompanied live by the solo violinist), comes from a letter from Artaud to Nin, dated 18 May 1933:]

Plusieurs choses nous rapprochent terriblement, mais une surtout: notre silence. Vous avez le même silence que moi. Et vous êtes la seule personne devant qui mon propre silence ne m’ait pas gêné. Vous avez un silence véhément où l’on dirait que l’on sent passer des essences, je le sens

étrangement vivant, comme une trappe ouverte sur un gouffre, où l’on sentirait le murmure silencieux et secret de la terre. Il n’y a pas de poésie inutile et fabriquée dans tout ce que je vous raconte, d’ailleurs vous le sentez bien.

… je veux vous amener à faire vivre devant moi des images, des images où je sente notre propre vie. J’ai depuis hier le goût d’une bouche de femme qui me poursuit, mais comme une idée, comme une essence. Ce goût n’est plus une chose du corps, il me montre à nu le sens même d’une âme.3

[Video ends; opening fanfare returns. The following, the actress’s first sung text, comes from

Nin’s first encounter with Artaud, at a dinner party held by René and Yvonne Allendy. The entry

2 Antonin Artaud, “[Lettre à Anaïs Nin],” in Antonin Artaud: Oeuvres, ed. Évelyne Grossman (Paris: Gallimard, 2004): 90-1. 3 Translation mine: “Many things bring us appallingly close together, but one thing above all: our silence. You have the same silence as I do. And you are the only person in whose presence my own silence hasn’t disturbed me. You have a vehement silence, in which one seems to sense essences flowing. I sense it is strangely alive, like a trapdoor opened on an abyss where one senses the silent murmur and the secret of the earth. There is no futile, manufactured poetry in anything I tell you, as you well know. …I want you to bring alive for me images, images in which I sense our own life. Since yesterday I have experienced a taste for the mouth of a woman who is pursuing me, but as an idea, an essence. This taste is no longer an affair of the body; it shows me, nakedly, the very meaning of a soul.” 271 from which Andriessen drew it (that of 12 March) predates Nin’s attempted sexual encounters with Artaud.]

At the Allendys’: Artaud – the face of my hallucinations. The hallucinated eyes. The sharpness, the pain-carved features. The man-dreamer, innocent and diabolical, frail, nervous, potent. As soon as our eyes meet I am plunged into my imaginary world. He is veritably haunted and haunting. I was afraid to meet him, because a few days before, I had read some of his writing and there was an extraordinary twinship. Henry said I might have written these pages. I knew I was going to meet my brother in imaginings and styles. I did not expect that face. “Je suis le plus malade de tous les surrealistes.” He read us the outline of his play […]

[The following text dates from 18 June, three months after the initial encounter described above.

By eliding the two occasions, Andriessen cuts away a long series of tense interactions between

Nin and Artaud, from their first conversations to their first attempt at sex. At the beginning of the following sung text, Nin gives Henry Miller a selective account of her latest encounter with

Artaud, which ended with the former apologizing for his impotence:]

I entertained and excited Henry. I was feverish and he was jealous. He said, “Your eyes have a subdued brilliance, as if you had made love.” I could not sleep. I was haunted by Artaud; I had to see him again. I sent Henry away the night of Hugo’s arrival, and I met Artaud at the Viking, at the same table where Henry and I first looked at each other with love. I was trembling. And then began a night of ecstasy. We left the café because the Quatz Art Ball students were riotous and it hurt our exaltation (the last time I saw them, Henry and I were in a hotel room and I wanted to join them!). We walked in a dream, in a frenzy, Artaud torturing himself and me with doubts, with mad talk about eternity, God, God, God. wanting me to feel him physically, and I transported, melting, carried away, so much that we stopped on the quays and We kissed violently; an ecstasy like that with June, different, rising upward, in frenzied ascension. “I’m living through the greatest moment of my life. This is too much, too much!” Artaud walked, stumbling almost with joy […]

272

He said: Mon amour, mon grand amour!” We sat in a cafe and he lulled me with endless tender phrases, and I was frightened by his fervor. He said, “Entre nous il pourrait y avoir un meurtre.”

II. Allendy

[The following text comes from the 1942 first edition of René Allendy’s book-length psychoanalytic essay L’Amour, the publication of which came nearly a decade after the events depicted in Nin’s diary. Allendy’s affair with Nin almost certainly informed this work;

Andriessen, supposing this, selected salient passages from Chapter IV, “Le point de vue psychique.”A recorded male actor’s speaking voice delivers the lecture about the nature of jealousy, during another film interlude:]

et avec laquelle les parents vulgaires jouent si stupidement : « On va te laisser ici tout seul ; tu n’auras plus de parents », etc., ou qu’il s’agisse d’un désir de possession absolue. L’idée d’une possession absolue, surtout en matière sentimentale, est éminemment infantile. L’enfant voudrait

avoir la présence perpétuelle et les soins, les pensées exclusifs de sa mère, existant seul pour

elle…4

[The rest of the text for the Allendy voice comes from a preceding passage:]

Parmi les innombrables malentendus qui entourent l’amour, il en est un assez couramment admis, selon lequel la jalousie serait la reaction normale de celui qui aime, et même, dans une certaine mesure, la preuve de son attachement véritable. La jalousie se trouve au centre de motivations multiples, mais on peut affirmer qu’elle est toujours maladive. Sans doute, dès que l’amour s’est produit, l’expérience grave qu’il comporte, avec les dangers de souffrance vive en cas de rupture, inspire une peur anxieuse de perdre le contact avec l’être aimé et un désir de s’assurer son

4 Translation mine: “Jealousy is always regressive, whether the fear of abandonment, so intense in small children, and with which vulgar parents play so stupidly – ‘we’ll leave you here alone; you have no parents’ etc. – or whether it is a desire for absolute possession [the sentence ends here in the libretto, without the grammatical closure of the expected second clause]. The idea of an absolute possession, especially in sentimental matters, is eminently childish. The child would have the perpetual presence and care, the exclusive thoughts of her mother, only existing for her…” René Allendy, L’Amour (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1942): 180-1. 273 attachement, pour des fins de sécurité; mais ceci n’est pas nécessairement de la jalousie, car la jalousie est une possessivité tyrannique, toujours plus ou moins cruelle. Quand un amoureux présente une accentuation marquée des instincts digestifs, son désir ressemble à celui du chasseur pour la proie qu’il va tuer et manger, el revêt alors des nuances de tyrannie et de cruauté. Pour illustrer cette interprétation, nous avons, dans les annales judiciaires, le cas de quelques grands sadiques qui mordaient leurs victimes, buvaient leur sang, mangeaient leur chair. Ils servent à

faire comprendre ce qui se passe, dans des proportions heureusement très réduites, chez les petits

jaloux!5

[The following text dates from 19 April, about a month after the dinner party at the Allendy residence at which Nin met Artaud. By this point, she has tired of Allendy as a lover. Detecting this, he has invited her to their usual hotel room for sex. She meets him, curious about his use of violent language in a recent analysis session.]

Métro Cadet. I’m late and Allendy thought I was not coming. Experience, curiosity, comedy. But

I would like some whiskey. Allendy doesn’t like my wanting whiskey. He says he never takes anything to drink in the afternoon and so he won’t now, it would upset his habits. When he says this I drink more fiercely. It’s humorous. “Allons donc.” The French room, in blue now. Shutters closed. Lugubrious. Lanterns and velvet. The alcove. As in eighteenth-century engravings! The beard and the French and all! The alcove. Allendy doesn’t kiss me. He sits on the edge of the bed and says, “Now you will pay for everything, for enslaving me and then abandoning me. Petite

5 Translation mine: Among the countless misunderstandings that surround love, it is quite commonly admitted that jealousy would be the normal reaction of the lover, and even, to some extent, evidence of his real attachment. Jealousy is found at the center of multiple motivations, but one can affirm it is always sickly. Without a doubt, as soon as love has formed, the serious experience he has, with the danger of acute suffering in case of rupture, inspires an anxious fear of losing touch with the loved one and a desire to ensure his attachment for the purpose of security; but this is not necessarily jealousy, because jealousy is a tyrannical possessiveness, always more or less cruel. When a lover presents a marked accentuation of digestive instincts, his desire is like the hunter to the prey that will kill and eat, and then take on shades of tyranny and cruelty. To illustrate this interpretation: we have, in judiciary annals, the cases of some great sadists who were bit their victims, drank their blood, and ate their flesh. They serve to make comprehensible what is happening, happily in very small proportions, in little jealousies! Allendy, L’Amour, 176-7.

274 garce!” And he takes out of his pocket a whip! Now, I had not counted on the whip. I didn’t know how to regard it. I was enjoying Allendy’s fierceness – the fanatic eyes, his anger, the will in him […] What I hated today was, with Allendy [trailing off], seeing through life as a drama which can be handled, dominated, tampered with-to feel that to know the springs of life is to destroy the essence of life, which is faith, terror, mystery. Today I saw [trailing off] the horror of wisdom. The mortal price one pays for it! The question is: Have men died today because they have tampered with the sources of life, or did they tamper with the sources of life because they were dead and obtained an illusion of livingness from the handling of life? Tonight I’m terrified. I have walked through the universe of death. I was fucked by death!

[The following text, sung immediately after the preceding, dates from 17 June, two months later –

near the end of Nin’s days-long unconsummated attempt at an affair with Artaud. (For more of

this passage, see the epigraph to this chapter.)]

I write love letters to Henry, to Father, to Hugo. Not to Allendy, because he is acting spitefully, like a woman. Not taking his defeat like a sage. And Artaud asked me, “What have you done to

Allendy? You have done him harm.” And, “Why do you give that terrible impression – of evil – of cruelty – of seductiveness, trickery, superficiality? Is it an appearance?”

[The following several texts date from various points in May and June, after Nin first meets her father following his twenty-year absence from her life. From an entry dated 21 June, written on a solo vacation in Nice (and originally a comment after the letter from Henry Miller that

Andriessen places during the next film interlude):]

Strange days. Strange Days. Weather bad, weather bad, so I created my own weather. So I

created my own weather. I ignored the place, the hotel. I lived within myself, writing letters, dreaming, contented.

III. I await my father

[From 22 June, when Nin was still on vacation and either in Nice or her next destination, a hotel near Saint-Raphaël (in the heart of the Vallis Curans, known to Nin by the portmanteau 275

Valescure):]

I await my father with deep joy and impatience.

[From the long entry of 5 May, in which Nin describes her first adult meeting with her father in

rapturous detail and immediately concludes that he is her “double,” or kindred spirit:]

My Double! My evil Double! He incarnates my fears, my self-doubts, my faults! He caricatures my tendencies…His power to give an illusion of sincerity by the fact that he deludes himself. […]

When I look at him I am sick of my lies and wonder if they are as transparent as his.

[From the entry dated 1 June, upon a visit from the publisher William Bradley:]

When I talk, I feel that I lie imperceptibly in order to cover myself. I put on costumes. I hate to expose myself truly. Lies seem like a costume, small lies, deviations mostly, because I am afraid not to be understood, and I am afraid of the pain. And then what I do not tell, I pour into the journal. I chafe because people don’t understand, and it is my fault. The truth is I only face human beings in fragments. Henry, who has the largest portion, Hugh, Allendy, Joaquín, Father. I always find the mensonge vital necessary – the one lie which separates me from each person.6

Will Father alone have the whole, as the journal has? What will I have to conceal from Father?

Always a secret, and this secret creates the journal.

[Repeated, from 22 June:]

I await my father with deep joy and impatience. Tomorrow, tomorrow begins another romance!

[From a letter that Henry Miller sent to Nin while she rested in Nice, which she reproduces in the

21 June entry of the journal – delivered by a male actor’s recorded speaking voice as part of a film interlude:]

Am waiting anxiously for a letter. What shall I do? I’m wretched. I hate telling you that I am miserable, but it’s the truth. Maybe all I want is to hear from you. It seems so long ago since I left

6 “Vital lie” was Nin’s self-coined term for a falsehood, omission, or pose that allowed her to maintain a given relationship without inviting objections from the lover or friend in question. These were “vital” not only for the relationships, but for the alter egos that Nin adopted for each of them.

276

Louveciennes. Write me at once. Everything looks rotten to me. I hate Paris. Hate the whole world. Jesus. I don’t know what’s come over me. I love you – terribly. I wouldn’t be able to do a

damned thing without you. I’ve just realized that you’re the whole world to me. And when I

talked so glibly about my self-sufficiency I was just a braggart and a liar. I’m completely

disoriented.

IV. Father Story

[The singing actress disregards the message from Miller, and goes on to sing of her father’s arrival in Valescure, in an entry dated 23 June by Rupert Pole:]

Today, First day of Father story. King Father arrives after conquering a paralyzing lumbago.

Pale. Suffering. Impatient to come. He appears cold and formal, but I will learn later that he is distressed that he and I should meet at the station – formally. He conceals his feelings. His face is a mask […] He was humiliated by his stiffness. He treated me as his fiancée. (He had told Maria,

“I must go and join my fiancée.” He used to call me his betrothed after I sent him a photograph of myself at sixteen.) […] He talked about his love affairs as I do, mixing pleasure with creativity, interested in the creation of a human being through love […] The next morning he could not move from his bed. He was in despair. I enveloped him in gaiety and tenderness. I finally unpacked his bags while he talked to me. And he continued the story of his life.

V. The seduction

[Continued from above:] Meals were brought to the room. I wore my satin negligée. The hours passed swiftly. I talked too – I told him the story of the flagellation. […] He appeared for a moment not to listen, to be absorbed in the dream of his discovery – as I get with people. But then he said, “You are the synthesis of all the women I have loved.” He was watching me constantly.

He said, “When you were a child you were beautifully made, formed. You had such a dos cambre. I loved taking photographs of you.” I sat all day at the foot of his bed. He caressed my foot. […]

“I don’t feel toward you as if you were my daughter.” 277

I said, “I don’t feel as if you were my Father.”

He said, “What a tragedy. I have met the woman in my life, the ideal, and it is my daughter! I’m in love with my own daughter!”

I said, “Everything you feel, I feel.”

After each one of these phrases there was a long silence.

[…] Father asked me to move nearer. He was lying on his back and could not move. “Let me kiss your mouth.” He put his arms around me. I hesitated. I was tortured by a complexity of feelings, wanting his mouth, yet afraid, feeling I was to kiss a brother, yet tempted – terrified and desirous.

I was taut. He smiled and opened his mouth. We kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave of desire.

I was lying across his body and with my breast I felt his desire, hard, palpitating. Another kiss.

More terror than joy. The joy of something unnameable, obscure. He so beautiful – godlike and womanly, seductive and chiseled, hard and soft. […] And when his hand caressed me – oh, the knowingness of those caresses – I melted. But all the while some part of me was hard and terrified. My body yielded to the penetration of his hand, but I resisted, I resisted enjoyment. I resisted showing my body. I only uncovered my breasts. I was timid and unwilling, yet passionately moved. “I want you to enjoy, to enjoy,” he said. “Enjoy.” And his caresses were so acute, so subtle; but I couldn’t, and to escape from him I pretended to. Again I lay over him and felt the hardness of his penis. He uncovered himself. I caressed him with my hand. I saw him quiver with desire. With a strange violence, I lifted my negligee and I lay over him. “Toi, Anais!

Je n’ai plus de Dieu!” Ecstatic, his face, and I now frenzied with the desire to unite with him…undulating, caressing him, clinging to him. His spasm was tremendous, of his whole being.

He emptied all of himself in me…and my yielding was immense, with my whole being, with only that core of fear which arrested the supreme spasm in me.

VI. Strange days

[Over the next several days, Nin reports that she and her father continued to have sex multiple

times each day and night. At the end of the stay, she records all of the lies necessary to placate

278 every man in her life.7 She proceeds to spend several days with Miller in Avignon. Over the months of July and August, Nin returns to life in Louveciennes with Guiler, juggling an epistolary relationship with her father, her physical affair with Miller, and her married life. At the end of

August, she reproduces the following letter in her diary; Andriessen admixes the “strange days” fragment from 21 June with its text:]

Strange days [From a letter to her father dated 30 August:] […] from the way I look at you, you will know that I love you, that I am moved by your voice, and your eyes, your bright smile, and the sound of your footsteps. […] I love our serene hours and the way you make me laugh. How

you can laugh! That will be our Sabbath – not a Sunday, but a seventh day of our own invention.

VII. The seventh day

[Continued from the above text:] At the dawn of the seventh day, while we eat our Quaker Oats, you will say, “It is good.” […] I am going to sit on your bed, and we will spread out in front of us all that we have, all we possess, instead of our eternal “I wish, I want.” No more regrets and no more thinking, for example, that you haven’t done enough, created enough, given enough. Those will be the days of our joy. We will feed on joy. And then, because of that wonderful seventh day, in six days you will create music so miraculously beautiful that I shall reward you with another

seventh day and a way of looking at you that will be unmistakable […]

VIII. Henry was tired

[The following dates from 6 October, a week after Guiler read passages from his wife’s diary.

Having found at least one account of a tryst with Miller, the shaken Guiler was only calmed when

Nin, forced to improvise, proclaimed the volume he found to be an installment of an “imaginary

diary” in which she sublimates her desires. As of the date of the following text, she has been hard

7 “Father had to believe I was returning to Paris. Hugo would understand that I should not return for reasons of health. But then if I returned to Paris I had to visit Father’s wife. Thus I must pretend to go to London with Hugo’s family. Hugo must think I was going to the mountains. But Henry expected me in Avignon. I had never hated my lies so. I was imprisoned in all my deceptions at once. I did not want Father to know I could go to Henry after nine days with him.” 279 at work fabricating a “real” diary – an expurgated one to show her husband – when she realizes, during an afternoon visit to Miller, that no one supports her in the way that she supports Miller:]

Henry He was tired from a late night. We lay in bed, softly kissing. When Henry was asleep I felt a dark, dark loneliness. The noise of the door, as I went away, awakened him. “Are you all right, Anaïs?” I knelt to kiss him. Then my despair stifled me, my despair stifled me, my despair – and I bowed my head: “I’m lonely, Henry.” I’m lonely, I’m hungry – I’m so lonely nobody can ever heal me! But Henry thought I was lonely for a few moments only, because he had gone to sleep. In the street I wept. In the street I wept! I weep now while I write.

[This passage consists of a recording of the actress singing with piano accompaniment. The text

was set by Nin’s father as the Villancico vasco in his Diez Villancicos Españoles, a set he

completed within weeks of, if not during, his affair with his daughter:]

IX. Basque Song

Ator, ator mutil etxera, Gastaña zimelak jatera Gabon gaba ospatuteko Aitaren ta amaren onduan; Ikusiko dok aita bareka Amabe guztiz kontentuz.8

8 Nin’s text contains several departures from modern Basque spellings. My English translation, adapted from that of Barbara Miller: “Come, come home [male] child, /To eat brown chestnuts /To celebrate the night of Christmas eve /With your mother and father side by side; /You will see father laugh/ And mother too will be glad.” Barbara Miller, trans., “Villancico Vasco/Basque Folk Carol,” The LiederNet Archive, accessed June 28, 2016, http://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=72704.

The French alternate text that Nin included in his published score differs slightly (translation mine): “Ah come, at last, /Into our house, /Where we keep the chestnuts /To celebrate Christmas /So clear and lovely /Between your father and your mother moving, /You feel a flame in your heart /You feel your soul burning.” Andriessen likely derived his own ideas about the song from this latter text.

Original French and Basque texts: Joaquín Nin y Castellanos, “Villancico vasco,” in Diez villancicos españoles (Paris: Max Eschig, 1934), 6-7.

280

Appendix C

Olga Neuwirth’s Cuts and Edits to Berg’s Lulu, Acts I-II in American Lulu

Cuts and Changes to Lulu, Replacements in American Lulu, Acts I-II Acts I-II Universal Edition Nr. 10745, vocal score Ricordi Sy. 4126, full score arr. arr. Erwin Stein (1936) Olga Neuwirth (2012, red. 2014) Prolog (mm. 1-85), Menagerie scene Untitled opening (70 mm., set in Lulu’s with Tierbändiger. He describes the New York apartment in the 1970s, with events to be depicted as a sideshow full Clarence and Lulu; repeated later as the of dangerous animals, and Lulu as the opening of Act III): Clarence asks Lulu serpent, “created to inflict evil/mayhem.” why she remains insatiable despite her comfortable life, and she begins to narrate. Act I, Scene 1 (late 19th-century Act I, Scene 1 (Recollection: New Vienna) Orleans, 1950s) mm. 86-189: Alwa and Schön converse BLACK 1: Sampled sound of an actor with the Painter and Lulu, then leave; the reading MLK’s “The Rising Tide of Racial Painter propositions Lulu and chases her Consciousness,” over sustained chord (A, around the studio B-flat, D) in marimba and electric guitar mm. 190-196: Painter sings several lines mm. 69-75: Lulu begins to say her name, in dialogue with Lulu, calling her first but stops short; the Painter’s responses, in Nelly, then Eva – she declares, “my name which he tells her of his other names for is Lulu!” her, are partially excised and replaced with rests m. 337, Painter to the prone (dead) m. 217: line excised; rests in the Painter’s Professor Goll: “I have not touched her!” staff mm. 358-407: orchestral interlude m. 358: E-flat/B-flat dyad held out from (Verwandlung; Trio: Canon) between Act m. 357 and sustained under BLACK 2: I, Scenes 1 and 2 Sampled sound of an actor reading lines from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, interwoven with lines from June Jordan’s “Rape is Not a Poem” Act I, Scene 2 Act I, Scene 2 m. 414: pause for spoken dialogue m. 246: pause for spoken dialogue, over added drone on G in octaves, with talk of Dr. Schön’s impending marriage excised mm. 437-445: some instrumental music m. 268: G/B dyad held over from m. 267, and negligible sung dialogue as Painter under fermata, as Painter goes to see goes to see who’s at the door who’s at the door m. 482: Schigolch: “the carpets!,” m. 305: Clarence is silent for this bar remarking on the luxury of Lulu and the Painter’s home m. 487: 4/4 bar of instrumental music m. 311: 3/4 bar 281

mm. 488-519: Schigolch discusses aging. m. 312: B-flat m/m7 chord held for a bar Dialogue, ending with Lulu: “I’m a beast!” mm. 579-614: Lulu and Schön discuss his m. 371: a slightly altered equiv. of Lulu m. impending marriage, and Schön informs 578, with crescendo leading into Lulu that he and she will no longer see equivalent of Lulu’s m. 615 each other mm. 661-666: Lulu assures Schön that mm. 418-422: Lulu’s lines given to the she does not envy his fiancée, in sung synthesizer and soprano saxophone, Dr. dialogue with him Schön’s either excised or given to guitar m. 666: the orchestra underscores Bar omitted dialogue between Schön and the Painter mm. 675-676: the orchestra plays as m. 431 of AL = first beat of m. 675 + final Schön reminds the Painter of his half- three beats of 676 in Lulu (“half million” million in profits earned upon marrying, comment elided) painting Lulu m. 678: Schön: “if we have to fight a m. 434: Bloom rests (allowing the Painter duel…” (revealing his affair with Lulu to to realize the truth on his own) the Painter) mm. 694-first three beats of 716: Schön m. 450: BLACK 3. G#7 chord explains how Lulu met Dr. Goll, and an extrapolated from pitches of Lulu m. 693 exchange about Schön and the Painter’s and held under audio sample of actor names for Lulu (Mignon and Eva) ensues reading “One Minus One Minus One” by June Jordan Final beat of m. 719-first two beats of m. mm. 454-455, the AL equivalents of Lulu’s 723: the painter inquires about Lulu’s mm. 719 and 723, are converted to 3/4 father, and Schön mentions that Shigolch bars and joined, eliding talk about Lulu’s had just been there, in the house father m. 735: Schön once again begins to note, m. 467: Bloom rests “you have half a…” mm. 760-764: bars have repeat signs mm. 492-496: bars not repeated mm. 773-786: continued percussion solo Bars eliminated underscores spoken dialogue as Painter dies in a locked room mm. 801-852: discussion between Schön, Bars eliminated Alwa, and Lulu as they attempt to force the door between them and the Painter (now dead) open mm. 897-911: Alwa blames Schön’s Bars eliminated treatment of Lulu for the Painter’s death mm. 922-938: Schön phones the police as Bars eliminated Alwa and Lulu discuss the Painter m. 956: Lulu, flippant: “wait and see, m. 591: Lulu rests children!” to Schön and Alwa mm. 958-988: Grave for orchestra m. 594: BLACK 4, audio sample of actor eliminated (the passage that Adès reading MLK’s “The Only Road to

282 emulates in the interlude after Scene 2 of Freedom” over a chord of E, F, G, A-flat, Powder Her Face) and B, held by the strings Act I, Scene 3 Act I, Scene 3 mm. 1005-1010: Alwa and Lulu have Lines eliminated spoken dialogue about the Prince over the jazz-band music m. 1026, Alwa: “you wore a dark blue m. 632, Jimmy: “you wore a dark blue dress” velvet dress” (possible David Lynch reference) mm. 1032-1033: Alwa mentions his mm. 638-639: Jimmy rests mother mm. 1056-1065: Lulu sings of the mm. 663-671: Lulu rests; piano solo feelings she gets about her audience; eliminated piano solo over the jazz-band mm. 1095-1128: Alwa discusses the Bars eliminated; no Prince character opera he could write about Lulu, and the Prince enters mm. 1129-1143: Prince sings of studying mm. 701-715: Jimmy sings these lines Lulu and admiring not her dancing, but her body and spirit mm. 1144-1149: Prince sings of making Bars eliminated Lulu his bride mm. 1152-1168: Prince, Gardierobe, and mm. 718-736: all lines from the extra Direktor interact as Lulu, having characters either eliminated, reassigned, or collapsed onstage, reenters moved to instrument parts; only Commissioner, Jimmy, and Lulu are present mm. 1169-1176: additional dialogue Bars eliminated about Lulu’s collapse and Schön’s attendance at the show with his fiancée mm. 1190-1203: full sextet texture as m. 752: woodwinds hold a G major triad Lulu, the Gardierobe, Alwa, the Prince, as Bloom and the Commissioner bicker, Schön, and the Direktor all sing speaking mm. 1205-1235: Lulu and Schön argue m. 754: final beat of Lulu’s m. 1204 held; most of these lines eliminated or spoken mm. 1240-1244: Lulu mentions the mm. 759-763: all mention of the Prince Prince’s intention to take her to Africa, and Africa eliminated, and Lulu instead and continues singing notes, speaking to Bloom: “Your bribe’s made him wonder if a darkie’s worth it!” mm. 1256-1267: Lulu challenges Schön Bars eliminated over his very long engagement mm. 1284-1326: Lulu, asserting power m. 791: semitone dyad held as Bloom, left over Schön, convinces him that his alone when Lulu leaves the stage, begins engagement is untenable and begins writing the letter to his fiancée himself dictating his breakup letter to him (subsequent lines for Lulu removed or reassigned to instrument parts as well) 283

mm. 1343-1361: Lulu dictates the m. 811: BLACK 5. E-flat and G, with signature and postscript of Schön’s letter gradual glissando to E-flat unison, under an audio sample of an actor reading more lines from June Jordan’s “Rape is Not a Poem” Act II, Scene 1 Act II, Scene 1 m. 3-end: Geschwitz sings Berg’s m. 814-end (measure numbers melodies continuous): Eleanor sings in Neuwirth’s pastiche blues mode mm. 40-60: Schön laments the state of his Bars eliminated home life after Geschwitz’s visit m. 64: Lulu invents an excuse for m. 854: Lulu offers no explanation (rests) Geschwitz’s visit: “she wants to paint me.” m. 100-194: Lulu, Schigolch, the Athlete, mm. 889-991: white-note cluster from and the Gymnasiast interact Lulu’s m. 99 held as Clarence declares he once intended to marry Lulu, and as BLACK 6 – an audio sample of an actor reading from MLK’s “The Current Crisis in Race Relations” – plays m. 220: Lulu sings a melisma on the m. 919: Lulu rests after the first beat of the word “lange” throughout the measure bar, and the rest of the melisma goes to the soprano saxophone m. 224: Kammerdiener announces the m. 923: no Kammerdiener character (bar arrival of “Herr Doktor Schön,” who of rest) turns out to be Alwa mm. 230-238: Lulu’s visitors scatter and mm. 929-930: pitches from Lulu’s mm. hide 229 and 230 juxtaposed to form held chord over these two inserted bars mm. 250-262: Lulu and Alwa interact Bars eliminated with Kammerdiener mm. 274-first three beats 277, Alwa to Bars eliminated; Lulu’s mm. 273 and 278, Lulu: “The gods created you to bring the both 4/4 bars in the original, converted to people around you to corruption – not 5/4 through your conscious intention” etc. mm. 318-328: Alwa sings of Lulu’s hand, Bars eliminated then arm, then body m. 335, Alwa: “Mignon, Mignon” m. 989: Jimmy rests mm. 346-367: Schön enters, confronting m. 1000: pitches held from previous bar, Alwa; the Athlete debates an escape route sustained for this inserted measure with Lulu mm. 418-419: Schön, upon hearing the mm. 1051-1052: Bloom has a rest, Lulu’s Athlete fleeing: “what was that?” Lulu: line shifted to vibraphone “It’s just your persecution complex.”

284

mm. 442-485: the fourth and fifth mm. 1075-1077: these three inserted bars sections of Schön’s five-strophe aria, and contain a chord held out from Lulu’s m. Lulu’s interjections 442 m. 554: no music for Geschwitz m. 1146: Eleanor, Sprechstimme: “oh no!” mm. 573-614: Schön succumbs to his m. 1165: this inserted bar contains a chord wounds extrapolated from Lulu’s m. 572 Final beat m. 648-655 m. 1200: BLACK 7, audio sample of actor reading from MLK’s “The Current Crisis in Race Relations,” as strings hold inserted chord mm. 656-721: orchestra plays music for mm. 1202-1268: sample of Wonder film interlude Morton theatre organ playing music for film interlude Act II, Scene 2 Act II, Scene 2 mm. 747-first three beats of 785: the m. 1293: final eighth-note of Lulu’s m. Athlete dicusses his plans for the freed 746, rest, then final beat of Lulu’s m. 785 Lulu mm. 808-946: Geschwitz, Alwa, the m. 1317: this inserted bar contains pitches Athlete, and the Gymnasiast all discuss extrapolated from Lulu’s m. 808 Lulu mm. 972-979: Athlete rails against Lulu, Bars eliminated as she enters – weakened from prison m. 1002, Lulu: “God in Heaven!” m. 1366, Lulu, a reference to MLK: “Free at last!” mm. 1079-1128: Alwa compares parts of m. 1461: this inserted measure contains Lulu’s body to musical topoi and tempi pitches extrapolated from Lulu’s m. 1096 [Hymne] m. 1150: final 4/4 bar of Act II m. 1483: one beat added to final statement of Hauptrhythmus motive, with fermata

285

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