verdi and the undoing of women

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Verdi and the undoing of women

JOSEPH KERMAN

Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 18 / Issue 01 / March 2006, pp 21 31DOI: 10.1017/S0954586706002072, Published online: 07 June 2006

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0954586706002072

How to cite this article:JOSEPH KERMAN (2006). Verdi and the undoing of women. Cambridge Opera Journal, 18, pp 2131 doi:10.1017/S0954586706002072

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 18, 1, 21–31 � 2006 Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0954586706002072

Verdi and the undoing of women

JOSEPH KERMAN

Abstract: For a brief period in his career, Verdi wrote operas about compromised or ‘fallen’women, women condemned for their sexuality: not only Lina in Stiffelio and Violetta in Latraviata, but also – if we take into account the way their men regard them – Lida in La battagliadi Legnano, Luisa in Luisa Miller and Leonora in Il trovatore. These women suffer or die. Gildaalso dies, in Rigoletto, ultimately a victim of her sexual availability. This essay examines Verdi’scontribution to ‘the undoing of women’ and relates it speculatively to his experience asGiuseppina Strepponi’s lover around the same time.

For Susan McClary, on the Big Six-O

Nearly twenty years ago a book came out that caused a tempest in what was thenthe teacup of opera studies: Opera, or the Undoing of Women by Catherine Clément. Bygetting the book translated and published by the University of Minnesota Press in1988 and writing the introduction to it, after having done much the same forJacques Attali’s Noise in 1985, Susan McClary became a force to be reckoned within musicology at a time when her early articles still had to be hunted for, well beforeFeminine Endings. Clément’s book was calculated to shock, as McClary knew, and itstill packs a punch today, after all the time we have had to explain what’s wrong withit. The tone is personal – vibrantly so – and the rhetoric hyperbolic and totalising.In one way or another, Clément contends, women in opera are victimised,humiliated, and usually killed, seldom quickly. The patriarchal spectacle that is operaentails the ritual sacrifice of women.

It is easy for opera specialists or even buffs, then or now, to dismiss this claim.There are whole sub-genres of opera that treat their women with respect. ButClément is not an opera specialist, she is the French feminist author of such diversebooks as The Feminine and the Sacred, Gandhi, the novel Theo’s Odyssey and severalothers. When she says ‘opera’, she really means ‘Opéra’: not the genre opera overits entire history, but the repertory of the Paris Opéra when she grew up in andaround the 1950s, just as old people in the United States grew up with Rudolf Bingand the Texaco Opera Theater. And she no longer seems so easy to dismiss. Thatour basic, traditional operatic repertory drips with female blood is incontrovertible.And why is it that women are destroyed in opera/Opéra plots? Only seldom forimpeachable crimes, like Norma, the Druid priestess who has married a Romanbefore the opera begins; or as the outcome of tragic fate, like Lucy of Lammermoor;or just for amusement, as in The Tales of Hoffmann.

This article goes back to a paper given as the Donald J. Grout Memorial Lecture at Cornell in1999, under the title ‘Some Verdi Heroines’, and then on other occasions. It finds its truehome as a tribute to a scholar who deserves much of the credit (and less of the flak) for thereconfiguration of music studies that has taken place in the last twenty years. I remain gratefulto the late Lenore Coral for the original invitation to Cornell.

The reasons women are destroyed in opera can almost always be traced to theirsexuality. Sexual transgression, sexual aggression, even sexual victimisation: all canbe deadly. At the top of the scale of iniquity is seduction, the original sin of Eve,re-enacted by opera’s most incendiary heroines: Carmen, Delilah, Kundry, Salome,Lulu. Carmen compounds iniquity by not only seducing her lover, but alsoabandoning him for another man; betrayal is an action that can be fatal, even if thereis some secret, virtuous reason for it. Carmen seduces and betrays; she dies. Yetwomen who do not seduce or betray, women who are themselves seduced, are alsoat risk. This can be true whether they struggle against infatuation, like Amelia inVerdi’s Un ballo in maschera, or luxuriate in it, like Gilda in Rigoletto. Retribution isvisited on operatic women for seduction, betrayal, and also submission.

The works of Giuseppe Verdi bulk large in the operatic canon, and it is thereforeworth asking if and how Verdi’s output as a whole stands up under Clément’sindictment. On the one hand, Verdi is no Puccini, whose routine ill-treatment of hiswomen is an embarrassment even to his admirers. On the other hand, Verdi is noGluck, who scoured the corpus of Greek tragedy for heroines of sometimessuffocating nobility, survivors all – Alceste, Iphigenia in her two manifestations.Verdi had his bad patch: a whole clump of women come to grief because of sexualtransgression, actual or perceived, in operas composed within a four-year periodbetween 1849 and 1853: Lida in La battaglia di Legnano (1849), Luisa in Luisa Miller

(1849), Lina in Stiffelio (1850), Gilda in Rigoletto (1851), Leonora in Il trovatore (1853)and Violetta in La traviata (1853).

In La battaglia di Legnano, Lida’s husband Arrigo returns from the dead and findsthat she has remarried. He reviles her for her betrayal, as he sees it; she endurespangs of guilt and submits to a humiliating scene. Still, Lida survives, borne to safetyon a flood of patriotic fervour that sweeps all before it, after Arrigo dies as theItalian champion at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. She survives because inanother fateful year for Italy, 1848, nineteenth-century morality took a back seat topolitics.

The heroine of Luisa Miller dies at the hand of her jealous lover Rodolfo becausehe thinks that she has left him for another man. ‘Ah, mi tradia!’ ( ‘Ah, she betrayedme!’ ) Rodolfo cries out repeatedly in the refrain of his Act II aria. Luisa wascompelled to act as if she had left Rodolfo in order to save her father’s life;nonetheless the betrayal leads to her death. Before Rodolfo gives her the cup ofpoison they will drink together, she had already decided to kill herself.

Lina in Stiffelio is an adulteress, albeit a repentant one by the time the piece begins.Her husband finally forgives her, so Lina survives. She is, however, humiliated in anugly way, both visually and musically.

The proximate cause of Gilda’s death in Rigoletto is self-sacrifice, of course.But behind that proximate cause lies her seduction, the fact that she allows herselfto be seduced by the Duke in the first place. She ignores Rigoletto’s warnings inAct I, activates his doomed plot in Act II, suffers and dies a drawn-out death inAct III. The opera is one long reprobation for her first, fundamental feminineweakness.

22 Joseph Kerman

What we can call ‘virtuous betrayal’ appears again, after Luisa Miller, in Il trovatore,where Leonora betrays her lover Manrico to save his life. Manrico only learns thetruth when she is dying of a self-administered poison. Leonora dies not because shecannot stand to live with the Count di Luna, but because, after betraying Manrico,she cannot stand to live with herself. Infidelity is as fatal for her as it is for Luisa( though unlike Luisa she gets to pour her own fatal draught).

La traviata can be seen as a full-scale study in virtuous betrayal: Violetta betraysAlfredo in response to pleas from his father to save the good name of his bourgeoisfamily. She will die – indeed, she is already on the way to death the first time we seeher. Consumption, a manifest symptom and symbol of her life as a prostitute,actually drives the action. In the end, it is sexual promiscuity that kills her.

This group of six Verdi operas, all composed in a four-year period, offers a seriesof studies of women caught in the toils of their sexuality. This topic emerges onlyat this stage in Verdi’s output. It is interesting, and perhaps revealing, to comparethese women with the masculine types that inhabit many of his earlier operas.Abigaille in Nabucco leads a military coup; Joan in Giovanna d’Arco puts on armourand dies heroically in battle; and Lady Macbeth calls famously on ‘the spirits thattend on mortal thoughts’ to unsex her. Two other of these redoubtable sopranos,Gulnara in Il corsaro and Odabella in Attila, stab their baritones to the heart. LikeTosca! The women in the operas composed between La battaglia di Legnano and La

traviata are more feminine to the point, sometimes, of stereotype. They are punishedfor feminine iniquities or weaknesses, again to the point of stereotype.

Giuseppina

As the psychologist Gerald Mendelsohn argued some time ago, this new theme inVerdi’s operas follows upon a milestone in the composer’s personal life, his liaisonwith Giuseppina Strepponi, the soprano who created the role of Abigaille in Nabucco

and who had befriended him even before that.1 After losing her voice Strepponi setup in Paris as a voice teacher, with Verdi’s help. Verdi visited Paris for the first timein 1847, for the production of Jérusalem, and they fell in love. The manuscript ofJérusalem has been found to include some love notes they wrote to one another.

Giuseppina Strepponi and Verdi were certainly in love. By nineteenth-centurystandards, however, Strepponi was a woman of loose virtue. As a young singer shehad lived with several men and had a number of illegitimate children.2 How Verdi,who famously nurtured his image as a true son of the Italian soil, reconciled receivedviews of women’s purity with Strepponi’s impurity when the relationship flamed upat the start we can never know. As the flames died down he clearly developedfeelings of ambivalence. We do know that Giuseppina blamed herself for her pastlife bitterly, and that Verdi refused, declined or anyhow failed to marry her until

1 See Gerald A. Mendelsohn, ‘Verdi the Man and Verdi the Dramatist’, 19th-Century Music, 2(1978), 110–42, 214–30, and ‘La Dame aux camélias and La traviata: A Study of DramaticTransformations in the Light of Biography’, Perspectives in Personality, 1 (1985), 271–303.

2 This matter is investigated at great length in Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography(Oxford, 1993).

Verdi and the undoing of women 23

1859, twelve years after they started living together. He mortified her by bringingher to stay in provincial Busseto, where the neighbours were scandalised by herunmarried status: they sometimes brought dead cats to her house. Verdi could treatsome people very harshly, Giuseppina among them. Again, we do not know howVerdi’s feelings towards his second wife were affected by his tragic first marriage toMargherita, the twenty-two-year-old virginal daughter of his protector and surrogatefather Antonio Barezzi. Their two babies and the mother herself died within awrenching period of a year and a half, between 1838 and 1840. Verdi refused tohave children with Strepponi.

Mendelsohn thinks that Verdi’s new involvement with Strepponi finds itsreflection in the new focus of his operas on women in trouble. Parallels betweenStrepponi’s situation and the action in La traviata have occurred to many peoplebefore Mendelsohn: the woman with a past consumed by guilt, even though hermoral credentials are impeccable; a love affair threatened by bourgeois morality; andso on down to a number of smaller details. I believe with Mendelsohn that theevents of Verdi’s life in these years coloured, or rather determined, the action ofmany other operas. Take La battaglia di Legnano, for example. Writing about thisultimate operatic flag-waver, a critic as intelligent as Gabriele Baldini found it‘curious that what should by rights have been Verdi’s most ‘‘public’’ opera . . .finishes by being, even at first glance, one of his most ‘‘private’’ works’.3 Baldinifound it curious that Verdi should have lavished so much energy on Lida’s troublesin view of this opera’s patriotic imperative. Given Strepponi and the date 1848,however, does this really seem so curious?

What is striking is the ambivalence of feeling revealed in these six operas. Theplots could almost have been chosen methodically to explore Verdi’s conflictedpassions. His younger men present a wide gallery of jealousy: Verdi can identify withRodolfo’s despair but turns a cold, clinical eye on Stiffelio’s bottled-up rage. Hisolder men, men closer to his own age, are more forgiving, either sooner (Rigoletto)or later (Germont). As for the women, four emerge as particularly revealing ofVerdi’s ambivalence: on two of them, Lina and Gilda, he can vent his disdain or hisdisgust, while two others, Luisa and Violetta, gain his admiration and his love. Orso I will argue.

Lina

Stiffelio is a Protestant minister, and the opera’s central conflict is between theforgiveness he preaches and his phenomenal propensity for jealousy. His wife’sadultery is discovered in Act I; in Act II the man of God actually moves to kill hiswife’s lover (his hand is stayed). In Act III, scene 1, Lina pleads with Stiffelio forforgiveness – more: for absolution – in a strong duet, which Roger Parker calls a

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

24 Joseph Kerman

‘crucial clash of vocal forces’.4 But Lina gets no comfort from Stiffelio, only adivorce.

In this Act III duet the plot allows Lina to assert herself for the first time, andI am not as sure as Parker is that the music Verdi gives her really rises to theoccasion. The question is moot, however, for Lina is crushed definitively in the nextscene, the opera’s finale, set in Stiffelio’s church. As he preaches, the lectern Biblefalls open to the passage where Christ forgives the woman taken in adultery; thespirit moves Stiffelio and he publicly forgives Lina by glaring at her as he reads thewords out loud. She mutely crawls up to the pulpit on her knees and falls at his feet.All this in public view; there is no private forgiveness, no personal gesture towardsher by Stiffelio of any kind. After Lina has been reviled verbally for three acts, stageaction takes over from words and humiliates her graphically.

Parker is right on the mark about this repellent scene. In his book Leonora’s Last

Act, after observing that there are two kinds of women in nineteenth-century opera,‘the docile ones who usually suffer and die; and the scary ones who almost alwayssuffer and die’,5 Parker draws attention to many parallels between Lina and Gilda inRigoletto. Lina’s humiliating crawl is mirrored by Gilda’s shameful enclosure andexposure in the sack. Parker also traces some striking musical parallels. At the sametime, he trumpets a crucial difference in the chapter title ‘Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings’.Unlike Gilda and the other undone heroines who die, at the end of her operaLina falls silent. She utters nothing during her crawl except a few brokenexclamations; Verdi denies her a voice in her own undoing, and to deny an operaticcharacter song is to cancel her very being. Lina’s défaite is not death but extinction.Although the plot may pardon Lina, Verdi’s music – or absence of music – does not.As another woman remarks bitterly in another Verdi opera, ‘To the wretchedwoman who once fell, mankind will always be implacable’ ( ‘Così alla misera, ch’è undì caduta . . . L’uomo implacabile per lei sarà’; La traviata, Act II ).

Stiffelio emerged from obscurity only in the 1990s, when it was revived at CoventGarden for José Carreras and at the Metropolitan Opera for Plácido Domingo.Videos from both productions are available. At the Met, Sharon Sweet does notcrawl; she sinks majestically to the ground. At Covent Garden, Catherine Malfitanobravely gives it a try, but even she doesn’t do a full crawl. This would have been toomuch for the director, one can guess. In any case, no soprano cantilena is heardsoaring atop a grand finale ultimo. When the show is over, the lady hasn’t sung.6 Shecries ‘Gran Dio’ with ‘Di–’ on high C, but she doesn’t sing.

Gilda

The leading lady in Rigoletto also receives an icy portrayal from her composer, itseems to me. The ways Verdi found to depict Gilda’s innocence – her ‘bewilderedimmaturity’, as someone has said – are well known and appreciated; Elizabeth

4 Roger Parker, Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, 1997), chapter 7,‘Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings’, 149–67, here 160.

5 Parker, 158–9.6 I take this irresistible formulation from Parker, 162.


Hudson drew up a list of them in an insightful article a few years ago.7 Gilda singsvery often in simple repetitive two-bar fragments, and rather than originatingmusical ideas, she tends to echo music belonging to other characters, who are in anycase constantly interrupting her or completing her phrases. Her Act I aria ‘Caronome’ is not only unusually simple in its basic melody, but it also fails to promotea cabaletta. A heroine in Ottocento opera without a cabaletta is someone prettyseriously impaired.

Hudson shows how much more richly Gilda sings in Act II, especially in ‘Tuttele feste al tempio’, the second of her big musical numbers, after her abduction andrape. It seems characteristic, however, that even this is not her own number, but aduet shared with Rigoletto, and she shares the cabaletta, too. The music shows awoman who has grown up in a hurry; Hudson calls it a musical ‘transformation’ andobserves that the radical difference between Gilda’s music in the two acts has madefinding the right type of voice to sing the role a long-standing problem.

In Act III, unlike Lina in Stiffelio, Gilda does get to sing as she dies, and singbeautifully. Yet at this moment Verdi has her regress to the musical simplicities ofAct I, as clearly as her thoughts turn back there in the libretto (she evokes hermother both times). Again Gilda is given simple – dare I say infantile – music inself-repeating two-bar phrases, and again she is interrupted repeatedly, as Rigolettobreaks in to register his anguish – ‘Dio tremendo! . . . ella stessa fu colta’, ‘Nonmorir . . . mio tesoro, pietate’, ‘Se t’involi . . . qui sol rimarrei’, ‘Gilda! mia Gilda!’.He sings longer lines than she does and his music modulates. He steals the scene.The only modulation in her death scene – an abrupt key switch – comes when herD flat melody ratchets up to D major for one bar and then sinks down again. Ispoke of Verdi’s ‘disdain’ for Gilda: even when she gets up to D major, she singsthe same simple music. This sounds cruel to me, as though Verdi were in the sacktwisting the knife. That the crux of D and D flat runs through the score makes themoment all the more excruciating.

A wonderful old video with Tito Gobbi cuts the last one of Rigoletto’sinterventions, surely the relic of a tradition imposed by prima donnas averse tobeing, like their roles, undone. Rigoletto is an odious character, yet his melodicgeneration and modulation convey passions so heartbreakingly prolific that Verdican turn our sympathy to him even as we sicken at the death of his near-inarticulatevictim. ‘Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings’, says Parker. Gilda sings, perhaps, to rehabilitateRigoletto.

Hudson makes a very sharp observation about Gilda in Act III. In the quartet‘Bella figlia dell’ amore’, she notes, Gilda ‘does not react in the way we would likeher to – for which we find it difficult to forgive her’.8 Rigoletto forgives Gilda, butnobody else does: not Victor Hugo who wrote the original play, nor Verdi whowrote the opera, nor, we have to say, mankind.

7 Elizabeth Hudson, ‘Gilda Seduced: A Tale Untold’, this journal, 4 (1992), 229–51.8 Hudson, 251.

26 Joseph Kerman

Luisa

If Violetta is the most traviata character of the heroines discussed here, Luisa Milleris the least. Verdi’s portrait of her is radiant, and her opera has on the whole beenundervalued. While less mature than Rigoletto, of course, it marks a major stepforward in Verdi’s rapid advance as a musical dramatist under the tutelary influenceof Giuseppina Strepponi. To begin, as a way of depicting an innocent village girl inlove, Verdi draws by no means innocently on the semiseria tradition, the contem-porary genre of mild, sentimental pieces with happy endings for their doll-likeheroines. Thus in Act I, when Luisa is happily in love with Rodolfo, her music ispretty and vacuous: her cavatina ‘Lo vidi, e ’l primo palpito’ gives no hint of thetragedy to come. Act II brings about a complete change, however: Luisa endures aharrowing scene with Wurm, henchman of Rodolfo’s father, the ruthless localmagnate who intends his son for a certain Countess. Luisa’s father Miller has beenthrown in jail and will be executed, Wurm tells her, unless she testifies that she hasonly been toying with Rodolfo’s affections and really loves him, Wurm. Her letterwill be leaked to Rodolfo, and as a further price on her father’s head, Luisa mustmarry the loathsome Wurm.

The whole scene is excellently composed in Verdi’s best recitative-cum-arioso-cum-parlante style of that period. At its centre is a remarkable aria for Luisa. Interms of dramatic structure ‘Tu puniscimi, o Signore’ serves as a necessary pause inthe tense psychological action, allowing the character to collect her feelings andexpress herself before acting – before giving in. The piece makes a textbookexample to show how music in opera can transform a verbal text.9 It is printed herewith all the repetitions in italics:

Tu puniscimi, o Signore,Se t’offesi, e paga io sono,Ma de’ barbari al furoreNon lasciarmi non lasciarmi in abbandono.Signor, non lasciarmi in abbandono,

Non lasciarmi in abbandono;

No, no, o Signore, se t’offesi mi punisci,

Ma non lasciarmi, non lasciarmi in abbandono.A scampar da fato estremoInnocente genitorChieggion essi . . . a dirlo io fremo! . . .Chieggon essi

Della figlia il disonorDella figlia il disonor.O signor, non lasciarmi in abbandono,

Non lasciarmi in abbandono, no, no, O signor,

Non lasciarmi in abbandono, non lasciarmi in abbandono,

Non lasciarmi, non lasciarmi in abbandon, o mio Signor,

Non lasciarmi, ah! . . . non lasciarmi in abbandon.

9 For a recent discussion along these lines, see Emanuele Senici, ‘Words and Music’, in TheCambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott L. Balthazar (Cambridge, 2004), 88–110.


[Punish me, O Lord, if I offended you, and I will be content, but don’t leave me, abandoned,to the fury of the cruel ones. To save an innocent father from a mortal fate, they ask – Ishudder to say it – his daughter’s dishonour!]

Verdi has Luisa hark obsessively on one key phrase, ‘non lasciarmi in abbandono’.The aria does not modulate, and the lingering tonicisation on a wayward, pleadingharmony, V/vi, adds desperation to obsession. As compared to the excessorderliness with which the semiseria Luisa of Act I expressed her happiness, the wayshe expresses her distress in Act II shows a new consciousness and a new maturity.Like Gilda, Luisa has had to grow up in a hurry.

No one would rate this piece very high on purely musical grounds, strictly asmusic; it’s an unpretty, ungainly aria, one never to be met with at song recitals oropera concerts.10 While the orchestral accompaniment is appropriately stressful andrelentless, its texture hardly reaches for more subtlety than that of Lady Macbeth’s‘Or tutti sorgete’ or Manrico’s ‘Di quella pira’. But pretty music or pure music is notthe point – the point is music working for drama. This aria exemplifies the youngVerdi’s music drama at its best.

Soon after ‘Tu puniscimi, o Signore’ Luisa is further humiliated by a confronta-tion with Rodolfo’s designated spouse, Countess Federica. It is all too much forher, and the beginning of Act III finds her writing a suicide letter. Miller, nowreleased from prison, is horrified by this development. Verdi’s response is moreinteresting: he sees it and sets it as a regression on Luisa’s part, a regression to thechildlike state in which he had depicted her in Act I. She reverts to her semiseria

mode in an only slightly less frothy version; her andantino ‘La tomba è un letto’would sit comfortably enough in such semiseria standards as La sonnambula or Linda

di Chamounix. But Miller has barely launched into a vehement melody of reproach( ‘Figlia? . . . Compreso d’orrore io sono!’ ) before Luisa bursts in with Schiller’sfamous line ‘È colpa amore?’ ( ‘Is love a fault?’ ). This, needless to say, is quiteunconventional in a big duet at this time. Particularly after her tremulous openingmusic, the passion of this pertichino – this brief, unexpected interruption – isunnerving. The distraught woman we saw emerge in Act II has not, after all,regressed to the girl of Act I.

Unnerving: Miller is completely thrown off and starts a totally different risposta,less indignant and more self-serving (and more tedious: ‘Di rughe il volto . . . mira. . . ho solcato’ ). Will she die and leave him, a broken old man, all alone? This timeLuisa hears him out. When she sings another pertichino that breaks into Miller’smelody, she is not really interrupting; she is speaking not to Miller but to herself:‘Quanto colpevole, ahimè, son io’ ( ‘How guilty, alas, I am’). It is a moment ofconversion, a private moment, made moving by the cross-rhythm between Luisa’sexpanding song and Miller’s stiff phrases, and by quiet, poignant harmonies. Luisatears up her suicide letter and agrees to start a new life with her father, somewherefar away.

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

28 Joseph Kerman

Two pertichini in a single long duet may seem like small specks around which tobuild a reading, specks easily blown away in what Carolyn Abbate calls the ‘drastic’experience of opera in the opera house.11 Abbate pits this live experience against‘gnostic’ experience in the study. Operas begin life in the study, however, or in theworkshop, and these pertichini certainly mattered to Verdi, for while the first of themwas indicated by the libretto, the second was not, and he had to create the dramaticlocation for it, as well as the music. Verdi was tracking Luisa’s reactions withprecision, and we should be paying attention.12 If it is presented faithfully, thedramatic progression up to now – from unconsciousness to despair, regression, andthen the telling pertichini – gives Verdi’s Luisa the emotional authority for her twosupreme statements in the opera’s last scene.

In the first of them, the duet with Rodolfo, she is able to comfort him even whilehe is rejecting her harshly. And in the following terzetto finale her dying song evokesboth the maturity she has acquired over the course of the action and also thesimplicity and frankness of character that Verdi had indicated at the beginning ofAct I and reminded us of again in the regressive passage of Act III. ‘Piangi, piangiil tuo dolore’, ‘Ah! vieni meco, deh, non lasciarmi’ – no one who has heard Luisa

Miller will have forgotten these melodies. We can compare the limpid, restrictedmelodic line with which Luisa dominates the final number with the more ample,ecstatic lines of other Verdi heroines who expire in last-act ensembles of this samesort. Luisa is not Leonora or Violetta, and she is certainly not Gilda. She is her owndistinctive and rather quiet self, the first of Verdi’s profound studies in . . . femininepsychology was on the tip of my tongue, but I’ll just say: psychology.

Violetta

As a sex worker, Violetta stands higher than any other of Verdi’s women on thescale of feminine iniquity. Yet, ironically or not, Verdi is determined to show her inthe best possible light. Also, ironically, whereas in Luisa Miller the tragedy stemsfrom upper-class tyranny, which Verdi deplores, in La traviata the pathos stemsfrom bourgeois morality, which Verdi supports.13

Catherine Clément understands this very well, and she writes scathingly about thescene where Germont, evoking patriarchal family values, persuades Violetta intorenouncing Alfredo.14 Clément writes about La traviata as though it were the

11 ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’ Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 505–36. I should also acknowledgehere the essay by Carolyn Abbate that has been so important for recent opera studies,‘Opera, or, The Envoicing of Women’, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality inMusical Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), 225–58.

12 I should perhaps have declared earlier that I still hold to the view of opera as first andforemost ‘text’, reflecting intentions of its composer, rather than as ‘act’, reflecting those ofits singers, conductor and director. In one such act that I remember, at the San FranciscoOpera, Luisa might as well as have been mooning the audience during this number.

13 I have written on La traviata at greater length in ‘Opera, Novel, Drama: The Case of Latraviata’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 27 (1978), 44–53.

14 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing, foreword by SusanMcClary (Minneapolis, 1988), 60–5.


equivalent of Dumas’ play La Dame aux camélias, its source. I know this sounds likea broken record – and I know the simile sings of another era – but the message ofan opera is not the plot, it is the plot as manipulated by music. Musical meaningsin opera trump verbal meanings (as well as directorial interventions); the music ofan opera transforms the plot. It transforms the libretto. Music traces the responseof the characters to the action – and operas, like plays, are not essentially about thevicissitudes of women (or men); operas are about their responses to thosevicissitudes. In the great Act II duet of La traviata Germont does not bully. Musicshows his attitude towards Violetta change, from hostility to a tenderness that isfinally symbolised by his accepting her as, in effect, his own daughter. Is he beinghypocritical, asks Clément? Music knows no hypocrisy – anyway, Verdi’s music inthe 1850s knows no hypocrisy. Music cancels the very question of hypocrisy.

Elizabeth Hudson says we find it hard to forgive Gilda for her sacrifice. If we findit easy to forgive Violetta for her sacrifice, that is because Germont is not themonster of patriarchal authority that he is in the play. Music recasts him as a fellowhuman being who moves her by his own unhappiness.

The music at the end of Act III of La traviata surely counts as one of Verdi’sgreatest inspirations. Violetta is hallucinating – ‘hearing things’ – and what she hearsis the melody of Alfredo’s declaration of love in Act I. Gino Roncaglia once calledthis melody the opera’s tema cardine, or hinge theme, because it keeps coming backat crucial moments in the drama.15 The difference this time is that the melodymodulates, indicating an expansion, a flowering of that love, a maturing, anapotheosis, new joys, a new ecstasy; that this happens when Violetta, at the verymoment she is dying, imagines that she is reviving, adds to the scene’s invinciblepathos.

No doubt it is hard to feel, until almost the very last moment, that the recipientof that love would have been adequate to this flowering. After a promising first act,Alfredo turns out to be one of the shallowest of Verdi’s tenors. Violetta’s dying,undying love may be thought sentimental, like her effusions over the portrait. Maybeso – Clément probably thinks so – but maybe not entirely. Alfredo has a remarkableoutcry near the beginning of the finale, when the men interrupt Violetta just briefly:‘No, non morrai, non dirmelo, dei viver, amor mio’, and so on ( ‘No, you will notdie, don’t say so, you must live, my love’ ). To me this six-bar phrase is the truestthing Alfredo sings in the whole opera; there is a new Alfredo a-borning here, withVerdi as midwife. Just as Gilda’s death scene reflects on Rigoletto, Violetta’s deathscene reflects on Alfredo. What is more important, Alfredo’s moment works tovalidate Violetta’s hallucinatory fantasy.

Desdemona, Alice

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

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

30 Joseph Kerman

destroyed. Many commentators have sensed a parallel between Giuseppina’ssituation and that of Violetta in La traviata – enough to make Julian Budden go outof his way to ridicule the notion that Verdi portrayed Giuseppina in this opera. ButBudden is missing the point.16 Of course Verdi would never have dreamt ofequating Strepponi with Violetta. The point is that Violetta allowed him to explorefeelings of love, guilt and suffering that he learned from his experience asStrepponi’s lover. Verdi explored similar feelings in other operas around the sametime.

After La traviata, the fallen-woman syndrome retreats in Verdi’s oeuvre. In Simon

Boccanegra Amelia’s supposed betrayal hardly registers after it has allowed for thetenor’s double aria. In Un ballo in maschera another Amelia goes to the brink, to thebrink of adultery, yet she survives; although her husband means to kill her, herelents and gradually she fades out of the opera, leaving the pathos for Riccardo.The tenor gets the death scene, not the soprano. In Don Carlos, while Elisabethcertainly has a hard time, it somehow does not seem as hard for her as for the menaround her. Leonora in La forza del destino betrays nobody but her father. Andalthough Aida dooms her lover she does not betray him (and he does not blameher).

And then, much later, we get to Desdemona and Alice Ford. How striking it isthat, on returning to the stage after fifteen years in retirement, the old man shouldreturn to the sexual sin of betrayal twice, in both Otello and Falstaff. Both times thebetrayal is imaginary – imagined by Otello in one opera and by Master Ford in theother. In the mondo implacabile of Violetta Valéry, in the misogynist world ofCatherine Clément, imaginary betrayal also qualifies as a sexual sin, along withvirtuous betrayal. One opera turns it to comedy, the other to tragedy, the mostheartbreaking of all of Verdi’s undoings of women.

All this may be seen as a subliminal acknowledgement on the part of Verdi ofGiuseppina Strepponi, of what he understood he had derived from her forty yearsearlier, when their liaison began and his art underwent profound and unprecedentedchanges. Under her aegis Verdi had reached the first plateau of his mastery as adramatist. Now he reached the final one. If there was some acknowledgement of thepast here, conscious or unconscious, it was now blended with something new, in theplots as well as in the music. In his final works Verdi found a new dimension in hisheroines. In Falstaff he shows us a world run by women, a mondo not implacabile, butburlone, where women fool their men, marry off their daughters, laugh, plot, dumpand pinch. And in Otello there is an emotional bond between Desdemona and Emiliaunlike that between women in any earlier Verdi opera.

Ma basta. To enter any further into the new world of Falstaff and Otello we willneed a new essay, a new discourse.

16 Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1992), II, 165–6.


verdi and the undoing of women

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