|
[Art] should
move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged.
— Denis Diderot, qtd. Solomon, 309
-
Gustav Mahler once observed that listening to his own work performed caused
"a burning pain [to] crystallize" in him. He went on to note that he was compelled
to write his symphonies at the point where the narrative power of words failed
him, "at the point where the dark feelings hold sway, at the door which leads
into the 'other world'—the world in which things are no longer separated
by space and time" (qtd Nussbaum 265). I want to begin with Mahler's comments
because they place music-- like literature-- in the realm of the emotions, but
emotions so deep and dark that they cannot be fully articulated in words. I would
assert that music is not essentially ephemeral, it simply attempts —in Mahler's
words again—"to get to the bottom of things, to go beyond external appearances"
(qtd Nussbaum 266). In this essay I hope to suggest that music erupted in new
religious, political, social, and cultural ways throughout Europe in the eighteenth-
and early nineteenth centuries. As a number of literary genres increasingly sought
to moderate religious and political reform and secularize and nationalize public
and private consciousnesses, music was enlisted as a potent ideological and aesthetic
force, a manifestation of the residue of a culture that still clung to the power
of oral-based methods of communication. And the pain that Mahler speaks about—pain
that I would identify as essentially political, social, religious, and economic—was
the subtext of the dominant popular discourses during the romantic period. In
short, virtue was put on trial during the mid to late eighteenth century throughout
Europe, and opera emerged to mediate the pain and dislocation that occurred when
a secularized notion of virtue emerged to displace a theologically based system
of values and beliefs.[1] -
It is necessary to begin, however, by defining "virtue" as a concept and briefly
tracing its history as a public source of value. As Pocock has noted, virtue has
traditionally been synonymous with "nature," "essence," or "essential characteristic,"
but within the republican vocabularly it took on the additional meanings of "devotion
to the public good," or "the relations of equality between citizens engaged in
ruling and being ruled." Understood as virtǜ by Machiavelli, the concept
also increasingly began to be understood as something like citizenship, "a code
of values not necessarily identical with the virtues of a Christian," and expressed
instead in the notion of justice or "a devotion to the public good" (41-42). Distinguishing
between abstract rights (politicum like equality, citizenship) and rights
to bear arms and own property (commercium), Pocock argues that as "the
universe became pervaded by law, the locus of sovereignty [became] extra-civic,
and the citizen came to be defined not by his actions and virtues, but by his
rights to and in things" (43). By the mid-eighteenth century, "the ideals of virtue
and commerce could not be reconciled to one another" as long as virtue was seen
as purely civic, and so virtue was redefined with the aid of a concept of "manners": The
effect was to construct a liberalism which made the state's authority guarantee
the liberty of the individual's social behavior, but had no intention whatsoever
of impoverishing that behavior by confining it to the rigorous assertion of ego-centered
individual rights. On the contrary, down at least to the end of the 1780s, it
was the world of ancient politics which could be made to seem rigid and austere,
impoverished because underspecialized; and the new world of the social and sentimental,
the commercial and cultural, was made to proliferate with alternatives to ancient
virtus and libertas . . . . Now, at last, a right to things became
a way to the practice of virtue, so long as virtue could be defined as the practice
and refinement of manners. (50) -
The sweeping historical
trajectory that Pocock charts here can be glimpsed in miniature by examining the
operas of Nina and Agnese. Both works present the struggle of the
heroines' virtue to assert itself against a force of paternal domination that
is figured as an antiquated imperial power. In the heroines' struggles to control
the possession of goods (family jewels in Nina and property in Agnese)
the operas enact the performance of public virtue as it intersects with private
trials and tribulations. -
Secondly, the term "sentimental"
needs to be defined in the context of these operas, although clearly it is beyond
the scope of this essay to develop fully all of the permutations of its use in
a variety of different national literary traditions.[2]
"Sentimental" in these operas tends to suggest the privileging of the authenticity
of the emotions, combined as this action is with tropes of interiority and the
use of objects that provoke memories and their association with identity or personal
history (Howard 65). As Howard notes, when we use the term "sentimental" we can
be understood to be suggesting that the work "uses some established convention
to evoke emotion; we mark a moment when the discursive processes that construct
emotion become visible" (76). Straddling the divide between the visible and the
interior, the social and the natural, sentimental artists tend to construct cultural
artifacts that will portray humans as thinking and feeling beings, or rather,
individuals who feel and live in their bodies as much as in their psyches. Within
the British tradition, Lord Shaftesbury has been seen as the originator of this
ideology, but his class prejudices have recently been interrogated, as have those
of such erstwhile followers as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Laurence Sterne,
and Addison and Steele. As Markley has noted, literary historians have attempted
to understand Shaftesbury's formulation of sentimentality as either a manifestation
of latitudinarianism or deism, both vaguely secularized systems of advancing self-sufficient
virtue as the means by which manners dominated and controlled behavior in the
public realm. -
For instance, Smith as well as Jean-Jacques
Rousseau theorized that human benevolence and morality could only be understood
by acknowledging an innate disposition to sympathy or empathy in human nature.
For these theorists, emotions lead to manifest acts of virtue or, what Smith's
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) defines as the empathetic imagination:
"By the imagination we place ourselves in [another man's] situation, we conceive
ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and
become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of
his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not
altogether unlike them" (9). There can be no question that by attending the performances
of operas such as Nina and Agnese audience members were forced into
a participatory and empathetically imaginative posture. Given the hyperbole of
the theatrical and musical action, the audience is virtually hurled into the emotional
maelstrom being enacted on stage and thus participates in the empathetic display
of sentiment. -
Finally, it is also important to recognize
that as literary critics we are invested in believing that ideologies primarily
spread through cultures by means of print media, and for many centuries we have
deceived ourselves that male-authored, canonical poetry, preferably epical or
lyrical, spread those ideologies most effectively. But increasingly, literary
historians are recognizing that the ideologies that they detect within literature
themselves have been reflected, affected, adapted, and transformed through musical
genres. This essay will examine how sentimentality and its valorization of virtue
spread through one particular intersection of opera and literature; that is, the
seduced maiden narrative is enacted in these operas, once as a comedy of sorts,
once as a tragedy. Giovanni Paisiello's Nina (1789) was clearly
influenced by the works of Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, while Fernando
Paër's Agnese (1809) is a direct adaptation of Amelia Opie's popular novella
The Father and Daughter (1801). Furthermore, both of the operas spin in
and out of ideological orbit with Richardson's novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded
(1740-41), which in turn was rewritten by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni
in his dramatic adaptation Le Pamela Nubile (1753), the Irish playwright
Isaac Bickerstaffe as the comic opera The Maid of the Mill (1765), and
which then was later adapted and transformed by François de Neufchâteau into the
opera Paméla (1793). And certainly we can detect sentimental familial concerns
in Denis Diderot's dramas, particularly Le Fils Naturel ou les épreuves de
la vertu ("The Natural Son; or, The Trials of Virtue," 1757). What I hope
to suggest is that music and literature have collaborated in constructing a few
fairly basic cultural scripts (domestic, familial, painful, and cathartic: recall
Oedipus or Demeter/Persephone) that are then retold endlessly, continually readjusting
the particulars to accommodate changing social and political conditions. Sentimentality
as a value system, a potent ideology, almost a secularization of religion was
spread throughout eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European culture not
simply through novels and dramas, but also by being performed in opera houses
from London to Rome and Naples. -
Sentimental novels and
operas most frequently took as their subjects the dysfunctions of the patriarchal
family under siege, or the trials and tribulations of the seduced maiden and the
alternately tyrannical (Nina) or betrayed (Agnese) father. They
frequently employed, as Markley has noted, talismanic exchanges of money or property
in order to reify the bourgeoisie's attempt to assert "the 'timeless' nature of
a specific historical and cultural construction of virtue and to suppress his
reader's recognition of the social and economic inequalities upon which this discourse
of seemingly transcendent virtue is based" (210). Most of these works read now
like little more than crude wish fulfillments or fairy tales, but they were extremely
popular in their own day and, as such, deserve our critical attention as important
ideological markers for their culture. Why and how did the sentimental as a discourse
system evolve as one of the most popular public displays of emotion on the stage?
The sentimental as a genre, whether manifest in literary fiction or opera, clearly
attempts to mediate between members of a family that found themselves at odds
over the shape and power structure of the newly evolving bourgeois society. -
André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's sentimental opera Lucile (1769) is a case
in point. Staging a wedding day celebration, the ensemble sings "Where can one
feel better than within the bosom of one's family?," while later the characters
reply, "The names of spouse, of father, and of son, and of daughter, are delightful."
With its heavy use of gnomic sentences and moral tags, Lucile reminds us
that sentimental opera, like sentimental fiction, enacts Diderot's recommendation
to avoid intricacy of plot in order to "allow emotional expansion in the characters
and similar responses in the readers or spectators. Such ritual displays of emotion
[within the domestic sphere] are often meant to show the power of human benevolence
as a driving communal force between people both on and off stage" (Castelvecchio,
141-43). They also place religious sentiments, which were once in evidence in
the public church into the private, domestic sphere of the home, thereby transmuting
religious practices and beliefs into filial, familial displays. Although this
is a matter that clearly requires more space than an essay allows, it could be
suggested that as belief in a universal and traditional Christianity was breaking
down, opera and literature stepped in to claim displaced religious sentiments
for their own. And for this reason we can, I think, see sentimental discourses
participating in the larger secularist movement of a post-Enlightenment Europe. IIMusic
which has not been heard falls into empty time like an impotent bullet.
—Theodor
Adorno, 133
-
The works of Giovanni Paisiello
(1740 -1816) epitomize the sentimental strain in opera, which may explain the
waning of his popularity by the 1820s. Rossini, however, praised Paisiello's operas
by stating that "the genius of the simple genre and naïve gracefulness . . . realizes
the most astonishing effects with the utmost simplicity of melody, harmony and
accompaniment," while Mozart, who knew and admired Paisiello's works, once commented
that "for light and pleasurable sensations in music [one] cannot be recommended
to anything better" than Paisiello. For all the praise he received in his lifetime,
including the patronage of Napoleon who called him "the greatest composer there
is," Paisiello's best-known opera Nina o sia la pazza per amore (Nina or the
love-distressed Maid) fell on hard times (Robinson; Hunt). Dent, for instance,
has accused it of being "sentimental comedy at its worst . . . . Its sentimentality
is to modern ears perfectly unbearable, and we cannot understand how the whole
of Europe was reduced to tears by these infantile melodies" (Dent, 111). Nina's
British premier occurred in London on April 27, 1797, although by that date the
opera was already close to a decade old and was widely known throughout Europe.
We might note that Nina's contemporary status is beginning to improve as
evidenced by the growing number of modern revivals, including one at the Oxford
Playhouse (March 1982), one by the Zurich Opera now available on DVD (July 1998),
one at La Scala, Milan (1999), and one by the Bampton Opera Company, Oxfordshire
(1999). -
As a sentimentale opera distinct from the
other Italian operatic "mixed" genres of semiserio and mezzo carattere,
Nina was a highly idealized portrait of how a family achieves happiness
after suffering has redeemed all of its members of their excesses (read: sins).
In the eighteenth-century Italian operatic tradition the term sentimentale
did not have the negative connotations that the word assumed in British works
fairly early on: excessive, morbid, affected, or indulgent. Instead, within the
Italian tradition a concept of sentimentale was predicated on portraying
people who were ideally sensitive to understanding and feeling the highest emotions
in harmony with the physical senses. These people were also capable of feeling
compassion for others, or the quality of empathy, which marked them as practitioners
of a new, humanized religion of the heart: sensibility. -
The
source for Paisiello's Nina was the version of the opera by the same name
written by Benoît-Joseph Marsollier and Nicolas Dalayrac, a one-act opera comique,
which premiered in Paris in 1786.[3]
But this opera itself was based, according to Marsollier and Dalayrac, on "an
anecdote reported by our newspapers a few years ago, and already employed by M.
Beculard d'Arnaud in his Délassements de l'homme sensible, under the title
La Nouvelle Clementine [vol. I, 1783]" (qtd Castelvecchi 149). The stories
of D'Arnaud were very much in the contemporary French larmoyants tradition,
sentimental tales that resemble the earlier British works of Eliza Haywood and
Samuel Richardson. D'Arnaud's short story, however, is not an accurate version
of a newspaper account of a suffering young woman suddenly reunited with her lost
lover, but actually is an adaptation of the Clementina episode from Richardson's
History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54). Ironically, the actual historical
woman from the newspaper died having never been reunited with her lover, while
the episode in Richardson looks toward a happy ending when Clementina accepts
the marriage proposal of Count Belvedere in lieu of her original suitor Sir Charles.
As d'Arnaud once observed—apparently unaware of the contradiction in the
various Clementina stories—"Richardson's immortal writings put the original
itself under our very eyes, not its representation" (qtd Castelvecchi 163). Once
again, we return to the continuously intersecting and overlapping nature of French
and British works of sensibility as they recur to a limited number of tropes and
concerns. -
Resoundingly popular throughout Italy and France,
Nina exploited the motif of a young, beautiful, and virtuous woman suffering
unjustly at the hands of a greedy aristocratic and patriarchal tyrant. Such a
theme was particularly popular given the thunderous reception of the translation
of Richardson's Pamela and its adaptation for the stage by Goldoni in 1753.
In fact, Goldoni was in the audience for a performance of Nina and observed
that "when the opera of Richard [Sedaine and Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-lion]
was withdrawn, it appeared difficult to supply its place with any thing which
would be equally successful. This miracle was affected by Nina, or the Distracted
Lover; and if the success of this piece did not surpass the preceding, it
at least equaled it . . . [because of the public's sympathy] for an unfortunate
being without crime and without reproach" (Memoirs II, 333). By the autumn
of 1788, Nina was being produced in Italy, thanks to an Italian translation
and libretto by Giuseppe Carpani, who staged the first Italian production in Monza.
Paisiello set this version to music and first performed his Nina on the
occasion of Queen Maria Carolina's visit to the new village of San Leucio, near
Caserta. -
Originally commissioned by King Ferdinand, the
opera was to be performed at the opening of Ferdinand's "model village," San Leucio,
a community of silk manufacturers who were to live in blissful harmony and productivity,
a sort of proto-communist haven. As Stefano Castelvecchi argues, the success of
the opera's premiere had everything to do with the presence of "a powerful female
figure, and Nina's role would be sung by celebrated prime donne for decades
to come" (134). The presence of Queen Maria Carolina, a strong female ruler of
an Italian city-state, even one the size of Naples, in conjunction with the persecuted
daughter-heroine of the piece, brought together two of the central tenets of sentimentality
as a political ethos: that is, the notion of the family as a microcosm of the
nation, and of the parent as a deity of the city-state that is finally understood
and experienced as a family. Such a topos highlights the sentimental political
ideology operating at the time: parents know best, and all subjects, like occasionally
wayward children, need to obey their strictures and prop up the structure that
was the patriarchal family and state. -
Castelvecchi has
provided the following summary of the source of Paisiello's Nina, the opera
of Marsollier and Dalayrac: Nina and Lindoro [Germeuil in the French
version] love each other, and are betrothed with the consent of Nina's father,
the Count. Yet, when Nina's hand is requested by a wealthier suitor, the Count
favours the latter, thus breaking the pact with Lindoro. A duel between the two
suitors ensues; when Nina sees her beloved lying in his own blood, and her father
asks her to accept as her spouse Lindoro's slayer, she loses her reason. The Count
cannot bear the sight of his daughter's sorry state: he leaves Nina in his country
estate, entrusting her to the benevolent care of the governess Susanna [Elise
in the French version.] Nina—having lost all memory of the recent, tragic
events—spends her days thinking of Lindoro and waiting for his return, surrounded
by the affection and compassion of servants and peasants. On one occasion she
falls into a delirium, and believes she sees Lindoro. Some time later the Count
comes back, stricken with sorrow and remorse; but his daughter does not recognize
him. When Lindoro, whom everyone thought dead, returns, the Count welcomes him
with open arms, and calls him son. At first, Nina does not recognize Lindoro.
Father and lover 'cure' Nina by showing her that Lindoro is back and still loves
her, and that she can marry her beloved with her father's consent. (Castelvecchi
138) -
Somewhat anti-climactically for modern tastes,
the opera stages only the events that occur after Nina's mental breakdown, providing
a long exposition that prepares us for the appearance of the mad Nina in the opera's
first scene. As Castelvecchi notes, such a structure erases "narrative complexity"
and instead puts its entire focus on the "emotions" of the principals, Nina, Lindoro,
and the Count. This technique, lending itself to hyperbolic displays of madness,
grief, confusion, and disorientation, became a staple of most eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century sentimental literature and theater. Such a device in
this particular instance suggests that Nina needs to be "read" in many
ways as tableaux vivant, with a few characters in a series of static almost
pantomimic poses, reciting their past actions in highly stylized, hyperbolic scenes.
And such a technique reveals how closely sentimental opera remained in touch with
its sources in the pantomimes of classical stories and fairy tales of the Boulevard
Theatre, which themselves had a fragmentary, abrupt, and incomplete quality (recall
Rousseau's Pygmalion). As melodrama relies on the mute hero or the wound
on the hand to identify the villain, sentimental works rely on the blush, the
sigh, the gasp, the interrupted speech, the telling silence. Sensibility as an
ideological discourse was predicated on the belief that the body spoke through
tears, through blood, through sweat, and that such primitive, physical markers
were more reliable than writing or print in conveying the truth of a person or
situation.[4] -
Further, it is necessary to emphasize that, unlike melodrama, which developed
slightly later, there is no active villain in this opera. The Count, having seen
the devastation that his greedy motives have had on his daughter's sanity, has
already been reformed by the time the action begins on stage. Throughout Nina's
interactions with Lindoro, whom she persists in not recognizing after his return,
she continues to privilege the sentiments above reason as a means to truth. Lindoro
returns to the village disguised as a shepherd and she fails to recognize him,
although noting something vaguely familiar about him. She questions him about
the dead Lindoro, and is confused that this shepherd knows so many details about
the dead Lindoro. It is only when Lindoro shows her a ring that he had given to
her as a souvenir of their "passionate embraces" and then kisses her that she
is able to remember and then recognize him. But then Lindoro pretends not to recognize
Nina, and she must produce a waistcoat that she had embroidered for him before
he is able to accept her identity (1790 version of the opera). In both versions
of the opera the emphasis is on the physical talismanic object (either ring or
waistcoat) that had been exchanged between the two lovers, foregrounding for the
audience the importance of the body's purchase of sentimental currency. The doubled
and quite extensive recognition scene between the lovers, such a staple of both
sentimental and melodramatic literature, occurs literally over the bodies of both
the heroine and Lindoro, or rather, over their bodies' remembrance and reenactment
of sexual passion and bodily emotion. -
I cite here the climactic
duet performed in Act II during the recognition scene in order to point out its
rhetorical investment in a pedagogy of virtue: Lindoro:
Then, Lindoro took your hand:
He tightly held it to his bosom,
And in this same place,
I pressed on you, O my treasure,
My kiss of
fire,
My soul—like this.
Nina:
You!...Heaven
. . . ah, what a moment!
That which I feel in my heart,
I would like
to explain to you,
Yet I know not how to explain it still. In
the Quattro that immediately follows, the Count and his servants observe:
Ah, it is taking a favorable course, oh God,
She is following the motives
of her heart.
Quiet: she speaks in the language of love. -
Immediately after the reconciliation of the lovers, Nina sings that she is
now able to "talk about virtue," and she does so by sitting down to be transformed
from the "mad" and suffering woman into the virtuous, controlled heroine. In order
to convey on a performative level the transformation of Nina's character from
"mad" to virtuous, the 1998 Zurich performance presents Nina (Cecilia Bartoli),
whose hair had been disheveled and unkempt during her "mad" scenes, now sitting
calmly while her maids carefully arrange her hair on her head. At exactly the
point at which her hair has been brought into control, Nina sings of "virtue."
We cannot know exactly how the performances of 1790 staged the same scene, but
it is instructive to compare Nina's hair scene with the presentation of Sterne's
Maria de Moulines, perhaps one of the most famous "mad" women in literature. In
his Tristam Shandy (1760-67), Sterne first presents Maria sitting on the
bank of a river with "her hair, all but two tresses, drawn up into a silk net,
with a few olive-leaves twisted a little fantastically on one side" (529). He
revisits Maria in his A Sentimental Journey (1768) presents Maria as driven
mad by the desertion of her lover as well as her beloved goat: "She was dress'd
in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose,
which before was twisted within a silk net." As Maria cries for the loss of her
father, lover, and goat, all of apparent value to her, the narrator wipes away
her tears "with my handkerchief. I then steep'd it in my own—and then in
hers—and then in mine—and then I wip'd hers again—and as I did
it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted
for from any combinations of matter and motion. I am positive I have a soul; nor
can all the books with which materialists have pester'd the world ever convince
me of the contrary" (Vol. II, ch. 64). This passage is both comic and pathetic,
ironic and sentimental in its presentation of the exchange and intermingling of
bodily fluids, all the while the narrative voice protests the claims of the material.
But it is the emphasis on Maria's hair, its earlier neat style contrasted to its
later chaotic appearance, that performs in a very physical way the transition
from sanity to madness, or, in Nina's case, from madness to sanity. The audiences
of late eighteenth-century Britain and France would certainly have recognized
in Nina's performative gestures the similarity of her conduct to that of Maria
de Moulines. -
But what I would call a pedagogy of virtue
also is enacted in the opera through the presence of the townspeople throughout
the action. The initial scene consists of a chorus of villagers retelling Nina's
tragic story, providing a very public explanation for her current, lamentable
state, which is also a very public spectacle: "Who can endure such pain? Our heart
cannot, and melts into tears" (I. 1). Like a Greek chorus, the townspeople of
Nina witness and are instructed by the series of sentimental scenes that
gradually enfold: the Count's frustrations, his kindness toward Nina, Nina's sufferings
and confusions as she continues to dispense the family jewels to a variety of
servants, the reappearance of the long-lost Lindoro, and finally the reunions
and reconciliations of Nina with her father and lover. Like a morality tale, the
opera performs a sort of pedagogy of public virtue for the townspeople, who are
accepted by Nina and her father as extended family throughout the action. -
The erasure of class differences is yet another ideological move that sentimental
opera makes, as it argues for the state as an extension of the family, thereby
eradicating the appearance of class inequalities (and highlighting the fact that
the original premiere of the Italian version of the opera occurred at a totally
constructed and artificial classless village of silk workers). An almost feudal
notion of the father-Count ruling over his daughter-subjects is perpetuated by
the opera, which performs its cultural work by suggesting that servants are just
working members of an extended and happy family. As Lawrence Stone has observed: In
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the restricted patriarchal
nuclear family was modified by the loss of a sense of trusteeship to the lineage,
by the decline of kinship and clientage, and by the concurrent rise of the power
of the state and the spread of Protestantism. The most important consequence was
the substitution of loyalty to state or sect for loyalty to lineage or patron.
This weakened the diffuse affective network of kin and neighbours which had surrounded
and sustained the loosely bound family structure, and tended to isolate the nuclear
core. (653) By continuing to foreground the chorus of peasants
as if they lived within the family and were actually members of the nuclear family,
Nina functions as a nostalgic discourse, persuading its audience members
that a radical social and domestic transformation has not occurred. -
The issue of marital choice is also emphasized in the opera as Nina, the beleagured
heroine, goes mad, much like the later Lucia di Lammermoor, when she is not allowed
to marry the man of her choice. The evolving nature of the increasingly popular
companionate marriage, as well as the rights of women, is certainly at issue here.
As Stone has noted, in France in the second half of the eighteenth
century there was some intensive propaganda, both in writing and in art, in favour
of the affective family type, free marriage choice, marital love, sexual fulfillment
within marriage—the alliance of Cupid and Hymen—and close parent-child
bonding . . . .Despite this, however, there is strong evidence that the practice
of marriage arranged by parents for material advantages was reinforced by the
legal code of both the Ancien Régime and Napoleon's Code Civil. (390) European
families at all class levels were undergoing tremendous changes in attitudes toward
love, lust, and the need to procreate, and Nina enacts that familial transformation
in a highly stylized, ritualistic manner for its audience. The opera also stages
the vexed and contentious issue of the treatment of the insane by presenting a
series of "mad scenes" in which Nina gives away family jewels to a variety of
servants. We can recall here Foucault's discussion of the "disciplinary" society
and the increased need during this period to define insanity in order to institutionalize
it. But we can also recall that what Markley calls a "theatrics of sentimentality"
relies on the actions of upper-class characters who must manifest signs of sentimental
distress in order to display their moral worthiness, their right to possess the
class status and privileges that they inherited at birth (220). By dispensing
the family jewels, Nina in effect is performing her sentimental guilt, her rejection
of her father's status, and her heightened awareness of class inequities. -
But these serious issues dissolve as the Count, motivated by simple and misguided
greed, is reformed by witnessing the sufferings of his daughter and subjects.
Later we are informed that the bloody duel which had precipitated Nina's mental
crisis did not actually result in Lindorno's death, but only his wounding, and
the piece ends happily, one might say magically, for all concerned. Given the
date of this opera's performance in Italy, 1789, the political implications could
not have been lost on a population that itself was agitating for reform. The "happy
ending" of this opera occurs not because the audience wanted to believe that they
too lived in a nostalgic political-state that functioned as a family, but because
the sentimental ethos demands it. In the sentimental universe, virtue became the
most highly valued quality or characteristic of the bourgeois, secularized community,
because this is clearly a public sphere in which private values must accommodate
public sentiments just as public displays of emotions must conform to the reality
of private relationships. III The
transgressive element in music is its nomadic ability to attach itself to, and
become part of, social formations, to vary its articulations and rhetoric depending
on the occasion as well as the audience, plus the power and the gender situations
in which it takes place.
—Edward Said, 70
-
During the eighteenth century the British stage, like the French, was flooded
with works that employed sentimental categories clearly derived from Samuel Richardson's
tremendously popular and influential novels Clarissa and Pamela.
The Irish playwright Issac Bickerstaffe (1733-?1812), for instance, adapted Pamela
as a light comic opera with music by Samuel Arnold in 1765. With 35 performances
at Covent Garden, Bickerstaffe's Maid of the Mill had to be "divested of
the coarse scenes and indecency of the original" (Kavanaugh, 365), but it was
so popular that it was credited with bringing comic opera back into popularity
in London after The Beggar's Opera fell out of fashion. After the importation
and adaptation of Pixerecourt's Coelina onto the London stage by Holcroft
in 1801, however, sentimental drama veers off to become melodrama, a distinctly
hybrid genre, one that splits tragedy and comedy into something that we would
recognize today as tragicomedy, an amalgam of "tears and smiles," an uncomfortable
mixture of bathos and pathos. [5]
The conventions of sentimentality are a curious mixture, then, of musical forms,
literary genres, and conservative political and social sympathies all bound up
in a strikingly visual manner, suggesting the high-toned, moral origins of the
genre. What I am calling the sentimental ethos is an ethical system that seeks
to shore up the faltering claims of the pater-familias, primarily through
exerting control of the family's bloodlines, and reifying the daughter's choice
of a husband (in conformity with the father's wishes). In sentimental operas and
fictions the dominant threat is the unsuitable secret marriage, the disputed inheritance,
or the seduction plot, while in gothic works dynastic, public, political issues
figure more prominently. -
But why did sentimental opera
and fiction become so popular before, during, and after the French Revolution,
and what does such a cultural phenomenon reveal about the vexed and ambivalent
cultural relationship between France and England during this period? In an attempt
to answer those two questions I have briefly tried to suggest the cultural fluidity
of the sentimental as a genre and pointed to the increasing interaction between
librettists, composers and artists of the two countries who "borrowed" ideas,
ideologies, acting styles, and even scripts and libretti from each other. Another
important constituent of the genre's success was how audience dynamics changed,
because after the Revolution the French audience started to resemble the British
tradition of a diversified audience. With working citizens increasingly attending
the theater, and with Shakespeare's growing popularity in France, spectators'
tastes were altered, and this called for a theatrical experience full of emotional
appeal and involvement. In opposition to theatrical performances that adhered
to the Aristotelian, classical three-unities rule of forbidding actions on stage,
this new audience was interested in action-packed scenarios and rapidly developing
intrigues rather than the slow building tableaux that had been popular
earlier. Even though some theater critics considered the new theater to be a blatant
pandering to the lowest elements, with its heavy reliance on grotesque prison
scenes, dramatic escapes, wild crowd scenes, and the simplistic triumph of the
just over the unjust, the public that sought entertainment rather than edification
nevertheless expected to witness recognizable personal experiences that could
serve as a means to self-knowledge (Kennedy 19-21). Sentimental operas developed,
then, within the general categories of opera semiseria, or opéra comique.
Opera semiseria, combining comic and horrible events with both aristocratic
and lower-class characters, was well suited to the sentimentality of the period.
Ironically, in a manner reminiscent of Sade, these operas specialized in juxtaposing
the pathetic with the appalling without having to carry through the action to
a tragic conclusion. Ferdinando Paër (1771-1839), an Italian who spent most of
his productive life in Germany and France, is remembered today as one of the major
practitioners of opera semiseria. -
Moving Shakespeare's
royal personages out of the palace and into domestic hearth and home was actually
the major strategy of Amelia Opie when she rewrote the Lear story as The
Father and Daughter. Coincidentally, Opie shared with David Garrick a distinct
fascination with visiting insane asylums. We are told by her biographer that when
she was not attending murder trials, she was visiting insane asylums in Norwich
and London. [6]
An astute student of human passions in extreme situations, her sentimental novella
traces the history of the motherless Agnes and her devoted father. Adored by her
successful father and worshiped by the community, Agnes falls prey to a seducer,
who persuades her to elope with him. Thinking they are on their way to be married
in London, Agnes is pregnant before she knows it, and her lover has disappeared
in order to marry—at the request of his corrupt aristocrat father—a
woman with a larger estate. Thus far, the plot is a virtual copy of Nina,
with the heroine Agnes being replaced in the affections of her lover by a wealthier
woman, thus doubling the victimization of the damsel in distress. Seduced by a
wealthy aristocratic man, Agnes is powerless against his family, reminding us
of Julie Ellison's observation, that "as sensibility's social base becomes broader,
its subject paradoxically becomes social inequality. Sensibility increasingly
is defined by the consciousness of a power difference between the agent and the
object of sympathy" (18). Class inequities provoke our sympathy for Agnes, but
the father's humiliation stirred the strongest emotions in Opie's readers. The
loss of his daughter's virginity as a piece of valuable property that the father
himself rightly possessed was what most incensed the contemporary male readers
of this text. -
The climactic recognition scene between
father and daughter occurs after Agnes returns with her son Edward to her birthplace,
and encounters a chained madman roving around in the woods, claiming that he is
there to visit his daughter's grave: At the name of 'father,' the
poor maniac started, and gazed on her earnestly, with savage wildness, while his
whole frame became convulsed; and rudely disengaging himself from her embrace,
he ran from her a few paces, and then dashed himself on the ground in all the
violence of frenzy. He raved, he tore his hair; he screamed and uttered the most
dreadful execrations; and with his teeth shut and his hands clenched, he repeated
the word father, and said the name was mockery to him (93). The
hyperbole here, the frenzy, the gnashing of teeth and violence of display, all
of these actions code emotional excess as dangerous, insane, and unacceptable
behaviors in the new bourgeois British citizen. And to cause such extravagance
of feeling in another person, and that person being one's father, is an unforgivable
sin in the new middle-class emotional economy. Agnes must pay for her error and
she does so promptly: as her father gazes on her with "inquiring and mournful
looks," Agnes begins to cry, "tears once more found their way, and relieved her
bursting brain, while, seizing her father's hand, she pressed it with frantic
emotion to her lips" (94). The father is led by Agnes to shelter in an insane
asylum that he himself built in his prosperous days, before the ruination of his
business which was brought about by his depression over his daughter's disastrous
elopement. Here Agnes patiently serves as his attendant, while he spends his days
sketching charcoal drawings of her tomb on his wall. His madness consists in telling
Agnes that his daughter—standing in front of him—is dead. After seven
years of such penance, Agnes is rewarded finally with her father's recognition
of her, quickly followed by the father's death and then Agnes'. They are ultimately
buried together in the same grave. -
The climactic pathetic
scene, in which father and daughter both recognize each other for the first time
since her fall and the last time before both of their deaths, is dramatically
framed by Opie with the use of an aria adapted from Handel's oratorio Deborah,
and transformed into a popular parlor song which the father and daughter sing
to each other about paternal love and hope (113). The use of the aria at this
particular point in the novella is telling, for what it suggests is that at points
of high emotional intensity we turn to staged recitals of our feelings, hence
the distancing effect of the Handel piece at the precise moment when the emotional
intensity overwhelms both father and daughter. -
The libretto
for the Handel oratorio was written by Samuel Humphreys and was based on the gruesome
story of Jael in the Old Testament's Book of Judges, chapter four. The Israelites,
who have been under captivity for the past twenty years, have been told by the
prophetess Deborah that Sisera, the Canaanite commander, would be assassinated
by a woman. After the battle in which the Israelites are victorious, Sisera flees
the battlefield and seeks sanctuary in the tent of Jael, wife of Heber. Jael accommodates
him, but while Sisera sleeps she nails his head to the ground with a tent peg.
The challenge for the librettist was to make this violent murder demonstrate the
goodness of God. -
The passage that is cited by Opie comes
in Act 3, scene 2: Abinoam [the father's] recitative:
My prayers are heard, the blessings of this day
All my past cares and anguish
well repay;
The soldiers to each other tell
My Barak has performed his
duty well.
Barak [the son]:
My honored father!
Abinoam:
O my son, my son,
Well has thy youth the race of honor
run.
Abinoam's air:
Tears, such as tender fathers shed,
Warm from my aged eyes descend,
For joy to think, when I am dead,
My
son shall have mankind his friend. -
In E flat
major, the air adds the distinctive color of two solo flutes to soft strings and
a pair of organs. This aria is generally considered a welcome moment of humanity
in a relentlessly nationalistic, bellicose libretto, and like other such airs
written by Handel, an accolade to good sons by loving fathers, beautifully composed,
simple, lyrical, a touching rich bass aria considered by Winton Dean to be "as
beautiful as anything of its length (18 bars) in Handel's work." Dean points out
that it was adapted from an earlier Chandos Anthem, but in this version the Israelite
father weeps for joy in the knowledge that his son's future fame is assured because
of his success in battle (228). Most significantly, however, Deborah, like
Lear, presents an earlier patriarchal period of masculine warfare and domination
that is actually sustained by the presence and power of women. Not seen as daughters
or even wives, the women in this biblical narrative are either prophets or assassins.
-
Deborah was performed seven times in 1733, and
then revived again ten times over the next 15 years. Dean tells us that the oratorio
was revived many times in the twenty years after Handel's death (1759-79). We
might legitimately ask, however, how would Opie know the aria if the oratorio
had not been performed since 1779, at which time she would have been only ten
years old? And how would she even have had the opportunity to see one of the revivals
if she did not travel to London until she was an adult? Interestingly, Dean claims
that "there is no record of favourite songs [from the oratorio] being sung at
concerts" (237), which suggests that the air could not have circulated as a publicly-performed
concert song during the period. But such airs did not need large forces to perform,
so could become parlor songs and therefore had wide popular distribution in private,
home performances. I think that we have to assume that the aria would have been
familiar enough to Opie and other middle-class Britons to allow her to quote lines
from the piece in her 1801 novella. Strongly melodic and very direct in its emotions,
the airs were the most popular and accessible music in Handel's oratorios and
contributed to the perception that the biblical oratorios were actually sentimental
dramas and nationalist panaceas. One could argue, in fact, that Opie's deployment
of Handel stands as the crucial mediating moment between a print-based economy
and a competing oral-based culture. In the emerging market for printed sheet music
to be performed in the home, we can glimpse how print and performance culture
began operating in close conjunction with one another. -
The
use of the Handel piece further prepares us for Ferdinando Paër's later adaptation
of the novella into an opera he entitled Agnese (1809), an opera that follows
in almost virtual detail its source material in Opie, although the action is set
in Italy and the opera has a happy ending, with Agnese marrying Ernesto and moving
in with her suddenly recovered father. Like Nina, Agnese centers
on insanity caused within the family by the greed or lust of one family member,
setting off an illness that metaphorically suggests the interconnectedness of
all members within the familial circle. In Nina the daughter magically
regains her sanity and the opera can conclude happily in marriage, but in Opie's
novella the father gains his sanity only long enough to recognize the horror of
his daughter's situation, and to die almost immediately as a result. Clearly,
Paër did not want to present such a conclusion to his operatic adaptation, so,
like Nahum Tate revising Shakespeare's Lear, he tidied up the story and
presented the happy ending that he knew his audience would demand. -
Even so, his light touch did not please everyone in the audience. In his Life
of Rossini, Stendhal recorded his disgusted reaction to seeing a performance
of Paër's Agnese: "Even the remarkable popularity of the opera cannot shake
my conviction that it is profoundly wrong for art to deal with purely horrifying
subjects. The madness of Shakespeare's Lear is made tolerable by the most touching
devotion of his daughter Cordelia; but I personally feel that there is nothing
to redeem the ghastly and pitiable condition of the heroine's father in Agnese"...[which]
has always remained with me as a thoroughly disagreeable memory" (qtd. Commons). -
Agnese is, apart from its conclusion, an almost literal adaptation of
the Opie novella, with Luigi Buonavoglia writing the libretto and adding for comic
relief the character of the director of the insane asylum, who treats the inmates
as laughable and easily cured if they would just stop indulging in their extreme
emotional responses to a variety of life's typical events. Agnese was the
first opera to take its audience literally into a lunatic asylum and to depict
in almost clinical detail the behavior of a madman. Was its blatant depiction
of insanity a cheap attempt to exploit the sensibility of the era? Certainly visits
to observe the inmates of Bedlam had become a sort of sport for people like Garrick
and Opie, not to mention the general bourgeois population. -
Paër, however, transforms the Handel aria, "Tears, such as tender fathers shed,"
and instead has Agnese play the harp and sing a favorite song so that her father
will finally recognize her through her voice. And instead of using the Handel
piece, taken as it was from a gruesome Old Testament story, Paër has Agnese sing
a decidedly New Testament lament that figures the daughter as a lost lamb seeking
for her father, the good shepherd: "If the lost lamb/Finds her good shepherd once
more,/Grief quickly/Changes to joy;/With her harmonious bleating/She sets the
hill ringing;/Nor from her face could you tell/How dismayed she has been./So to
her father/Return Agnese." The change in imagery is significant, in that the Old
Testament patriarch is replaced in Paër by the father as a forgiving Christ-figure,
a shepherd seeking his lost lambs, not a vengeful diety. -
Although composed in 1809, Paër's Agnese was not performed in London
until 1817, and was unfortunately competing directly with Don Giovanni
that particular season. Despite a fine production and enthusiastic reviews, the
opera only had five performances before it was suspended "on account of some similitude
which was thought to exist between the situation of Hubert [the father's insanity]
and that of his majesty [George III]" (qtd in Fenner, 131). But what is most striking
about the use of Handel in Opie and later in the popular melodramas writtten by
Marie Therese Kemble in 1815 (Smiles and Tears; or, The Widow's Stratagem)
and Thomas Moncrieff in 1820 (The Lear of Private Life, or the father and daughter),
is that the music is used in all of these pieces at what we would recognize as
the "moment of desire" in the text. The aria is used to frame what I would identify
as the oedipal crisis of the narrative: the moment at which the father struggles
to recognize his daughter as a sexual woman, an individual who has defied him
and allowed herself to enter into an illicit passion with a seducer who has no
intention of making her his wife. -
The recognition scene
is so painful to the father that he distances it by performing its pain in a stylized,
almost ritualized manner, couching it in distinctly Old Testament biblical imagery.
Such a move emphasizes Opie's emotional pathos in order to suggest that the sexual
disgrace of the daughter is equivalent to the warfare between rival Old Testament
tribes. To lose one's virginity is tantamount to losing national honor and one's
standing as God's chosen people. I am reminded here of Zizek's response to the
question, why do we listen to music? His answer is: "in order to avoid the horror
of the encounter of the voice qua object. What Rilke said for beauty goes also
for music: it is a lure, a screen, the last curtain, which protects us from directly
confronting the horror of the (vocal) object....voice does not simply persist
at a different level with regard to what we see, it rather points toward a gap
in the field of the visible, toward the dimension of what eludes our gaze. In
other words, their relationship is mediated by an impossibility: ultimately,
we hear things because we cannot see everything" (93). Although this is obviously
a large topic that needs further development in a larger venue, I would claim
that what the music screens from view is the father's fantasized vision of his
daughter in the sexual act. The music blocks, in other words, a reversed primal
scene so that what cannot be imagined or viewed by the culture at large is the
daughter's seduction, the daughter's uncontrolled sexuality. -
What I am suggesting is that Handel's oratorios were secularized when his arias
were sung as popular parlor songs and eventually made their way into the sentimental
novels of the day, as emotional touchstones of sorts. But Lear and indeed
all of Shakespeare's dramas were also domesticated so that the national and dynastic
issues that Shakespeare explored became transformed into popular novels and dramas
that moved the action from the public to the private realm. The shifts that we
see in the secularization and domestication of high cultural artifacts to popular
ones says a good deal about the construction of the national as well as the romantic
ethos in this period. I think therefore I am seems to have been transformed to
I cry therefore I am, or I suffer therefore I am, or I am guilty and in pain therefore
I am. Provoking intense suffering and displaying that suffering in stylized, almost
ritualized ways became the dominant mode for this culture to define personal and
civic virtue, as well as universalized humanity. Citizens of Britain were able
to recognize their shared humanity—their shared "Britishness"—only
when they could see demonstrated intense guilt about failed filial duty, intense
shame about sexual license, and intense grief about causing madness or suffering
in one's family members. IVMusic
therefore quite literally fills a social space, and it does so by elaborating
the ideas of authority and social hierarchy directly connected to a dominant establishment
imagined as actually presiding over the work.
—Edward Said,
64
-
What ideological role did sentimental operas and fictions
play, then, in the evolution of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
European culture? I would contend that these works, like all cultural discourses,
served a bifurcated ideological function, both liberal and conservative causes.
To some extent dramas and operas—like their classical Greek sources—enact
ancient fertility rituals, complete with symbolic castrations (mutes) and besieged
virgins, in order to perform a quasi-religious function in an increasingly secular
society. Stories from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Greek or Roman mythology were
no longer presented as models to a population that clamored for tales of secular
heroism, a populace that was now drawn to psychological dramas rather than depictions
of spiritual journeys. The poetic psychomachias of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth and
Coleridge found their theatrical equivalents in the dramatic agonies of suffering
daughters and guilt-ridden fathers, who in turn were metaphorical equivalents
to a British populace ruled by a periodically insane King. As Fredric Jameson
notes, the "political unconscious" (passim) of a nation is revealed in
its symbolic enactments of a social narrative, and the master narrative of this
particular society was repression, long-suffering, and acceptance of a flawed
political system that was preferred over the chaos that could result from revolution.
Romantic drama spoke to the "political unconscious" of bourgeois Britons because
it enacted their own "mixed" and ambiguous feelings toward an insane ruler and
a society committed finally to incremental change. -
So
we might ask, what does it mean that both French and British citizens flocked
to a number of largely forgotten operas before, during, and after the French Revolution?
What was at stake in staging and viewing the performances? As I have suggested,
the opera and its mutations/manifestations embodied a public space in which French
and British citizens could vicariously experience the threats of violent political,
social, and economic revolution. But ultimately the operas were radically nationalistic
for each nation, even though, ironically, they used the same tropes and told the
same narratives. Each country was trying to use the theater and the opera house
to impose a form of nationalism on its emerging bourgeois populace. As Gerald
Newman observes, Britain sought to see itself and its citizens in national and
secular terms rather than in religious or tribal ones during the mid-eighteenth-century.
This shift was made possible, according to Newman, because of cultural rather
than political activity (56). Benedict Anderson has also discussed the growth
of secularism as allowing for a new sort of "imagined community," a country with
a "national imagination" that would replace the religious construction of the
medieval and renaissance communities (6; 36). There is no question that the institutionalization
of the sentimental, hybridized opera during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was a central development in the growth of the new British and to some
extent the French "national imagination." |
