-
In 1706 the English critic John Dennis published an
essay, "Upon the Opera's after the Italian Manner,
Which Are About to be Establish'd on the English Stage:
With Some Reflections on the Damage They May Bring to
the Public" (Hooker 382-93). Dennis argued that the
Italian operas' privileging of sound over sense was a
slippery slope leading to cultural decline. He believed
that opera threatened the implicitly masculine
tradition of British drama, and that music was
"effeminate" and hence threatening to cultural order,
especially to the hierarchies of social class and
gender. In fact, he concluded, "Nothing is so Gothick
as an Opera" (391-92). Dennis was using "Gothick" in
its sense of "barbarous." Certainly by its very nature
opera subverts the rational precepts that ordinarily
organize our conscious sense of reality. Opera invites
us into a world where everyone sings rather than
speaking, and (in eighteenth-century opera
seria) repeatedly tells us tales of gods and heroes
derived from Classical mythology and Italian
Renaissance romances. From Dennis's perspective, the
London invasion of this Italian art form was equivalent
to the Goths at the gates of Rome.
-
The "Gothic" style of literature emerging in English
less than a century later seemed equally deleterious to
those wishing to maintain standards. Very little has
been written about a possible link between opera and
Horace Walpole's extravagant and peculiar Castle of
Otranto, but the index to the Yale Walpole
Correspondence includes almost six hundred
references to opera. Furthermore from their creators'
perspectives, both opera and the literary Gothic were
designed or defended as genres intended to repair a
perceived cultural loss. In 1590's Florence, a group of
intellectuals who called themselves "The Camerata"
sought to restore that unity of words and music once
exemplified, they believed, by the performance
practices of ancient Greek tragedy. In the second
preface to The Castle of Otranto, Walpole
asserted that "the great resources of fancy have been
dammed up by a strict adherence to common life," a dam
that presumably might be breeched by "Gothic Story"
(7). And as Herbert Lindenberger has observed, opera
and the Gothic are the two modes of art that have
maintained what he calls "the high style" throughout
the last two centuries (167). If opera is inherently
"Gothick," then the writing we call "Gothic" is also
distinctly "operatic": not only "extravagant," but
"flagrantly artificial," "flamboyant," "passionate,"
"irrational," and "exotic."
-
I have argued elsewhere that Horace Walpole's
Strawberry Hill and the novel it inspired are indebted
to the aesthetics of eighteenth-century Italian
opera seria (Williams 104-118). I would further
argue that by means of Otranto "the operatic"
migrated into English literature, influencing works we
now call "Romantic." But as the literary Gothic
influenced Romanticism and opera itself became
"Romantic" at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the
relationship between them became increasingly
complicated. Many librettos were based on literary
sources that had at least some Gothic elements.[1]
But the degree of such influence depends on how broadly
one defines "Gothic." If we think of "Gothic" as
primarily "medieval," then Wagner's appropriation of
history, legend, and folklore in The Flying
Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Tristan
und Isolde might qualify as "Gothic operas."
Sometimes influence works in the other direction;
operas can become more "Gothic" for operatic, not
literary, reasons. Donizetti's Lucia di
Lammermoor (1835) is arguably the only Gothic opera
firmly in the canon; it has a haunted fountain, a
tragic family conflict, and a heroine driven to murder
and madness. Ironically, however, Lucia's most
"Gothic" episode, the heroine's mad scene, does not
occur in Scott's novel. The librettist Cammarano gave
Lucia a mad scene because by the early nineteenth
century, it had already become conventional in Italian
opera as a show-piece for the soprano. Ironically, when
Scott's inarticulate Lucy becomes "Lucia," she is most
memorable in her inarticulate madness. There are also a
handful of surviving works drawn from unquestionably
Gothic texts, such as Heinrich Marschner's Der
Vampyr (1828) based on Polidori's "The Vampyre"
(1819).[2]
-
But Italian bel canto and late
eighteenth-century Gothic fiction have one important
quality in common; each transposes "operatic" extremes
of artificiality and emotional intensity into the world
of bourgeois family romance. The passions and
situations are extreme, but they are played out within
the structure and constraints of the patriarchal
family. The plots concern anxieties about the rightful
heir, the proper inheritance, and the compulsion to
enlarge family fortunes through advantageous marriages,
no matter how the parties directly involved might feel.
The most explicitly "Gothic" opera composed in the
nineteenth century was, however, a failure. Gounod and
Scribe/Delavigne's La Nonne sanglante was based
on the "Bleeding Nun" episode in M.G. Lewis's The
Monk (1796). It closed after eleven performances in
1854 and has never been revived.[3]
As we shall see, the production was fraught with
practical problems. I also want to consider, however,
whether this failure is also rooted in its
fundamentally Gothic source. Was the flagrantly Gothic
text fundamentally unsuited to the (unconscious) needs
of a mid-nineteenth-century libretto?
-
M.G. Lewis's episode of the Bleeding Nun serves as a
counterpoint to his master narrative involving the
seduction and betrayal of the virtuous monk Ambrosio.
It concerns a woman who also betrays her religious vows
and murders the lover for whom she has broken them. Her
guilt is signified by her blood-stained habit. In this
tale, Don Raymond makes a terrible mistake. A
rationalist who does not believe in ghosts, he devises
a scheme whereby he may elope with his beloved Agnes,
whose cruel and greedy aunt Rodolpha has forbidden
their marriage. According to local superstition, every
five years on May 5 at one hour after midnight, the
specter of "The Bleeding Nun" descends from the tower
and leaves the castle, carrying a dagger and a lamp.
That night the servants leave the gates of the castle
open to facilitate her passage. Raymond suggests that
Agnes disguise herself as the Nun so that the two of
them can elope.
-
In the dead of night on May 5, Raymond watches as
the nun appears. He thinks to himself that her disguise
seems remarkably authentic. They get into his carriage
and drive away, exchanging vows of eternal
fidelity:
In my veins while blood shall roll,
Thou art mine!
I am thine!
Thine my body! thine my soul! (Lewis 156).
Suddenly a storm comes up and the carriage is
wrecked. When Raymond regains consciousness, his
"bride" has vanished. To his horror, he realizes that
he has accidently exchanged vows with the ghost
herself. She visits him every midnight, to the
considerable detriment of his health and happiness.
Eventually, the Wandering Jew intervenes. He is able to
speak with her and learns that the Nun was Raymond's
distant relation, Beatrice de las Cisternas, who had
lived a hundred years ago. She wants a proper grave for
her unburied bones, and Raymond, being a member of the
family, is the person to bury them. Thus he frees
himself from the haunting apparition. Meanwhile the
unfortunate Agnes is left behind and forced to take the
veil. Like Beatrice, however, she too breaks her vows,
meeting Raymond secretly and becoming pregnant. When
this sin is discovered, she is imprisoned in a vault of
her convent by the cruel and vindictive abbess. Agnes
gives birth to an infant, who soon dies. She goes mad,
but is eventually rescued. She recovers her sanity and
marries Raymond.
-
Lewis's novel was translated into French a year
after it was published in England, and translated again
in the 1840's. Curiously, a popular play called La
Nonne sanglante by Anicet Bourgeois and Jacques
Maillan also enjoyed considerable success in France
during the 1830's. The play shares virtually nothing
with Lewis's episode except its evocative
title.[4]
It would, however, inspire Cammarano's Maria de
Rudenz, composed by Donizetti and premiered at La
Fenice in 1838.[5]
The Gounod libretto, written by Eugène Scribe
and Germain Delavigne is, however, directly based on
Lewis's novel.
-
Scribe and Delavigne changed Lewis's narrative
substantially. They moved the action from
eighteenth-century Germany to eleventh-century Bohemia,
and the deus ex machina is no longer the
supernatural Wandering Jew but a historical figure,
Peter the Hermit. The opera opens on a scene of civil
war. Baron Luddorf and Count Moldaw are fighting each
other. Castle Moldaw is in flames, and Peter the Hermit
exhorts the warring parties to leave aside their strife
to unite in a crusade against the infidels. When the
two families agree to a truce, Peter demands that it be
affirmed by the marriage of Agnès, daughter of
Baron Moldaw, to Count Luddorf's older son. He does not
know that she is already in love with the younger son
Rodolphe, and when he discovers the young man's
feelings, he unsympathetically advises him that "One
can be strong in suffering if he suffers for his
country" (Act 1, scene 2). Thus the couple plan to
elope, with consequences like those in Lewis's
novel.
-
Having sworn his unfortunate vow during the
misdirected elopement, Rodolphe, like Lewis's Raymond,
is visited every midnight by the Nun, who reminds him
that he has sworn eternal devotion to her. She tells
him that twenty years previously she had been in love,
but her lover had gone to war. Told that he had been
killed in battle, she takes the veil in despair, only
to learn that her beloved is not only still alive, but
intending to marry someone else. She reminds him of
their love and his vows to her. In order to spare
himself "these complaints" (her words), he murders
her.
-
The Bleeding Nun tells Rodolphe that the death of
her murderer is the price of his freedom. He promises
to avenge her. Meanwhile, Rodolphe is told that he may
marry Agnes because his older brother Theodore has been
killed in battle. At the ceremony, however, the Nun
appears (visible to him alone) and identifies his own
father as the murderer. Horrified, Rodolphe realizes
that now he again cannot marry his beloved. The
families are furious at this apparent betrayal and
intend to kill him. At the Nun's tomb (in a site
sauvage near Peter's hermitage), Luddorf overhears
his son's conversation with Agnès, learning that
he knows his guilty secret. Seized by remorse, he
impulsively decides take his son's place, mortally
wounded by the soldiers pursuing Rodolphe. Dying, he
begs forgiveness at the Nun's tomb. Her ghost appears,
forgiving him and declaring that God will pardon them
and reunite them in death. The two ascend to heaven,
accompanied by a chorus praising divine mercy:
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O clémence ineffable!
|
Oh ineffable mercy!
|
|
Daigne les accueillir. . .
|
May you welcome them. . .
|
|
La vertu du coupable
|
The grace of the guilty
|
|
Est dans le repentir.
|
Is in repentance.
|
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(Act V, scene 4)
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* * *
-
Gounod himself had virtually nothing to say about
this early effort in his Memoirs d'un artiste.
Kerry Murphy, editor of Charles Gounod: La Nonne
sanglante. Dossier de presse parisienne, writes
that in financial terms the opera was doing well.
Several critics wrote approvingly of the theatrical
spectacle offered by La Nonne, and commented
with equal favor about Gounod's music. None of the
contemporary reviewers seem to have suspected that the
opera was about to close forever. But several different
practical problems may have damaged the opera. Only one
member of the cast was particularly distinguished, at
least important enough to have an entry in The New
Grove: that is the tenor Louis Guéymard, who
created the role of Rodolphe.[6]
From the singer's perspective the opera was also
unsatisfying. The role of Rodolphe is long and taxing;
Peter the Hermit virtually disappears after Act 1. The
soubrette Agnès has no aria, while Urbain the
page gets two. Furthermore the Opéra management
was changed in the midst of the of the performances.
Steven Hubner writes that the new manager may have
cancelled La Nonne "in order to demonstrate a
radical change of course at the beginning of his
tenure" (41-42).
-
The most comprehensive discussion of La Nonne
in English is Andrew Gann's essay, "Théophile
Gautier, Charles Gounod and the Massacre of La Nonne
sanglante." He also speculates that there may be
another element in the mix of unfortunate
circumstances: prima donna politics. In the months
leading up to the premiere, Gautier had been
consistently praising in the popular press the woman
cast to sing Agnès the Nun. Her name was Palmyre
Wertheimber, a young soprano who had recently begun to
have some success on the opera stage, having won some
prizes and created a role at the Opéra
Comique.[7]
She is reported to have had a Callas-like ability to
act that equaled her voice. Gautier wrote:
La nonne sanglante de M. Gounod, fournira
bientôt à Mlle. Weirteimber l'occasion
de se montrer dans un rôle créé
pour elle et avec sa propre originalité
[M. Gounod's La nonne sanglante will soon
furnish Mlle. Wertheimber an opportunity to appear in
a role created for her and with its own originality.]
(Gann, 58)
Later he remarked:
La première représentation de La
Nonne sanglante de M. Charles Gounod, aura lieu
très prochainement; Nous regrettons bien
sincèrement que le rôle confié
à Mlle Wertheimber ne soit pas à la
hauteur du talent si correct et si distingué
de cette jeune artiste.
[The first performance of M. Charles Gounod's La
Nonne sanglante will take place soon. We
sincerely regret that the role assigned to Mlle.
Wertheimber will not be worthy of this young artist's
disciplined and distinguished talent.] (Gann 52)
According to Gann, Gautier's interest in Mlle.
Wertheimber may have been more than merely musical. In
any event her debut at the Opéra was not to be a
fortunate one. For it appears that there was another
avatar of Callas already there. Her name was Sophie
Cruvelli, who despite her Italian name was in fact a
German who sang the French repertoire. She had been
offered the role of the Nun in January of 1854 and
turned it down. She left Paris until after La
Nonne closed. She returned and resumed singing
leading roles at the Opéra. Agnès the
Bleeding Nun marked the virtual end of Palmyre
Wertheimber's Paris career. She did not return until
many years later, when her voice was already in
decline.
* * *
-
Scribe and Delavigne probably chose Lewis's story as
the basis for a Grand Opera because it seemed to offer
promising material for this genre so dominant in
mid-century France. This type evolved during the 1830's
and 1840's. The most successful examples, with all of
which Scribe was involved, include Meyerbeer's
Robert le diable (1831) Les Huguenots
(1836), and Halévy's La Juive (1835).
Audiences expected five acts, at least one ballet, and
numerous theatrical spectacles. Productions gave ample
opportunities to show off the advanced technical
capacities of the Paris Opéra stage. The plots
of Grand Opera, rather than evoking the Classical myths
and Italian romances favored by Baroque librettists,
were usually set in the distant but historical past,
frequently the middle ages, and sometimes incorporated
the supernatural. Thus Gothic fictions and librettos
for Grand Opera sometimes treated the same kind of
material. Furthermore, like the Gothic, Grand Opera had
a political inflection.
-
This operatic genre played a complex role in French
public life in the middle of the nineteenth
century.[8]
Until the Revolution, opera in France had been a
spectacle closely associated with the royal court, a
means of displaying the monarch's wealth and power. But
the institution of a new republic after Napoleon's fall
made the public function of opera more ambiguous. As
Jane Fulcher shows in her book, The Nation's Image:
French grand opera as politics and politicized art,
the development of Grand Opera effected a compromise
between the power of public spectacles and the dangers
of displaying events too overtly political. Since early
Gothic fiction also quite frequently had a political
sub-text, the theme of patriotic nationalism that
Scribe and Delavigne superimposed on Lewis's Gothic
horror story is certainly not unexpected and not
necessarily inappropriate to the Gothic itself. (As
James Watt suggests, late eighteenth-century Gothics
that emphasized a supposed history rather than the
fantastic horror story also had a political purpose:
"the loyalist Gothic romance" implicitly extols
"traditional" British virtues and values, those of the
conservative establishment.) (Watt 42-69).
-
Just as Gothic fiction tended toward sensational
episodes designed to harry the reader's sensibilities,
Grand Opera relished the spectacular scene. In writing
La Nonne, Scribe and Delavigne found ready
excuses for new Gothic spectacles in their libretto.
Act 2, scene 6 must have been sensationally effective.
It begins with an encounter between Rodolfe and the
Bleeding Nun, in which she reminds him of his vow,
"Toujours à moi!" She takes him by the
hand. ("How cold your hand is," he exclaims,
unconsciously foreshadowing another and more familiar
Rudolpho). Then, to quote the stage directions:
"Lightening flashes, the thunder rolls, and one hears
the "mugissements" of hell.
"Mugissements" may describe the sounds made by
bulls, the wind, horns, sirens. (I chose "Infernal
howlings.") The Nun drags Rodolphe off, stage right.
Then the stage directions continue:
The stage is covered with clouds. Infernal music is
heard. Then the scene changes, presenting the ruins
of a Gothic castle, a great hall, in which the doors
and Gothic windows are half destroyed. In the middle
of the stage is a vast table of stone, and stone
seats that are are covered with ivy and wild plants.
The moonlight reveals, at the back of the stage, a
hermitage on the top of a rocky cliff.
Rodolphe and his page Urbain enter. The latter,
seeing the hermitage, decides to seek Peter the Hermit,
leaving Rodolphe alone. He muses that here in this
ruined castle his ancestor, also named Rodolphe, had
once lived. Then another transformation occurs:
The moon disappears. The doors and windows in the
ruin regain their form and their elegance. The ruined
stone table changes into a vast one covered with
elaborate dishes and surrounded by many chairs. The
torches around the table are suddenly illuminated, as
are the candelabras which decorate the room; the
darkness turns to light and the gilded objects and
arms displayed on the walls glitter in the
brightness; but this change is made in complete
silence.
Rodolphe exclaims that here is the place that he had
known in childhood. And then,
Subterranean singing, both somber and mysterious, is
heard. Richly dressed lords and ladies appear in the
doorways, extremely pale, and hardly moving. They
glide slowly forward.
They are, of course, dead—ghosts—who
sing a chorus about returning to remember their
beaux jours, their lost loves and their lost
lives. Urbain enters with Peter the Hermit, who
exorcizes the phantoms by raising his cross before
them, telling them to go back to the nothingness (le
néant) from whence they came. Rodolphe
faints in Urbain's arms and the scene ends.
* * *
-
And yet, though reviewers praised the music and the
spectacle, one theme runs through a number of
commentaries. Several critics remark on the
inadequacies of the libretto. For instance, La
France musicale declared on October 22, 1854:
Le sujet, il faut bien le dire, ne présente
nulle part les éléments organiques d'un
drame musical bien constitué; la vie est nulle
part.
[One must say that the subject does not anywhere
offer the elements organic in a well-constructed
musical drama; there is no life in it.] (Gann 56)
-
Théophile Gautier was also clearly inclined
to blame it:
Le poème, combiné avec une maladresse
et une négligence qui étonne chez un
homme d'une habilité aussi proverbiale que M.
Scribe, contenait cependant deux ou trois situations
de nature à tenter un musicien, et dont M.
Gounod a tiré le plus grand parti. . . .
[The poem, a combination of awkwardness and
carelessness astonishing for someone of M. Scribe's
proverbial cleverness, nevertheless contains two or
three situations that might tempt a musician, and M.
Gounod has used most of them.] (Gann 58)
-
And an anonymous parody of the overwrought
Scribe/Delavigne style appeared in Le
Mousquetaire on October 19:
Eh bein! repentez-vous, ô Delavigne, ô
Scribe!
Ou bien craignez Dieu la vengeance terrible.
Et si vous faites des opéras
Ne les faites plus comme ça.
[Delavigne and Scribe, repent!, or else fear the
wrath of God. If
you're going to make operas, don't make them like
this.] (Gann 65 )
-
One could translate the critic's damning conclusion,
"La vie est nulle part" as "There's nothing true to
life here," or simply, "It's unrealistic." Certainly
Scribe had had difficulties in placing this libretto
with a composer.[9]
I would speculate that the librettists felt that
transforming Lewis's family secret (a century or five
generations old) into one both immediate and horribly
personal would intensify the dramatic effect, would
make Rodolphe's conflict more psychologically
realistic. Scribe and Delavigne's changes in the story
that might also at first glance make it seem more
"Gothic" than Lewis's. By condensing the drama into the
space of twenty years and making Rodolphe's own father
the murderer, they intensified the Freudian family
romance so fundamental to Gothic narrative. By calling
Rodolphe's beloved and the Bleeding Nun by the same
name, Agnès, they strengthened the two
characters' identities as doubles. Indeed, the plot as
it emerged from the hands of the librettists dramatizes
a distorted version of the Oedipal crisis and the
incest taboo. Luddorf kills the woman who should have
been Rodolphe's mother and is trying to see to it that
his son will not marry the woman he loves, who is her
double and shares his "mother's" name.[10]
But these changes serve to confuse rather than to
intensify the melodrama.
-
The libretto's principal failure of realism lies in
Count Luddorf's necessary but completely unmotivated
change of heart in the last scenes, when he suddenly
decides to sacrifice himself for his son. The move
toward psychological realism backed the librettists
into a corner. Only a deus ex machina could rescue
Rodolphe from the warring families' murderous pursuit
and restore him to his beloved. Such a device was
comfortably accommodated in many a Baroque opera, and
would reappear in somewhat different form in Wagner.
But in The Flying Dutchman, for example, from
Senta's first appearance we know of her rather neurotic
obsession with the Dutchman's legend, so that we are
not entirely surprised when she flings herself into the
ocean. In La Nonne, however, Scribe and
Delavigne have Luddorf simply act on his sudden change
of heart, which leads him to die in his son's place.
Yet until this moment we have seen (or heard) not a
glimmer of this character's inner self. Then the
writers add a second psychological
intervention—the Nonne's sudden abandonment of
her desire for revenge. And these two conversions are
rewarded by yet another mode of rescue: the two ascend
to heaven accompanied by a chorus singing of God's
mercy.
-
In Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera Gary
Tomlinson argues that changing operatic conventions
reflect changing cultural ideas about subjectivity and
the relationship of the self to the invisible.
Certainly by 1854 the cultural moment that gave birth
to The Monk had passed. Lewis's novel reflects,
sometimes quite directly, the turmoil of the French
Revolution, as when, for instance, his mob's murder of
the cruel Abbess echoes the death of the Princesse de
Lamballe in 1792. The horrors of the Revolution were,
however, significantly internal, within the French body
politic. The Gothic fiction of the 1790s expresses most
powerfully the revolt fomented from within by the
unruly fears and desires of the individual unconscious.
Early Gothic fiction was perhaps most effective in
making such private, unconscious passions public,
accessible to the reader. In revising Lewis's narrative
for the operatic stage, however, Scribe and Delavigne
tried to make the private public by mapping a patriotic
tale onto a domain of family secrets and hidden
conflicts. One could imagine, I think, a verismo
version of Lewis's tale in which Luddorf is haunted
from first to last by his guilty secret, or perhaps an
expressionist opera, like Bartok's Bluebeard's
Castle or Schoenberg's Ewartung, in which
the borders between the hero's tormented psyche and his
world are not distinct or entirely discernable. But
Lewis's tale of the Bleeding Nun was not a historical
romance that could be authentically rendered as a
patriotic fable in five acts and a ballet.
* * *
A Note on the Translation
-
I have tried to render Scribe and Delavigne's often
melodramatic French into idiomatic English, not
attempting to preserve the meter and rhyme nor to
produce a text suitable for singing. Since modern
English does not make a distinction between familiar
and formal address, I have ignored this difference in
French except in one instance. In translating the
exchanges between Rodolphe and the Bleeding Nun, I used
the archaic English forms of the familiar as
appropriate to the uncanny conversation between ghost
and mortal. (I have also wondered whether the mortal's
inadvertently addressing the Nonne in the familiar may
not have facilitated her power over him.) I gratefully
acknowledge the advice and encouragement of my
colleague Marlyse Baptista in making this translation.
A native speaker of French, she was generous in helping
me not only to avoid outright errors, but also to
discern the endlessly fascinating nuances and
subtleties of translating French into English. I also
wish to thank my research assistant, Lance J. Wilder,
who learned Pagemaker in order to give my libretto a
professional appearance and who has been endlessly
patient in making the numerous changes I requested.
Translation of the
Scribe/Delavigne Libretto (.pdf)
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