by Alissa Balocco
Review of Marco Emanuele. Males at the opera. Eccentric characters in Benjamin Britten’s theatre – Mimesis, 2016
Outcasts, misunderstood, rejected. All the male protagonists of Benjamin Britten’s musical theatre are representatives of an identity that diverges from the dominant standard: they are not very masculine, the are not very virile, they do not seem to respond to the characteristics of the heterosexual system of thought that predominates around them. Eccentric subjects, indeed, as Marco Emanuele defines them in the title of his essay Maschi all’opera (Mimesis, 2016), a queer re-reading of the English composer’s operatic repertoire. In particular, the author discusses music and gender identity, and how musical language can offer a representation of homosexuality and the idea of male gender.
One thinks of Peter Grimes, whose condition of exclusion is already detectable in the difference with which he leads his life compared to the other inhabitants of the village. The fisherman lives in solitude, without a woman at his side, and his roof is a capsized boat. But it is the way in which Grimes sings that makes us notice his diversity: if the other men are capable of singing strophic songs, of performing an open song, of converging on the same notes to reinforce their togetherness as a community, the fisherman is unable to express himself if not outside those patterns. His voice is lost in coloratura, his melodic lines are shifting, and if he tries to blend in with the group, he goes out of tune and out of sync. It is a sign that Grimes does not feel at ease, if not with evident discomfort, with the set patterns of a common male behaviour.
The use of an expressionist, ever-changing vocality, often in a tessitura that is not natural for the tenor, is common to all the protagonists of Benjamin Britten’s opera: the shy Albert Herring, of the opera of the same name, can finally indulge in ornamented singing only at the moment of his sexual awakening, which occurs after he catches his friend Sid courting Nancy. Albert, too, like Grimes, defiles and disrupts, with his unrestrained voice, the manners representing the perfect, blameless masculinity (in this case, it is the hymns and choruses accompanying his election as May King). When, in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, the ghost Quint calls little Miles to him, his voice takes on oriental connotations that, in the tradition of 19th-century melodrama, identify as feminine; Quint represents the eccentric body par excellence: who he was before he became a ghost, who he loved, it is not known; he eludes any definition, remaining in the realm of the monstrous, as he is outside the strict Victorian categories of gender and sexuality.
‘The fragmented singing expresses the male’s lack of unity, the pointless searching for oneself in the loss of self’ Emanuele writes. The limitation to the purely vocal that characterises these Britten’s anti-tenors takes the form of a word denial : an element that, interpreted through the idea of Western male thinking, symbolises feminisation and loss of control. What also contributes to establishing the category of those who are outside the “norm” of heterosexuality are the violent orchestral explosions of sound, which are the musical equivalent of social oppression and hate speech; and a musical idea that passes from mouth to mouth convinces the villain that he is a real one: the manhunt in Peter Grimes is an example of this. A way of affirming, writes Emanuele, that ‘gender identity is also produced by the way others look at it, and in particular those in power’.
Britten experienced that male oppression first-hand: in England, in the years when the composer was beginning to write for the theatre, same-sex sexual intercourse between consenting adults were punished with imprisonment, scripts for the stage were subject to censorship and, in these, any hint of homosexuality was strictly ban until 1958. Just as Britten did not have the right to love freely, the protagonists of his operas are also doomed to a tragic end: in his works, no love duet is ever performed, no ‘I love you’ is spoken (with the exception of the last opera, Death in Venice, but this was only in 1973), the only way out is an actual death (as in Peter Grimes) or a symbolic one (the silence to which Albert Herring is condemned, or even Captain Vere in Billy Budd).
Males at the Opera. Eccentric Subjects in Benjamin Britten’s Theatre is a powerful essay that highlights the extent to which Britten’s theatre asks questions about gender and sexual identity, reflecting the anxieties of a society where departing from usual or accepted standards of masculinity takes on ‘the mark of inversion and monstrosity’. And in which, in the end, the monster is not only deprived of his voice – real or musical – but is removed, eradicated , even led to physical elimination. As happens to Peter Grimes: when, in the throes of a delirium, the fisherman pushes his ship out to sea, the music goes silent. Everything returns to how it was before, in silence. The monster’s body has been destroyed.
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
The illustrations in this issue were made by Elena Manferdini.
The cover is a collage by Giuliano Paolini (Photo Ⓒ Luca Vianello, Torino / Courtesy Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Torino / Ⓒ Giulio Paolini)
