by Alexandra Wilson
The following article is entirely published and taken from Calibano #1 – Madama Butterly/The Oriental Woman, the cultural in-depth magazine of the Rome Opera House
Female deaths are an operatic commonplace: there is scarcely a serious nineteenth-century work in the Italian tradition that does not end with one. Audiences of the day were able to accept high death counts as simply a centuries-old convention of theatrical tragedy, or to recognise that operas were merely adaptations of much-loved, pre-existing literary texts. But from the 1970s onwards, operas started to be subjected to feminist investigation, with the French author Catherine Clément reflecting in her book L’Opéra, ou la défaite des femmes on the motivations that drive us to watch, and derive enjoyment from, ‘the infinitely repetitive spectacle of a woman who dies’. Looking at opera from the perspective of a literary theorist, Clément observed that it was the ubiquity of these operatic dénouements – the fact that such endings were unremarkable to audiences, perhaps even no longer shocking – that was so deeply troubling.
Examining over thirty operas, Clément laid bare the hard, brutal facts of their plots, itemising the stabbings, the poisonings, the throttlings and the suicides, arguing that we are anaesthetised by the beautiful music, blinded by it to the abuse, violence and silencing of women that is being enacted before our eyes. Generations of music students have grappled with the merits and weaknesses of Clément’s argument, questioning whether, in tackling the subject of male cruelty and aggression towards women, composers were necessarily endorsing it.
More recently, many commentators have concluded that the answer to this question is an emphatic yes. The subject of opera’s cruel treatment of female characters has left the halls of academe and crossed over into the mainstream – not only into pre-performance talks but into your morning newspaper. In an age obsessed with identity politics and hyper-attentive to matters of cultural representation, canonical works that long seemed uncontroversial are suddenly prompting outrage, being held up for scrutiny and found wanting in terms of their representation of gender, as well as of issues such as race and imperialism.
Opera companies today are increasingly called upon to respond to the perceived misogyny of the works that they perform. There have even been exhortations for works that depict cruelty towards women to be removed from our stages, not only in obscure corners of the internet but from figures within the world of classical music. In 2006, the esteemed American musicologist Susan McClary wrote of Madama Butterfly: ‘I look forward to the day when we can pin this opera up in the museum of strange cultural practices of the past, when we can mount Puccini’s Butterfly once and for all as a historical exhibit’.
Puccini has been singled out as a composer who is particularly sadistic to his female characters. The composer’s biographer Mosco Carner went so far as to accuse him of punishing his heroines with a ‘manifestly sado-masochistic enjoyment’, writing, ‘There remains [Puccini’s] predilection for inflicting suffering and torture on his heroines. How do we account for the fact that Puccini’s passionate love for them must always be accompanied by a sadistic impulse?’ Carner attempted to explain this strand he perceived in Puccini’s works in terms of Freudian psychology. The composer’s artistic decisions, he argued, were guided by both a love-hate complex, meaning he was driven to kill the artistic creations he loved, and by the fact that he viewed his characters as ‘rivals of the exalted mother-image’. Puccini undoubtedly loved his mother – who had brought him up single-handedly after her husband’s premature death – and grieved heavily when she died in 1884, when the composer was only in his mid twenties. But for a biographer to psychoanalyse his subject and then attempt to map his speculative conclusions on to the artist’s work now seems old-fashioned, if not downright questionable.
Puccini had a turbulent relationship with his wife Elvira Bontura Gemignani (previously his mistress: she was married to another man when the two first set up home and had a child). Puccini’s numerous sexual infidelities – some of them liaisons of long duration conducted across continents – drove Elvira into a jealous rage, occasionally prompting her to attack him physically, or to pursue the women of whom she was jealous, on one occasion with truly tragic consequences. (Her harassment of a young maidservant in the Puccini household whom she believed, incorrectly, to be having an affair with her husband led to the young woman’s suicide.) But Puccini was no woman-hater. He had, for example, a long and productive platonic relationship with his British friend Sybil Seligman, exchanging frequent letters in which they discussed new and potential projects, artistic decisions, domestic unhappiness, and more humdrum matters. The composer’s extramarital liaisons may be discomfiting, but to seize upon them as evidence that his operas form some sort of misogynist manifesto would be simplistic indeed.
Let us examine the works on their own terms. Almost all Puccini’s heroines die (and some of his heroes too), though we would not find anything different in the serious works of any other nineteenth-century Italian opera composer. Indeed, the fact that Puccini wrote a serious opera – La fanciulla del West (1910) – in which the heroine does not die, and, instead, walks off into the sunset to a better life, is a departure from the norm in the context within which he was working. Furthermore, while various Verdi heroines are murdered by men – not to mention the numerous female victims of tabloid-newspaper-style murders in the verismo works of the 1890s – it is interesting to note that only one of Puccini’s heroines dies directly at the hands of a man. This is Giorgetta in Il tabarro, killed together with her lover by her barge-owner husband after he discovers her extra-marital affair.
Of the many Puccinian suicides, however, most are prompted at least indirectly by the actions of men: Le villi’s Anna dies of a broken heart; Liù (Turandot) sacrifices her life for the sake of an unworthy man; and Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly is abandoned and betrayed by the protagonist Pinkerton (we surely cannot call him the hero), leading her to believe she has no honourable choice other than to kill herself. Puccini had a particular penchant for his so-called ‘little women’ – well-meaning, innocent heroines who love deeply and often futilely, and are punished for it. It is perhaps this aspect of his works that has marked him out in the public imagination as the ultimate ‘sadistic’ opera composer: the fact that the victims of his works are such gentle types (though Verdi’s Gilda in Rigoletto would appear to come from the same mould) and the fact that they feel things so very profoundly.
There are, of course, other types of deaths in Puccini’s operas, caused less directly by male actions, but even here there is often a man hovering somewhere in the background. Manon Lescaut’s arrest and consequent demise could be seen as the consequence of her own frivolity in stopping to collect her jewels, but ultimately her trouble stems from being effectively ‘sold’ by her own brother to an older man who regards her as his property. Tosca jumps to her death because she is boxed into a corner fleeing from the police, but the mess in which she finds herself ultimately stems back to an attempted rape. The prompt for Suor Angelica’s suicide is a heart broken by news of the death of her child; nevertheless, some sort of romantic abandonment hovers in her backstory.
La bohème is the notable exception. Following the example of Verdi’s Violetta (La traviata), Mimì dies of natural causes – a case of simple, mundane bad luck. Mimì’s social situation may have contributed to her illness – the likelihood of contracting TB is increased by poverty, overcrowding and malnutrition. Perhaps if she and Rodolfo had not separated, he could have kept her warm and safe, but his own circumstances are little better and the separation was by mutual consent. Though some recent scholars have tried to depict him as a controlling figure, he is better read as simply rather immature, and it is clear he loves her deeply.
Female suffering is not the subject of the comedy Gianni Schicchi and, as befits an ensemble piece, the female characters have equal agency with men. Puccini seems to make an ironic nod towards his own earlier heroines – almost sending up his own earlier works – when the romantic lead Lauretta winds her father around her little finger in order to get her own way by threatening, mock-theatrically, to throw herself into the River Arno. The operetta La rondine ends with a romantic separation but it is driven by rather than forced upon the heroine.
If female deaths were a generic convention of turn-of-the-century Italian opera, it is perhaps Puccini’s particular musico-dramatic technique that has prompted the accusation that he revels in his heroines’ suffering. For Puccini is a composer who has persistently been accused by commentators of being ‘manipulative’. There is a trope in the Puccini reception history, persisting from his own time to the present, that his works move us to tears, however hard we might try to resist, and that they do so in a way that is somehow devious. Dramatically, he chose subjects with plots calculated to go for the jugular; musically, his works push our buttons in the same way as a Hollywood film score.
Puccini found ways of using music to raise the emotional intensity of opera to new heights. His arias have a distinctive way of building towards an emotional climax: arias typically begin hesitantly, using fragmented phrases, before swelling to determined, impassioned ardour. The voice embarks upon a prolonged ascent, the orchestral lines swell, and the vocal line is doubled by the strings at the octave. This technique opens up the musical texture, allowing the voice to take flight and creating a sense of the character bearing his or her soul.
Puccini uses this technique for both male and female characters, and for joy as well as for sorrow. But the device is employed most devastatingly when a character faces death. For example, Manon’s ‘Sola, perduta, abbandonata’ begins in an austere, sparing fashion, symptomatic of the heroine’s exhaustion, before building to an impassioned lyrical and orchestral outpouring as her desperate agitation grows. We are in the desert with Manon at that moment, completely transfixed by and believing in her plight. Is this a working out of a sadistic fantasy or simply a dramatic stroke of genius?
There is something melodramatic and consciously theatrical about a death such as Tosca’s that distances us from it emotionally. Similarly, although the death of Liù in Turandot is grotesque, we are, arguably, somewhat distanced from it by the opera’s remote, fairy-tale like setting, its general sense of mechanical abstraction. The three operas that pull hardest at our heartstrings, on the other hand, are La bohème, Suor Angelica, and Madama Butterfly. All three works are intensely human and have a pronounced sense of ‘realism’ about them; their characters are so ‘ordinary’ that we can imagine ourselves into their shoes in a way that was novel for the operatic genre. And in all three, the heroine’s suffering and demise is the product of circumstances that are profoundly unfair. In Suor Angelica and Madama Butterfly the heroines are driven to the most unbearable despair. The theme of maternal loss in both works gives an added twist of the knife, though it is the particular skill with which Puccini delves into the characters’ inner psyche that marks these works out as so particularly devastating.
Madama Butterfly is arguably the toughest opera to watch, whether as a female or male viewer, and it is unsurprising that Clément pays particular attention to this work in her chapter on operatic deaths. Anybody who has been abandoned by a lover – in fact, anybody but the most hard-hearted – will undoubtedly squirm in their seat as they share poor, naively optimistic Cio-Cio San’s agonising wait for Pinkerton’s ultimately callous return, ‘real wife’ in tow. There is, furthermore, a nasty streak to this opera that is absent from a work such as La bohème, whilst also being rather different from the repugnant events that unfold in Tosca, with its torture scene, firing squad, and threat of sexual assault. For what we are dealing with in Madama Butterfly is, effectively, the sexual exploitation of a child: in a line in the first act that makes sharp-eared audience members wince, Cio-Cio San proudly tells us that she is fifteen years old. The fact that the scenario presented before our eyes is nothing more than seedy sex tourism has been made clear by many productions that have shifted the action from the turn of the twentieth century to periods closer to our own time.
Some commentators have found it beyond the realms of good taste and decency that such a grubby scenario is cloaked in gorgeous music. The sublime love duet in Madama Butterfly leaves little to the imagination with its ebbing and surging melodic lines that seem to reach ever higher. Inspired by the famously erotic love duet from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Puccini tantalises the listener, using chromatic harmonies to create a sensual glow, interweaving the voices with rich orchestral writing, lingering suggestively around a musical idea by repeating it over and over in ever more intense fashion, and above all withholding harmonic resolution across a prolonged period of some fifteen minutes. The music is at once sexual and intensely romantic. It is here that the fundamental, tragic misunderstanding between Pinkerton and his new bride seems captured most brilliantly.
Music like this is so seductive that we never want it to end, whether its context is joyous or painful for the characters involved – and some of Puccini’s death scenes are indeed protracted (though not all: Mimì’s is so swift and unobtrusive nobody on stage notices she has actually died). As John Snelson perceptively observed in a programme essay for a recent production of Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, ‘This is maybe where some of the guilt about enjoying such passionate music has a source. For Puccini’s makes us desire the character’s obvious suffering to be prolonged’.
Yet, for all this, one hardly senses that Puccini and his librettists are endorsing Cio-Cio San’s treatment in Madama Butterfly. It is the contrast between her dignity, as she is forced to grow up far quicker than she ought to have to, and the grubbiness and cowardice of Pinkerton’s actions that form the nub of the drama. The character psychology Puccini achieves is masterly, as he makes us endure the heroine’s long wait with her, slowing down the dramatic pacing so as to drag out the all-night vigil into what almost feels like real time. It is an uncomfortable watch, but it is meant to be.
Puccini’s detractors would argue that he over-eggs Madam Butterfly’s suffering; viewed more positively, we might read him as dwelling on her suffering merely as a scrupulous realist, or so as to indict Pinkerton’s atrocious behaviour. Pinkerton is not a cardboard cut-out villain, but there is surely no way in which Puccini’s or anyone in the audience’s sympathies lie with him. Butterfly remains on stage throughout – her role is a huge test of vocal and dramatic stamina – and Puccini lets the story be told through her eyes. Pinkerton, on the other hand, is a cad, an empty vessel whose story is of little interest, who sheepishly departs the scene.
There is no doubting that Puccini’s heroines are strong. Among them are some characters who are feisty indeed. Musetta, who exudes confidence and commands the room as she performs. Tosca, a self-sufficient professional woman who fights back when under attack. Minnie, who carves out an independent life in a tough environment and provides guidance and wisdom for the men in her community. Clever Lauretta, who knows exactly how to get what she wants. And in Turandot, Puccini and his librettists created the ultimately powerful female protagonist, even if her unwilling, unconvincing capitulation to Calaf leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
Puccini’s so-called ‘little women’ are not Victorian-style simpering maidens who collapse in a faint or expire in the arms of a man. Rather, without exception they demonstrate stamina and fortitude. Mimì and Musetta are working women, eking out an independent life. Butterfly matures from a child to a woman before our very eyes and is a woman with agency, in rejecting the offer of marriage she receives from Prince Yamadori and taking her own life for what she believes to be ‘honourable’ purposes, horrific though her decision may seem to us.
To call for Puccini’s operas to be ‘cancelled’ on account of their representation of women would be short-sighted. Rather, the difficult issues that his operas raise can be addressed in positive, thought-provoking ways through pre-performance talks, programme essays and creative contemporary productions. To set a distressing subject – as a composer of tragic opera almost inevitably must – is not to endorse it; indeed, in many ways works like Madama Butterfly seem to act as cautionary tales. We might argue that there is far greater compassion for women, far greater humanity in Puccini’s operas than there is in the numerous present-day films and television crime dramas in which brutal female deaths are a matter of routine, never mind in violent computer games and rap songs. Here, women are often reduced to the status of mutilated body parts in the name of popular entertainment and audiences accept the fact unthinkingly. If we want to condemn the worst examples of the cultural mistreatment of women – of a sort far more likely to inspire real-life misdeeds – it may be time to refocus our gaze beyond the field of opera.
Alexandra Wilson is Professor of Music and Cultural History at Oxford Brookes University (UK) and a specialist in turn-of-the-century Italian opera and operatic culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. Her books include The Puccini Problem (Cambridge University Press), Opera in the Jazz Age(Oxford University Press), Puccini’s La bohème (Oxford University Press), and a new edited collection, Puccini in Context(Cambridge University Press).
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. In this first issue, following Aida/Blackface, the magazine questions forms of European fascination with Japan and vice versa, starting with Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera Madama Butterfly.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
*The cover image was created by Francesco D’Isa using Midjourney
