Angela Gheorghiu with her portrait

Today I attended the Metropolitan Opera broadcast at my local movie theater in a performance of Puccini’s La Rondine (like La Traviata, only minus the tuberculosis and judgmental father).  I cannot thank the Met enough for getting these performances out to a wide audience because for many of us here in the US, it is virtually impossible to see good opera live.  This topic would require another blog entry in a more rant-like style, so I will defer for now and simply note that I very much enjoyed the performance, even if Angela Gheorghiu did have a bad cold (she still sang well, except right at the beginning when her voice seemed a bit weak.  But I digress again).

During the intermission, Renée Fleming spoke to Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna (the tenor) about the opera and why they have championed it so fervently.  Gheorghiu said that she enjoyed the role, particularly because unlike many Puccini operas, the heroine does not die (Fleming then made a ‘She’s Alive!’ joke).  This statement got me thinking about the famous feminist critique of opera, Cathérine Clement’s Opéra, ou, la defaite des femmes, translated into English as Opera, or, the undoing of women.  Clement’s book looks at how operas treat women, particularly the women who die, and how often these deaths are graphic, brutal ends.  Naturally, there are plenty of operas in which the women do not die, many of which are in the standard repertory (Mozart’s works, Fidelio, Rosenkavalier, and plenty more, even some not written by Germans), but Clement does have a point that many favorite works do end poorly for the soprano.  One critique of the study pointed out that in basing her argument primarily on the text, Clement ignores the precise vehicle which gives the women power: their voices. Yet to me, Clement’s study reveals less about operatic tradition and more about the operatic present. It would be one matter to look back and see a fixation on deaths for the female leads but to me, it is far more unsettling that these continue to be the works that dominate the operatic stage — and continue to do so without reflection about why they are still so popular.

Thus far, the female roles at the Met have been varied.  There was Salome, who is not only a soprano but a hysterical one; her death does feel mandated considering how far behind she has left conventional society.  In Thaïs, the soprano death is particularly bizarre: one minute she is a reformed courtesan crossing a river to leave her life of sin behind, the next minute, she is no longer of this earth [apparently these two operas teach us that sopranos should avoid deserts….see also Aida]. Contrast that with the courtesan Magda, the lead in La Rondine, who realizes that without money she and her love cannot be happy, so she makes the logical (and almost non-operatic) choice to go back to her benefactor in the end.  Has anyone heard of an opera company staging an ‘All Courtesan’ Season?  It would be very doable, even though Thaïs really should be staged only by extremely competent professionals.

The most telling work, though, that I’ve seen so far this season in terms of women was John Adams’ Dr. Atomic, a piece that, because it is new, cannot be simply dismissed as the product of a different time or place.  There were two main female roles in this opera:  Kitty Oppenheimer, the wife of the main character, and Pasqualita — I don’t have a brief statement of who her character is because her role was never made clear to me.  In fact, neither part had much of a role.  Kitty primarily quoted from works of literature and sometimes vocalized, whereas Pasqualita mostly vocalized and sometimes spread Mother Earth-type wisdom that one might find printed on the side of a Starbuck’s cup.  Both roles, then, featured women who sang, but who had no voice: no text of their own, no ideas to convey.  Earlier operas may have undone women, but in Dr. Atomic, they did not even require an undoing — perhaps this explains why they, unlike their predecessor compatriots, managed to escape the desert alive.  Womens’ voices are absolutely necessary in Dr. Atomic, particularly in the extremely effective opening chorus, where the combined power of the voices in a high part of the tessitura sets up the tense, driving atmosphere that permeates the rest of the opera.  But the women don’t seem to have much to contribute in Los Alamos; it is the men who sing of important matters, like science, math, chemical elements, and the weather.  The opera ends with a disembodied female voice speaking in Japanese, pleading for water presumably in the wake of the destruction from Dr. Atomic’s bomb.  She has a voice but no body; in the opera, the women had voices but no words — all in all, it’s hard to understand how these characters fit into the work at all, and that makes me truly wonder what this opera is saying about women.