|
-
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:
| 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. |
| (Act V, scene 4) | *
* * -
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) |
