Opera21 Magazine

First introduced to classical music as a freshman in high school, Howard attended Morgan State University in Baltimore, where he had the opportunity to travel the world with Morgan State’s Choir and perform in some of the best performance halls with world-class singers. He has been a part of the Domingo- Cafritz Young Artist Program for a couple of years now, but he says he is still fairly new to opera. He didn’t being pursuing a career as a soloist or start learning opera repertoire until he began his graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music in 2008, and six years later, he still feels like a newbie at times. 

Howard’s journey to the young artists program is, put simply, unique. Originally from the DC area, Howard graduated from the Manhattan School of Music in the spring of 2010, and he came down to Washington D.C. to audition for the Washington National Opera chorus. The slots for the Young Artist Program had already been filled for the year, and he was hoping the chorus audition would be a good source of feedback as he prepared to audition for young artists programs the following year. Little did he know that his journey would move much more quickly than he expected. Blown away by his audition, the chorus master and artistic planner asked him to come back a couple of months later to audition for the artistic director, Christina Scheppelmann. “The very next day, I had to audition for Maestro Domingo at the Kennedy Center. He pretty much created a slot for me, and that is how I got into the program. It was crazy. I always tell my friends, you never know where your opportunities are going to come from, so always be ready.” 

Howard’s story is not what one would normally expect from someone entering into a young artist program in America. He grew up in an inner city neighborhood not far from The Kennedy Center. With articles titled, “I Could Have Been a Great Opera Singer, If I Were Rich,” circulating the opera blogosphere, Howard has proven that the circumstances into which one is born does not define the outcome of success, even in opera, which is sometimes labeled a silver spoon profession. Having to deal with homelessness and sometimes not knowing where the next meal was going to come from, Howard says his childhood experiences distilled in him a toughness that gives him the strength to keep pursuing his dreams. “It’s the mindset. It gives me an extra sense of strength and fortitude, that I can press past any situation because of how I grew up. Some things you may never achieve, but at least knowing that even if you are afraid of something, you’re going to challenge the fear. That’s what growing up as an underprivileged, inner city youth has taught me – to never give up. I came literally from nothing. My childhood experiences have given me the drive to fight for what I knew I deserved, no matter what I looked like, no matter whether I was a light skinned black guy or dark skinned black guy. I was going to make sure I showed up ready, prepared every time I walked in the door. And given where I am today and where I am headed, I can’t justify saying I didn’t try.” 

While he personally hasn’t faced racial discrimination while pursuing a career in opera, it is clear that his racial background has influenced his attitude towards his work. “I have some family members who did experience discrimination because of race. That has made me more aware of the possibility. Say I show up and I’m not as prepared as the next guy. People may not be as compassionate or be as willing to work with me. They may not give me a second chance. It’s been said that people are always looking for the opportunity to not use us blacks. I haven’t personally gone through that, and I hope it’s something I never have to experience. But being black, I am aware of what is happening in our country, the climate of our country, and I’m aware of my history. I know that I need to make sure I show up and don’t give anyone any excuse to say, ‘It’s because he’s black.’ I never want to hear that. I just want to hear, ‘This guy is talented and ready to perform, so we can trust him.’” 

Howard recognizes, however, that his situation may not be the norm for other African-Americans who are pursuing a career in opera. He is a bass, a fach where the demand far surpasses the supply. “There are people who still aren’t able to look past complexion and look for the soul or for the voice. I have some friends who feel like they don’t get the same opportunities as other singers do get because of their ethnicity.” 

Race is a problem that plagues the opera industry, with singers being pushed to do roles that are beyond their vocal ability merely because of the color of their skin. In an ideal world, people should be hired based on talent and vocal ability. “I’m hired to play Italian characters and people other cultures. I’m not Italian. I don’t look like what the librettist would have wanted for the Italian character. But because I have the voice, I can do the job.” Howard also says that many singers are afraid of typecasting, worried that once they sing in an opera like Porgy and Bess, those roles will be the only ones offered them. But singers like Lawrence Brownlee are making headway in America, Howard says. 

In addition to problematic casting issues, blackface is a large thorn in the side of what some people feel is an art form that can’t seem to get with the times. While most other theatrical forms have abandoned blackface, condemning its use as racist, major opera houses all over the world still use it, with some notable exceptions. During one of the panels for The American Voices Festival, which took place at The Kennedy Center last fall, Anthony Freud, the general director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, said, “Racial prejudice is utterly indefensible, in whatever form it takes, and we as opera companies either believe that or we don’t.” The Lyric included Otello as part of its 2013-2014 season, and the leadership intentionally decided not to use blackface in the production. 

Howard questions the intention behind the use of blackface in opera. “If you want to specifically portray a black character, there are enough talented black people to fill the roles. When blackface is done, the question of intent comes to mind. If you do it to avoid working with black people or if you’re trying to mimic or ridicule, then it is wrong.”  The weekend following our conversation, Howard was scheduled to sing at an event at the Constitution Hall celebrating Marian Anderson’s 75th anniversary of performing at the Lincoln Memorial. “She was denied to opportunity to perform there originally because of her skin. Marian Anderson once said, ‘As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold the person down.’ Most of the time, you know when you’re doing something to harm someone. You should never do something purposely to offend.” 

Many houses will use the authenticity of the story as a reason for not casting African Americans in certain roles or for using blackface, which is a flimsy excuse in the modern age of regietheater. Howard says that authenticity is just an excuse not to use certain people. “Most operas are works of fiction that were made up for entertainment. Unless the opera was written specifically to cast only black singers, such as Porgy & Bess, or written about a real life person, anyone who says that is just making an excuse. For example, I did a Muhammad Ali opera. Muhammad Ali is a real life person, so it would have to be cast with an African American singer, or in that case, someone would have to be in black face.” 

Howard emphasizes the importance of telling the story of African Americans. “Some directors, or artistic directors, at opera companies do not consider works like Porgy and Bess and Showboat as serious opera. Was Gershwin not serious when he wrote his music? Works like Showboat and Porgy and Bess tell the history of our people. Did you know that the banjo was originally a black instrument? There is an exhibit at the Baltimore Industrial Museum called ‘The History of the Banjo.’ All of the bluegrass and white country singers sat with black musicians and learned how to play these instruments. Sometimes, blacks create something, and then there are some people who think that they are above that, so we throw it away. I’ve had black professors tell me, ‘I hope you’re not singing a bunch of spirituals.’ But it’s the music of our people and it tells the story of where we came from. I don’t know many Jewish people who are going to tell you not to tell their story. They have a Holocaust Museum. We’re not proud of the struggle, but we are proud of the fact that this is where we were, and this is where we are now. You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from. There is no reason for us to fight when we don’t know what we didn’t have and what we could lose at any moment.” 

“I think it’s very important to tell our story, and it should continue to be told until race is no longer an issue, until we can get over the fact that there is no race and that we are all human, that nature gave us different skins based upon the climates we live in. Race is still is an issue, and we do need to move past it.”

In an essay by Domingo de Mascarenhas in the anthology Art and Ideology in European Opera, the author ties Madama Butterfly’s composition and subsequent revisions to a momentous event in Japanese history: the Russo-Japanese war. By the end of this war, Japan had defeated Tsarist Russia. The Eastern country’s defeat of a Western power was cause for celebration in Japan. For them, it signified their foothold in a global stage dominated by Western powers. However, from a social perspective, the generation of young Japanese people living in the early 20th century faced a dilemma. They wanted to modernize and move the country forward while at the same time holding onto their ancestral customs. Consequently, they were neither fully Western nor fully Eastern. 

Cio-Cio San, the leading lady of Madama Butterfly, is a member of this generation and the struggles of her generation are dramatized through her marriage to an American naval officer. Her marriage causes her family to disown her (at the behest of her uncle, a Buddhist priest). But her willingness to be faithful to her husband at all costs leads to her death. Puccini sets this drama to music that goes far beyond late Romantic Italian lyricism. He employs a series of leitmotifs, which emphasize cultural differences, most notably the beginning of “The Star-Spangled Banner” which opens Pinkerton’s aria, “Dovunque al Mundo.” The orchestra plays the same phrase towards the end of the aria to accompany Pinkerton’s shout of “America forever,” sung in English to emphasize the cultural discrepancies. Butterfly’s music for the beginning of Act I marks her squarely as Japanese. The phrase that accompanies her suicide makes its first appearance when Pinkerton catches a glimpse of the knife, which Butterfly’s father used to kill himself. The fact that her father took his own life, by order of the Emperor, shows that he is subservient to the ideals of duty, honor, and self-sacrifice. These are the traditions which are deeply embedded in Japanese society. 

Other markers of Butterfly’s ethnicity appear successively from her Act I entrance to her abandonment by her family. These extend not only to musical devices in the score, but to directions in the libretto as well. For instance, one of the first things she does is leading her family in a group bow. This action is repeated at the close of the marriage ceremony. In musical terms, this section includes the phrase, which underlines her explanation to Pinkerton that, in Japan, everyone claims to be rich even if they are not. This phrase appears again in Act II when she refuses Prince Yamadori’s hand. When interpreted by the right performer, such as Renata Scotto, this phrase can be a marker of Butterfly’s disdain for Japan’s cultural mores. 

In Act II, while Pinkerton is safely in America, Butterfly attempts to adopt his music. “The Star-Spangled Banner” inflects her vocal lines, emphasizing her obstinacy to submit to Japanese cultural norms even though everyone else can clearly see that her husband has abandoned her. She insists that she is not Japanese, but American, and therefore should only practice American customs. Yet even in her staunch xenophilia, she is still almost heartbreakingly Japanese. When she mimes an American divorce proceeding, her naivety almost makes the scene cartoonish. When Sharpless, the marriage broker, arrives to attempt to break the news of Pinkerton’s second marriage , she not only asks him how his ancestors are, but she asks him if the robins make their nest in America before or after they nest in Japan. The reason for this is quite simple: Pinkerton said he would be back when the robins nest. Three years later, he still hasn’t returned. 

Even big arias like “Un Bel Di Vedremo,” which first emphasize Butterfly’s naïve faith in romantic principles, serve to heighten the cultural divide. The orchestra replays the melody at the appearance of Pinkerton’s ship, the Abraham Lincoln, in the harbor. At first, this might seem like a simple indication that all of Butterfly’s romantic fantasies are, at least for the moment, fulfilled. However, the aria’s theme soon gives way to “The Star- Spangled Banner,” which in turn leads to a climactic affirmation in the text that Pinkerton has come back for her. Everyone who told her otherwise was wrong. The mere fact of the aforementioned musical progression ties Butterfly’s idealistic view of marriage to her idealistic view of the United States. This is contrasted with the extreme Japanese exoticism of her previous aria, also in the second act, where she describes the horrors of the geisha life and how she would rather die than return to it. 

Thematically, the opera has a lot of recognizable motifs from Black folk storytelling - several characters are conjurers, and aspects of the plot mimic elements of Br’er Rabbit tales. But Joplin brings these aspects up as a means of dismissing them, and it makes the opera a conflicting listen. Musically, Joplin was an expert not only at rendering ragtime elements into the opera, but other Black folk forms as well, filtering them through a fairly strict musical theater structure. The music is competent, if not especially innovative to a modern listener, and as the work was left as a piano score upon Joplin’s death, there are several available orchestrations of the work recorded. Gunther Schuller completed the piece for full chamber orchestra which, despite Schuller’s affinity for and championship of Black American music, seems most at home with the grandest of the grand-opera-like segments of the work. There is a more recent orchestration for a 12-person ensemble closely resembling the working ragtime pit bands of Joplin’s day, with string quartet plus double bass, trap kit, and 5 horn players on flute, cornet, clarinet and trombone, completed by Rick Benjamin, which makes the music feel a bit more vital, and handles the syncopation with much more agility. No version I’ve heard, however, has been able to help the work’s musical acuity reconcile with its themes - the nostalgia present in some of the music seems especially at odds with the sense of judgment coming from the clumsy libretto. There’s also the question of Joplin’s use of ragtime elements in the opera - its only pure ragtime sequences are dance sequences to provide a sort of illustrative account of blackness, with a slightly disparaging feel to these particular uses. But taken on its own merits, the score is enjoyable and well crafted, drawing equally well from all its sources. 

There are no questions as to the thematic Blackness of Anthony Davis’ X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Drawing from the dramatic potential inherent in the development of one of the most important figures in Black American history and politics, the work takes the opportunity to meditate on many broader themes through a black framework, specifically masculinity and influence which appear frequently in the libretto. In the work, two characters which have a major influence on Malcolm’s development (the hustler Street and the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed) are sung by the same tenor, given similar breathtaking vocal writing that demonstrates the nature of their influence on Malcolm at the point - yet the impact of this decision would be substantially diminished if the opera hadn’t focused a majority of its first scene on the death of Reverend Earl Little, an activist and Malcolm’s father, at the hands of a white vigilante group, and the effect this has on young Malcolm and his family. Similarly, the revelations of both Malcolm’s initial conversion to Islam and his later pilgrimage to Mecca would mean much less without Malcolm’s extended aria from a prison cell at the end of act I, displaying regret but also rage, and identifying his responsibility as well his perception of the institutional racism that shaped his path. 

Musically, Davis gives us quite a range of influences to work with. He draws heavily from 20th century atonal music, alternating these ideas easily with more lyrical, tonal writing, and introducing the texture of minimalism as a frequent element. The score of the opera features a fairly heavy use of elements taken from American Jazz - a large portion of the opera’s second scene, set in Boston as Malcolm is marveled by city life and in particular by the hustler Street, utilizes a mostly straightforward swing feel, Street crooning in a fairly spectacular bit of tenor showmanship and scatting. The orchestra uses trap kit (in addition to timpani and various mallet percussion) as a primary source of motion, and several parts in the score are indicated as needing “to be able to improvise in the jazz style” - several of the woodwind players in the orchestra are required to double between 2 and 6 instruments as well. Davis has a solid background as a jazz and improvising keyboardist, and as a result these ideas are integrated much more smoothly into his composition than they often are in orchestral music. The orchestra in the 1986 recording consists of some of the best of the downtown avant-garde and jazz scene at that time, many of which are still active today. We find solos used sparingly, to provide either some modal color over drones or ostinatos, serving various dramatic functions but especially providing a boost to some ecstatic moments in the libretto. It is clear for Davis that the language of jazz and improvisation is merely another palette to reach for when scoring for a large ensemble - with the exception of the second scene, we find it very rarely used as a racialized expository device as it is in the Joplin opera. 

Anthony Braxton’s Trillium operas (including E, M, R and the recently produced J: The Non-Unconfessionables as subtitles) are hard to evaluate in the context of other operas, and yet work firmly within the tradition as they willfully subvert many of the conventions. Braxton, as a composer, has come face to face with the question of identity many times, most often by critics. His music, at once too intellectual to belong to the jazz canon and too visceral (and, to some degree, indeterminate) to be programmed in the concert hall, has often been subject to clumsy questions of racial identity, and the image and

promotion of the man himself has, until recently, failed to take into account many facets of his personality and philosophy that power his music as much as the physical act of playing it. The Trillium operas, then, are a series of 36 one-act operas (in progress) for orchestra of varying sizes, devised as much as ritual or occult happenings as an evening at the theater. Four act groups make up the body of Trillium E, the librettos of which are unconnected. The cast, consisting of 12 singers, serves different functions in each situation - a pair of characters who may be married in one act may never interact in another. Every singer makes up the chorus. Each character is conceived as some type of archetype, with mythic names like Helena and Sundance contrasting blunt ones like Bubba John Jack and Ashmenton. The narratives often deal with negotiations of some type, whether political (one act of Trilllium E features a Star Trek-like space crew in their diplomatic encounter with an alien race) or personal (another features a comically drawn- out negotiation between a genie and each member of the family who released him). Librettos, written by the composer, often have the function of Medieval morality plays, and the audience or listener has the experience of watching a kind of metaphysical repertory theater, where sometimes a character will pull back from the “story” with the phrase “I have a feeling...” and provide some omniscient observation, sometimes unrelated to the action at hand. Braxton acknowledges the philosophical and aesthetic choice to create opera where the story is almost secondary, yet, but there are nevertheless moments of extreme humor, poignancy, and emotional investment among these works, particularly in Trillium E. 

The music, like much of Braxton’s output, is firmly modernist and often atonal, yet Braxton’s sense of organization, both of improvised/indeterminate sound and of through-composed orchestrations, is impeccable, part of what makes entering his sometimes dense soundworld navigable. There are moments of solo improvisation alongside the orchestral texture in this opera, provided by one of the 12 main instrumental soloists among the orchestra - there also a few graphic passages in the score and some conducted improvisations too utilizing Braxton’s Language music system (a system present in much of his music as a performer as well as music for larger ensembles). But a good majority of the music for the ensemble is fully notated, and gets to a high degree of precision and sensitivity in balance with the highly speech-like vocal writing. The cast often includes jazz and other disciplines of singer alongside operatic vocalists, and yet with this vocal writing the timbral differences are less noticeable between members of the cast with varying backgrounds. The orchestra is similarly diverse, including many musicians that are adept improvisers, and who have a distinct personal and technical language to bring to the performance as well. Those looking for pentatonic motifs, blue notes, swing passages, anything easily identifiable as a Black American musical trait, will not find those here. Trillium E is nevertheless a thoroughly Black theatrical experience in many ways, tying diasporic narrative instincts in with the aesthetic of Black creative music, both improvised and not. Its mysticism and playfulness provide a nice balance to the mostly functional libretto. 

The Prince’s betrayal of Rusalka leads directly to the opera’s second instance of disease. Because of Rusalka’s impotence, she was unable to maintain the Prince’s fidelity, which bestows a curse upon her and emphasizes her otherness to an even greater extent. Thanks to the curse, she is in a state of permanent liminality; she is neither human nor water nymph. She explains her despair to her father in her second act aria in the aforementioned terms; in effect the curse has made her a pariah and eventually leads to her shunning by her sisters and the other water nymphs. In Act III, the nymphs damn Rusalka because she sought to be human, and therefore decide she should be an outcast. The ending may seem like a romanticized view of love when the Prince, now cognizant of his mistake, begs Rusalka for a kiss as a token of her affection. But even though he is not afraid of death, the fact is, his imminent demise is brought about by Rusalka’s curse. Her inability to achieve full status as either human or fish has made her a danger to others. 

The opera drives at a rather disconcerting notion: that the circumstances we are born into are often paralyzing. Rusalka’s story dramatizes the female experience of lack of control over her own sexuality and destiny. Because the Foreign Princess was able to give the Prince what he desired, she is able to validate herself in the world of men, even if it is only fleeting. Both women jockey for a position of power in a patriarchal system. The Foreign Princess, whose only purpose is to come between the two lovers, admits to Rusalka, “I may have his hand, but you have his heart.” Unfortunately, in this game of gender politics, neither woman can win the man wholly. The mere fact of being a woman creates difference, or in effect, an irreversible “disease” banishers both women to a space of undefined nothingness. 

Much like Rusalka, La Somnambula also deals with otherness and gender roles, albeit under far more human conditions. This opera can seem silly when viewed with a superficial modern-day lens. The fact that an entire village could be ignorant of the affliction of somnambulism is, quite frankly, ridiculous. However, by putting ourselves into the mindset of the characters, that of 19th century Swiss farmers, not only does it become possible that they would not have heard of this problem, but the true nature of sleepwalking in the opera becomes apparent. Somnambulism fulfills the same function as Rusalka’s lack of voice; by afflicting Amina with an unknown illness, Bellini marks her as an outsider. Her struggle to prove her innocence after she is discovered in the Count’s bed is a struggle to be reincorporated into society. 

Amina’s sleepwalking also is the catalyst through which gender tensions are explored. Elvino’s reaction to discovering his fiancé in another man’s bedroom could be construed as normal, except he doesn’t give her a chance to explain herself. Furthermore, her disorientation in the final scene of Act I is a clear indication of her innocence. Elvino goes further; not only does he end his engagement to Amina, but he begins a relationship with her rival, Lisa, and proposes marriage to her all too quickly. His immediate silencing of Amina, along with his quick replacement of her, indicates a men’s tendency to devalue and revalue women. He no longer desires a woman whose reputation may be marred by her apparent indiscretion. 

Sleepwalking in Bellini’s opera blurs the line between disease and indiscretion. Amina’s disease is the impetus for her actions, but in the provincial minds of the townspeople, her actions are inseparable from her disease. Even the Count’s second act aria, where he defines somnambulism for the townspeople, falls on deaf ears. The situation reaches its climax at Elvino’s wedding to Lisa, which is interrupted by Amina’s second sleepwalking episode. Amina literally has to almost die in order for her voice to be heard; the townspeople are only able to believe what the Count has been saying when they actually witness it. Her final sleepwalking scene functions as a deus ex machina; the jubilation of her final rondo, “Ah! non giunge,” is only possible because the townspeople can now recognize their mistake. They wake her up once she reaches “terra firma” on the other side of the bridge, and Elvino once again proposes marriage to her. 

Although Amina has a voice, unlike Rusalka, it is ineffective if no one listen to it, as they do here in this opera. Her perspective is only validated when others decide it may be. The tragedy of the story is Amina is unaware of how her fellow villagers have wronged her. She is, in effect, still “sleepwalking.” All is made right when her marriage proposal is reinstated and the villagers once again take control of her, directing her to “Come to the church” for her wedding. Amina suffers not only from a physical disorder, but a psychological one in which she is numb to her powerlessness as a female. Rusalka realizes her predicament, but can do nothing to change it, whereas Amina doesn’t even recognize it. 

Wagner’s patron King Ludwig II was clearly psychotic. Verdi, after a rather feeble attempt to portray madness in Nabucco, gave up, scrapping his proposed King Lear because he found the subject “too stressful.” Italian composers also had to be careful around the topic of insanity after the psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso’s influential 1864 study Genio e follia, which found connections between lunacy and genius and argued that hereditary insanity caused artistic creativity. 

This phase of physical illness is followed (with some overlap) by a more realistic treatment of insanity in psychoanalytic opera. Madness goes from being a form of beautiful freedom (exemplified by the stunning coloratura of most bel canto mad scenes) to a living hell of painful atonality. Insanity is no longer necessarily confined to a particular scene; characters slowly descend into it rather than suddenly “snapping.” This shift coincides with the rising popularity of Freudian psychoanalysis. As individual psychology becomes a widespread topic of research and discussion, librettists and composers (as well as artists in other media) become more concerned with accurately portraying it. Strauss’s Elektra (1909) and Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) serve as perfect specimens of this phase. Janáček’s operas also contain psychoanalytic portrayals of insanity, usually as a protest against social prejudice. In his Jenůfa (1904), Kostelnička madly drowns Jenůfa’s illegitimate baby to enable her to marry Laca, and in Káťa Kabanová (1921), the title character gradually goes insane and commits suicide after confessing publicly to an assignation with her lover. 

Insanity as a Gendered Problem

We tend to associate mad scenes with female voices, but mad scenes exist for castrati, tenors, and baritones as well. In a letter to the Annales Médico Psychologiques, R. Ropert reminds readers that madness in literature was originally a primarily masculine problem, especially in classical and medieval texts. This is reflected in early operas that adapt these works, such as versions of the Roland/Orlando story (composed by Lully, Handel, Vivaldi, and Haydn) and adaptations of Orestes’ story (such as Glück’s Iphigénia en Tauride). 

By the late 1700s, insanity becomes an almost exclusively female affair. Donizetti’s Maria Padilla contains (as far as I can tell) the only bel canto mad scene for tenor, in contrast to at least half a dozen famous soprano mad scenes. Why is the soprano voice favored? Ropert suggests that the supposed celestial quality of high voices plays on the idea of religious ecstasy, so mad sopranos best express the liberation that accompanies madness in bel canto plots. Of course, the fact that female characters are the ones going mad also reflects the social constraints women historically suffered from. The women are the ones who stand in need of the freedom madness can offer. Insanity also conveniently puts troublesome women out of the way by removing them from the male world into which they may have transgressed. 

The nearly exclusive focus on female madness ends with the bel canto era. Once we reach the psychoanalytic phase of opera, men have a chance to go mad in operas again, although women still predominate. This is in part due to the role that insanity can play in protesting social prejudices (of which women are usually the victims).

How Realistic are Operatic Portrayals of Insanity? 

Clearly, insanity has a lot of symbolic weight to carry. But that’s not necessarily incompatible with a realistic portrayal of madness. Crazy people obviously don’t usually sing coloratura arias, but if we ignore such meta-theatrical considerations, the mad characters’ behavior and symptoms could be consistent with diagnosable mental illnesses. It would take far more than a single magazine article to explore this character by character, but we will look at the most famous of all insane heroines, Lucia di Lammermoor, as a case study. 

In an article in the Annales Médico Psychologiques, J. Verdeau-Pailles catalogues Lucia’s symptoms and arrives at a diagnosis. The intensity and sudden onset of her symptoms point to a “spectacular psychotic crisis,” with delirium serving as a response to intense mental stress. Key symptoms include “sudden onset, precipitation by an external event, depersonalization, affective perturbation, intellectual inhibition, anxiety and depression, aggressive impulses, disorientation, [and] amnesia of a short and definite duration.” According to Verdeu- Pailles, “The disorganization of her psychological life follows a ‘downward spiral’ that becomes irreversible, leading to her psychological and physical death.” He insists that this is in accordance with what Janet and Freud classify as “hysterical delirium” and what Follin calls “hysterical psychosis.” He admits that modern diagnostic manuals do not recognize this condition, but insists that it is a clinical reality and cites a literature review to that effect.

Lucia has been assigned a rather outdated diagnosis which, even if it is accepted, is not perfect. That hysterical psychosis would lead to death, especially as quickly as it seems to in Lucia’s case, is unlikely. However, we should make some allowance for Donizetti and other mad scene composers. Given the dramatic, musical, and symbolical functions insanity already fulfills in opera, it would be a bit much to demand clinical accuracy as well. Besides, realism in general has never been one of opera’s selling points. 

Summary

Tuberculosis is the rare example of disease that was associated with the rich as well as with the poor. Since it was transmitted through the air, it was particularly prevalent among the poor. In addition to increased close contact, malnutrition and alcoholism are also known risk factors for the disease. However, the upper classes were very taken by this apparently melancholic and sensitive mode of dying, and tuberculosis became known as the “romantic disease.” In many ways, Violetta represents the ideal consumptive – fragile, beautiful, and utterly tragic. Indeed, little is made of her actual symptoms in the libretto. Without Grenvil explicitly mentioning “la tisi,” Violetta’s fatigue and eventual collapse could be associated with any other disease.

In 1882, German physician Robert Koch discovered the link between the tuberculosis disease and the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which were extracted from the mucous coughed up by infected patients. In his now famous lecture Über Tuberculose, Koch explained that the bacteria, which could be spread through coughing, spitting, or speaking, in fact caused the disease. This discovery, of course, rather dampened the consumption craze of the upper classes, and since then has been associated with the lower classes. Puccini’s La Bohème, which premiered 14 years after Koch’s discoveries, represents a far less idealized version of the disease than Verdi’s La Traviata. Mimi has hardly sung a dozen words, in fact, before she has a coughing fit. As the evening progresses, the libretto references her paleness, fatigue, and chills. In fact, Rodolfo specifically states that “povertà l’ha sfiorita” (poverty has withered her). Mimi’s music in the final act is a far cry from Violetta’s; the critical pulmonary nature of the disease is emphasized by her short, quiet phrases. This is completely different from Violetta’s sustained lines in “Addio, del passato.” 

Though Violetta and Mimi are the two most well-known victims of bacterial or viral infections, they are by no means the only ones. Britten’s Aschenbach (Death in Venice) succumbs to cholera, a disease caused by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium. More recently, Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös’ 2004 opera, Angels in America, deals with AIDS, a condition caused by HIV infection. Of the four operas, this last one most directly addresses social conceptions of infection and disease. 

Why then, do composers include infection and disease in opera? As mentioned earlier, there are more convenient and glamorous ways to kill off characters. Disease is indeed much less targeted than a stabbing, for instance. Nevertheless, it might be worth noting that pulmonary TB, AIDS, and cholera can all be linked to lower socioeconomic classes. Even though viruses and bacteria obviously do not infect preferentially by class, all three diseases were exacerbated by poor hygiene practices and cramped interactions. In addition, AIDS and TB were viewed at the time as sexually transmitted diseases and even though the transfer of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is not strictly spread through the act of sex, courtesans, such as Violetta, would no doubt have been particularly susceptible.

At the Question and Answer session following the performance, General Director Christopher Mattaliano said, “This opera couldn’t be even one minute longer than it is. The intensity never lets up.”   That statement certainly sums up the experience I had as an audience member. The opera ran straight through with no intermission, thus heightening the audience experience of the true intensity of this opera.   The choice of a modern setting for this production somehow magically added to the experience, giving the whole opera production a surreal quality.  Kelly Cae Hogan, who played Salome in this production, expressed how this role fits her voice so exquisitely that it feels somehow effortless during the actual performance.  That’s truly amazing given the extremely demanding nature of this role.   I believe that this strong performance of the role of Salome was also a key to the experience, as the audience is able to live vicariously through her character