#opera analysis

so! let’s talk about bellini’s la sonnambula.

“savannah you don’t even like bellini that much” lalalalalalalalala can’t hear you i have Opinions.

specifically, let’s talk about lisa.

if you’re not familiar with the story of la sonnambula, it’s basically about this small town village girl named amina who’s in love with a boy named elvino and they’re about to get married and shit. BUT amina is a sleepwalker! and no one in this swiss village circa 1830 knows that sleepwalking is a Thing. so when amina sleepwalks into an older gentleman’s hotel room and elvino discovers her there, he denounces her as a cheating whore and breaks off their engagement, but amina’s honor and engagement are swiftly restored once the whole village sees amina sleepwalking and realizes that That Is A Thing.

it’s an exceptionally stupid plot, but i digress.

so who’s lisa?

WELL, lisa is the owner of the aforementioned hotel and she’s had her eye on elvino for practically forever. in fact, they were even engaged before amina came into the picture and he broke up with her. she flirts with count rodolfo (the aforementioned older gentleman) in his room while she’s making the evening rounds, but runs when amina shows up (not knowing she’s sleepwalking) and drops a handkerchief in the process.

then she goes and finds elvino and is like “uh hey i think your girlfriend is cheating on you” and then elvino has this massive overreaction and yadda yadda yadda he actually decides to marry lisa after breaking up with amina! but then amina’s adoptive mother teresa finds the handkerchief and slut shames lisa in front of the entire village.

and here’s the thing: even with her getting elvino, which caused amina’s life to be temporarily ruined, i feel incredibly bad for her.

first off, she’s a businesswoman in a small town in the 1800s. that was really fuckin hard and she was probably already looked at with some suspicion by the townspeople, especially working in a job that yes, did cater to men traveling alone!

[also, a tangent off this: as i previously mentioned, lisa is in love with elvino, who was engaged to her before he broke up with her and got engaged to amina. but lisa is being chased by a local village dude named alessio, and she is Not Having It With Him. she’s trying to gently fend him off too, which is ALSO very hard in a small town in the 1800s. plus the class differences and how she’ll no longer have her own property if she gets married. get married to someone she doesn’t like AND have to give up ownership of her property? no thank you. and that may also cause some problems for her. she litchrally just wants to live her life and not get treated like a piece of shit.]

but really: is it at all sensible to claim that being in the same room as a man alone means you’ll have sex with him? girl was just doing her job and she flirted with a guy ONE (1) time at work. and it wasn’t even really flirting!

this is the entirety of the “flirting”.

immediately after this, amina shows up and lisa runs away. and i think she does even though the intruder is coming in through the window (and what sort of person would come in through the window?) because she’s probably already on edge. she’s probably afraid of making that one wrong move and having her honor and reputation obliterated, which could also be bad for her business!

and lisa getting elvino isn’t her trying to destroy amina’s reputation! she doesn’t know amina is a sleepwalker!

it’s an on-sing one line-off thing. ten seconds tops. she even leaves the room before singing the line so she doesn’t know!!! so she may benefit from amina being out of the way, yes, but she didn’t know!

also, lisa did not intend to have the entire village see the debacle play out imo. she did know they were outside to welcome the count, but the chorus was already peeping in before lisa returned with elvino so she had no way to tell them all beforehand! they didn’t know either, which makes me think lisa didn’t intend for them to know.

there is this, which some could interpret as lisa saying “uh, fuck you amina”:

but i have a different approach. this is not necessarily her saying what should happen to her; it’s her saying what will happen to her. if it’s true she’s been unfaithful, according to nineteenth-century society, she’ll be hated forever. that’s just how it was. she’ll be a social pariah.

and lisa knows that, and she’s afraid that it’ll happen to her.

and then it does.

see, in act two, elvino decides “well let’s go to my fallback girl and marry her” and lisa is obvs Quite Happy About This.

she doesn’t feel worthy of him. 🥺

so they are just about to enter the church for the wedding when rodolfo shows up to stop them and then teresa shows up. after much back and forth, lisa tries to defend herself:

this is what we call projecting. i cannot stress this enough: she is trying to protect herself.

is it very cash money of her? okay, no. is it understandable? uh, yeah.

and technically, she is correct: she doesn’t know amina is a sleepwalker and amina was the intruder in the previous act and they never interacted, so no, she has never been caught alone in a man’s room.

but as i said, even if she had been caught: she was at work! she was LITCHRALLY at work!!! what is this, a mike pence “never be alone in a room with someone of the ‘opposite’ [there are more than two genders btw] gender even for professional reasons” thing? that’s ridiculous!

and in a way, as we quickly see, lisa was caught: teresa pulls out the handkerchief she found and shames her.

and lisa is ashamed, saying she doesn’t dare to even lift up her head and she cannot defend herself.

and after this, in the libretto, lisa is silenced. she never speaks her own words again. this powerful woman is rendered powerless, humiliated to the point of losing her ability to express her own thoughts in this village now set against her.

and no one comes to defend her. not elvino, her former/current lover. not alessio, the man supposedly head over heels for her. obviously not teresa, who is the one leading the charge against her. not anyone who has ever interacted with her in a professional or personal capacity.

not even count rodolfo, the powerful man who was actually there and could exonerate her, decides to defend her.

it’s not that he can’t defend her, it’s that simply he does not want to. he litchrally says he does not want to share his thoughts.

and then he turns around and immediately pleads amina’s innocence.

he wants to defend her. and that may be possibly because of the implication for him: he took advantage of a poor peasant girl. but for lisa: oh that’s different, surely she was flirting with him, she had power in the situation because it was her business, and so on.

but let’s set that aside for a section because that is conjecture. except for elvino, no one else connects this to him.

but it ties into a larger thing that may or may not affect rodolfo, definitely affects the villagers, and probably affects stage directors to this day: the madonna/whore complex. amina is the pure madonna, lisa is the whore left in the shadows. amina’s innocence must be protected but lisa can fend for herself so surely she’ll be okay, right? wrong.

amina being an ingenue doesn’t make lisa a bad person. lisa is in a precarious position and she is afraid and she is trying her best to stay afloat in a society designed to work against people like her.

she isn’t an angel or a devil. she is a woman trying to live.

thank you for coming to my ted talk!

I decided instead of spamming y’all with overenthusiastic reblogs of all my Hoffmann content, I’d just post links here to my most significant Hoffmann ramblings for people to check out if they’re interested...

Exploration of the Hoffmann/Nicklausse dynamic and Nicklausse’s status as canonically genderfluid

Why the Violin Aria is so important

A comparison of the role of the Muse in the opera vs. the play

Some thoughts on the roles of the students, servants, heroines, villains, and others in the opera

Reviews of the first 25 Hoffmann productions I watched (I have seen more since then but am waiting to hit 50 before I post an update list :p )

My top 10 Hoffmann productions and why I love them

A brief history of the four main Hoffmann edits, including detailed summaries of each one

23/04/2020 ~ Thursday

So today I start screaming into the void! I want to try and make this a more or less regular study journal, to help keep me on track when it comes to my research.

-the composer was only NINETEEN when he began working on it

-for perspective: i am currently nineteen

-he started work but had to stop for a year because he was called to fight in World War I

-and he finished it afterwards

-he also co-wrote the libretto with his dad

-so basically he was working on this mostly between 1917-18 (idk when exactly he was released from service) and 1920

-you know what else was going on then?

-the end of World War I

-a fucking pandemic

-obviously a lot of people (including possibly korngold himself) were traumatized as fuck, especially surrounding the concepts of death and survival

it is sometimes said that this is one of the most wrenching music dramas in the operatic repertoire. i wholeheartedly agree, and i’d also like to propose: perhaps korngold just really, really understood the deep emotional pain the world was going through in that moment?

was this a perfect production? no. was there a LOT of great stuff in it? yes. did it make me think about and feel the material in a whole different way? HELL YEAH.

loved the sets. LOVED them.

Anthony Roth Costanzo was everything as host and I died when he popped out of the pickup truck at the beginning.

the musical and dramatic performances were PHENOMENAL. chorus, actors, and orchestra TOP NOTCH.

Nadine Sierra is 110% captivating and her mad scene has to be seen to be believed.

Javier Camarena is *chef’s kiss*. no more needs to be said.

Artur Rucinski is perfection itself and King of the Baritone High Notes. also loved him calling Putin “pure evil” in the interview and saying that he was channeling that pure evilness into his role.

Christian Van Horn was great, ultimate luxury jump-in, if you didn’t know (and didn’t catch the one pre-recorded video in which Matthew Rose appeared) you would’ve thought he was originally in the show.

Arturo and Normanno actually had personalities! thanks Eric Ferring, Alok Kumar, and Simon Stone.

and Alisa had a personality! and Deborah Nansteel sounds kinda like baby Stephanie Blythe!

the amount of blood used was even more than photos indicated. utterly correct decision.

Frizza is an amazing conductor.

the harp, glass armonica, and cello soloists all need raises stat.

I’d love to see how this production works in-house—from what it looks like, I think the HD did a great job of showing what needed to be showed between the live action and the videos.

loved Stone’s comments about how his ideas are only the catalyst and a director’s ideas shouldn’t be the endpoint; everyone should get to contribute. ideal tbh

I couldn’t keep my eyes off for even a second for all of Act I.

HOW THE FUCK DID NADINE JUST BLAST A HIGH D AFTER DOING SOME NINJA LEVEL SHIT WHILE TRYING TO GET AWAY FROM ARTUR IN ACT II

I want to eat that cake

the mad scene, once again, pure perfection. SO many good staging choices, you could just see how she was trying to convince herself that she was finally free only for those Arturo zombies to come back and remind her no you never truly will be free (and then she shoots herself).

also LOVE the Alisa/Lucia bond this production had going on.

there was a moment right before the mad scene where Raimondo is asking that heaven not punish the community for Lucia murdering Arturo and suddenly a bunch of shit just clicked—it’s one single moment of self-awareness that everyone has contributed to this mess, this culture has made this mess, and then they go right back to gawking and making a pitiful spectacle of Lucia during her mad scene.

also, for the first time I really “get” the opera not ending with Lucia’s mad scene. maybe this wasn’t what Donizetti and Cammarano had in mind, but the opera is called Lucia di Lammermoor. it’s all about her struggle and beatdown by these men around her. she gets the ultimate showcase. but it’s not the end. she still dies, and the men around her still make it all about them—it’s no accident that there are no women at all in the last scene. the men twist her death to make it about them, which is why nothing can truly change. they get the last word, not her.

it has to do with power dynamics.

Laca had only one goal the whole opera: to win Jenufa. and he was willing to do anything to achieve that goal, including permanently disfiguring knowing that the man she loved would leave her if she weren’t conventionally pretty.

(which, that itself is a bitch move, but at least Steva had the decency to agree to pay child support provided that no one ever found out that the baby was his. bare fucking minimum but the bar is in the basement for this opera, but I digress.)

I don’t know about y’all, but to me that’s not love in the slightest. in my opinion, Laca wants power over her, he wants her to belong to him.

and he’s willing to do anything to make Jenufa his own—anything, that is, except the one thing she actually needs, which is to raise her child as his own. he refuses to raise the child of the half-brother he so despises.

and this is what causes the Kostelnicka to do what she does. in a moment of desperation, she lies to Laca and tells him the baby is dead, anything to get her married off because she knows that that is Jenufa’s only guarantee of being remotely safe at this point.

and then, because she has to, she makes that lie come true.

the Kostelnicka is a sacristan. she is an important older member of this closed-off, very conservative, tight-knit community. she has also lived through an abusive marriage to a now-deceased alcoholic. she knows first-hand that women like Jenufa have no options in this world nor any real way of getting out of it. she knows that Steva is an alcoholic and a womanizer and that he’s now engaged to another woman.

I believe she is genuinely for the most part trying to do her best for her stepdaughter (and of course she definitely believes that, and of course her actions would benefit her too because she won’t be the recipient of shame and mockery over having a stepdaughter with an illegitimate child). she’s trying to keep her away from alcoholic men, so she says Jenufa can’t marry Steva until he’s been sober for a whole year, which poses a major problem because Jenufa is at that point four months pregnant with Steva’s child. knowing that Jenufa has no other options, she tries to get her married to the only other man who has ever shown any interest in her whatsoever.

and then in a last-ditch attempt to save that situation she does the unthinkable—but only, and I cannot stress this enough, in reaction to Laca’s refusal to take Jenufa and her child. yes, she was hoping the baby would die, thus easily solving everyone’s problems, but I don’t believe she was planning to kill him at all until Laca did his shit.

and then the Kostelnicka tries her best to break the news to Jenufa in such a way that Jenufa will find comfort in it. she does her damndest to make sure she never finds out the truth and instead thinks her baby died peacefully.

so Act III rolls around and it’s their wedding day. and I’m a cynic about this and I see everything that Laca does in Act III as either trying to save this impending marriage or being incredibly emotionally insensitive.

Like towards the very beginning of the act, one of the other characters asks Jenufa if she’s nervous about getting married. Jenufa says no, and Laca’s follow-up is, I kid you fucking not,

“Why should she be nervous? She knows that I’ll never harm her again!”

…do you fucking hear yourself.

And, yes, Jenufa wants everyone to patch things up and move on. But towards the beginning of the act, Laca informs Jenufa that he has invited Steva and his fiancée to their wedding and does so in a way that makes it seem like he had not previously told her about said invitation (Jenufa does not respond to this at all).

And then, later, when Jenufa just fucking found her baby drowned in the ice, Laca’s first words are not to give her comfort but “Try to pull yourself together!” Come on. Come on. The sheer insensitivity.

He does do one good thing—he threatens to kill anyone who tries to execute Jenufa for supposed infanticide—but I’m a cynic about this: he’ll do anything to keep anyone from taking her from him.

and immediately after this, we see the difference between the Kostelnicka and Laca: she is willing to publicly confess her role in this whole wretched imbroglio. she knows, and declares as such, that she is unworthy of Jenufa’s love. she confesses that she had selfish intentions, was afraid for her own honor as much as Jenufa’s.

In the not-quite-ensemble that comes after her confession, Laca sings of his own guilt, admits it. but only in aside. he addresses his words, ostensibly, to Jenufa, but really to himself. she does not even hear what he says, let alone anyone else in the community. even Steva has Karolka (his now former fiancée because Karolka has by far the most brain cells of anyone in this godforsaken opera) to hold him publicly accountable as she breaks off her engagement to him.

but no one keeps Laca accountable for how he ruined Jenufa’s life and largely caused the death of her child. and he never tells anyone.

the Kostelnicka gives herself up to the justice system. for a split second she considers killing herself instead, but instantly changes her mind for one simple reason: “No, no! I must not! If I did, they would turn on you, Jenufa!” she is willing to take the consequences of her own actions and save Jenufa at any cost.

and all these reasons—her level of desperation, her knowledge of the very real and very horrible things that could happen to her stepdaughter should anyone find out about her illegitimate child, her guilty conscience, her full owning up to what she’s done, her acceptance that what she’s done means that Jenufa will likely never love her again, her work to keep making sure that Jenufa is as safe as can be under the circumstances knowing that Jenufa will likely hate her forever—are why in the end, I don’t have a big problem with Jenufa’s ultimate decision to forgive the Kostelnicka. she’s doing her best.

it’s her forgiving Laca at the end and continuing to go through with their planned marriage that’s the problem for me, for all the reasons outlined in this post.

and then, at the very end, Jenufa tells Laca to leave: surely he won’t want to be associated with a ruined woman like her?

Laca’s response, to me, is horrific:

“So now you’re going forth, seeking a better life, and you won’t take me with you, Jenufa?”

His mind immediately goes to “oh, she likely has no future here, so she’s going to leave everything behind and make a better life for herself—but fuck all that because I’m not a part of it.”

This is particularly bad given that Jenufa never once said that she planned to leave or make a new life for herself. all she said was that they cannot be together because she is unworthy of him—because she says that he was “always for me the best and the finest man of all!” and “Tho’ you meant to hurt me when you cut my cheek, I forgave you long ago. You sinned only out of love, just as I sinned.”

which, JENUFA PLEASE THAT IS NOT LOVE THE IDEAS OF LOVE THAT YOU HAVE BEEN TAUGHT ARE SO FUCKING FUCKED UP

but anyway, all he cares about is whether Jenufa is with him. that’s it. and I see in his last words to her in the opera an intense manipulation.

she has no one else in the world left. her community has abandoned her, her stepmother who was trying her best though it was incredibly misguided and partially for the wrong reasons will surely be given the maximum penalty possible in court, her child is dead, her former lover irreversibly revolted by her. she knows this, he knows this.

and he takes this moment to say: “I would bear far more, far more than that [social contempt] for you! What does the world matter if only we are together!”

He doesn’t care. He has what he wanted all along. That is all that matters to him. He’s preying on her, taking advantage of an isolated woman. This is how so many abuse stories begin—and as we know, he is more than willing to both physically and psychologically abuse her.

And Jenufa, the woman who has no one else in the world, the woman who has no more options, the woman forever physically and psychologically scarred, the woman who’s been raised in a community with fucked-up ideas about love and relationships, forgives him because she believes it is the right thing to do and the only way to move forward. She has openly admitted (at the end of Act II) that she does not and cannot truly love him.

It’s a recipe for utter disaster. We don’t find out what happens to them afterwards, but in my opinion there’s no way this story ends well for Jenufa.

so I cannot accept that the very last scene of the opera is something we’re supposed to view in a positive light. the penultimate scene, yes, the final scene, absolutely not. it’s a horrifyingly sad commentary about what can happen to women, how they have no good options, about how these cold-hearted communities trap women in situations with no way of ending well.

had she forgiven the Kostelnicka and in fact been able to simply leave the community by herself, I have no doubt that with her strength, her kindness, and her intelligence (in the opera, she teaches children in her spare time and other characters even say she should do it professionally), she could make her own way in the fin-de-siècle world. that could be a somewhat happy ending, as true as a happy ending could be for her.

but this is what happens to her in the end.

towards the beginning of Act III, Laca declares to Jenufa:

“Now I’ve overcome all the evil in my heart, for you are with me.”

…but is that really true?

it’s because while I don’t really like saying “oh the creators would have wanted this” or something like that, I will go ahead and say this: I think Verdi and Solera were trying to do two different things that are...not necessarily incompatible, but in this case they were.

number one: they were trying to create a Risorgimento allegory

number two: they were trying to make a point about why religious violence is not very cash money

unfortunately, they used the Crusades for the purposes of the former, and they thought they could somehow maneuver to also do the second, but it didn’t really work at all.

Verdi and Solera had had an absolutely massive triumph with Nabucco, and they tried to do more of the same here. however, unlike in Nabucco, this time they made the oppressors—the Catholic Lombards and other associated Crusaders—their stand-ins, with the concept of leading a difficult, underdog-esque movement of “liberation”. now, though I am a scholar of history, I am not a medievalist nor do I have a specialist’s level of understanding about intercontinental relations during the time period. however, I can tell you two things:

number one: it is fundamentally unacceptable to invade a place that isn’t yours and murder and rape and pillage the inhabitants already living there.

number two: tragically, religion that is designed to be a source of love and hope and all things good in the world is often twisted into an instrument of hate. the Crusades were no exception.

Verdi, as many of you know, had...extremely complicated feelings about religion, a perception which I share. and he was also intensely anticlerical, which comes through in many of his operas, including this one. it is to Verdi’s credit, however, that his operas portray exceptionally nuanced portrayals of people wrestling with religion. take Don Carlos, for example, which portrays religion both at its best—the welcoming of the auto-da-fé victims into heaven in spite of what men may say, the solace characters seek—and its worst (the Grand Inquisitor, the auto-da-fé itself). and Verdi is always sure to make it clear when he is roundly condemning the worst of it.

even Lombardi gets in on this action: Giselda wrestles with her faith and comes to the brink of losing it completely, Pagano strives to find redemption through becoming a hermit (though his subsequent actions are...questionable at best).

so it no doubt comes as a bit of a shock when there is a chorus with the opening words “Stolto Allhà!” (literally “Stupid Allah”) or that Act IV in particular portrays the Crusaders’ victory in a positive manner. the former, I believe, is not intended to portray the Crusaders in a good light: this is just how they are.

I’ll come back to the latter in a bit.

there is plenty of that wholehearted condemnation of the worst of religion in this opera, most notably in one of my absolute favorite moments of the opera, the Act II finale. Giselda’s grand cabaletta leaves no stone unturned, blunts absolutely no edges. here’s my translation:

GISELDA

No! To flood the earth with human blood is not the just cause of God!

It is because of vile insanity, not pious direction, that now you are driven to seize the Muslims’ gold!

This was not the word of heaven...no, God does not will it!

... (other characters cut in)

A divine force has torn the dark cloth from my eyes!

The vanquished people arise—soon, horrible revenge from the shadows!

None of your souls will be granted the right to die on your native soul!

The God of humanity always scorned the evil slaughter of human bodies!

... (other characters cut in again)

I already see your heads hanging by their hair, the playthings of the wind;

I see barbarians rising up in torrents...barbarians who conquer Europe and enslave its people!

These were never the words of God, to let waves of blood flow!

No! God does not will it!

He only came down to earth to speak of peace!

(the original libretto)

so we can say pretty well confidently that Verdi and Solera did not really condone the horrors of the Crusades, least of all the religious justification for them.

but if they do not condone it...then what? why does Giselda suddenly rejoin the Crusaders in Act IV? and what about the “liberation” Risorgimento narrative?

for the former, there are two possible explanations: Solera’s libretto includes a passage seemingly cut and unused by Verdi at the beginning of Act IV in which Pagano rescues Giselda, who is now otherwise alone in the world, from certain death by dehydration and exposure and returns her to her father, convincing Arvino (her father) to forgive her. however, as is, Giselda has a clear motive for rejoining her people: she has a vision informing her that her people are on the brink of death by dehydration and since the vision also tells her of a magical water source, she is the only person who is able to save them. and because Giselda is a fundamentally decent human being, she rejoins them, gives them the news, and saves them all. however, her joining in in the Crusaders’ chorus at the end of Act IV, Scene 2, is not clear. perhaps it is that she simply has no one else left in the world besides these people she’s known all her life.

but the wrench is in the nature of using the Crusades as a Risorgimento allegory, particularly in light of all this. the liberation/unification of Italy, which is definitely something to be celebrated, I believe, is equated to the “liberation” of Jerusalem, which is obviously much more problematic. we are expected to root for the accomplishment of this goal. however, this fails to account for the very real human side of the equation and the whole “maybe genocide isn’t good” factor, which as just discussed, is itself a major point in the opera.

ergo, particularly as we in the 21st century are beginning to look at history with a much more critical eye that relies less on “great man/event” history and traditionally dominant forces (such as those that drove the Christian side of the Crusades), this duality makes the work feel far too fractured and uneven. it was really just a bad choice of historical allegory: I fully believe that had Verdi and Solera picked a different sort of conflict, or hell, had even taken a different angle with the Crusades, this could have been much more consistent and successful in its messages. however, things are as they are, and so it is not.

you guessed it: Les contes d’Hoffmann. I spent way too many hours over the past months writing this thing.

I just think of all of this altogether too much so I decided to just write it all down in one place like the lit crit nerd I am.

As I’ve mentioned before, there is a LOT of evidence in Les contes d’Hoffmann that the two main characters (the titular Hoffmann and his friend Nicklausse, aka the Muse) are absolutely an item. To the point where I honestly can’t understand how a director can look at this opera and think “oh that’s not gay” and proceed to stage it as if it’s not. It is SO GAY. I can only imagine that directors who stage this differently are deliberately trying to specifically remove the gay content (e.g., taking out the Violin Aria, messing with edits, doing weird things with the productions that I won’t get into lest I fall into a rant and forget what I’m here to talk about).

For some, the only way to acknowledge that Nicklausse and Hoffmann are an item is it ignore the Nicklausse part and have the Muse be a girl for the entire opera. Because, well, we can maybe admit to the romance, but at least it’s not gay, right?

Well, no.

Often, we get a strange dynamic where productions can’t seem to decide how to mitigate the gayness. Is Nicklausse a girl so there’s no gay with Hoffmann? But what about when he’s flirting with Giulietta (and come on, it’s really hard to stage the Barcarolle, which is basically a love song, without Nicklausse at least vaguely flirting with Giulietta and vice versa, because they’re singing it together). How is that not gay if you insist Nicklausse is a girl? There’s no way to get around it.

No matter how you spin it, it’s gonna be gay. And like I said, if a production tries to insist otherwise, it’s specifically to push back against The Gay. That usually fails miserably for two reasons. One, those productions are garbage, I don’t care who the director is and how fabulous the rest of their work might be. And two, by trying their hardest to get rid of the gay, they are flat-out admitting that it is there. If it wasn’t so blatantly obviously gay, people wouldn’t try so hard to prove that it isn’t.

On another note, it’s pretty obvious that the character of Nicklausse/the Muse is genderfluid. The Muse introduces herself in feminine terms in the Prologue (and Muses are typically associated with femininity), but navigates the majority of the opera identifying as Nicklausse, who’s a man. Ironically productions that try to lessen The Gay get stuck on this because if Nicklausse is definitively a feminine Muse, she’s gonna be gay with Giulietta, in which case the only way to avoid that is to say that isn’t gay because Nicklausse is a man, and, well, whoops, you just admitted the character is genderfluid.

Like I said, there’s no way around it.

I feel like even this super-vague analysis should be enough to convince people. But, because it’s not lit crit if we don’t get all in-depth and nerdy, and because it’s really fun, I’m going to plumb the depths of my research and analysis and share with you this 4,000-word essay proving that yes, indeed, Nicklausse is genderfluid; and yes, indeed, he and Hoffmann are a couple, and a very gay one at that.

Let’s begin.