A glance at the calendar of the Deutsche Oper Berlin for the month of April is enough to confirm all the clichés. Desdemona, wife of outsider Othello, is the archetypal female victim. Beyond any doubt as to her moral purity, she sings an angelic »Ave Maria« before being murdered in a fit of jealousy by her husband. Senta, too, dies at the end of THE FLYING DUTCHMAN: »Will she be my angel?«, the Dutchman beseeches her father. And Senta sacrifices herself to attain redemption for her cursed lover. Violetta, the courtesan in LA TRAVIATA, is another example: starting out as a harlot, she then becomes a saint, accepting life without her lover in an act of martyrdom – and, in a gesture of consideration for his family honour, she expires at the end. Then we have Aida, the slave girl. From the very first strains of her music, it is foreshadowing her death. Thais, too, morphs from whore to saint: after making the cleansing transformation to pious nun, the former prostitute dies gazing heavenwards, her head full of visions. And to round off our list we find Lucia di Lammermoor choosing madness and death as the only way to escape the schemes of men.

So that is the cloth from which opera’s women are cut? Either humiliated or venerated; either held up as angelic figures or cursed as seductresses? Can we still take this kind of story seriously in this day and age?

These plot lines were written at a time when women were still trapped in a rigid, patriarchal straitjacket, fated to be servants to men and their families. Not that the musical theatre of the 19th century presents women occupied with their domestic duties. On the contrary: the actions and activities of operatic heroines have little or no connection with real life. None of them has a family and none is particularly suited to holding down a relationship. They are all surfaces onto which the heroes project their desires and fantasies - hell and heaven, sinners and saints.

Moreover, the aestheticized death of these women invites us to daydream and also keeps the women at one or two removes. Anything about them that might appear genuine or conceivable – that might hint at the reality of romantic love – is kept from us. Instead, they take refuge in phantasms, deliver monologues, cling to unattainable desires and prefer to focus their energies on the concept of love rather than on love itself. At which point we can conclude that opera is as topical today as it has ever been. Surely the massive quest for love in our singles-oriented society is partly due to the growing gulf between expectations and reality, whereby we are always holding out for something better.to come along. Do we find a way to live out our amorous ideal? Or is it the case that, in order to be able to believe in romantic love, we actually have to stay living on our own, so that the real world does not impinge on and threaten our cosy belief system?

Today the great operatic love stories of the 19th century, the dreams of harlots and saints, tell us above all something about our insecurities and our fear of falling in love. The music of these works conveys the message that love is a utopia where loneliness reigns. These mechanisms have to be laid bare for any performance being mounted in 2020.

Barbara Strozzi [painted by her husband 1640]

 

Nonetheless, the issue of the depiction of women in opera has not gone away. Works from the baroque era portraying strong, powerful women indicate that the situation was not always as one-sided as it was in the 19th century. Monteverdi and Händel presented female rulers who selected their lovers themselves and responded with rage and death threats if their equally self-confident female rivals appeared on the scene. There were equal rights in matters of singing voice: the male hero sang in the same pitch as his female colleagues and prima donnas sang the roles of men and women alike. Coupled to this there is the story from Monteverdi’s time of the first ever woman to write an opera. Francesca Caccini composed at least seven works of musical theatre and for over 40 years was a highly respected – and famous – freelance artist. Similarly self-assured were performances by Barbara Strozzi and Maddalena Casulana; these two writers of madrigals reveal that the humanist cultural ideal pushed by the Italian Renaissance did not recognise gender apartheid. That the history of operatic music was to be dominated by male composers for centuries afterwards, almost up to the present day, is the most serious and shocking problem confronting women in opera.

For we will never know if female composers would have fantasised about whores and saints or depicted the subject and essence of love differently. All we have is the present day and the future to work with.