Research: Death in Opera – Sarra Shepherd

http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html
13.02.20

As the earliest operas were modeled after a certain conception of Greek drama, the tragic ones among them naturally reflected an idea of death in line with their model. The first operas took plots from mythology, including Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), the oldest opera still produced with any regularity. The story is the familiar one that begins when the happy marriage of Orpheus to Euridice is terminated by Euridice’s death. The gods then give Orpheus permission to travel into the underworld to retrieve his wife, such is his love for her. Their single prohibition: “Do not look at her until you reach the sunlight.” Of course, he cannot resist a glance backward and the entire enterprise is ruined. The story links love and death; in a very broad sense, the ensuing history of tragic opera has been an elaboration on that theme.

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‘many characters in early operas die simply for lack of love, frequently accompanied by the most wretched self-pity”

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In his triptych of operas made in collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte— The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte — life takes center stage and is flooded with light. Forgiveness among quarreling and conspiring lovers is the theme of both The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte. Death figures only in Don Giovanni,when the famous lover (Don Juan of legend) kills the father of one of his conquests in a duel, and is later himself dragged to hell by the dead father’s shadow. Even so, Giovanni’s killing of the Commendatore is an act of self-defense, not premeditated murder, and when Giovanni is pulled to hell, the punishment seems inappropriate. In some versions of the opera an ensemble of Giovanni’s friends and enemies sing about life after his death and the distinct feeling is one of loss. An aspect of life has been condemned by moral agent (the Commendatore) and snuffed out.”

In Lucia, love and death make a huge return. The Scottish lass Lucy, of the castle Lammermoor, is in love with Edgar of Ravenswood and he with her. But her brother Henry has other plans and forces Lucy to marry a man named Bucklaw for money and advantage. On her wedding night, Lucy goes insane and stabs Bucklaw to death, then sings a very long and very effective insanity scene, accompanied by flute and usually draped in a bloody nightdress, then collapses, dead of sheer sorrow. Not to leave anyone innocent alive, Donizetti has Edgar stab himself to death at Lucy’s grave.

Thus did the bel canto tradition revive the marriage of Eros and Thanatos. Society was back, too, in the form of large choruses that sang commentary on the action while distancing themselves from the horror. Death does not happen to crowds; it comes only to individuals.

The advent of Richard Wagner’s music dramas ushered in an entirely reformed view of death. While the death of the individual was the cornerstone of tragedy for the Italians, it took on a transcendent meaning for Wagner. In a Wagner music drama (a term he preferred to the Italian “opera”), individual death is nearly always a meaningful sacrifice to a greater whole. Death is no longer punishment, it is a kind of reward in the form of escape from desire. In Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the title characters find true love only in death; in fact, the musical climax is a passage called the “Liebestod,” or “Love-Death.” Their ends as individuals return them to a transcendent unity. Desire and death are one.

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Late in life Nietzsche contradicted himself. In an essay titled The Case of Wagner (1888), he condemned Wagner’s embrace of death and praised Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) for its sunniness and embrace of life. Carmen, of course, ends with the death of its heroine, and she even sees it coming. She has rejected her former lover for a new one and the former will stab her to death outside the bullring. She has seen this in the cards— literally. But her death is not a sacrifice, it is an affirmation of the values by which she has chosen to live. Nietzsche at the last saw in this a greater, larger thing than Wagner’s “love-death.”

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Cavalleria was shocking in its time, as much for its directness of expression as for what it expressed. Here were revenge and murder stripped bare of any noble pretence or mythological garment. The story is a simple one involving a Sicilian soldier, his burning lust for a married woman, and the inevitable outcome.

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Death figures oddly in the sole comedy of Trittico, the enduringly charming Gianni Schicchi. In this opera after Dante, the title character feigns to be the voice of a dying man (who is, in fact, already dead) in order to will himself the man’s fortune. This is not selfishness, but a distorted nobility, the opera implies, as Schicchi does this in order to produce a proper dowry for his love-stricken daughter. In Turandot, left incomplete at Puccini’s death in 1924, the gentle Liu sacrifices herself for her master Calaf so that he can claim as his own the moon goddess Turandot. This role of woman as sacrificial object was uniquely nineteenth century and predominantly Mediterranean.

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In Jenufa, the title character is repeatedly wronged by those around her. Her fiancé’s jealous brother disfigures her, her fiancé leaves her, and her stepmother drowns her illegitimate baby. Through it all, Jenufa finds opportunity to grow emotionally. In The Cunning Little Vixen, the story is set among animals. The title creature escapes a gamekeeper to found a family, only to see her path lead to death. Yet, it is a death absorbed into a cycle of life. Nature has taught humankind a lesson. The Makrapulos Affair concerns an opera singer as old as her art. In the course of the opera, 337-year-old Emilia Marty (one of many names she has had over the centuries) must learn how to die.

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In the French composer Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (1958), death is the very subject. A young woman fears death and, seeing the tumult of life around her and the threat of the 1789 French Revolution, escapes to a convent. At length, it becomes clear that the other nuns have taken vows in order to embrace death, not avoid it. The final scene, one of the most chilling in the repertoire, calls for the sisters to chant a Salve Regina (Hail Queen of Heaven) as they exit the stage, one by one, to be guillotined. Periodically, the guillotine falls. The chilling effect is a constant diminuendo, until at last only one voice is heard singing, and that, too, is terminated.

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Tragic drama without music can convey horror, pity, fear, and sorrow, but music adds a dimension of unsettling personal involvement.

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Now, to examine well known death scenes in opera…

Mozart – Don Giovanni.
Massenet – Werther.
Catalani – La Wally.
Adams – The Death of Klinghoffer.
Leoncavallo – Pagliacci (Nedda)
Shostakovich – Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Puccini – La Bohème.
Strauss – Elektra.