THE ABSENT MOTHER IN OPERA SERIA
Martha Feldman
[N.B. This is a preliminary version of my paper for the Study Group. I intend to send a different version around mid-May. Please note that for now sections 2 through 4 are largely adapted from my article "Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995). Sections 1, 5, 6, and 7 are new.]
1. Opera seria was founded on myths of the good king. In a structural sense, these myths were naturalized through the cultural messages delivered in the libretto, whose propositions - so it told the listener - were not up for review. This was an ironic message in the context of most eighteenth-century Italian theaters, since even as such myths sought to foreordain and foreclose the viewer's outlook on the world, so doing they also seem to have freed viewers to listen when and as they pleased: far from watching myths play out on the stage with the constant vigilance of modernist viewers, spectators of Metastasian drama rarely gave their undivided attention. It appears, then, that audiences' attentions were as anarchic, erratic, and unpredictable as the operas' narrative forms were axiomatic, inert, and repetitive; that indeed the two were inherently and linked.
In this sense, the manner in which opere serie were experienced was inseparable from the message. Yet manner and message were anything but coterminous. Discontinuous listening was possible, I would argue, precisely because endless, insuperable patriarchy was a foregone conclusion. Or so it was meant to be: other signs in Italian theater life, as we will see, suggest fractures in the field of patriarchal relations that ruled the old regime. Recall that the semiotics of theater space in the prototypical public theater would have a monarchical loge placed centrally among ribbons of boxes. [slide 1] In the lower tiers, those boxes were bedecked with noble families, who formed so many microcosms of the royal, ducal, or princely family. Since families owned their boxes or leased them annually, the principal unit of theatrical viewing was a familial one and the principal figure within the family unit was the husband. But the institution of marriage was in a peculiar state of crisis in eighteenth-century Italy, and many, if not most, husbands could not be found in the boxes that were theirs. In this respect, at least, the patriarchal order articulated by the hall was drained at the level of practice of much of the message it proposed. Marriage, moreover, was only the most visible among a complex of family crises in settecento Italy: with the crisis of marriage came a crisis of motherhood. The figure of the mother will be my theme toward the end of this paper. First it will be useful to begin with the divine king, a figure who preceded even the mother in the collective imaginations of early modern Europeans. For this purpose I turn to Metastasio's Artaserse to ask how kingship, as well as kinship, conflict, and passion, operated in what might well be regarded as the classic exemplum of the seria myth.
2. Artaserse, like all of Metastasio's librettos, entails a struggle to resolve conflict between duty and inclination. [slide 2] Conflict saturates the very opening of the libretto, when king Serse is murdered offstage after having banished his daughter's suitor, Arbace, on grounds of his inferior rank (Act I.i-ii). Setting off a battery of complications, Serse's murder is an event that thenceforth makes Arbace the central human embodiment of the conflict between love and duty. For as it turns out, Serse's assassin is Arbace's father, Artabano, who has acted to avenge the injury to Arbace's honor, yet mysteriously planted the incriminating dagger on his son. Though framed and bewildered, Arbace keeps silence to shield his father from suspicion. He shrinks only once, when Artabano proposes a plot to usurp the heir apparent, Artaserse, and make Arbace king. This leaves Artabano furious at Arbace's defiance of fatherly privilege, though awed at his sense of honor and torn, finally, over whether Arbace should be praised or censured (II.iii).
Artabano's dilemma is mirrored in broader struggles of class and consanguinity that mark the two females: the princess Mandane loves Arbace yet seeks vengeance for her father's death. Arbace's sister Semira pleads his innocence. Once again, Arbace is the prime target of conflict and instrument of resolution. In Act III, after a series of mishaps that serve as tests of Arbace's moral resolve, he proves himself to be virtuous once and for all by offering his life first to Mandane and then (in exchange for his father's) to Artaserse. In both attempts he is refused, and in Artaserse's first act of royal grace he decrees exile for Artabano instead of execution. The way is cleared for the marriage of Mandane to Arbace and Artaserse to Semira, and the libretto ends with the populace crowning Artaserse's virtue in a final chorus of praise.
Embedded in this narrative lies a moral tale of impure elements tamed and eradicated from the idealized body politic, as generically represented by ancient Persia. Metastasio arrays the social order in an archetypal geometry with a pair of royal heirs descending triangularly from the king, who stands at the apex of the love/duty conflict.
[slide 2]
This upper stratum forms a sacralized royal household poised above the more secular, heroic realm of Artabano, Arbace, and Semira, who duplicate the familial triangle of their royal superiors to whom they are bound through ties of friendship, love, and counsel. The system of hierarchical strata extends partially downward to an even lower order in the figure of Megabise, a corrupt general who has Artabano's ear, just as Artabano had had Serse's ear. The two main strata will converge genealogically once the lover-pairs of Artaserse/Semira and Mandane/Arbace are freed to marry by the erasure of negative forces in the kingdom. Until then, upper and lower ranks are traversed most conspicuously by the heroic Arbace, who functions in the libretto as a symbolic medium of inner virtue, immanent in the body social but as yet not fully realized at the outset of the opera. Significantly, his virtue flags only once: at the beginning of Act I he threatens to skew the moral order not just by courting Mandane but, worse, by taking umbrage at King Serse's have spoken "down" to him and charging that if royalty were assigned on earth it might as easily have fallen on him as on Serse. From this moment of transgressive pride many sins are born for which, in the moral economy of opera seria, Arbace pays the largest price but owing to which he alone undertakes a full-scale moral ascent. Arbace's story of moral transformation is Artaserse's didactic subplot, an instructive lesson of grace.
Were the conflicts that Metastasio's characters confront as simple as those between public duty and personal desire, however, the plots would be limply self-evident. Somewhere at issue is always the seemingly ineluctable problem that honor cuts so many ways as to suffer no matter what the outcome: that honoring the father will betray the prince (Arbace); or honoring the beloved will betray the father (Mandane). Since narrative lies ever victim to this fact, conflicts are mediated through an ethical hierarchy with obligations pointing ever upward from lovers, friends, counselors, and confidantes, to fathers, brothers, and sisters, and finally to kings. As a rule kings trump kin and kin trump nonblood relations in resolving conflict.
Accordingly, the moral prerogatives postulated through this scalar movement also place public concerns above private ones, thus forming a parallel set of criteria that is structurally interesting precisely because imperfectly congruent.
Indeed, even the alignment of various relationship-types--father/son, sister/brother, confidante/king, princess/lover--with the conditions of public/private cannot alone solve dilemmas regarding the rights and duties of social caste. Larger clan relations inseparably bind king and kin, as well as other alliances; and some of these, though merely potential, such as troths or covenants, will help ensure the perpetuity of the patriarchy. The king in particular occupies at once two categories, sacred and profane. In accordance with long-standing Western tradition (as described most famously by Ernst Kantorowicz), he is divine and eternal with respect to office yet human with respect to person. Mediator of the two realms, his double position aids upward resolutions in securing new affinal relations, new princely offspring, and the general harmony and durability of the kingship.
Furthermore, as crux of the moral order, the king's embodied father image takes on a variety of meanings whose implications again fan out through numerous levels of the body politic. As eternal embodiment of the father to his subjects and a temporal father-body to his children, the king was a father figure in at least two senses: a divine but kin-like king to the body politic and kingly kin to his own progeny. The decorum of loyalties implied by these varying positions involved each person in multilayered relations, of which different ones would be implicated in different situations. Thus Mandane, at a point in Act II when she believes that Arbace has killed her king and father, can actually urge Artabano to condemn his own son to death while still reproaching him afterwards for having done so: "Mandane's duty was t'avenge a father, But Artaban's to save a son: compassion Became thy state, and hatred suited mine. . . . Such were our diff'rent duties" (2:13).
The implicit destination of all upward motion--and a feature I deem crucial to listening practices--is the divine figure of God the Father. All relations cascade hierarchically down from God, for whom the king served as instrument and representative on earth.
This direct link between god and king is instantiated in a host of symbols. When Artaserse attains the crown, he bestows sublime love on the people in exchange for their earthly loyalty (III.xi). In the midst of the rite he is to drink from a "sacred cup" by which he imbibes the eternal polity into the king's body and consolidates his connection to the sacred. Shortly thereafter, proof that divine providence smiles on the new reign is offered as Mandane appears with news that Megabise, in his lowly will to desecrate the body politic anew, has been inciting disorder among the populace, only to be stopped by Arbace (III.13). In the libretto's prime transformative incident, Arbace's sword becomes the divine rod of iron that breaks Megabise's evil back.
3. Mandane's report reveals that critical to Arbace's spiritual ascent and the upward transformation of the populace is the medium of passion. A key feature of her account is that at the brink of his final upward resolution Arbace preserved the populace from unrest not with reason but with impassioned oratory: "On some with threats he wrought, on some with prayers; oft changed his looks from placid to severe." Arbace's passion is finally the instrument that restores order to the kingdom and joins him to the royal family through Mandane. Occurring at the very moment when Megabise threatens to profane the polity, the medium of passion becomes the kingdom's warrant against doom and assurance that its axioms will stand secure.
In this respect the magical effects of passion that Mandane recounts here merely illustrate at the narrative level the force that drives opera seria at the level of experience--the emotion collected and poured forth in singing and hearing arias. As described by 18c intelligentsia in Italy, opera seria was a form of spectacle, a series of diverting set pieces and visual delights--arias, dances, stage effects. Its instrumentality lay in the states of awe induced by spectacle and (moreover) the states of emotion brought on by ravishing voices.
Story-telling thus had little power to operate directly on audiences, as process and not mere paradigm, except perhaps when forced to listen in a sovereign's presence. Yet even then, I would insist, listening was not therefore an acknowledgement that the myth of the good king was true. Rather it was proof positive of its power as myth. It was an affirmation that the medium of the message was effective. The person of the monarch, to recall Norbert Elias, was made sovereign through the imitation of his behavior by his subjects. By extending a condition of his bodily person, they also extended his controls into the body politic. Everyone collectively thereby became the monarch, who was thus dissolved into the new sovereign of the people. When the king was absent, performances reenacted kingly force by virtue of iteration.
The process of generating passions, magically linked thus to the sovereign's moral and spiritual condition, made sovereignty more than a mere site of power and charisma: it made sovereignty centerless, invisible, and pervasive. It rendered it internal in the sovereign's subjects. Indeed it rendered the sovereign's physical presence all but unnecessary and "proved" ineffably the immortality of his spirit.
If anything, the narrative contributed to this invisibility by dispersing propositions and symbolic currencies so thoroughly as virtually to absolve audiences of any requirement to evaluate what went on onstage for evidence of a verifiable reality. That work was sooner done by more narrative genres. Narration could have no privileged place in the way audiences were asked to experience propositions whose truth claims were all decided in advance. Seria in its classic form asserts a social order that exists naturally, inevitably, and endlessly. An opera seria, as it progresses, merely turns the pages of eternal time, its outcome preordained, and its messages and denouements hardly susceptible to validation through inspections by earthly mortals. Seria's characters therefore need not be situated in real histories of family, place, or time. They are abstract actors of a transcendental truth, divine messengers of absolutist metaphysics. Like Athena, they spring without origins from the head of Zeus--literally, for the Father is so engendering that mothers typically are dispensed with altogether.
In this sense seria's moral lessons had their limits. They reminded people of how to show deference to the king and other superiors, especially fathers. They could demonstrate how to court future spouses, how to treat brothers, how to identify and resolve conflicts between family and state. One thing they did not teach - or taught only by negation - was how to view mothers.
4. Mothers would have given centerless kingship a knowable core. Power here, to the contrary, was a roving signifier whose mercenery signifieds could be enlisted however the social or political fit was best: as father, bishop, king, general; dynasty, oligarchy, principality, or papal state. Far from grounding itself in realistic polities and genealogies, opera seria thrived in these roaming representations of kinship and power.
As such the claims of seria could not sustain representations within a material world, or in a world of effects. Its taken-for-granted nature depended on mechanisms that circulated ideas, acts, and objects in highly saturated and pliable signs--the divine king, noblesse oblige, the magnanimous prince, the royal crown, the divine sword, altar and sun, the sacred cup. Usable for many different purposes, opera seria sounded the absolutist order in a general way while numerous changes were rung on the messages it was taken to express.
In its classic form, the messages of seria were inscrutable because mystifying in transmission. Seria could more easily articulate messages at a generalized structural level by (paradoxically) disarticulating the process by which a viewer's experience might test such truths--the modes that might lead viewers to certify or spurn them: thus perspectival illusions could disregard the exigencies of human form; audiences could ignore the genders that inhabited characters on the stage; and kinship structures could circumvent the realities of human generation. Far from "promoters" and "producers" using tangible, material evidence and narrated stories to prove its propositions to listeners -- "the king is omnipotent and magnanimous," "princes are valiant lovers," "subjects must imitate codes of honor similar to those of their royal superiors," and so forth --that is, far from "proving" propositions by showing and telling, those propositions could better be ratified through the illogical magicalities with which they were produced.
The high points of opera seria therefore occur when the critical junctures of plot--moral transformations and political turns--coincide with extraordinary outpourings of feeling. The emotional effect Mandane's rhetoric attributes to Arbace in narrating the scene of his transcendence resembles the effects that collectivized listeners in the opera house, where such rhetoric was embodied in transmaterial lyric form. In place of material guarantees, arias by turn articulated and resolved conflicts, not through rational deliberation but through the expressions of morality, justice, and love concentrated effusively at the ends of scenes. Sung by solo voices, arias worked to dissolve narrative into lyric magic, as recitative culminates repeatedly in outbursts of unfathomable, mystically empowered song.
This special role of song is defined as well through spatial location. Arias, recall, were performed in the forestage or proscenio, that borderland between stage and house typically flanked by proscenium boxes. Marked off musically, they served to transcend the more everyday operations of plot and action. Arias thus inhabited a liminal space where normal time and action were suspended, feeling annihilated reason, and passion collected in the recitative could be unleashed at the scene's end.
In this way arias correspond to the myriad formal disjunctions that struck eighteenth-century writers on opera seria--between reciting and singing, story and song, opera and ballet, character and gender. Indeed to outsiders, it seemed as if all of seria's forms had astounding license to disjoin other forms--indeed, to unhinge from meaning altogether.
5. So too, we might say, the lives of couples who watched from their boxes. For in eighteenth-century Italy, the very condition of aristocratic marriage had been rent from its representation, since the marital institution was laboring in a state of extraordinary tension. Although wives now moved freely, and frequently, throughout the expanding public sphere, marriages within the Italian aristocracy were still typically arranged by parents. Moreover, as the aristocracy underwent growing uncertainty, fiscal and social, financial expedients dictating the bottom line increasingly governed their choices of husbands. Those husbands were often known little, or not at all, to the females who were to wed them. This was especially so given that girls had often been confined to convents for their periods of education, and were thus prevented from making acquaintances with men in the outside world, or even knowing anything about marriage per se.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, the tolerable contradictions of early modern married life were finally stretched to their limit through the introduction of a compensatory institution, which provided aristocratic wives with surrogates for husbands who were preoccupied with business affairs and mistresses.
Enter the cicisbeo, an extreme figure of late courtly society. [slide 3--Tiepolo] Roughly defined, the cicisbeo (sometimes called the cavaliere servente) was a male escort who fulfilled a wife's needs for company, intimacy, and public partnership. Married or single and usually drawn from the noble class, cicisbei were evidently chosen by common accord between husband and wife and were often specified in marriage contracts. They typically entered long-term relationships with a single married woman - relationships that in some cases lasted for decades. Cicisbei took part in numerous activities that in centuries past had been reserved for spouses: taking the wives they served on carriage rides, visits, and outings to public theaters and cafes; attending morning toilet, when a wife was dressed and groomed by her maids, and thence to church; and helping to serve her at mealtimes. [slides 4 and 5--Longhi] So institutionalized was the fashion of non-spousal escort that some women complained that they were forced to endure the cicisbeo over the company of husbands they preferred. Yet as Charles De Brosses remarked, "it would have been a kind of dishonor had one not been publicly ascribed to her" - and so it was that the order of marriage was disordered in the form of a rule.
In considering this phenomenon in relation to the genre and institution of opera seria, we should imagine the hall of an eighteenth-century European theater as a stage for the audience, just as much as the actual stage was for the drama, each box vibrating with its own candlelight, curtained and thus framed. Across the panorama of such little "theaters," the cicisbeo and his escorted female sat boxed like so many marionettes. Indeed it was in the theater most particularly that the cicisbeo appeared as the stereotyped gallant.
As the decades passed, however, the cicisbeo increasingly formed the target of moralists' barbs: a bird in flight, a fop, fatuous, vain; so conquettish as to be barely male. As one satirist put it, coding the him as an inhuman creature, "At the theater, men, 'beasts,' and charming sounds [all] have their run: they all race to see the Bear and the mishmosh of action."
But the invective that rained down on the practice of cicisbeismo signalled wider and ever-deepening social ills. Seen by the later eighteenth century as a corrupt proxy of the good husband, the cicisbeo now became ruinous to the souls of women, a defiler of wifedom, womanhood, and motherhood. Under the sway of the cicisbeo, wives were thought to rebel against husbands and even lose their natural love for their own children. In time the cicisbeo became an icon of anti-aristocratic discontent, usually attacked along with the vanities and masks of aristocratic women. Not surprisingly, the practice diminished sharply after about 1780, when the aristocracy was at its most fragile.
Censure of cicisbeismo in the late eighteenth century was inseparable from the larger moral project of reconstructing the family, a project in which literati like Alfieri played a clamorous role. In this prerevolutionary imaginary, "true" love - of hearth and home - had been ravaged by the falsehoods of cicisbeismo and other forms of aristocratic dissimulation. But worst of all, cicisbei were ruinous to the ethical core of the nation, understood as "a family writ large." In the new morality etched by reformers, religious and revolutionary alike, mothers were to be the moral educators of their children; and in this work all women, aristocratic and plebeian, would be created equal.
6. Once viewed through the inverted lens of the French revolution, the implications of the wanting mother and the king-as-father appear in a blaze of clarity. As Lynn Hunt maintains in The Family Romance of the French Revolution, French society moved in the later eighteenth century from imagining its rulers as fathers to condemning the fathers of the ancien régime with near-pathological fear. Her argument goes as follows. Within the imaginary collective of the ancien régime, virtually all princes and ladies had served as fantasy-world parents. But by the latter half of the eighteenth century such fantasies had widely come to be regarded as dangerous daydreams, phantasms of adolescence. Simultaneous with this new attitude, French culture was experiencing a shattering ambivalence about the role of fathers, figurative and real. Since the magical nature of kingship was inseparable from the axiomatic nature of fatherhood, parental authority generally--especially though not only paternal--had to be reevaluated. Deference, as taught to the king's subjects and the father's children alike, could no longer be granted automatically. Each person might now in principle be a contracting social being, responsible for his or her moral relations with the larger world.
The watchmen of the people's newfound liberty were to be the brothers of the republic--in a Freudian sense, children of the fallen father--banded together to ensure fraternal rights at any cost: "fraternité ou mort." The central drama of the revolution was therefore the killing of the king. For the French the king, as king, was dead on 21 September 1792, when kingship was legally abolished (and with it the very word, still regarded by "many" as what one deputy called "a talisman whose magical force can serve to stupefy"). To ensure that both of the king's bodies were exterminated, however, only an execution framed in the regal terms of ritual sacrifice would do. Louis's last words on the scaffold augured the utility of his own death in precisely sacrificial terms, bidding that his blood be "useful to the French" and a way of "appeasing God's anger." A great crowd stood witness to the event, dipping their spikes and kerchiefs in the blood after the dripping head was hoisted aloft by the executioner. [slide 6--engraving of Louis's head held aloft, Révolutions de Paris] Soon afterwards, the radical weekly Révolutions de Paris claimed that the blood of Louis Capet had cleansed the French of a 1300-year stigma, while depicting Liberty as a voracious pagan goddess whom one cannot "make auspicious...except by offering in sacrifice the life of a great culprit."
In all of this, note that the "brothers" did not deny the king's magical status: on the contrary, they set out to "devour" and thus encompass and transform him into and through themselves. As Hunt points out, the announcement of the Journal des hommes libres the day following the execution cast the event as pivotal not so much in the remaking of the French political system as in the remaking of French systems of belief: "Today," it announced, "we have just convinced ourselves that a king is only a man and that no man is above the laws." By killing the king the brothers depleted his magic and he became ordinary. Once dead, the king's head and body were quickly thrown in a grave and covered with quicklime. The space previously occupied by the king now marked a sacred void that would be filled by the collective body of equal individual citizens whom his death helped to create.
How sisters would figure in this new body of citizens is a problem for others to take up; but it is telling that mothers too had failed the French symbolically and had to be held to account for fathers' failures. Central to the dramatization of this charge was of course the figure of Marie-Antoinette. In 1793 the queen was indicted for a variety of sexual crimes, crimes which extended various representations of her in pornographic and moralizing literature that had been flooding Parisian bookstalls over the 1780s and early 90s. From the litany of charges, nothing was omitted: adultery, homosexuality, sodomy, bestiality, incest. [slide 7--engraving of Marie-Antoinette in sexual embrace with a man and a woman, Vie privée, libertine et scandaleuse..., 1793] The queen's body bore an unbearable polysemy, a polysemy identified in her ability to dissemble. Hence a second set of charges accused her of "having taught the king to dissimulate--that is, how to promise one thing in public and plan another in the shadows of the court." Her sexualized body was a mask: a malleable symbol, it was aristocratic and feminine, like the body of the courtier (or in Italy, like the body of the cicisbeo)--therefore meretricious, monstrous because part male yet castrating. The sacred void that loomed with the destruction, symbolic and literal, of the king and queen left only one measurable space for women when all was said and done, a space of pure monumentality. Women would be the Nation, Freedom, Reason, Virtue, the Statue of Liberty bearing her torch--an infinitely imitable figure because unreal.
7. By the latter half of the century both France and Italy were awash in tales of renegade fathers, errant and absent mothers, and orphaned children, who flooded sentimental literature, including the genre of so-called opera semiseria. Familar examples include Paisiello's Nina of 1789 and Paer's Camilla of 1799, both based on French libretti by Marsollier des Vivetières and both objects of frenzied popularity as made into opera on Italian soil.
Shifts in opera seria were slower to come. Metastasio had virtually expunged those few mothers who had been admitted to opera seria by Zeno and others circa 1700. This being the case, seria transformed the family it depicted--first by lessening fathers morally or killing them off. King Mitridate is a case point: Cigna-Santi's Mitridate of 1767 (set by Mozart three years later) is a tyrant who manages to redeem himself and (magically) his kingdom too; Sografi's Mitridate of 1796 is a monstrous enemy of justice who dies by his own sword to the relief of the populace--a revolutionary revision, if ever there was.
Mothers came in for a only small share of this, since even late in the century opera seria rarely resuscitated them. The striking countercase of Semiramide did widely restore to the stage one mother whose motherhood Metastasio had all but suppressed in his Semiramide riconosciuta. By the mid-1780s, Semiramide had been transformed into the notorious virago familiar from Voltaire's play, in which she murders her husband, plots an incestuous marriage, and is stabbed to death by her son. A Milan version of 1784 by Moretti with music by Mortellari was content to have her lover assassinated. But the infamous Giovannino libretto La vendetta di Nino, ossia La morte di Semiramide, staged at Florence two years later in a dramatic setting by Alessio Prati, culminated in matricide onstage.
These of course are mere stories, and stories alone can tell only so much. Yet that it became possible to conjure up fathers and mothers as unredeemably guilty, and thus recast the plights of sons and daughters, was one token of a new subjectivity in later eighteenth-century Europe, a subjectivity that valorized the capacities of the individual for moral reflection, judgement, and self-improvement. As the individual's world became ever more scrutable, the happy ending of the familial history was demystified. With it, too, the old schismatics of representation, staged and not--which displaced singers from sets, characters from singers' genders, husbands from wives, and mothers from children--began to ease. Where once the theater reached past the worldly, with sets so abstruse and limitless that no singer could inhabit them, with sopranos resounding unaccountably pit of male bodies and ballets tucked radiantly but extraneously between operatic acts, now a new logics of representation imposed itself. The earlier ways had come to signal the perilous feints of the old order. And the scrutinies that reviewed them and forced them out were so many signs that the crisis of absolutism had been eclipsed by the coming crises of modernity. But that is another story.
Martha Feldman
The University of Chicago
NOTES