Operatic Mutilations: 19th Century Opera, Pasolini, Callas

“The poor bodies of prima donnas - destined for desecration!”

Catherine Clément, Opera, or The Undoing of Women

Mutilated Women in 19th Century Opera

No feminine sin is left unpunished in 19th century opera. Carmen's choice of lover causes her death. There will be no happy ending for Violetta the prostitute. Tosca's murderous plot over the chief of police fails and ends in her suicide. Of course Isolde cannot keep her lover, the nephew of her much older husband-to-be. Mathilde says, "Devo punirmi, se troppo amai! (If I loved too much, I should be punished!)"

I would like to call these punishable offences "Mutilations": acts that tear opera women from dominant culture, rejecting what is expected by cultural powers (church, state, family, etc.). Scorning your lover. Being a sex worker. Killing cops, killing rapists. The more blood the better.

We could lay back and let tragedy, death and madness be the end. But when I watch my favourite operas, I choose not to see it this way. I choose to see these violent ends, these Mutilations, as triumphs over circumstance. I see Carmen, Tosca and Lucia as martyrs for feminine liberation. If death is what follows autonomy, to death! "Lasciatemi morir! (Let me die!)"

When Lucia is driven to madness, killing the man she was forced to marry, she escapes her fate as a prisoner of her husband. Dr. Mary An smart says, "She goes to the place no one can touch her anymore, which is the madness."

Perhaps Carmen, if she were to have known her ending at the hands of a jealous ex-lover, would have chosen the path anyways. She sings, "L’amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser... (Love is a rebellious bird that nobody can tame...)"

Tosca kills Scarpia in an attempt to save her revolutionary beloved, who is jailed and tortured for harbouring a criminal. She sings, "Vissi d'amore (I lived for love)," and so her choice to kill for love is the most extreme expression of her philosophy.

In an art form bathed in female blood, let me imagine these on-stage snuff films to mean something beyond a lesson for misbehaving women. Instead, to war! To grand dramas where women die their love-deaths, not as a tragedy, but as a hero's death. A death as a choice against circumstance. Tosca jumps off the roof of the parapet, and to falls to freedom.

Medea commits the ultimate Mutilation when she kills her own children as an act of revenge against her unfaithful husband. Infanticide is as shocking a topic today as it was when Euripides' original play debuted in 431 BC. This story was a natural choice of film adaptation for Pasolini the transgressor.

Pasolini's New Desecrated Form

From his 1969 film adaptation of Medea, Chiron says: "What was sacred is preserved within the new desecrated form."

Medea was made during a time when Pasolini saw a "genocide" of Italian culture in favour of neo-capitalism and consumerism. He holds simultaneous reverence for tradition, with a desire to adapt classical works (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) in his own anti-naturalist image. He says, "I want to re-create everything."

I find that Pasolini's mixing of high and low culture, his so-called "contamination", to be incredibly aligned with the sensibilities of 19th century opera. I see his reverence for antiquity while simultaneously mutilating it as less of a contradiction, and more of a continuation of a 19th century conversation adapted for his own times.

During the 19th century, modern operas were seen by some intellectuals as a "contaminated" art form. These mixtures of high drama and appeal to the masses through sleaze and celebrity was blasphemy for some, absolute entertainment for others. Political commentary in these works also stoked controversy. Verdi's Rigoletto, for example, is a scornful tale of a corrupt, hedonistic man, originally written as a king. Unfortunately, the work was censored and the character of Duke of Mantua was re-written to temper anti-monarchist sentiment. La Traviata, also by Verdi, exposes Violetta as a victim of the family institution. Tosca's cop-killing premiering during a time of political turbulence in Rome certainly wasn't neutral.

So, what would a contaminated, political work of entertainment look like in 1969? It would look like Medea.

Pasolini would, at the end, become his own tragic figure, a martyr, punished for his "feminine sins" as a gay man and a revolutionary artist who wailed on a stage that was not prepared for his voice. As the king of Corinth banishes Medea, he says, "You are different from us, so we don't want you here."

Maria Callas Must Be Slaughtered: Cosi Fan Tutte (So Do They All)

"You need your idols," says Maria Callas, "...but you destroy your idols very easily."

Casting Medea as the retired Callas who had recently been scorned by her lover, Pasolini steeps himself in the opera tradition of the "double reality". Lines between theatre and reality are blurred. As Callas's voice is lost to what is now speculated to be a degenerative condition, Pasolini casts her in the role of a vengeful sorceress, fallen from grace, into madness and revenge. It is brilliant.

Indeed, one could picture an Italian Grand Opera based on the life of Callas. A young woman is canonized La Davina, only to come crashing back down to earth, punished for her vanity.

From The Tales of Hoffmann: "A prima donna is a column broken in two that bleeds from top to bottom..."

As a child, opera diva Maria Malibran was threatened by her father, co-starring in Othello with her, that if she did not sing her role perfectly, he would actually kill her during their performance. At her 1825 debut, when her father reached for her neck, as scripted, she was so frightened that she bit his hand until it bled. Again, double reality. Malibran died young. Her grave was dug up several times by necrophiliacs seeking one more bite of her flesh.

In Renaissance times, women who sang publicly or published their poetry were regarded as prostitutes who granted sexual favours in order to be permitted a voice in cultural production. How far have we truly come? The Institution is a meat grinder of feminine flesh. Recently, a young violinist spoke out against a non-disclosure agreement presented by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to keep her sexual assault quiet. The cracks of the classical music machine are held together by clotted blood.

In Conclusion

In the 19th century, opera audiences came for blood. Fictional blood, and real blood. They called for the death of Tosca, as they called for the destruction of Callas. Pasolini understood this, adapting Medea as an operatic double reality for the 20th century.

Opera is a bloodsport. What does this look like in the 21st century?

More on opera, Callas, Pasolini and the destruction of feminine flesh:

Books

Demented: The World of the Opera Diva by Ethan Mordden

Opera, or The Undoing of Women by Catherine Clément

Lectures

Introduction to Pasolini's "Medea", Casa Italiana, NYU

Music

Ostia (The Death of Pasolini) by Coil

Stretched Arches and Cut Toes by The Rita

Theatre

The Judas Cradle, Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper