As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I studied classics before pursuing music. One of the things that has drawn me to opera since my degree is its similarity to Greek Tragedy. Of course, there are comic operas (and Greek comedies, for that matter, which I love just as much and find almost as interesting), but I want to talk about tragedy and the tragic here. I promise that’s not as depressing as it sounds.
Greek tragedy, for me, is one of the most fascinating art forms ever. It’s over 2000 years old, still going strong, and - believe it or not - still relevant. It’s the basis of so many of our stories, even now. Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to improve on a story almost as old as time (as we know it); perhaps it’s because Greek tragedy plays on themes that are utterly universal to our Western world - the relationship between religion and state, the perils of excess and self-denial, the complexities of justice. Most of us worship different gods, these days, but surprisingly little else has changed. For my money, Greek tragedy is the art that comes closest to having humanity at its core.
Opera has a very similar structure to Greek tragedy, and seems to have evolved in quite a similar way. Like the earliest tragedies, the earliest operas deal with mythical (or fictional, or ancient historical) stories, rarely have more than two characters on stage at once, and have long passages of introspection followed by choral commentary. As the benchmark was raised - both dramatically and musically - it became common practice to include several characters on stage at once, engaging in complex and often overlaid dialogue.
Unlike tragedy, however, opera moved away from myth and ancient history to engage with more contemporary writing. In a way, that’s very positive. There are only so many times you can retell a story that’s already at least a thousand years old, after all, and all art must move with the times or be left behind. But, somewhere between its obsession with killing off the main female character and its labyrinthine plots, opera seems to have lost sight of how tragedy really works.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I studied classics before pursuing music. One of the things that has drawn me to opera since my degree is its similarity to Greek Tragedy. Of course, there are comic operas (and Greek comedies, for that matter, which I love just as much and find almost as interesting), but I want to talk about tragedy and the tragic here. I promise that’s not as depressing as it sounds.
Greek tragedy, for me, is one of the most fascinating art forms ever. It’s over 2000 years old, still going strong, and - believe it or not - still relevant. It’s the basis of so many of our stories, even now. Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to improve on a story almost as old as time (as we know it); perhaps it’s because Greek tragedy plays on themes that are utterly universal to our Western world - the relationship between religion and state, the perils of excess and self-denial, the complexities of justice. Most of us worship different gods, these days, but surprisingly little else has changed. For my money, Greek tragedy is the art that comes closest to having humanity at its core.
Opera has a very similar structure to Greek tragedy, and seems to have evolved in quite a similar way. Like the earliest tragedies, the earliest operas deal with mythical (or fictional, or ancient historical) stories, rarely have more than two characters on stage at once, and have long passages of introspection followed by choral commentary. As the benchmark was raised - both dramatically and musically - it became common practice to include several characters on stage at once, engaging in complex and often overlaid dialogue.
Unlike tragedy, however, opera moved away from myth and ancient history to engage with more contemporary writing. In a way, that’s very positive. There are only so many times you can retell a story that’s already at least a thousand years old, after all, and all art must move with the times or be left behind. But, somewhere between its obsession with killing off the main female character and its labyrinthine plots, opera seems to have lost sight of how tragedy really works.
See, I’m with Aristotle on this. In his Poetics, Aristotle spends a while talking about what makes a story tragic. At its very basic level, tragedy is the result of bad things happening to good people. Humans, as we all know, fuck things up occasionally. In the case of Greek tragedy, most people fuck up through an excess of arrogance and ambition, which leads them ultimately to make mistakes so terrible and irreversible that they're referred to by modern scholars under the - admittedly simplistic - heading of “the fatal flaw”.
Essentially, a tragic character makes the mistake of overreaching him or herself and suffers pretty terribly as a result. Usually, the price of Error is death, but some tragedians get a bit creative with the idea as we move through the ages. Sometimes the price of Error is seeing everyone you love die; sometimes it’s becoming a monster (literally or figuratively).
A tragic hero(ine) will have a fanatical devotion to the gods, or to their state, or to their family, and the bad things that happen to them will spring from an excessive devotion to that cause to the exclusion of reason or other causes. Sometimes it’s fate, and no amount of planning ahead or being awesome can get you out of that one. But the character it happens to has to be identifiably good. Bad things happening to bad people strays over into schadenfreude territory, and we don’t learn anything. Good things happening to bad people teaches your apparently very gullible audience that crime does, in fact, pay. And good things happening to good people is, well, comedy.
So, back to opera. No-one can deny that bad things happen to good people in opera. The thing is, there isn’t always an identifiable Error that makes it happen. This is either the result of a change in writing standards, or a change in society that makes these “errors” seem less terrible in retrospect. And this, my friends, is where feminism comes in.
It’s not like men never die in opera, of course - you only need to look at operas like Aida, or Cavalleria Rusticana, to know that. But they’ll die for their lover, or as a result of an honour killing. Let’s look through our chequered history of dead heroines: Lucia goes mad when her lover is murdered. Manon dies of consumption after sacrificing love for what she mistakenly hopes will be financial security. Butterfly commits suicide so that she can no longer be a burden in the life of the foreign soldier she once married. Violetta dies of consumption after sacrificing her one true love for the greater good of his family. Tosca commits suicide after a failed attempt to save her lover from execution. Mimi dies of consumption and hasn’t even done anything wrong. You’ll notice that consumption is a pretty common way to kill off sopranos - kind of like using AIDS to kill off gay characters in dramas written after 1980.
It’s difficult to even claim that operas show us the intrinsic unfairness of life, because operatic plots are almost invariably full of confusing twists and highly exaggerated climaxes. I mean, sure, Greek tragedy had a lot of people turning on each other in unlikely ways, turning into trees, and so forth, and very often dealt with kings and heroes rather than the everyman, but at its heart it has some of the fundamental questions of humanity. Opera is...silly. I love opera, because it is silly, but I also find it difficult to engage with any story whose plot is essentially “Jane is a prostitute/actress/singer who is quite a sweet person. She falls in love. Bad things happen to her and then she dies horribly.” What does this tell us?
To be honest, if anyone wants a more modern example of how operatic plots tend to look, watch Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. Consumptive prostitute heroine tries to balance love against financial stability, saves her lover’s life, leaves him so he doesn’t have to watch her die. Badabing, badaboom. Romantic opera in a nutshell. Satine is the Tosca-Mimi-Violetta of recent years.
I have this tendency to propose alternative endings to operas where the heroine dies tragically. I think some of them might make some pretty interesting stories. The thing is, I’m not against people dying. I’m not saying all stories should end well. I’m just saying that if you’re going to kill off your main character, make it for some reason other than that they happen to be female*. Because, when it comes down to it, that’s the only thing our dead heroines have in common.
* Modern play- and screen-writers, take note - this also applies to people who happen to be of colour, gay/in same sex relationships, transgendered or disabled. None of these things is a death sentence in life, so it doesn’t need to be in art.
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