Opera, or, The undoing of women Book

I found this extremely tedious reading: Clément approaches some interesting issues, but never alights on them long enough for analysis in depth, a butterfly fearful above all of being pinned down. Her default tone is rhapsodic, which is wearying.

It would be interesting to contrast the roles of women in opera with the actuality of their real-life contemporaries: nuns, prostitutes, divas, etc. But then there are the fancy-dress fantasy roles: priestesses, valkyries, mermaids, queens; do these speak to contemporary womanhood?

Her bibliography of 2+ pages has works of musicology in the minority, outnumbered by anthropology, philosophy, and psychology; Adorno is there, no doubt a baleful influence on this book.

Clément's allusions are almost exclusively Gallic: Tintin, Cocteau, Charles Trenet, and not to forget Lacan and Levi-Strauss. This is fine and appropriate, but may add an unintended alienation effect for the Anglophone reader.

Comments as I read:

Prelude: Clément makes a great deal of paying attention to the words of the libretti of the operas she analyses. This has the welcome effect of her giving equal billing to librettists, but also some odd aspects. She speaks of her attention to texts as something transgressive - something opera devotees avoid and disdain; but she writes in French, the very language of a number of the operas she examines. She calls attention to this Of course, in one's own language it is rare that one can avoid the meaning. ... There is no getting around it. One has to understand. I think that that is the secret cause of resistance to French opera: meaning exists, no more mystery, so long exoticism. But she is translated into English, a language with no operatic tradition to speak of, at least in the period she concentrates on: late 18th to early 20th century: Purcell is too early and Britten too late.

1. Prima Donnas, or the Circus of Women

Tales of real and fictional prima Donnas. She brings in the father-rapists of Freud's patients but does not convincingly find them in the operatic texts. Clément begins her operatic Baedeker with summaries of:

The Tales of Hoffmann
Don Giovanni
Tosca

The second does not really fit into a chapter on prima donnas and Clément makes no effort to tie it to the topic. The 3 women of Don Giovanni are a conjugation of seduction: past, present, and future, but "seduction" is actually rape, as seen with Donna Anna and Zerlina.

2. Dead Women

Madam Butterfly
Carmen
Tristan and Isolde

In addition to straight summaries, Clément tends to write dramatic descriptions of scenes from the operas, almost like mini-novelizations, which she seems to offer in the place of analysis. On Isolde, though, she goes off into some anthropological parallel, evidently inspired by Levi-Strauss, with an Amazonian tribe's mythology that only tenuously connects with the opera, despite her assurances. The connection seems to be the association of women as poison-producers: deadly, but essential to the tribe's fishing practices.

Alluded to at the end, but not summarized: Pelléas et Mélisande.

3. Family Affairs, or the Parents Terribles

La Traviata
Don Carlos
The Magic Flute

Like Bergman, she sees Sarastro and the Queen of the Night as Pamina's parents; uses the opera as a means of exposing the sexism and class prejudice of the Enlightenment.

Alluded to at the end, but not summarized: Elektra.

4. Women Who Leap into Space

Eugene Onegin
La Bohème
Lucia di Lammermoor
I Puritani
La Sonnambula

Metaphoric rather than literal leaps, evidently, into love or madness. She follows the observations of Kierkegaard's seducer throughout the chapter.

At the end, back to Don Giovanni: a childhood memory of the baritone tumbling down a stage staircase during his serenade. She mentions,but does not summarize, La fanciulla del West and Cosi fan tutte, attributing the former's lack of popularity to the fact that Minnie the barkeep gets her man at the end and rides off with him.

5. Furies and Gods, or the Wanings of the Moon

Turandot
Norma
Der Rosenkavalier
Pelléas et Mélisande

"Just imagine that Norma is Turandot grown old." Claims that Norma tells the same story as Rosenkavalier, an older woman relinquishes her lover to a younger. End of chapter riffs on Khovanshchina, Aida, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal.

6. Madmen, Negroes, Jesters, or the Heroes of Deception

Otello
Falstaff
Die Meistersinger

She does not relate Otello to Monastatos. The men in these operas are supposed to be "trickster" figures. Is Clément sure she has this whole anthropology / comparative mythology thing right? Rigoletto is mentioned in the opening section, but the opera is not summarized. Evidently, because he is not white, uxoricide Otello must be a victim rather than victimizer. Hans Sachs seen in role similar to the Marschallin: yielding a (potential) lover to a younger rival.

7. The Tetralogic of the Ring, or the Daughter Done For

The book's longest chapter, devoted to Wagner's Ring. Clément miscounts the valkyries, giving Brünnhilde only seven sisters. She wants traditional productions: bearskins and armor, and live animals, horses and rams, though she doesn't explicitly call for ravens and a bear. Her main analysis is along generalized familial lines: fathers are portrayed this way, mothers that way, and so on among brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives.

Finale In Praise of Paganism

Leaving the opera house, she disdains a man who, from the height of his scholarly perch, will think this or that, will do his work as a critic. Her description recalled for me comments from gay writers on opera: The opera formed an enclave, an Indian reservation where wildness was permitted, a transitory and painful promised land. Music for me was an unthought refuge.