Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

I Puritani
The Puritans

Mad Scenes

Denise Gallo

A soprano walks onstage. She is dressed in a flowing white shift, her slightly unkempt curls cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She appears distracted, her confused movements accompanied solemnly by the forlorn voice of a woodwind. Rather than long and melodious, her vocal lines are short and irregular. As is usually the case, she is barefoot. All opera lovers worth their salt know exactly what they are watching-it's a mad scene.

Called scene di pazzia in Italian and scènes de folie in French, mad scenes were abundant in the plots of early nineteenth-century operas, becoming as much a requisite in scores as drinking songs and storm scenes. In reality, though, the concept and expression of emotional extremes had been implicit in opera since its very origins in the late Renaissance. Indeed, one of the theories that led to the genre's creation proposed that singing text rather than speaking it elevated language beyond common speech. Furthermore, allowing the voice to soar depicted the release of feelings. Two centuries later, sopranos gladly trod the boards barefoot, because mad scenes, with their extravant coloratura passages, gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their vocal skills as well as their ability to act in dramatic roles.

Mad scenes generally featured women who had lost their senses for any number of reasons. The most common was betrayal in love, whether real or perceived. In Vincenzo Bellini's I Puritani, Elvira is certain that the woman with whom her Arturo flees can only be a rival; in reality, he is about the noble business of saving the life of the widow of King Charles I. Another popular cause of a heroine's insanity was paternal (or fraternal) domination. Although a woman had secretly been betrothed to another, a male family member had forced her into nuptials that would advance her family politically or economically. Such is the case in the opera with perhaps the most famous mad scene of all: Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. A variation on that theme occurs when a powerful but unwanted suitor threatens the heroine or members of her family, and to ensure their safety, she sacrifices herself to a loveless marriage. The subsequent backlash of hatred and curses from the betrothed she was forced to abandon increases the strain on her psyche. Imogene in Bellini's Il Pirata suffers just such a fate. Operatic insanity often pushes its victims to murder their tormentors, but, because of the Romantics' penchant for tales that ended in wholesale disaster, they themselves usually die as well as a result of their mental strain.

Some characters from the Classics, such as Dido, Sappho, and Medea, transformed well into operatic madwomen and, as such, began appearing in operas of the late Baroque era. In the eighteenth century, the age of the "happy ending," composers and librettists used madness as a comic device, creating characters who pretended to be insane in order to trick or manipulate others. This explains the proliferation of works in the 1700's with the word "finta," or "feigned," in their titles. Audiences throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century sometimes find it hard to accept the nineteenth-century theatrical view of insanity, which featured otherwise healthy characters who simply dropped dead from madness. One needs to go beyond the seemingly silly stories to uncover the social and artistic climate that gave breath to these creations, though.

In the late eighteenth century, authors and artists were creating works that reflected the dark and secret side of the mind. One of the most famous examples is Henry Fuseli's painting, "The Nightmare" (1781), its hapless heroine tossed over the bed, a foreboding white horse (a literal night mare) looming above her. Other paintings depicted the ruins of abandoned abbeys, eerie in the moonlight. A rise in literacy among the middle class resulted in the increased popularity of novels, and a similar fascination with the themes of horror and madness resulted in Gothic tales such Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. In the nineteenth century, a number of women, among them Jane Austen and the Brontës, created literary heroines who reflected the social and economic situations of the contemporary woman's existence. It was Charlotte Brontë who created the character some scholars have canonized as the "patron saint" of female madness in literature: Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason, the wife Mr. Rochester kept locked in the attic. It is hardly coincidence that the victims of madness in most of these works, whether artistic, literary, or dramatic, are women.

Today, feminist scholars have developed theories to explain the abundance of madwomen and the dearth of their male counterparts. Of course, in opera, the occasional hero is driven witless, such as the tenor Don Ruiz in Donizetti's Maria Padilla, and the baritone Tasso in Donizetti's Torquato Tasso. In contrast, however, the list of women is imposing: in addition to those mentioned earlier, there is Amina in La Sonnambula (if one counts sleepwalking as a psychiatric disorder), Margherita in Mefistofele, and the main characters of Anna Bolena, Linda di Chamounix, and Dinorah. Some musicologists have suggested that, in making women the victims of madness and then killing them off before the opera's end, males (that is, composers and librettists) were able to exert the ultimate repression and control over them. Some also suggest that the women in the audience, often in similar unpleasant (but less extreme) situations themselves, would identify with the heroines, finding temporary release through their deaths. On the other hand, some literary scholars feel that a woman's madness is a metaphor for rebellion; Bertha Mason, for example, succeeds in burning down Rochester's estate, blinding and disfiguring him in the process. Still others maintain that, while madness may suggest the illusion of power, it is a greater cry for help, in the words of Shoshana Felman, "a manifestion of cultural impotence." Some sociologists interpret the madwoman as a manifestation of the nineteenth-century's repressed sexuality.

In very rare cases, mad heroines are cured, as is Elvira in I Puritani. Although the sight of her lover and the sound of his voice bring her back to reality, she teeters on the edge of sanity, pushed back again to the world of illusion when she hears military drums. Elvira is finally shocked sane when Arturo is condemned to death. Fully restored to her senses, she proclaims that she will die with him in defiance of her family. In the nick of time, a general pardon is announced, and the couple rejoices in their dreams of a happy future together. This ending is an anomaly, however, for, in operas with mad scenes, the curtain generally falls to the sounds of minor chords, death knells, and a chorus of sobbing.

In today's "reality show" world, what place has an opera with something as incredulous as a mad scene? For one thing, it is a study in history, offering us a chance to experience a culture in which the pressures of life were quite different. It also allows us to hear how composers themselves perceived madness and how they depicted it musically. This is particularly poignant with the operas of Donizetti who unfortunately died in a state of madness himself. We also get to hear some of the most dramatic music of the early nineteenth century, often written specifically for the finest singers (male and female) then on the operatic stage. Most of all, in a world in which another kind of madness seems to engulf us, operas like Bellini's I Puritani offer a temporary release into the glorious sounds of the Romantic age.

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