Lucia di Lammermoor and the Heroine’s Escape to Madness
There are a bunch of female characters descending into madness in the opera:
Elvira from Bellini’s I Puritani,
Ophelia from Hamlet
Electra from Strauss’ opera of the same name…
But the most well-known must be Lucia from Gaetano Donizetti’s…
Lucia di Lammermoor.
Opera’s id:
Composer: Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
Libretto: Salvatore Cammarano
Language: Italian
Premiere: Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 1835
Donizetti composed this popular opera at the peak of his career, in 1835, and it was an immediate success. The story is based on Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel The Bride of Lammermoor – which is in turn based on real-life events which is in turn based on real-life events that took place in the Lammermuir Hills in Scotland in 1669.
Allegedly, the representation of madness in the opera was also informed by the composer’s own experiences: when he was writing Lucia, Donizetti was experiencing symptoms of mental illness caused by syphilis (which ultimately led to the hospitalization and death of the Italian composer).
The plot of the opera goes as follows
Act I
Lucia Ashton is in love with Edgardo Ravenswood, who is, however, the enemy of her brother Enrico. The couple meets in secret, and the two young lovers proclaim their love to one another. But Edgardo brings bad news to Lucia: before dawn, he must leave for France for what appears to be political reasons, to “work for Scotland's future”. Before leaving, he has decided to ask Lucia’s brother for her hand. Lucia, frightened, asks him to keep their love secret for a time. Despite being angry with Enrico, Edgardo agrees. In an informal engagement, the couple exchanges oaths of eternal love and devotion. Then, Edgardo leaves.
Act II
Months later, Edgardo is still in France, and Lucia’s brother Enrico has arranged her marriage to Arturo, a nobleman who could save the Ashton family from disaster. However, Enrico – who has been intercepting Edgardo’s letters to Lucia to deceive her into thinking that Edgardo has forgotten about her – worries that his sister will reject the impending marriage. For this reason, he calls for her and shows her a forged letter, supposedly sent by Edgardo to his new lover. Lucia announces that she is promised to another and cannot marry Arturo. Even when she sees the fake letter, despite being heartbroken, she refuses to marry someone else. Enrico pleads with her to reconsider: Lucia’s marriage is the only way he can escape execution. To Enrico’s aid comes the chaplain and Lucia’s tutor, Raimondo, who asks her to think of her recently deceased mother and marry for the good of the family. Lucia finally succumbs.
At the wedding, a visibly distressed Lucia signs the marriage contract. Suddenly, Edgardo appears: he heard about the marriage and, believing that Lucia has betrayed him, returned to claim her back. Lucia realizes that she has been deceived. But when he sees the signed marriage contract, Edgardo curses Lucia for what he takes as infidelity and leaves in rage.
Act III
A few hours later. Enrico visits Edgardo and challenges him to a duel that is to take place the following day. Meanwhile, the guests of Lucia’s marriage are participating in the wedding festivities. But the festive mood is interrupted when Raimondo announces to them a tragic event: when left with her husband in their private room, Lucia went mad and killed him. Raimondo found her clutching a dagger over a dead Arturo and asking for her husband. Lucia, evidently deranged and still covered in blood, enters the scene. She is looking for Edgardo, with whom she believes to be married. Enrico, who just returned from Edgardo’s castle, is initially furious with his sister. When he realizes that she has descended into madness, he is filled with remorse.
In the last scene, Edgardo – who still believes that Lucia is happily married to Arturo – laments for his lost love and waits for his duel with Enrico. The wedding guests reveal to him the truth: they come and tell him that Lucia is dying and asking for him. Before he can run to her bedside, however, he gets the news that his beloved is already dead. Stuck with sorrow, Edgardo commits suicide, hoping to reunite with Lucia in heaven.
The scene of Lucia’s madness is particularly strong, and the opera owes much of its success to it. From a vocal point of view, it is technically demanding, and the sopranos singing Lucia’s role use it as a way to express their virtuosity (listen to it here, sung by Joan Sutherland, and here by Maria Callas). Apart from the vocal expertise that it demands, the so-called “mad scene” captivates the audience’s interest because of its haunting theme. Lucia’s descent into madness, as a way to escape a harsh, oppressive reality, has divided feminist theorists as to whether it carries a dimension of liberation.
Interpretations
On one possible reading, the opera can appear as unhelpful, or even hostile to the feminist cause. Isn’t it yet another opera in which the female protagonist is undergoing extreme suffering and ultimately dies for the love of a man? Isn’t all this presented in a romanticized way, for the audience to enjoy while comfortably seated in the opera’s seats? Even worse, the opera reinforces the stereotype of madness associated with women. This stereotype was emerging at the time Donizetti composed Lucia. During that time, madness became gradually understood as a peculiarly female illness with sexual roots, “hysteria”, from which women deviating from all kinds of male expectations were considered to be suffering. Lucia’s frailty, apparent from the beginning of the opera, can be seen as further reinforcing the female madness stereotype according to which women are constantly at risk of madness, even when not exhibiting symptoms of mental illness. Today, the highly persistent association of the male with reason and the female with unreason suggests that this stereotype has not lost its bite.
A Deeper Representation of Madness…
However, this is not how all feminists look at the opera. In her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality, the American musicologist Susan McClary suggests that the opera has an emancipatory dimension. McClary notices that most 19th century artistic representations of female madness are presented through the male gaze and sensualized (see Pinel Freeing the Insane).
Opera does not allow this. The very nature of the medium demands that we give voice to the insanity: Lucia has to be sung. It is interesting to compare Donizetti’s Lucia with her book counterpart, Lucy Ashton: unlike Lucia, Walter Scott’s Lucy is presented as a mere pawn. She rarely speaks, since the book focuses much less on the heroine’s drama and much more on the broader socio-political concerns of the story’s male characters.
Moreover, McClary remarks that to represent Lucia’s madness, the music departs from formal musical structures – which are used to represent the musical expression of the dominant patriarchal structures. Lucia’s music is unexpected, leaving musical conventions behind and performing nonverbal acrobatics that challenge the abilities of the human voice. It defies the expectations of the opera’s chorus, whose music remains within the musical conventions and cannot follow Lucia with their songs. It also defies the expectations of the audience of the opera, used to expect a musical structure from the opera.
Musically, Lucia is liberated. More than that, the technical demands of the three arias that Lucia sings in the “mad scene” (Il dolce suono/Ardon gli incensi/Spargi d'amaro pianto) means that, musically, the moment of Lucia’s madness is also the moment of the soprano’s triumph. Compare that again to the book’s Lucy who, after killing her husband, is simply represented as broken and gets to utter a single sentence.
The “Mad scene” sung by Natalie Dessay
Would we read too much into it if we saw Lucia’s musical rebellion not as an exhibition of madness, but as a victorious rebellion against female oppression? Or even, moving away from a close focus on Lucia’s gender, against all kinds of social oppression? But there’s yet another reading, which relativises these conclusions.
Interpretation: Silence
Musicologist Mary Ann Smart suggests that the opera portrays the ultimate silencing of Lucia after her unsuccessful attempts of resistance. Indeed, throughout the opera, Lucia tries to resist the patriarchal and social powers that aim to subject her. In terms of the plot, already in her first appearance on stage, she is defying her brother’s wishes, meeting her lover - whom her family disapproves of - in secret. Her determination not to marry according to her brother’s wishes is remarkable and not wholly dependent on Edgardo: even after she is no longer counting on his return, she continues to reject Arturo, despite the cost on her brother. In a recent, controversial production by Katie Mitchell – which did take many artistic liberties – Lucia is even depicted as actively plotting the murder of her forced husband. But even if we follow the more conventional interpretation and assume that the murder was the product, rather than the cause, of Lucia’s madness, it remains an ultimate act of resistance.
Katie Mitchell’s controversial production
Lucia’s “mad scene” is not the triumph of this resistance.
What McClary seems to forget is that, despite Lucia’s musical excess, the scene is still framed within the opera, which follows specific musical conventions. The scenic guidelines of the “mad scene” state that Lucia should be framed by the chorus, submitted again to their gaze. Lucia defies them. But she does not succeed.
The opera does not end at the “mad scene”. Lucia collapses and her unconventional song comes to an end. This is the last time we see her in the opera. In the last scene, the normal musical conventions are restituted. Plotwise, Lucia dies and we don’t even see her death. In seeing Lucia’s madness and death not only as an escape but also as a victory, don’t we miss what her song is about: a tragedy?
Where do we end up, having gone through all these different readings?
They all seem to strike a nerve. Indeed, the representation of Lucia’s madness reflects the sexist stereotypes that were prevailing in Donizetti’s time and are still with us. Indeed, Lucia is resisting the abuse to which the male characters in the play continuously submit her. Indeed, through her madness – and her death – she escapes this abuse. And indeed, she is ultimately silenced.
Still, being silenced is not the same as being silent. Lucia articulates her voice and becomes the protagonist of the opera. She inspires compassion, indignation, and the desire to change the social circumstances that led to her demise. And even though she is silenced, her music remains alive to those who hear her, pointing to the possibility of going somewhere beyond our current world – but also to the necessity of making this a world that is real.