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Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Susan McClary
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Extract

One of the great accomplishments of seventeenth-century culture was the development of a vocabulary by means of which dramatic characters and actions could be delineated in music. The techniques for emotional and rhetorical inflection we now take for granted are not, in fact, natural or universal: they were deliberately formulated during this period for the purposes of music theatre. Monteverdi's descriptions of how he invented the semiotics of madness for La finta pazza Licori or of war for the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda reveal how very self-consciously he designed methods for ‘representing’ affective states.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , November 1989 , pp. 203 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 For passages concerning Licori, see Monteverdi, Claudio, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, trans. Stevens, Denis (Cambridge, 1980), 315, 318, 320, 335–6Google Scholar; concerning Combattimento, see the foreword to his Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (Venice, 1638)Google Scholar, trans. Strunk, Oliver, Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), 413–15.Google Scholar

2 Maravall, José Antonio, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Cochran, Terry (Minneapolis, 1986)Google Scholar; Attali, Jacques, Noise, trans. Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis, 1985), esp. 46–86Google Scholar; and Bianconi, Lorenzo, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Bryant, David (Cambridge, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bianconi states: ‘Attribute of authority, pedagogical requisite of the ruling classes, instrument of propaganda and persuasion: these are the three central features of seventeenth-century music as an agent of “publicity”‘ (p. 65). See also Tennenhouse, Leonard, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

For information directly concerned with Monteverdi's patronage at the Gonzaga court and its political dimensions, see Fenlon, Iain, ‘The Mantuan Stage Works’, in The New Monteverdi Companion, ed. Arnold, Denis and Fortune, Nigel (London, 1985), 251–87.Google Scholar For a perceptive theoretical model through which to address these concerns, see Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘The Production of Belief: Contributions to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, trans. Nice, Richard, in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Collins, Richard et al. (London, 1986), 131–63.Google Scholar

3 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York, 1980), 12.Google Scholar For a discussion of the ‘putting into discourse of sex’ for political purposes in Elizabethan England, see Tennenhouse, , Power on Display, 17–71.Google Scholar

4 For discussions of tonality in these terms, see my ‘The Transition from Modal to Tonal Organization in the Works of Monteverdi’, Ph.D. diss. (Harvard, 1976)Google Scholar; ‘The Rise and Fall of the Teleological Model in Western Music’, The Paradigm Exchange II (Minneapolis, 1987), 26–31Google Scholar; and ‘The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year’, in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Leppert, Richard and McClary, Susan (Cambridge, 1987), especially 21–3.Google Scholar

5 See, for instance, Ortner, Sherry B. and Whitehead, Harriet, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar; Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Riley, Denise, ‘A I That Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See for instance Monteverdi's ‘Vattene pur crudel’ (Book III), with its fierce depiction of feminine rage; ‘Io mi son giovinetta’ (Book IV), with its cute, mincing beginning (sung only by the women); or ‘O Mirtillo’ (Book V), with its shy, hesitant opening and subsequent emotional outburst. Very little work has been done on the musical articulation of sexual desire in Renaissance repertories, perhaps because studies of that music tend to concentrate on theoretical issues such as modal identity, musica ficta or signs of emerging tonal awareness, rather than on the ways modes were used to create particular kinds of images. See, however, ‘The Transition’ (n. 4). I am at present writing a book – Power and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Music – that includes an examination of musical constructions of the erotic in the madrigal.

7 For a provocative discussion of how the standard opera repertory organises gender and sexuality, see Clément, Catherine, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis, 1988).Google Scholar

8 Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley, 1988), 66–93.Google Scholar See also Laqueur, Thomas, ‘Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology’, Representations, 14 (1986), 1–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rose, Mary Beth, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, 1988).Google Scholar

9 Tomlinson, Gary, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1987), 7.Google Scholar

10 For extensive documentation concerning women's rhetorical training and their access to cultural production, see Kelly-Gadol, Joan, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Bridenthal, Renate and Koonz, Claudia (Boston, 1977), 137–64Google Scholar; Labalme, Patricia H., ed., Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York, 1980).Google Scholar For information directly concerning music, see also the following essays in Bowers, Jane and Tick, Judith, eds., Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950 (Urbana, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Brown, Howard M., ‘Women Singers and Women's Songs in Fifteenth-Century Italy’, 62–89Google Scholar; Newcomb, Anthony, ‘Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, 90–115Google Scholar; and Bowers, Jane, ‘The Emergence of Women Composers in Italy, 1566–1700’, 116–61.Google Scholar

For more on the ‘woman question’ in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, see Kelly, Joan, ‘Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes, 1400–1789’, in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 65–109Google Scholar; and Riley, (see n. 5), 25–35.Google Scholar

11 See Brown, , ‘Women Singers’, 62–7Google Scholar; and Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘City Women and Their Audiences: Louise Labé and Veronica Franco’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ferguson, Margaret W., Quilligan, Maureen and Vickers, Nancy I. (Chicago, 1986), 299–301.Google Scholar

12 For a discussion of how this attitude informed the phenomenon of the female writer of the Renaissance, see Jones, , ‘City Women’, 299–316.Google Scholar See also my discussion of Poppea on pp. 218–19 below. This attitude has persisted in Western culture. See Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979), especially Part I, 3–104.Google Scholar

13 For an examination of Catherine's imagery, see ‘Catherine de' Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow’, Rewriting the Renaissance, 227–41.Google Scholar For Elizabeth's imagery, see Montrose, Louis A., ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’, Rewriting the Renaissance, 65–87.Google Scholar However, the fact that England's monarch during the reign of Elizabeth was female strongly influenced the constructions of femininity and sexuality in the arts developed under her patronage. See Tennenhouse, (n. 2), 17–71.Google Scholar

14 The theoretical discussions that follow are based on my ‘Transition’ (n. 4). Orfeo';s headstrong impetuousness and Euridice's reticence do not exist in the notes per se, but in the qualities of motion indicated by the designated pitches up against particular norms. Thus understanding the syntactical norms and expectations of this music affects critically the ways in which one perceives compositional strategies and, consequently, performance choices.

The reductions in the examples may resemble Schenkerian graphs, but they represent the linear modal processes that guarantee the coherence of the passages in question. These pieces are not tonally conceived (except for a few moments prolonged by cadential harmonies, such as the conclusion of Ex. 1); yet the strategy of implying long-term goals, persuading the listener to desire those promised goals, and manipulating expectations in the process of attaining the goals is crucial to the emergence of common-practice-period tonality.

15 Many of Monteverdi's and Striggio's rhetorical strategies are indebted to a venerable legacy of devices and tropes developed in literature. For a discussion of this literary tradition, see Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Trask, Willard R. (Princeton, 1967).Google Scholar For two seventeenth-century attempts at borrowing rhetorical terminology for the purposes of music theory, see Burmeister, Joachim, Musica poetica (1606; Kassel, 1955)Google Scholar, and Bernhard, Christoph, ‘The Treatises of Christoph Bernhard’, trans. Hilse, Walter, The Music Forum, 3 (1973), 31–196.Google Scholar Claude Palisca discusses Burmeister's rhetorical theory and offers an analytic demonstration in ‘Ut oratoria musica: The Rhetorical Basis of Musical Mannerism’, in The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. Robinson, F. W. and Nichols, Stephen (Hanover, N.H., 1972), 37–65.Google Scholar

Because I am concerned with indicating how the music itself creates its rhetorical effects, I will not burden the discussion with Latin literary designations or correspondences. However, Orfeo's opening here might be fruitfully compared with the rhetorically dazzling opening of Milton's Paradise Lost (discussed briefly in Curtius, 243–4). Just as Monteverdi launches an extraordinarily prolonged ‘upbeat’ that is released finally on the word ’Dimmi’ (tell me), so Milton too directs all the energy of this passage – a synopsis of the entire Christian history of humankind – towards ‘Sing’. In both instances the listener is swept up in an onrushing flow towards the suspended outcome.

The sexual connotations of such musical devices seem at least implicitly recognised by Kerman, Joseph, ‘Orpheus: The Neoclassic Vision’;, Claudio Monteverdi: ‘Orfeo’, ed. Whenham, John (Cambridge, 1986), 129Google Scholar: ‘Monteverdi met this ideal with a perfect genius for declamation [ ] And to whip the recitative line into passion, he harrowed every available musical means for tension. Declamation guided him to sudden halts and spurting cascades in rhythm, and to precipitous, intense rises and falls in melodic line.’

16 This figure of the exchange of hearts between lovers is a convention of lyric verse and romance narratives since medieval times. It is significant here that Euridice alone testifies to this condition. A similar kind of speaking void can be found in Mimì's self-deprecating ‘Mi chiamano Mimì' in Puccini's La bohème. See the discussion in Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger, La bohème(Cambridge, 1986), 71–3.Google Scholar

17 For another reading of this passage, see Donington's, Robert treatment of Euridice's vow in ‘Monteverdi's First Opera’, The Monteverdi Companion, ed. Arnold, Denis and Fortune, Nigel (New York, 1972), 263–4.Google Scholar Donington rightly argues that the pitch-centre A is associated in the opera with death, and he thus sees in Euridice's own utterances the foreshadowing of her doom. I accept this argument concerning long-term symbolism, but would interpret the details of Euridice's speech on the more local and immediate level in which her gendered identity is delineated, for Monteverdi here creates a perfect musical instance of the ‘enclosed’ woman. See Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’, Rewriting the Renaissance (n. 11), 123–42.Google Scholar

18 See Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard, Richard (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; and Doerner, Klaus, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, trans. Neugroschel, Joachim and Steinberg, Jean (Oxford, 1981).Google Scholar Compare, for instance, Orfeo's madness with that of Monteverdi's sexually obsessed woman in ‘Lamento della ninfa’ (Book VIII). I am at present preparing a study of the musical representation of madwomen from various historical moments.

19 This reading of Orfeo's undoing in his moments of rhetorical excess is informed by Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, 1988), especially 51–4.Google Scholar See also Kerman, (n. 15), 132–7Google Scholar, for a discussion of the dramatic problems created by Orfeo's unconstrained passion.

Of course Orfeo's mourning of Euridice owes much rhetorically to Petrarch's reactions to Laura's death. But the two media – carefully constructed sonnets versus staged, enacted representation – produce very different effects, especially with respect to implied authority.

20 Clément, (see n. 7), 118.Google ScholarKerman, (see n. 15), 136–7Google Scholar, explains how Gluck’s eighteenth-century Orfeo avoids this dilemma.

21 Fenlon, Iain, ‘The Mantuan “Orfeo”’, in Whenham (see n. 15), 1–19.Google Scholar See also Tomlinson's discussion of the differences between monodic style in L'Orfeo and L'Arianna in Monteverdi (n. 9), 136–41.Google Scholar

22 Robert Walser’s work demonstrates that it is precisely these taboos – the taboos traditionally circumscribing representations of masculinity in opera – that are seized and deliberately violated in Heavy Metal, today's answer to baroque spectacle. Metal bands regularly flaunt rhetorical and sexual excess, simulations of madness and androgynous dress as anti-patriarchal signs of hypermasculinity. See his ‘Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Minnesota, forthcoming).Google Scholar

23 Quoted in Jones (see n. 11). As Jones comments: ‘Coryat reverses the gender roles on which love poetry was conventionally based. Constancy was assumed as a feminine trait, to be admired or overcome by men's uses of rhetoric; for Coryat, men's chastity is endangered by women's manipulations of language, and to encounter a “public woman” is to risk the casuistries of a previously masculine discourse. Practically speaking, he was wrong; a man who had sought out a courtesan could hardly claim to be seduced by her rhetoric’ (303–4). See also Graf, Arturo, ‘Una cortigiana fra mille’, Attraverso it cinquecento (Turin, 1926), 174–284Google Scholar; and Masson, Georgina, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1975).Google Scholar

24 For a different reading of Seneca's musical characterisation, see Rosand, Ellen, ‘Seneca and the Interpretation of L'incoronazione di Poppea’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 34–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 There was, in fact, a notable feminist presence in the seventeenth century. See Kelly (n. 10); and Riley, (n. 5), 25–35.Google Scholar There seems even to have been an occasional feminist voice in opera, made feasible by the extraordinary coincidence of a female patron and a female composer. See Cusick, Suzanne, ‘Francesca Caccini's La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina (1625): A Feminist Misreading of Orlando furioso?’, paper presented at the American Musicological Society Meeting, Baltimore (11 1988)Google Scholar, and Rosand, Ellen, ‘The Voice of Barbara Strozzi’, in Bowers and Tick, Women Making Music (n. 10), 168–90.Google Scholar

26 For studies of the differences in social and emotional development between males and females in Western culture, see Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, 1978), 180–90Google Scholar; and Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, 1982).Google Scholar

27 The Orpheus legend often makes it explicit that Orpheus turns to homosexuality after his loss of Eurydice. See Segal, Charles, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore, 1989).Google Scholar Linda Austern has compiled extensive documentation demonstrating that music itself, often personified as Orpheus, was regarded by the Elizabethans as effeminate because of its tendency to rhetorical excess, See her ‘“Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie”: Music and the English Renaissance Idea of the Feminine’, paper presented at the American Musicological Society Meeting, Baltimore (November 1988). See also Guillory, John, ‘Dalila's House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labor’, in Rewriting the Renaissance (n. 11), 106–22Google Scholar, for a discussion of how male sexual pleasure (even the heterosexual variety) comes to be regarded as effeminate during the seventeenth century.

28 See Clément (n. 7). Film theory has dealt extensively with the organisation of masculine desire and constructions of femininity. See, for instance, Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (1975), 8–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Silverman (n. 19); and Flinn, Carol, ‘The “Problem” of Femininity in Theories of Film Music’, Screen, 27 (1986), 56–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 See Stevens, (n. 1), 56.Google Scholar Stevens protests this situation by lumping women professionals together with other fads he finds deplorable when he condemns ‘the Dukes with their lavish and uncontrolled devotion to dwarfs, alchemists and lady singers’ (187). See also Bowers, ‘The Emergence of Women Composers’ (n. 10). Bowers documents some of the ways in which women's activity as professionals begins to be curtailed during the seventeenth century (141–6).

30 Representations of feminine desire abound in seventeenth-century music and then disappear with the eighteenth-century insistence on patriarchal values. See, for instance, the settings of texts from the Song of Songs by Schütz or Grandi, Frescobaldi's ‘Maddalena alla Croce’ or Stradella's malignant San Giovanni Battista. This obsession with charting female sexuality is again something that needs much more research. It has fascinated me, however, to note that my women students immediately pick up on the erotic imagery of seventeenth-century music, while most of the men fail to recognise it as having anything to do with the erotic. They claim to associate sexuality rather with the forceful thrusting [sic] of Beethoven. See my ‘Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II’, Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter (01 1987)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the constructions of masculinity in nineteenth-century symphonies.

31 In fact, the female characters in the premiere of L'Orfeo were all played by castratos (some of whom were scarcely able to learn their parts), despite the availability of virtuoso women singers. See Fenlon, (n. 21), 9–16.Google Scholar As late as the 1780s, Goethe could still write that by observing female impersonators on the Roman stage, ‘we come to understand the female sex so much the better because some one has observed and meditated on their ways’. See ‘Women's Parts Played by Men in the Roman Theatre’, Goethe's Travels in Italy, trans. Nisbet, Charles (London, 1883), 567–71.Google Scholar

The phenomenon of the castrato needs rethinking in terms of social gender construction. It stands as an extreme example of gender re-construction: the social ‘need’ for adult males who could sound like women was literally and violently inscribed on the body itself. While the motivation was not as simple as the desire to usurp jobs that otherwise would have been held by women, the practice did emerge at the same time as women virtuoso singers were rising to fame and creating a new demand. If it is not easy to puzzle out quite what this practice meant, it most certainly is tangled up with notions of gender organisation. For an imaginative reconstruction of the world of the castratos, see novel, Anne Rice's, Cry to Heaven (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

32 Pirrotta, Nino, ‘Scelte poetiche di Monteverdi’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 2 (1968), 254. An extraordinary misogynist backlash followed the reign of Elizabeth and can be traced chillingly in Shakespeare's Jacobean plays. SeeGoogle ScholarTennenhouse, (n. 2), 102–46.Google Scholar For discussions of similar periods of masculine paranoia and attendant anti-feminist portrayals of ‘powerful’ women, see Gilman, Sander L., Difference and Pathology: Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, 1985), 15–33Google Scholar; my own discussion of Bizet's Carmen in ‘Sexual Politics in Classical Music’, in Alternative Musicologies, ed. Shepherd, John (New York, forthcoming)Google Scholar; and Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan, ‘Tradition and the Female Talent’, in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Miller, Nancy K. (New York, 1986), 183–207.Google Scholar Although they have been heavily criticised for presenting somewhat prurient accounts of their subjects, see also Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; and Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Conway, Stephen (Minneapolis, 1987).Google Scholar The recent film Fatal Attraction is an instance from our own time.

33 In addition to Bianconi, (n. 2), 28–33Google Scholar and Tomlinson, (n. 9), 243–60Google Scholar, see Aston, Trevor, ed., Crisis in Europe 1560–1660 (London, 1965)Google Scholar, and Parker, Geoffrey and Smith, Lesley M., eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1985).Google Scholar

34 See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Hélène (Bloomington, 1984)Google Scholar, for an explanation of how celebrations of the ‘grotesque body’, taken from popular carnival festivities, can be used to challenge authority and official order. See Tennenhouse, (n. 2), 17–71Google Scholar, for an effective reading of Shakespeare in terms of Bakhtin's model. Tennenhouse argues that Shakespeare's inclusion of the carnivalesque in his Elizabethan plays served not to subvert authority, but rather to create the image of a more inclusive society in a way that flattered the queen, his patron. See also Attali, (n. 2), 21–4Google Scholar, for a discussion of Carnival's Quarrel with Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Attali uses this painting as a preliminary way of illustrating the opposition between collective and official musical cultures. This model would seem to offer valuable insight into the use of comic and female characters in seventeenth-century opera.

35 Bianconi, (n. 2), 183–4Google Scholar, explains the presence of these comic figures as the result of the merger in Venice between imported court opera and the network of professional commedia dell'arte theatres already established. He also argues (208–9) that they disappeared from opera at the turn of the century because of increasing specialisation: comic episodes became autonomous and were eventually detached from the dramma per musica. That there are formal and practical considerations involved in the elimination of comic characters from serious opera is unquestionable. Yet even the increasing segregation of serious and comic figures in the later seventeenth century (a necessary step if the comic scenes were finally to be detachable) is part of a cleaning-up process that gradually rectifies their promiscuous intermingling in mid-century. The impudent interventions by comic characters in some of the most serious scenes in L'incoronazione di Poppea could not be excised without destroying the piece.

36 Bianconi, (see n. 2), 188.Google Scholar

37 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Musicological Society Meeting, Baltimore (November 1988). I wish to thank Linda Austern, Barbara Engh and Robert Walser for their helpful reactions to that draft. I am also grateful to Leonard Tennenhouse and Nancy Armstrong, who made valuable suggestions for this revision.