The popular BBC-TV series Victoria (2016), portraying the life of the young British queen, has a scene during which Victoria attends a performance of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). Victoria’s musical and intellectual interests are well known, but it is not clear whether this particular episode is based on a documented event. The opera’s “mad scene” is the basis of this very brief extract. Victoria, as opposed to other members of her entourage, is shown as being mesmerized by what she is watching—her complete involvement is apparent, and her rapt response is pithy: “the mad scene always makes me cry.” Whether intentional or not, this scene evokes one of the most celebrated opera scenes in nineteenth-century literature, Gustav Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856), in which Emma Bovary attends a performance of the same opera in Rouen. Similar to Victoria, Emma is totally caught up in the moment, and this extensive and crucial part of the novel is a pivotal moment in the narrative. The emotional response by two very different women to music, and particularly to operatic performance, suggests the central role of music in the broader discussion of aesthetics and the intellectual life of the nineteenth century. This chapter offers a broad survey of the use of music in a wide variety of genres, focusing on particular moments where music plays a crucial narrative, thematic, or metaphoric role, often embodied in the figure of the operatic prima donna. Perhaps not surprisingly, the opera that frequently underscores these moments is Lucia di Lammermoor.
The nineteenth century was a period that “prided itself on fusing arts into generic hybrids, on seeing one art-form through another, and on harnessing music’s signification to everything” (Weliver and Ellis 2013, 4). Any discussion of the relationship between music and literature to the intellectual life in this century must place the figure of the performer at the center. The idea of the musical virtuoso captured the imagination of a broad public; Franz Liszt, Nicolo Paganini, and Jenny Lind spring immediately to mind, emblematic of an increasing professionalization of music-making, and performers found their way into the literature and broader cultural discussion of the period. Domestic music-making also looms large in literature, with the piano as its signifier and “object of cultural capital in a climate where, increasingly, middle-class respectability could be achieved through a display of its visible trappings” (Fuller and Losseff 2004, xix–xx).
Music was generally regarded as practiced by either women, foreigners, or other marginalized figures; all middle- and upper-class girls were expected to learn music—very seldom boys—while the most prominent female performers were the singers who loomed large in popular culture, playing an important role in the increasing recognition of women outside of hearth and home. But attitudes toward music-making were complex; they became “a charged site of cultural struggle insofar as it was promoted as both a transcendent corrective to social ills and a subversive cause for these ills” (Clapp-Itnyre 2002, xvii). There is the paradox of having educators, writers, and social reformers constructing music’s “unparalleled, other-worldly etherealism” while at the same time promoting music as “a practical corrective to foster, patriotism, morality, spirituality, and domestic tranquility,” resulting in musical aesthetics becoming politicized (xvii). The growing perception of the importance of music among the arts is expressed by an anonymous reviewer:
Music seems to be the art of our era. Its definite character leaves great freedom to the activity of the individual imagination. It is able to express our modern ideas in their comprehensiveness and generality. The most subjective of arts, it is best suited to give a voice to that spirit of isolation and individuality which is the characteristic feature of our times. It is therefore the only art in which we not only equal, but surpass all bygone ages. (xviii)
The nineteenth-century prima donna was a figure of great fascination to her contemporaries: “While their vehicles of vocal artistry included oratorio, art song, and ballads, the heights of fame were reached only by the stars of the opera: during the 1870s, shop windows displayed photographs of Patti, Albani, Trebelli, and Nilsson alongside those of Disraeli, Gladstone, and other men of the highest prominence” (Gillett 2000, 141). Patti was even celebrated by having two sonnets to her published in The St. James’s Magazine in 1878.
But there was a duality in perception: “traditional representations of the diva—as siren or vessel or some combination of both; as corrupt, monstrously selfish, ruthlessly competitive; as destructive and deadly,” were also common (Leonardi and Pope 1996, 13). The potency of the idea of the prima donna was well recognized: Walter Donaldson, in 1881, suggested that it was the only position where woman “is perfectly independent of man, and where, by her talent and conduct, she obtains the favour of the public,” allowing her to enter the theatre “emancipated and disenthralled from the fears and heartburning too often felt by those forced into a life of tuition and servitude” (Donaldson 1881, 246). This reflects a view gaining increasing currency in the late nineteenth century, wherein women were seen as staking a claim to emancipation and freedom from “traditional” domestic constraints; the diva could be viewed, not unproblematically and often threateningly, as in the forefront of this struggle, frequently breaking down class constraints, although few of the most prominent singers were working class in origin.
Catherine Clément’s (1989) libretto-centric view is that the beauty and power of the music in opera lulls audiences into overlooking or ignoring the fact that it is mainly the female protagonists who are victims and invariably die. Yet the most potent voices in nineteenth-century opera are female; the soprano frequently sonically overpowers all the male voices—it is only toward the end of the century when the tenor begins to rival the soprano in prestige: “Women in opera are rarely experienced as victims. Rather, they seem subversive presences in the patriarchal culture, since they so manifestly contain the promise—or the threat of women’s equality” (Robinson 1985, 3). Female singers played a significant role in both intellectual and popular perceptions of the changing role of women in society.
Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) is considered the first major novel that introduces the idea of the female artist as heroine, as well as the work that marks “the beginning of the ascent of the female opera singer in nineteenth-century fiction”: the novel lays the groundwork for “subsequent explorations of the prima donna’s gorgeous voice and her often tormented personal life (Weliver 2010, 103). The prima donna may be “a familiar, adulated figure on stage and page, but she was still different, exotic, and foreign as compared with the ideal, quietly controlled English femininity” (108). A stark contrast between the middle-class young woman playing and singing in the drawing room and the assertive, independent, and frequently threatening “siren” figure of the prima donna gradually emerges. This is expressed succinctly by George Eliot’s prima donna character, Armgart, from her eponymous verse drama, whose career is suddenly threatened, to which she responds:
What! leave the opera with my part ill-sung
While I was warbling in a drawing-room?
Sing in the chimney-corner to inspire
My husband reading news? (Eliot 1908, 88)
In literature, the intellectual and cultural role of opera is depicted both in performance and in the spaces in which the performances take place, particularly the opera box, an important site of the dominant male gaze. It is important to remember that music-making in the nineteenth century was both visual and aural. Opera “was one of the principal media through which the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie developed and disseminated its new moral codes, values, and normative behaviors” (McClary 1989, xviii). The growing complexity of both operatic plotlines and music allowed the art form to engage with a wide range of social and political issues. Opera was intertwined with broader intellectual currents, as can be seen in the two dominant operatic figures of the century: Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. Verdi addressed social and political aspects of the century in his operas, while Wagner’s groundbreaking music drama, The Ring of the Nibelungen, although couched in mythology and allegory, engages critically with burgeoning capitalism and ecological destruction, among many other issues.
The fictional representation of music “serves to shift prose writing from critical argument to emotional expression and lyric persuasion,” placing music in “social, cultural and political context, which highlights areas of intersection that can then be applied back to an understanding of the music itself” (Weliver 2006, 27–28). Fiction increasingly used operatic scenes as a form of both visual and acoustic ekphrasis, often to suggest a particular sense of interiority, while the ambition and complexity of operatic music evolved out of operas by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, where the orchestra plays a subordinate role to the virtuosity of the singers, into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, in which much of the drama is embodied in the orchestra, functioning as a form of omniscient narration as in fiction, allowing opera to explore interiority of character independent of the vocal line (Halliwell 1999). It is no accident that the greatest evolution of the novel, and opera, occurred almost simultaneously. The range of poets and novelists who engage with music in some form is wide, and in this chapter I can only glimpse at a few figures and pivotal moments in the long nineteenth century through the lens of the performers and their influence on intellectual culture and society. The chapter commences with Madame Bovary, and has three sections on opera in fiction, including works such as Trilby, The Woman in White, Vanity Fair, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, followed by sections on Henry James and Edith Wharton, culminating in a discussion of the way in which Wagner “infiltrated” fiction at the end of century. The profound influence of music on the poetry of Whitman is explored, while George Eliot’s neglected poetic drama, Armgart, offers a fascinating perspective of the crucial role of music in her works. The chapter ends with E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, and a final eruption of Lucia di Lammermoor into fiction.
Herbert Lindenberger asserts that “scenes from operas become a reminder—for author, character, and reader alike—of the gap separating the world of operatic passion from that of ordinary life. Its very consciousness of this gap has allowed the novel throughout its history to meditate on its own sufficiency as a genre” (Lindenberger 1984, 152). Donizetti’s opera in many ways epitomizes romantic opera of the nineteenth century, and it is no coincidence that Gustav Flaubert used it in Madame Bovary, in a scene which offers “an evaluation of the different ways that opera and novels can act on an especially susceptible consciousness” (Newark 2011, 84).
By no means the first use of opera in the nineteenth-century novel, this scene, and of course the novel, has been enormously influential on the intellectual interests of many later writers. There are three narrative levels playing out in this scene: the source novel (Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor), the original Italian operatic version, and the French version. The scene occurs at a dramatic turning point of Flaubert’s novel where Emma sees in the luxury and exoticism of the opera a symbol of her aspirations and a world with which she longs to engage. For someone like Emma, this world is not completely out of reach, and one way she can enter it vicariously is through her propensity for reading: the novel was increasingly exerting a significant influence on the broader intellectual culture as the readership expanded. In technical terms, Flaubert is cinematic in his narratorial fading of the music in and out of the scene while providing directorial control of the reader’s perception of the characters: the progress of the opera is counterpointed with Emma’s subjective reactions, advancing the plot and revealing aspects of Emma’s consciousness and personality. There are strong ironic elements in the narrative perspective which show an operatic experience that is overwhelming, but one simultaneously being deflated, a frequent narrative strategy in the nineteenth-century novel:
She let herself be lulled by the melodies: she felt a vibration pass through her whole being, as if the bows of the violins were being drawn across her own nerves. She hadn’t eyes enough to take in all the costumes and the scenery, the characters, the painted trees that shook when anyone took a step … a whole creation moving to the music as in the atmosphere of another world. A young woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the warbling of birds. Gravely Lucy entered upon her cavatina in G major. She plained of love, she longed for wings. So too Emma would have liked to escape from life and fly away in an embrace. (Flaubert 1950, 234)
The opera performance is a culmination of preceding events in the novel, as well as symbolic of Emma’s headlong rush into the liaison with Léon and its disastrous consequences: a clandestine relationship which would appear shocking to middle-class readers of the novel. The novel was indicative of the increasingly contested nature of sexual politics in the mid-nineteenth century which was to play such a significant role in the intellectual culture later in the century and beyond.
The figure of the female performer is part of a much wider philosophical idealization of music arising out of the Romantic movement; perhaps best expressed by Arthur Schopenhauer in his influential valorization of music over all other arts (1819): “music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are ideas”, while the effect of music is more powerful and penetrating than the other arts “for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence” (Schopenhauer 1958, 257). His ideas influenced many European intellectuals, including Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Herbert Spencer, and Walter Pater, as well as E. T. A. Hoffmann, who saw in music the revelation of “an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world” in which man “leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing” (cited in Bowie 1992, 70–71).
In one of Hoffmann’s most celebrated novellas, Der Sandman (1816), we come across the figure of Olimpia, the doll—an automaton—a concept of great fascination in nineteenth-century intellectual life. Hoffmann here explores the relationship between art and reality, a prominent debate in intellectual and artistic circles. The novella has occasioned much debate and critical attention, including from Sigmund Freud, who discussed the work in his essay “Das Unheimliche” (Röder 2003, 58). In Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel (1819), the doomed heroine Antonia is the daughter of a prima donna but has been forbidden to sing by her father. Hoffmann investigates the duality between the figure of the prima donna and the pure, unaffected singer, representing his idealized singers as “musical instruments, music coming not from but through them,” where, like instruments breaking from the strain of overuse, “these artist-martyrs die from an excess of music, or passion, or unrequited love. In the Romantic conflation of female pleasure in performance and forbidden love, music pours through the woman artist and overcomes her” (Hadlock 2000, 70–71). The career of Maria Malibran (1808–1836) is emblematic; she had pushed herself to her limits while unwell, leading to her premature death. Her life fascinated European audiences, embodying the cliché of the performer “who exhausted her life through her art and whose death was the definitive fulfillment and expression of her genius” (Bronfen 1992, 432). A statue of her as Bellini’s Norma—a character who sacrifices life for love—marks her grave.
Hoffmann’s duality inhabits Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881), in which the character of the Italian prima donna, Stella, Hoffmann’s muse and lover, is a central agent but a marginal stage figure. She evolves into three female protagonists: the singing doll Olympia, the siren-like courtesan Giulietta, and the doomed but beautiful-voiced Antonia. There is a pronounced self-referential aspect to the opera: an opera about singing which for Antonia, is the direct cause of her death. One might compare these three figures with three female protagonists of Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876): the opera star, the Alcharisi; the putative prima donna with a domestic-sized rather than truly operatic voice, Mirah Lapidoth; and the would-be prima donna, Gwendolyn Harleth, who possesses the ambition but not the talent, all forming a fractured image of the prima donna (Weliver 2000, 112).
The potency of the prima donna is finally made manifest during the epilogue of Offenbach’s opera, when Stella finally appears, but is completely silent: “The prima donna’s song has not been extinguished, but the poet can neither command it nor confine it, for in the last analysis the singer does not exist to serve the Romantic artist”; the epilogue takes us backstage to show the diva in her intense individualism, her performance over, she “walks out from behind the three dead heroines, having survived them all” (Hadlock 2000, 83–85).
Largely forgotten today, George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1895) is regarded as the best-selling novel in English in the nineteenth century. This novel enjoyed phenomenal success through a broadly based readership and had a “decisive influence on the stereotypical notion of bohemia,” affecting the “habits of American youth, particularly young women who derived from it the courage to call themselves artists and ‘bachelor girls,’ to smoke cigarettes and drink Chianti” (Sante 1991, 331). Trilby, a singer, is not a classic prima donna, even though there are many elements in her story which echo the life of Malibran. Words like “angel” and “siren” were often used to describe professional female singers seen simultaneously as a singing angel and musical demon (Weliver 2000, 247). Through the relationship between Svengali and Trilby, the novel investigates mesmerism and other current scientific theories, as well as aspects of community, identity and, most controversially, racial origins and stereotyping.
Svengali “controls” Trilby by means of his gaze; she has a brief but extraordinary career with Svengali as pianist and conductor. She is not only a vocal object but also a physical one—from her days as a nude model in Paris, to her being on display in her concerts. Her body as a physical sounding board is described by Svengali:
Himmel! The roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Panthéon. … The entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of St Sulpice … and not one tooth is missing—thirty-two British teeth as white as milk and as big as knuckle-bones! and your little tongue is scooped out like the leaf of a pink peony, and the bridge of your nose is like the belly of a Stradivarius—what a sounding board! and inside your beautiful big chest the lungs are made of leather! and your breath, it embalms—like the breath of a beautiful white heifer fed on the buttercups and daisies of the Vaterland! (Du Maurier 1998, 50–51)
This highly sexualized description suggests the availability of her body, also symbolized by an artistic fetish with her foot, contrasted with the “incomprehensibility of the throat”; the unknowable in this text “is the female voice rather than female sexuality … Svengali is the only one not subject to this fetish, for he is the only character who truly understands how the throat works,” yet no matter how much du Maurier’s grotesque character may distract us from this fact, it is Trilby herself who sings—the character epitomizes the fascination, as well as discomfort, with professional female vocalists that haunted society throughout the nineteenth century (Fleeger 2014, 31).
Though an instrument of Svengali, Trilby is solidly flesh and blood; however, she is still controlled by a man, unlike the “true” prima donna (Auerbach 1982, 18). Trilby is punished for loving too much and too many, and is doomed from the beginning: “the hypnotized Trilby is like Freud’s uncanny double, neither living nor dead … a harbinger of death” (Bronfen 1992, 441–442). She has appropriated many male characteristics, and is siren and sexual predator, as well as a Traviata-like figure. Similar to Olimpia in Hofmann’s novella, she is described in du Maurier’s novel as just “a singing-machine … a voice and nothing more—just the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with”; her own voice can only function in tandem with Svengali (299). This duality in her character is highlighted by the narrator who describes the sweet and unassuming Trilby in contrast to the Trilby “of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds—just the sounds [Svengali] wanted, and nothing else—and think his thoughts and wishes” (299). Her transformation into La Svengali is a Faustian pact which, of course, has its price—she has to die. Pace Clément!
O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?
…
All waits for the right voices; Where is the practis’d and perfect organ?
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, XXIV, 435
The protean figure of Walt Whitman emerged in the late 1840s and poetry, and in particular its metaphorical use of music, would never be the same: “For no other poet except Milton is the metaphor of song so central, so persistent, and so complex” (Karlin 2015, 141). Whitman’s use of music is inextricably and viscerally bound up with the body in all its aspects: the physicality of his poetry was a revelation to other poets and writers; he employed music as a metaphor in a variety of ways, but perhaps of most importance to him was the voice, and particularly the trained operatic voice: “But for the opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass” (Faner 1951, 82). An extended passage from one of his notebooks of 1855 suggests the intensely mystical yet deeply sexualized quality that he found in opera: “I want that tenor, large and fresh as the creation, the orbed parting of whose mouth shall lift over my head the sluices of all the delight yet discovered for our race.—I want the soprano that lithely overleaps the stars and convulses me like the love-grips of her in whose arms I lay last night” (82). This is transformed into “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass:
A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.
I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d
them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent
waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in
fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being. (Whitman 2007, 76)
Italian opera completely dominated serious music making and its related intellectual and artistic discourse in mid-nineteenth-century New York—Lucia being a central work. Audiences “started considering that listening to—and “understanding”—bel canto in Italian was a sign of intellectual distinction,” while Whitman describes opera as “the faithful mirror of a multicultural nation, a comprehensive art and a healthy instrument of education, reflecting a great number of collective identities” (Mariani 2017, 11, 71). The widespread view was that “real” opera was Italian opera; many operas until late in the century were translated into Italian. Hence Edith Wharton’s acerbic comment at the beginning of The Age of Innocence: “an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences” (Wharton 1921, 3). In actual fact, during the 1870s, when the novel is set, Wagner was becoming the most popular operatic composer in New York and elsewhere.
Whitman regarded it as unfortunate that after the Civil War opera, attendance became more stratified according to class, with attendance at the opera being more important than the actual enjoyment of opera itself for many of the upper classes. While the great Italian contralto Marietta Alboni only appeared in New York for one season, she remained Whitman’s favorite singer, and she left an indelible impression on all who heard her: “Her voice is a contralto of large compass, high and low—and probably sweeter tones never issued from human lips. The mere sound of that voice was pleasure enough” (Faner 1951, 59). But he could be extremely critical of particular singers, despite the great acclaim they enjoyed; his comments on the phenomenon that was Jenny Lind are revealing:
The Swedish Swan … never touched my heart in the least. I wondered at so much vocal dexterity … executed by this strangely overpraised woman in perfect scientific style, let critics say what they like, it was a failure; for there was a vacuum in the head of the performance. Beauty pervaded it no doubt, and that of a high order. It was the beauty of Adam before God breathed into his nostrils.
(as quoted in Faner 1951, 62)
His description has strong elements of both Hoffmann and Du Maurier, suggesting the singing automaton. Emily Dickinson and George Eliot were similarly unmoved by Lind, admiring her technical accomplishments, but feeling that she lacked something profound in her art (Sullivan 1974, 212). Both Whitman and Eliot reflect a pervasive intellectual ambivalence toward aspects of performance, particularly virtuosity; there was intellectual resistance but simultaneous admiration of the achievement of excellence.
Whitman’s reaction to singers and opera suggests a mystical connection to the materiality and “meaning” of the human voice that underlies all the artifice, where imperfections could be overlooked (Halliwell 2014). It was the full-blooded, full-throated vocalism of the Italian singers that thrilled him most; but simplicity could also move him. In his period as a nurse during the Civil War, he described an impromptu ward concert:
The principal singer was a young lady … nurse of one of the wards … join’d by the nurses of other wards. They sat there making a charming group, with their handsome, healthy faces, and standing up behind them were some ten or fifteen of the convalescent soldiers, young men, nurses, etc., with books in their hands, singing. Of course it was not such a performance as the great soloists at the New York opera house takes a hand in, yet I am not sure but I received as much pleasure under the circumstances, sitting there, as I have had from the best Italian compositions, expressed by world-famous performers. (as quoted in Faner 1951, 37)
Wilkie Collins’s popular novel The Woman in White (1860), was part of a subgenre of novels described as “sensational” and was characterized by “coincidence, mystery, suspense, moral ambiguity and … by secrets,” inhabiting a wider melodramatic tradition which used music extensively to heighten drama (Voracek 2004, 107). The heroine, Laura, is depicted playing the piano on four separate occasions, the music providing an emotional entry into her thoughts and feelings, charting her changing emotional state. Her final “performance” occurs when she plays for the Italian Count Fosco, whose appreciation of music is deep, having “a clear, cultivated, practical knowledge of the merits of the composition, in the first place, and the merits of the player’s touch in the second” (Collins 1896, 202).
Fosco is an enthusiastic performer himself, but is both feminized and demonized through his piano playing and singing (Voracek 2004, 122). His performance of Figaro’s aria from The Barber of Seville has that “crisply-fluent vocalisation which is never heard from any other than an Italian throat,” yet he is described as “a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male attire” (205). He reflects a common, somewhat paradoxical intellectual attitude in the nineteenth century that knowing too much about music is suspect—in some ways, the amateur was regarded as superior to the professional (Atlas 1999, 267).
Fosco’s performance is described in sinister terms: “The piano trembled under his powerful hands … his big bass voice thundered out the notes and his heavy foot beat time on the floor. There was something horrible—something fierce and devilish, in the outburst of delight at his own singing and playing, and in the triumph with which he watched its effect” (286–287). Then the music making changes from the drawing room to the opera house where Fosco attends a performance of Donizetti’s Lucretia Borgia. He is absorbed by the performance and the passage suggests the threat posed by his foreignness while acknowledging a genuine admiration of his aesthetic sensibilities:
Not a note of Donizetti’s delicious music was lost on him. … At the more refined passages of the singing, at the more delicate phases of the music, which passed unapplauded by others, his fat hands, adorned with perfectly-fitting black kid gloves, softly patted each other, in token of the cultivated appreciation of a musical man. At such times, his oily murmur of approval, “Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!” hummed through the silence, like the purring of a great cat. … Smiles rippled continuously over his fat face … “Yes! yes! these barbarous English people are learning something from ME. … If ever face spoke, his face spoke then, and that was its language. (406)
A highly musical writer, William Makepeace Thackeray’s works are suffused with musical, and particularly operatic elements, most notably Vanity Fair (1848) which, on a metaphoric level, can be seen as a novel charting the course of two novelistic prima donnas, Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp. The strategic use of opera intensifies in the final part of the book, where Thackeray associates his “two principal women with the opera and with well-known operatic heroines in ways that would provide ironic commentary on them while recalling the roles of each and foreshadowing the conclusion of the novel,” the culmination of the pattern which he establishes early in the novel and sustains throughout (Law 1987, 89). Amelia goes to the opera as a spectator; Becky is a performer: “she is consciously playing the role of someone she is not, and she is performing for profit” (1987, 105).
Opera serves initially as a signifier of social status. The famous scene on the night before Waterloo, when all the characters gather at the opera, has a furious coming and going in the opera boxes—an opera buffa—but the actual opera being performed is not mentioned. The scene emphasizes the crucial social function of the opera where the middle and upper classes could mix. The operatic allusions increase in the final scenes of the novel, when Thackeray uses three operas—Don Giovanni, Fidelio, and La Sonnambula—through which to reveal the narrator’s ambivalent and changing attitude toward Amelia and Becky. Amelia responds particularly to Don Giovanni, identifying with the passive Zerlina, succumbing to her tender moments in the arias, “Batti, batti” and “Vedrai carino.” Amelia does not have the heroic stature of Anna or Elvira; just as Zerlina is overshadowed by these two, so too is Amelia by the forceful and dominant Becky. Amelia sees herself reflected in the self-sacrificing title character in Fidelio but lacks her agency. Despite comic overtones, these operatic elements reveal the gap that lies between what the two women might think of themselves, both condemned by their vanity: “Neither prima donna is wholly satisfying, and readers must, as in life, be content with a performance that falls short of the ideal” (Law 1987, 110).
Leo Tolstoy uses opera scenes in his two major novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), employing the art form as a symbol of societal artifice and pretentious ostentation. The performance that Natasha attends has been described as classic example of ostranenie: stripping away convention to see what lies behind the form (Lowe 1990, 74):
all this seemed grotesque and amazing to Natasha. She could not follow the opera nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted cardboard and the queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it was so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt ashamed for the actors and then amused at them.
(Tolstoy 1983, 598–599)
This extended scene suggests a deep distaste for the art form: the unmasking of the artifice, its lack of verisimilitude in the use of song as communication, and the tawdry elements of performance are all focalized through the young and naïve eyes of Natasha. The opera performance is symbolic of the developing relationship and romance between Natasha and the dashing officer Anatole Kuragin. She has noticed him during the first act and his appearance and actions are quasi-operatic: “he moved with a restrained swagger which would have been ridiculous had he not been so good-looking. … He walked deliberately, his sword and spurs slightly jingling” (599). She becomes aware of his interest in her during the interval when she starts “performing”: “She even turned so that he should see her profile in what she thought was its most becoming aspect” (600). She becomes increasingly taken with him to the extent that the opera, which she viewed earlier as artificial and ridiculous, now does not seem so strange: “She looked about with pleasure, smiling joyfully” (602). The narrator directs the reader to consider the ridiculousness of opera through their familiarity with these conventions (Buckler 2000, 96).
In Anna Karenina, operatic elements find their major focus in the Anna–Vronsky story which is contrasted with the less theatrical and seemingly more authentic relationships between the Levins and the Oblonskiis. The two opera scenes do not stage any actual opera performances; all that is narrated in the first scene is: “A famous prima donna was giving her second performance and all high Society was at the Opera House” (Tolstoy 1980, 127). The two unnamed sopranos are Christine Nilsson and Adelina Patti, both of whom appeared in the St. Petersburg winter season in 1872–73 while Tolstoy was writing the novel, and Anna is linked with Nilsson in the various conversations that surround the first scene. The second scene is crucial—Anna attends the opera and becomes the focus of social disapprobation, articulated in French—for Tolstoy another symbol of social artifice and pretense: “Elle fait sensation. On oublie la Patti pour elle!” (She is causing a sensation. No one is paying attention to Patti because of her) (545).
The focus on Patti is not as embodying an operatic character, but as the diva: “On the stage the singer, in a glitter of bare shoulders and diamonds, was bowing low and smiling and she picked up with the help of the tenor—who held her hand—bouquets that had been clumsily flung across the footlights … and the whole audience in the stalls and in the boxes stirred, leaned forward, shouted and applauded” (542). Patti is not named: Anna, in effect, takes her place, becoming the focus of the audience’s attention—she becomes the operatic spectacle. Early drafts of the novel suggest that Tolstoy intended to have a specific reference to an opera (La Traviata), but echoes of La Traviata remain in the novel’s flouting of social conventions and its contemporary setting.
Rebecca A. Pope notes that the large number of diva figures in women’s writing “seems surprising,” as the women who play these roles “are reputed to be … ruthlessly competitive, capriciously temperamental, extravagantly vain, and glamorously ornamental” and would seem to be “a figure for the woman writer to avoid rather than privilege” (Pope 1990, 469). The diva’s “voice” in women’s writing “is both a mode of and metaphor for female empowerment in a culture that traditionally places women on the side of silence” (469).
George Eliot’s novels are remarkable for the way in which she incorporates her extensive musical knowledge and experience in the narratives, wider thematic explorations, and philosophical digressions.
Eliot seeks access to the emotional and psychological richness of opera, especially on behalf of female characters without other channels for emotional expression. The disclosure of her characters’ inner lives can be as “operatic” as the more obvious dramatic qualities associated with opera. If nineteenth-century opera aspired to the interiority that distinguished the novel, then clearly Eliot’s fiction also found, in opera, new ways of expanding its depiction of that very interiority.
(Da Sousa Correa 2012, 169)
The eponymous Armgart is the singer in Eliot’s verse drama Armgart (1870), which explores her rise and fall in five scenes—the first two illustrate her success and the final three chart the loss of her voice. Armgart embodies a tension that characterized most of Eliot’s writing career: an ambition to succeed at her art but a desire not to be part of the theatricality of literary fame (Bodenheimer 1990). She retained a typical Victorian reservation about women on the stage, yet admired these figures and, as a competent musician herself, acknowledged the importance of talent, technique, and unrelenting application to attain excellence. However, the passion and desire central to achievement can, and often is, destructive. She has Armgart exclaim early, in almost violent terms:
She often wonders what her life had been
Without that voice for channel to her soul …
“Poor wretch!” she says, of any murderess —
“The world was cruel, and she could not sing:
I carry my revenges in my throat;
I love in singing, and am loved again— (Eliot 1908, 68–69)
Of course there are sacrifices to be made to attain this mastery: a sentiment expressed by the great singer, the Alcharisi, in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, who has renounced family for her art and who tells her son Daniel: “I did not want affection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not be hampered with other lives. … I was a great singer, and I acted as well as I sang. … I was living a myriad of lives in one. I did not want a child (Eliot 1984, 536–537). This goes to the heart of Eliot’s dilemma between the creative life which required independence and a more conventional existence.
Armgart references two composers: Gluck (Orfeo) and Beethoven (Fidelio). For Eliot, the figure of Orpheus, in the opera often sung by a woman dressed as a man, and able to release the dead Eurydice by the power of song, was of potent symbolic value. Eliot’s portrayal of women musicians is more nuanced and sympathetic than much of the satirical treatment in other fiction, and her female opera singers are powerful figures (Da Sousa Correa 2012, 167). Yet her fiction also displays a good deal of ambivalence about women’s artistic performance, reflecting a pervasive unease in striving for excellence and recognition.
After an illness, Armgart loses her voice, which she feels has been a result of the cure; she accuses the doctor: “You have murdered it / Murdered my voice” (Eliot 1908, 100). Her companion, her cousin Walpurga, who has served her faithfully, points out the position of the ordinary woman who does not possess the talent of an Armgart, who has arrogantly looked down from her “clear height on all the million lots which yet you brand as abject” (117). Armgart is chastened and despite being in the position of using her name and talents as an actress rather than as a singer, decides to take the path of the teacher, seeing her voice as her dead child:
Song was my speech,
And with its impulse only, action came: …
Oh it is hard
To take the little corpse and lay it low,
And say, “None misses it but me”— (122–125)
She retains her independence, not taking the path of marriage and subservience. The drama ends with a final acknowledgment of the demanding life of the singer, as Armgart’s rival, Paulina, will now sing the role of Fidelio: “And they will welcome her tonight” (125), another role sung by a strong woman dressed as a man who rescues her spouse. Eliot’s drama is a powerful, yet little known invocation of the demands and costs that performance at the highest levels makes on its female practitioners.
The number of works of fiction that contain opera scenes and the variety of ways in which opera is employed in Henry James’s work is testimony the importance of opera as a social phenomenon and a marker of class in his world in both Europe and America (Halliwell 2017, 99). As Andrea Mariani (2017, 8) notes:
Far from being considered an imported good, which could be of some relevance only to the communities of recent immigration from Europe, and far from being limited to theaters of major cities along the East Coast (plus New Orleans), it had acquired a status and vast geographic diffusion … and a wide popularity among all social classes. This fact could indeed astonish (and preoccupy) only members of what was rapidly becoming a minority, that is, the heirs of the Puritans in New England.
The opera box is a unique place, being “one of a very few appropriate sites of heterosocial interaction for the offspring of the wealthy and respectable”; it is paradoxically “both private and public—private in that access to it is strictly controlled, but nonetheless in public view—it functions as a glorious jewel-box to set off its prize,” but also “a sort of luxuriously upholstered trap” which many a girl would have experienced “as a cul-de-sac” (Solie 1997, 97). The operatic space itself was strictly organized, “embodying social—and indeed evolutionary—hierarchies” (Sutton 2002, 101). Virginia Woolf, rather patronizingly, noted a particular audience phenomenon in Edwardian England:
Strange men and women are to be found in the cheap seats on Wagner Nights; there is something primitive in the look of them, as though they did their best to live in forests, upon the elemental emotions, and were quick to suspect their fellows of a lack of “reality,” as they call it. They find a philosophy of life in the operas, hum “motifs” to symbolise stages in their thought, and walk off their fevour on the Embankment, wrapped in great black cloaks.
(Woolf 1909, quoted in Sutton 2002, 101)
One of James’s early successful novels, The American (1877), has a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a significant component of the narrative. A wealthy young American, Christopher Newman, has met a beautiful aristocratic Parisian widow, Claire de Cintré. Her mysterious and repressive family, the Bellegardes, resist the match. Here is James’s first major treatment of the “Transatlantic theme,” in which the innocent from the New World confronts the decadent and devious Old World.
The novel shifts its mode from realism to the fantastic in the pivotal chapter 17, which takes place at the ornate Paris Opera during a performance of Don Giovanni, where Newman’s role as an outsider in this rigid society is highlighted. Don Giovanni is concerned with transgression and the blurring of classes; Giovanni himself “slums it” in his advances toward the peasant girl Zerlina, destabilizing the class system, just as Mozart has the opera swing stylistically between opera seria and opera buffa throughout the course of the action. These musical and social oscillations reflect the way Newman attempts to negotiate his way through the intricacies of French society (Rowe 1987, 81). James uses the architecture of the opera house with detailed “inside” knowledge. The performance starts with Newman in his “orchestra-chair,” observing the house, then he enters the box of the marquis, where an elliptical exchange takes place:
“I am very curious to see how it ends,” said Newman.
“You speak as if it were a feuilleton in the Figaro,” observed the marquis.
“You have surely seen the opera before?”
“Never,” said Newman. “I am sure I should have remembered it.
Donna Elvira reminds me of Madame de Cintré; I don’t mean in her
circumstances, but in the music she sings.”
There is no great possibility, I imagine, of Madame de Cintré being forsaken.”
“Not much!” said Newman. “But what becomes of the Don?”
“The devil comes down—or comes up,” said Madame de Bellegarde,
“and carries him off. I suppose Zerlina reminds you of me.”
“I will go to the foyer for a few moments,” said the marquis,
“and give you a chance to say that the commander—the man
of stone—resembles me.” And he passed out of the box. (James 1978, 200)
James uses the operatic situation and characters to suggest Newman’s outsider status; just as he does not know the plot of the opera, so too he is unaware of the subtle and unspoken codes that operate in this society and which underlie the reasons for his rejection by the Bellegardes (Skaggs 2010, 105). James also uses the opera as a parallel to the unfolding events of Newman’s relationship with Claire who, like Donna Elvira, retires to spend the rest of her days in a convent.
While the performance plays a prominent thematic role in the novel, the structure of the opera house is crucial; Newman does not understand the full social significances of the various spaces, and he symbolically remains an outsider: James “plans the choreography of the scene with a director’s skill, emphasizing the spatial aspects which further serve to isolate Newman who wanders uncomprehendingly through this bewildering, maze-like structure” (Halliwell 2017, 108).
“On a January evening in the early seventies Christine Nilsson was singing Faust at the Academy of Music in New York”—Edith Wharton’s celebrated opening sentence of her novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), introduces a scene during a performance of that quintessential opera of the late nineteenth century (Wharton 1921, 3). The opera performance serves as a structural frame for the novel while the reader is placed in the same position as the audience, as if in one of the opera boxes (Skaggs 2004, 49).
The idea of the gaze from and into the box is central to the novel, and Newland Archer’s gaze introduces May Welland, whom he will later marry. His observations of the women in the theatre have strong sexual overtones which combine with the swelling music: “As Madame Nilsson’s “M’ama” thrilled out above the silent house … a warm pink mounted to the girl’s cheek, mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and sufficed the young slope of her breast line to the line where it me a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia” (Wharton 1921, 5).
The narrative gaze is transferred to Lawrence Lefferts, who introduces the off-stage “prima donna” of the novel, Ellen Olenska. Ellen is dressed “rather theatrically,” thus attracting the attention of the audience and upstaging the other ladies in the box—there are strong echoes of Anna’s entering the box in Tolstoy’s novel. Ellen admits to Newland that she feels as if she is “on stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds” (1921, 100). The narrator reminds the reader: “In reality, they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs”—a perfect setting in the opera box (34).
The audience members are as much the performers in this opening scene as the singers; the opera performance is but a backdrop to this relentless opera-box drama interspersed throughout the novel. Wharton echoes James in her use of the opera with a complexity that reflects James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), where a brief scene in a Rome opera box reveals a remarkable change in Isabel Archer from the simple and rather naïve American girl at the outset to a sophisticated woman, self-consciously aware of her effect on others. Like the characters on stage in this unnamed Verdi performance, she is “performing” her newly assumed role of a woman of the world. The opera in nineteenth-century society was a site of complex relationships with a constant adherence to, and breaking of, conventions.
As the century drew to a close, several novelists made Wagner the focus of their works, reflecting his pervasive influence on all the arts. A new kind of prima donna is portrayed by the title character in George Moore’s Evelyn Innes (1898), who is transformed from a dutiful daughter and devout Catholic into an acclaimed Wagnerian soprano. Moore is credited with being the first writer of “Wagnerian” novels (Blissett 1961). The young Evelyn has inherited the voice of her dead mother, an opera singer, when a rich musical dilettante, Sir Owen Asher, arranges for her to study with a teacher in Paris; thus begins her career as a great Wagnerian singer. She returns to London as Asher’s mistress, meets a young Irish composer named Ulick Dean, and consummates her relationship with him during the interval of a performance of Tristan und Isolde in which she is singing Isolde. The novel “demonstrates the existential dimension of acting”: going on stage is seen as “a first step to freedom and as the beginning of a process of self-creation,” yet also “the destructive nature of this experience” (Gaspari 2006, 12).
Evelyn discovers her own sexuality in her relationship with Asher which then becomes channeled into her art through an instinctual and almost total identification with Wagner’s heroines, particularly Isolde. She “has reduced experience to sensations which acquire meaning for her only in the context of Wagner’s music and so has lost the power to discriminate morally, imaginatively, perceptually” (Cave 1978, 150). Moore capitalizes with great effect upon the popular image of female vocality, poised between destructiveness and fragility (Huguet 2013, 27). Evelyn, like Antonia in Tales of Hoffmann, is linked through her voice to her mother’s abortive career as a singer and she is faced with an existential dilemma:
Could she renounce her art? But her art was not merely a personal sacrifice. In the renunciation of her art she was denying the great gift that had been given to her by Nature, that had come she knew not whence not how, but clearly for exercise and for the admiration of the world. … Her voice was one of her responsibilities; not to cultivate her voice would be a sort of suicide. (Moore 1928, 70)
The attitude toward her voice is complex; it is a physical phenomenon but it also transcends the physical, through which the striving for the ineffable and spiritual might be possible. She becomes much more than just a performer of these Wagnerian roles; she is virtually possessed by them, yet the performances of these passionate and sensual characters exhaust her spiritually and physically. There is a blurring of art and life, and she virtually becomes an automaton like Olympia and Trilby: “She sang and acted as in a dream, hypnotised by her audience, her exaltation steeped in somnambulism and steeped in ecstasy” (1928, 198–199). When she returns contritely to her father’s house, the scene in her mind is that between Wotan and Brünnhilde: art and reality become completely fused:
She caught her father’s hand and pressed it against her cheek … she could not do otherwise … the grief she expressed was so intense that he could not restrain his tears. … She could only think of her own grief; the grief and regret of many years absorbed her; she was so lost in it that she expected him to answer her in Wotan’s own music. … And it was not until he asked her why she was singing Wagner that she raised her face. … “Because I’ve never sung it without thinking of you, father. That is why I sang it so well. I knew it all before. It tore at my heart strings. I knew that one day it would come to this.” “So every time before was but a rehearsal.” (210–211)
American Gertrude Atherton’s novel Tower of Ivory (1910) traces the life of Margaret Hill, later Margarethe Styr, born in the coalfields of America, but undergoing a dramatic life transformation into courtesan, actress, and later the protégé of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who becomes enamored of her unique interpretation of Wagner. She forms a relationship with an Englishman, John Ordham, when they meet at Ludwig’s castle, Neu Schwanstein. Ordham returns to London, marries an American heiress, but arranges a season of Wagner opera in London and falls in love with Styr while she is there. Styr returns to Munich and Ordham travels to Munich to find her singing to Ludwig in an empty opera house: “Styr sings the role of Brünnhilde as a fusion of the significance of Isolde and Brünnhilde—a woman choosing pure passion and death. Then she plunges into the flames of Siegfried’s bier and does not emerge” (McClure 1979, 88).
The bulk of the novel is set in 1880s London and reflects changes in the artistic life that saw the rise of figures such as Ibsen, Wagner, and Wilde, as well as the broadening of the intellectual debate. The dramatic death of Styr at the end of Götterdämmerung combines the figures of Elizabeth, Brünnhilde, and Isolde—three of her greatest roles, singing only for Ludwig and Ordham. In this performance there is a “Nietzschean-Wagnerian negation of the will to live” in which Styr “achieves redemption of her early immoral loves and a perfect memory of the joy of a first real love. The characterization creates a literary image of a whole and knowing woman” (90). A strangely compelling novel, Atherton draws on her extensive knowledge of European opera to explore the destructive aspects of elite musical performance and the profound influence of Wagner, while reflecting much of the intellectual debate of the period.
Of all the novelists of the turn of the twentieth century who used the figure of the prima donna in their fiction, perhaps none did so with such knowledge, consistency, and scope as Willa Cather. The Song of the Lark (1915) is a Bildungsroman, as well as a Künstlerroman, charting the development of the central character, Thea Kronberg, from a relatively impoverished background to become a celebrated Wagnerian soprano:
They were listening to a Mexican part-song; the tenor then the soprano, then both together; the baritone joins them, rages, is extinguished; the tenor expires in sobs, and the soprano finishes alone … and several male voices began the sextette from “Lucia.” … Then at the appointed, at the acute, moment, the soprano voice, like a fountain jet, shot up into the light. … How it leaped from among those dusky male voices! How it played in and about and around and over them, like a goldfish darting among creek minnows, like a butterfly soaring above a swarm of dark ones.
(Cather 1978, 273)
Once again, Lucia! This crucial early, if makeshift, performance, launches Thea Kronberg’s journey to the opera stages of Europe and the United States. In the Epilogue, the narrator stresses the power of her voice and its symbolic significance:
A boy grew up on one of those streets who went to Omaha and built up a great business, and is now very rich. Moonstone people always speak of him and Thea together, as examples of Moonstone enterprise. They do, however, talk oftener of Thea. A voice has even a wider appeal than a fortune. It is the one gift that all creatures would possess if they could. Dreary Maggie Evans, dead nearly twenty years, is still remembered because Thea sang at her funeral “after she had studied in Chicago.” (418)
Cather takes pains to emphasize the grit and determination that Thea has needed to achieve success, but it comes at a cost. The triumphant performance of Die Walküre that closes the book signals the acknowledgment of an illustrious career, but the final vivid image is of “a spent prima donna making her lonely way home. … Thea fights her own way with inflexible determination” (Thomas 1989, 36). Artistic achievement requires sacrifices, as well as isolation.
In Cather’s novel, one of the central symbolic images, as in Eliot’s Armgart, is Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, the score of which is given to Thea by her childhood piano teacher, Wunsch. Like Orpheus, Thea cannot look back at Euridice; the Orfeo score acts as “her passport to the Kingdom of Art” (38). Thea is given Orfeo’s lament to sing in its German translation, “Ach, ich habe sie verloren,” and this music returns like a leitmotif recalling her days with Wunsch (the aria also reflects the debate about what type of voice should sing this role: male, female or, in fact, castrato—highlighting aspects of gender and sexuality which are an ambiguous undercurrent in the novel). Wunsch is an exile from Europe, old and alcoholic, but a man of genuine musical ability, and he inscribes “Einst, O Wunder” in the score—from Beethoven’s song, “Adelaide.” The words suggest that his failed artistic life might be redeemed by Thea; his last view of her evokes her toughness: “Yes, she was like a flower full of sun, but not the soft German flowers of his childhood … she was like the yellow prickly-pear blossoms that open there in the desert; thornier and sturdier than the maiden flowers he remembered; not so sweet, but wonderful” (122).
Her early operatic success comes in Dresden, where she sings Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, and she triumphantly performs at the Metropolitan Opera, the culmination of the many years of hard work and emblematic of the courage and cool-headedness that she has developed as a performer:
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. That afternoon nothing new came to Thea Kronborg, no enlightenment, no inspiration. She merely came into full possession of things she had been refining and perfecting for so long. Her inhibitions chanced to be fewer than usual, and, within herself, she entered into the inheritance that she herself had laid up, into the fullness of the faith she had kept before she knew its name or its meaning.
Often when she sang, the best she had was unavailable; she could not break through to it, and every sort of distraction and mischance came between it and her. But this afternoon the closed roads opened, the gates dropped. What she had so often tried to reach, lay under her hand. She had only to touch an idea to make it live. (422)
The portraits of these three very different prima donnas, all rising from obscurity to stardom, reveal changing conceptions of the position of the female musician in society, as well as a deepening understanding of the psychology of performance and performers, and the importance of music in society as the musical bourgeoisie expanded and the aesthetic debate broadened.
On a grand tour of Italy with his mother and Edward Dent, E. M. Forster attended a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Teatro Verdi, in Florence, in 1903, with the great Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini in the title role, then just thirty-two. Dent wrote in his diary: “We much enjoyed it. The Lucia was excellent and the audience very noisy” (quoted in Fillion 2010, 6). This Lucia performance made its way into Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), set in a fictional provincial town, Monteriano.
Forster uses the scene as an opportunity for “performance” for his characters; surrounded by this passionate music, they are each forced to react. This scene is the “structural and symbolic pillar of the novel,” not just a “splash of local colour” (25). Philip Herriton, his sister Harriet, and companion Caroline Abbot are in Italy attempting to “rescue” the baby son of an Englishwoman Lilia, who has died in childbirth. They consider her Italian husband, Gino, unsuitable, but they allow themselves a night at the opera. Philip, who in some ways reflects Forster himself, enjoys the performance despite his negative views of Italian opera, grasping that the principle of opera in Italy “aims not at illusion but entertainment” (Forster 1975, 94).
The famous sextet engenders an almost sexualized response: “The audience sounded drunk, and even Caroline, who never took a drop, was swaying oddly. Violent waves of excitement, all arising from very little, went sweeping round the theatre” (95). However, the climax of the performance “was reached in the mad scene” (95). The scene is also used for comedic effect: Virginia Woolf described it as “a masterpiece” (Wilde 1985, 44), and it is a potent mixture of comedy and genuine passion. The scene is an obvious reference to Flaubert, which Forster makes explicit: “Harriet, like M. Bovary on a more famous occasion, was trying to follow the plot” (Forster 1975, 95). Philip expresses his reaction to the opera, perhaps echoing Forster’s own: “These people [the Italians] know how to live. They would sooner have a thing bad than not to have it at all. That is why they have got to have so much that is good”; noting that however “bad the performance is tonight, it will be alive. Italians don’t love music silently. The audience takes its share—sometimes more” (90).
This scene reflects in a distorted form the trajectory of the novel as a whole, which starts out as a comedy of manners and turns into a tragedy, culminating in the accidental death of the baby. The mad scene is the iconic moment, as in so much of the literature of the nineteenth century, and as the cascading roulades end, the audience goes wild and Lucia emits a scream of pleasure as the floral tributes land at her feet. Here is the emotion of the music made corporeal as she acknowledges her audience; her pleasure is palpable as she gazes back at the audience—empowered by her vocal art.
The reaction of the two women is fascinating. Harriet, perhaps feeling threatened through sensing the sexual potency of what has just happened, is disgusted: “It’s not even respectable” (96). She is determined not to enjoy the performance, keeps trying to quiet the audience while inquiring where Sir Walter Scott is in this musical farrago. Caroline is caught up by the music and the sensual atmosphere. She returns to her hotel room conscious that she is neglecting her duty in terms of her mission, but at the same time she experiences a sense of elation.
While nothing overt is apparent in her reaction at the opera, the next morning Harriet watches Gino, bare-chested and singing a snatch of opera. Blowing a smoke ring from a cigar, his physical presence is too much for her, and recalling the music of the night before, “she lost self-control. It enveloped her. As if it was a breath from the pit, she screamed” (103). Her reaction is an operatic scream—her voice expresses what she has experienced—an echo of Lucia’s wordless coloratura of the night before. She is consumed by the madness of Lucia. Lucia rules!
Intellectual engagement with music is reflected in myriad forms during the century: “historians, philosophers, evolutionary biologists, mental scientists, politicians and theologians were thinking about music as a way to understand human bodies and societies, as well as to conceptualize and communicate more metaphysical notions” (Weliver and Ellis 2013, 3–4). As access to professional music-making spread from the middle classes—and the aristocracy before that—to the broader population, thinking about music in an increasingly wide sense became part of public consciousness, and this is reflected strongly in the literature of the century. In this brief tour through a small part of the literary output, we have seen how a particular musical figure—the prima donna—captured the imagination of poets and novelists, who used this potent musical force to explore a wide variety of aesthetic, philosophical, and social ideas and issues. The novel drew on music, and opera in particular, in innovative and rapidly evolving ways, while poets expanded the range of verbal strategies to suggest aspects of musicality in their work. This is but one aspect of the rich tapestry of music’s interaction with literature.