Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (review)

Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera. Edited by Mary Ann Smart. (Princeton Studies in Opera.) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. [vi, 301 p. ISBN 0-691-05814-8 (cloth); 0-691-05813-X (pbk.). $55 (cloth); $17.95 (pbk.).]

Opera has long provided challenging questions for anyone wishing to develop feminist, gay, lesbian, or other (relatively) new musicological methodologies. Siren Songs, the latest collection of essays on opera, gender, and sexuality, makes a significant contribution to these projects. But it does so with an important and refreshing difference. Leaving behind the fashion for autobiographical and confessional narratives, defensive postures, and "essentialist" binary oppositions, most of these essays are based on the kinds of documents used in what is now being called "traditional" historical scholarship. Music analysis and examinations of literary sources, staging manuals, composers' letters, and social and political contexts are the basis for fascinating observations about representations of gender and sexuality, many of which also yield broad perspectives on the relationship of opera to history.

Catherine Clément, whose book on the fate of women in opera librettos launched one important strand of feminist musicology more than twenty years ago (Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988]; originally published as L'opéra, ou, la défaite des femmes [Paris: B. Grasset, 1979]), opens with a meditation on the impact of real and imagined histories on Austrian stagings of Fidelio in the 1930s and 1940s. Like the panel of contributors to "Staging Mozart's Women" (Gretchen Wheelock, Mary Hunter, and Wye Jamison Allanbrook), Clément highlights possible tensions between historicized readings of musical styles and operatic conventions, and the social and sexual politics of performing operas in modern settings. A recent opera performance also provides the starting point for Katherine Bergeron's essay on Pelléas et Mélisande, although this time the stage is set in the composer's own time, in a psychodrama where the characters are all symptoms of Golaud's emotional distress. Bergeron focuses on Mélisande's hair, symbol of unfettered desire and a Freudian fetish; she also suggests that certain repeated ideas in the music chart the ebb and flow of Golaud's desire and repression. The resulting network of observations about visual effect, musical detail, and psychoanalytic symbolism highlights a complex core of eroticism and psychic distress in an opera that has often confounded critics by its apparent restraint and evasiveness.

Two other essays adopt psychoanalytic frameworks, one by Lawrence Kramer, who calls on Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan in a dizzying theory of opera and sexuality, the other by Peter Brooks. Brooks's work on melodrama and the body has already influenced recent opera criticism. Here, in an essay on Eboli's role in Don Carlos, he develops another very suggestive idea: that of "the hystericized voice" (p. 125), a kind of "acting out" in which singing is both an exploration of symptoms and a passionate, talking cure. Brooks and Kramer illustrate theoretical models for understanding sexuality in opera by means of relatively brief examples from the repertory and its reception. Other authors examine the meaning of a whole work by placing it within its immediate historical context. Linda and Michael Hutcheon unearth a wide array of literary, artistic, and medical connections between Salome and fin de siècle female sexuality; Joseph Auner examines gender in Jonny spielt auf, modernism, and mass culture; and Philip Brett proposes a new reading of the libretto for Peter Grimes, viewing it as a symptom of postwar British debates on social policy.

But operas may also stand in oblique relationships to their contexts, perhaps even encouraging revisions of accepted historical narratives. Roger Parker suggests that in Don Carlos, Elizabeth's last aria resists nineteenth-century trends toward interiority by adapting references to the past from earlier in the opera, remaking history and challenging patriarchal authority. And Martha Feldman and Heather Hadlock...