Summer reading
I have a cherished memory of watching Le Nozze di Figaro for the first time, on video, and being captivated by a certain scene in Act II. In Mozart’s opera, the Countess and her maid, Susanna, are involved in a scheme to expose the Count’s infidelity, thereby forcing him to stop making advances on Susanna and obstructing her marriage to Figaro. The plan involves disguising Cherubino, the Count’s pageboy, as a woman to lure the Count. A not insignificant detail is that the role of Cherubino is a trouser role, intended for a mezzo-soprano.
In the scene, Cherubino arrives at the Countess’s bedroom. He sings a song he’d written about his love of women, with Susanna accompanying on guitar, and the Countess is charmed. Susanna proceeds to dress Cherubino in feminine clothing. “If women fall in love with him, they certainly have a reason,” she exclaims upon seeing the result. The Countess discovers that Cherubino has stolen one of her ribbons and tied it around his arm, and teases him. Cherubino laments his impending departure due to his military commission—the Count’s ploy to get rid of him. He makes a last-minute pass at the Countess: “Perhaps now, so near to the final moment…those lips….”
Then the Count knocks on the door, putting an abrupt stop to the proceedings. But in those brief, suspended moments in the Countess’s bedroom, a world of possibilities seemed to open up. In the production I was watching long ago (with a 20th century British upstairs-downstairs staging), Cherubino, serenading Susanna and the Countess in a butch three-piece suit, seemed to engender a sense of intimacy between the two of them, as though he had seduced them into lesbianism. Susanna undressed herself to put her own clothes on Cherubino, and Cherubino seemed to pique the Countess’s interest as a double of Susanna. Cherubino, for his part, seemed happy about Susanna dressing him up and ordering him around (in an aria that begins, “Come, get on your knees”). The original flimsy pretext of tricking the Count had become irrelevant. The three of them could, for a few moments, enjoy the pleasures of lesbianism and gender nonconformity for their own sake.
The problem—insofar as it is a problem—is that I think my memory of this Le Nozze is largely wishful thinking accreted over time. (I have never tried to watch that production on video again, in part because I want to protect this memory.) In any case, watching that scene has never had the same effect on me again. I’m always disappointed when I remember that the Countess repeatedly chides Susanna for appreciating Cherubino’s beauty and orders her to do all the work, or that the stage directions specify that the Countess eventually shoos Susanna out of the room so she can have Cherubino to herself. I’ve seen this opera and read the libretto many times, but due to selective forgetting, I’m always surprised again each time. Is this really how it goes? Was it always like this?
I was thinking about all of this while finally finishing Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, a classic meditation on gay men's relationship to opera. Koestenbaum seems to posit an exchange: gay desire must be sublimated into opera instead of publicly expressed, but in return we gain the license to bend opera to our own desires, if only privately. Le Nozze hints at gender subversion, but only as part of the chaos that must be overcome so two hetero marriages can be saved. But it’s in the shadowy territory of subtext and sublimation that Cherubino, and the mezzo who sings the role, are getting away with something. (Watching Isabel Leonard trying to seduce Marlis Petersen and Amanda Majeski on the Met stage, I feel like I’m getting away with something, too.) I write from my own cis lesbian perspective, but other people—gay, bi, trans, nonbinary—have read Cherubino and his trouser role siblings in different and similar ways, seeing and hearing something of themselves as well.
In his song to the Countess, Cherubino sings of desire that is indescribable, torturous, but strangely pleasurable: “I find no peace night or day, and yet I enjoy languishing this way.” This forms part of the gay subtext of the opera, but it also expresses how I feel about Le Nozze. It’s not a coincidence that the Susanna-Countess-Cherubino scene, with its multiple layers of performance and its display of the power of singing to voice unnameable desires, is a microcosm of opera itself. (The Queen’s Throat, as well as multiple essays in Corinne E. Blackmer’s and Patricia Juliana Smith’s En Travesti, all draw tongue-in-cheek comparisons between being gay and being an opera fan: both suspect, marginal identities.) Le Nozze dangles something ineffable in front of me, always just out of reach. But it’s not that I think that gay desire is abject and unsatisfiable, which is an idea that The Queen’s Throat uneasily circles around. I try to experience the opera’s sly, winking ambiguity as open-endedness: no matter how apparently mutually contradictory or inexpressible or impossible, we can want everything we want.
I read and enjoyed Wagnerism: Art and Politics In the Shadow of Music, Alex Ross's stupendous survey of Richard Wagner's cultural influence in non-musical domains. Then I read and enjoyed Alison Kinney's review of the book, published last year, in which she's open about her own status as a both passionate and conflicted Wagnerian.
I had no beach reading this summer, because I did not go on a fucking beach vacation. Instead, I lay in my bathtub taking notes on Wagnerism, playing “Tristan” on Spotify, and hooting immoderately at all the subjugation jokes and fin-de-siècle Wagnerian esoterica. (Ross points to a bathtub sold by Moosdorf & Hochhäusler that allowed bathers to rock back and forth while singing ‘Wagalaweia!’” Believe you me, once I’m finished with this review and don’t need to worry about splashing my laptop, the Rhinetub and I are going places.) In fact, reading Wagnerism in the tub was all I did this summer, because I’m a slow reader, and this book is 664 pages long before the notes start. Truly true Wagnerians will enjoy the impressive bibliography, which cites some even more compendious tomes, Timothée Picard’s 2,496-page Dictionnaire encyclopédique Wagner (2010) among them. But Ross’s prose was good company: chatty and occasionally rollicking, but more often thoughtful, tender, and ethically urgent. By turns, the chapters felt like a syllabus-writing teacher filling in the gaps in my cultural knowledge and experience; a slightly breathless raconteur spouting gossip; at the very end, a delightfully self-deprecating personal essayist; and, often, a real geek, amassing the long, minutely detailed lists of arcane facts that nobody, except other opera fans, will appreciate. (These are the kinds of people I hung out with on beaches, back when we had beaches.)
I've started going to concerts again! More on that next time.