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Mozart, Botany and the Nature of Woman
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Tia DeNora |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
That something "ain't over till the fat lady sings" is a comic comment on opera which has passed into common parlance. But just how opera depicts women is a topic of more serious import. Flowers are a particularly common motif used when referring to women in opera. Tia DeNora, a sociologist at the University of Exeter, England, identifies several strands of such imagery parallelling female identity in the works of Mozart and others. |
You are the flowers of life ... You civilize the human race ... You are the Queens of our beliefs and of our moral order. (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, from the 1806 preface to Paul et Virginie) |
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| "What kind of flower is a woman?" Flower imagery is prevalent in many operas. | |
 he association between women and flowers was hardly new to the late eighteenth century; indeed, its origins were pre-Linnaean. New, however, was the overtly sexualized character of flowers. Given the social salience of botany in the 1780s, it seems reasonable to suggest that aristocratic and upper-middle-class audiences would have been at least vaguely aware of this new, anthropomorphic and overtly sexualized addition to flower imagery. If so, they would no doubt have appreciated its uses in opera. |
The woman-flower comparison is frequently employed by Mozart and Da Ponte. For example, in Act I of Le nozze di Figaro, a chorus of flower-bearing country people describes how the Count's magnanimity in rescinding the droit de Seigneur has preserved for them "the divine innocence of an even lovelier flower." As Wye J. Allanbrook has observed, the most musically "florid" part of the text they sing begins with the word fiore (W. J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, Chicago, 1983, p. 92). Later, a chorus of peasant girls presents flowers to the Countess--it is perhaps no accident that Beaumarchais named her Rosina; nor perhaps that nearly half the female characters in Mozart's buffa works have flower names. In the Beaumarchais version, Figaro's famous monologue was a diatribe about politics. In the Da Ponte version political satire is removed. Instead, in Act IV, Figaro turns his attention to women ("Aprite un po' quegl'occhi, uomini incauti e sciocchi"--"Open your eyes a little, you incautious, silly men"). Angered and exasperated, Figaro compares women to a range of natural and supernatural entities: witches, sirens, owls, comets, vixens, she-bears, and malign doves. He also compares them to "thorned roses." |
Flowers and gender
What kind of flower, then, was woman? And how was she to be classified? Women, as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre put it in the 1806 preface to Paul et Virginie, may be the "flowers of life," but like all natural objects, they are subject to laws that lie outside human convention. On the one hand woman/nature could bestow grace upon men, and shelter them from the exigencies of mundane life. We see this point clearly illustrated in the finale of Le nozze di Figaro. When all the confusion is sorted out, properly individuated love is protected by the efforts of women and is secured within the "lawful" institution of bourgeois companionate marriage. On the other hand, love (and woman) are morally vulnerable and both can be "led astray" by an excess of desire. |
Woman was paradoxically configured as moral guarantor on the one hand and temptress on the other. Within this paradox, nature and culture (social convention) could come into conflict when woman's sensual vulnerability led to the transgression of convention and the traduction of men (as Figaro observes in the conclusion of his Act IV monologue). Woman therefore required study--she could be controlled through understanding of the laws governing her behavior. "What kind of animal," asks Don Alfonso in Act I of Così fan tutte, "are these beauties of yours?" ("Che razza d'animali son queste vostre belle?"). As we have seen, this concern with taxonomy was characteristic of eighteenth-century thought; it should therefore not seem surprising that buffa plots abound with interrogations of woman's nature, and, within this enquiry, convey an almost obsessive interest in woman's sexual weakness. |
Working in nature's laboratory
One of these interrogative modes was the seduction plot, a creature of the late eighteenth century (e.g. Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1781). It consisted of a contrived or man-made environment in which the controlled or quasi-experimental procedure of testing women could be carried out in clinical detail. The proving ground for man's observation of woman was, perhaps not surprisingly, often the garden--nature's laboratory. Mozart's and Da Ponte's Così fan tutte is a prime example of a seduction plot. Here, two gardens ("a garden by the seashore"/"a pretty little garden") provide the backdrop for women's temptation, resistance and eventual seduction. Dorabella and Fiordiligi ("lily-flower"--Da Ponte doled out flower symbolism with a heavy hand [lily = purity] for this more resistant sister) are described by Despina as "poor fools ... wandering in the garden" ("Le povere buffone / stanno nel giardinetto" [1.12]). |
In Act II, scene 3, Don Alfonso calls the sisters to come at once to the garden where, in scene 4, Ferrando and Guglielmo arrive by boat, distributing garlands of flowers. Their servants distribute further flowers. The disguised lovers and the sisters then pair off and stroll in the garden. Later, when the men reconvene to discuss the sisters' behavior (Dorabella has succumbed to Guglielmo's advances), Ferrando, who has remained unsuccessful in his attempts to seduce Fiordiligi, tells his friend that she is "chaste as a lily" ("pura como columba" [literally, any plant from the arum family, such as jack-in-the-pulpit or calla lily]). When Fiordiligi objects to Dorabella that she doesn't understand how the heart can change in only one day, her sister replies, "Now you're being ridiculous! We're women!" ("Che domanda ridicola! Siam donne!"). Later still, after Fiordiligi has finally responded to Ferrando's wooing, Guglielmo refers to her as "flower of the devil" ("fior di diavolo"). |
This investigative attitude toward women (and the trial of women in gardens) is by no means unique to Mozart's operas. It is also featured in Da Ponte's and Martín y Soler's reworking of the plot of L'arbore di Diana (first produced in 1787; it was the work Da Ponte himself considered to be his best). As Mary Hunter has observed, the text was reworked from a 1721 festa teatrale by Metastasio (Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 3, 1991, pp. 101-5). A magic tree in Diana's garden lights up and plays music when pure nymphs walk beneath it, but its fruit blacken and pelt impure nymphs who pass under it. After Cupid's three youthful helpers have seduced all of Diana's nymphs, and eventually even the Goddess of Chastity herself, the garden is transformed into a palace of love. In Da Ponte's reworking of the story, the obstacle to the union of Diana and Endimione is no longer his inexperience, but Diana's commitment to virginity which, of course, is then duly tried and eventually vanquished in the course of the opera, underscoring once again the emerging modern notion of woman's paradoxical character as both virtuous and vulnerable to temptation. |
Strong and weak women
Of course, not all women are so weak. In the Da Ponte-Martín y Soler Una cosa rara (performed first in the autumn of 1786), a beautiful "girl of the mountains" loves a mountaineer but is pursued by an infatuated Infante of Spain. She resists the Infante's advances (both before and after her marriage) and for this (apparently astonishing) "virtuous" female conduct, she is awarded the appellation "cosa rara" or "rare thing," following, as Da Ponte tells it, the famous line of the satirist, "Rara est concordia formae atque pudicitiae"--"rare is it that beauty and virtue go together." She could perhaps just as easily have been referred to as a "flower of grace and virtue" ("Fior di grazie, e di virtu")--Rusticone's words in the 1789 Da Ponte-Salieri work, La cifra (J. Platoff, Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990), pp. 99-120). |
To what extent are the "biology lessons" of opera buffa conveyed, not only through plot and librettos, but also through musical characterization? In recent years this important question has been addressed by several pioneering scholars. Of these, Gretchen Wheelock's analysis of the gendered distribution of musical material in Mozart's operas is highly compelling. Wheelock has described how the social force of Mozart's female characters is musically undermined by the use of the so-called weak and unstable realm of the minor mode--a predominantly feminine musical medium. Wheelock's work speaks clearly to sociologists and others who are interested in the non-cognitive means through which social classifications are achieved and reinforced (see Wheelock in Ruth A. Solie (ed.), Musicology and Difference, Berkeley and London, 1993, pp. 201-21). |
Charles Ford has suggested that musical femininity in Mozart is achieved through fluid, aperiodic and functionless musical material which demarcates the feminine as a "sub-style," removed from the more musically purposive "public discourse" of diatonic musical masculinity. According to Ford, the chromatic color and nuance characteristic of Mozart's female vocal lines inscribes the feminine as, musically, a private world of feeling and sensibility; this is, of course, as Ford points out, a male representation of feminine sensibility (C. Ford, Così?, Manchester, 1991, p. 138). The musical unpredictability of so much of Mozart's feminine musical material, particularly when women are undergoing seduction, Ford suggests, renders woman as "an empty but plenitudinous space," one in which the Enlightenment, in the form of its many projects and spokesmen, can project its classifications and "scientific" claims. |
These specifically musicological explorations, which attempt to document musical constructions of gender differences, illuminate music as a crucial medium in the articulation of modern gender imagery. It should therefore come as no surprise that the biology lessons of the Enlightenment era were echoed and given further substance through the text and tones of opera buffa. |
The historical concept
Woman as natural, as unstable, as in need of surveillance, as belonging in the realm of the private sphere--woman in this set of representations was deprived of participation in the then emerging realm of public life. At the same time the household or "private sphere" was being transformed. Not only a locus of reproduction and physical maintenance, it increasingly came to be viewed as a feminine haven of feeling, warmth, and individuated love. Thus, the eighteenth-century obsession with woman, worked out in a range of media, provided a means for articulating and publicizing the bourgeois notion of marriage and its various antagonisms. To be sure, these views did not pass uncontested. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is perhaps the best-known work today to object to the gender bias of Enlightenment thought--its implicit pairing of woman with the private, and man with the public, sphere. |
During the 1780s, dicta concerning the nature of woman and the social shape of love were being reinforced in a variety of cultural media. Opera buffa provided yet another "workspace" for the imaginative elaboration of gender difference as it was initially articulated in its modern, bourgeois form. Of course, opera is impoverished if it is reduced to a mere venue for the rehearsal and mobilization of social imagery and sexual politics. But restoring opera's links to the social, scientific, and cultural contexts in which it was produced and consumed can also empower opera studies. Opera buffa gave dramatic, scenic, and musical flesh to the peculiarly Enlightened obsession with woman and her nature. Conversely, when nature and social convention are depicted as poised in harmony (through the medium of woman's constancy), as at the end of Le nozze di Figaro, opera buffa served as a crucial medium for the celebration (and modern articulation) of the fragile but glorious joys of love. |
This is an extract from pages 158-164 of "The biology lessons of opera buffa," by Tia DeNora, in
Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna, edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster, published by Cambridge University Press. © Cambridge University Press, 1997. |
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