Handel's Bestiary by Donna Leon & Michael Sowa & Alan Curtis

Author:Donna Leon & Michael Sowa & Alan Curtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Literature is filled with tigers. There is William Blake’s “Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night,” a troubling reminder that the same hand that created good also created evil, and then there is A. A. Milne’s Tigger, beastliness replaced by whimsical charm. Bestiaries, too, are filled with tigers, strange beasts who sometimes wear their stripes but most often forget to do so. The artists who painted or drew tigers show little evidence of actually having seen one. The idea had certainly been disseminated that they were variegated in coloring, for many of them are speckled or dappled to a certain degree. But they tend to have spots, rather than stripes, and they are thin, with the body structure of hunting dogs.

The tiger bounds into the Western accounts in the first century, described by both Lucan and Pliny, and reported by Pomponius Mela as coming from Hyrcania, in Persia. Pliny first describes the theft of the cubs: mounted on a swift horse, a hunter will steal the cubs and begin his escape. As the pursuing mother grows dangerously near, the hunter lets fall one of the cubs, thus distracting the mother, who stops to save it. When the enraged mother again draws close to the hunter, he drops another cub, again to have her stop to rescue it. And in this way the hunter safely arrives at his ship with one cub still in his arms.

A thousand years later, the tiger remained, as did the hunter in search of her cubs. But the dropped cub had been replaced, over the centuries, by a glass ball which the hunter threw down in front of the mother when she drew dangerously close. Distracted by the motion, the tiger would pause to examine the ball and, seeing in it the image of a tiger, would assume it to be her cub and would pause to suckle it. Upon discovering the deception, the mother renewed her pursuit of the hunter, who would drop another ball. In this way, once again she was deprived of her cub, as the hunter, horse, and cub made it safely to a waiting ship.

The Medieval mind spent a great deal of time in search of Higher Meanings, usually religious and moral truths disguised by a layer of symbolism. The tiger, thus, can be seen as a symbol of maternal love, but she can just as easily be used as an example of human vanity, for what other motive could cause her to abandon her chase at the sight of herself in the mirror? Thus moralists could, and did, argue that she was waylaid by vanity and pride: it was always the female tiger who was deflected from her need to save her cubs by the sight of her own reflected image in the glass ball. What more shocking example of the dangers of female vanity?

The tiger, however, is also an image of courage and fidelity, and it is this tradition which imbues Ruggiero’s final stand-and-deliver aria from the opera Alcina, “Sta nell’Ircana.

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