Opera In The Flesh by Sam Abel

Author:Sam Abel [Abel, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000308150
Google: TU2fDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26T03:48:08+00:00

Endless Desire

After the adulterers, the next most prominent group of sexual perverts in opera are the nymphomaniacs, the characters driven entirely by their insatiable desire for sex. There are fewer nymphomaniacs than there are adulterers in opera, though most nymphomaniacs wind up as adulterers as well. But what they lack in numbers they make up in fascination; the nymphomaniacs draw attention to themselves because of their excessive and flamboyant personalities. They are few, but they are the stars of opera: Don Giovanni, Carmen, the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto, Lulu, perhaps a few others (maybe Baron Scarpia, though he has only one object of desire, Tosca; Mozart’s Cherubino might qualify, but I assume that he will get over his randiness by the time he grows up). But these few figures have attracted so much attention that they virtually represent opera for their respective periods, especially the iconic and eponymous Carmen and Giovanni.

Unlike adulterers, nymphomaniacs are identifiable perverts, in the model of nineteenth-century medicine that Foucault outlines in The History of Sexuality.9 The nymphomaniac has specific symptoms that the audience can readily recognize: the perpetual fascination with sex; the twisting of all activities to secure more sex; the range and variety of sexual partners; and the compulsion to list and keep track of those partners. I know a nymphomaniac when I see one in opera. But when I look at these perverts more closely, I am left with a puzzling paradox: Nymphomaniacs never get much sex during the opera’s narrative. In fact, most often they do not get any sex during the opera at all, and they certainly never have more than two partners, hardly within the medical definition of nymphomania. Don Giovanni tries to seduce three women but fails with all of them. Cherubino also makes passes at three women without success. Carmen has two lovers but has little chance to sleep with either of them.10 The Duke of Mantua shows interest in three women but only gets physical with Gilda. And even Lulu, the nymphomaniac’s nymphomaniac, who has everyone in the opera falling over her, generally keeps to one lover at a time and marries the most prominent ones; she only has multiple partners at the end, when reduced by impoverishment to working as a prostitute.

What, then, makes me believe that Carmen, Giovanni, and their like have an insatiable sexual desire? Mostly because they tell me so. In each case, the librettist makes sure that someone, either the nymphomaniac or a close associate, presents the identifying symptoms in the earliest scenes of the opera. Giovanni’s servant Leporello has the list aria, in order to document the Don’s endless desires. Cherubino sings breathlessly in Act I that he falls in love with every woman he sees. Carmen sings her “Habanera,” de-claring her own sexual dangers and her resolute conviction to stay with no one man. The Duke of Mantua opens Rigoletto with “Questa o quella” so that I know he does not care with whom he sleeps, as long as he sleeps with some woman.

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