Free Spirits & Material Girls
The Downfall of the Hero and the Manichean Foundations of Tragedy
version I, 20th July 2001
1: Blood Phlegm & Gall5: Caulking the Weaker Vessels
8: Weaving a Protective Garment
Abbot Odo of Cluny summarized the beauty of women as skin-deep:
". . . all this feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humours, gall . . . how then can we ever want to embrace what is merely a sack of rottenness?"
Similarly the Middle English treatise Holy Maidenhead tells of the horrible changes of pregnancy, how the painful and swollen uterus becomes a water-bag, while the breasts trickle with milk. This emphasis on the materiality of women's bodies, sees them as objects and pointedly leaves out of account the fact that men are made of nearly the same unsavoury ingredients. It was assumed, however, that men were not beautiful or liable to deceive the senses in the same way as women. Yet Maters and Matter are cognate, they make more material in the fallen world and represent the tying of the spirit to the earth, represented by the binding or swaddling of the newborn child. Blood in the body is safe but blood on a bandage is filth. The man's gaze is a spiritual one which can ascend to the spiritual sphere or become fascinated and fixed in the world of generation, taking the downward path to physical love and reproduction.
This dangerous carnality of women was what the Platonic concept of Love sought to escape, sometimes fixing its gaze on the beauty of men or boys and, whether the object of love is male or female, encouraging the ascent of the spiritual fluid to the head rather than down to the loins. It is a concept closely related to the sexual Tantric yoga of the East and the sexual Cabbala, as understood by Swedenborg. These spiritual exercises appear to have been an exclusively male practice, a form of prolonged solitary ecstasy.
At the psychological level the projection of Evil onto women makes them receptacles or containers for all negative feelings about sexuality. The modus operandi of a Jack the Ripper owes some of its mythic resonance to the notion of rupturing the sacks which are perceived to carry this effluent. In a warped religious obsession, the murderous male sees himself as a spiritual avenger, the hand of a God raised against creation, effectively separating spirit from matter. By laying out the intestines of a woman across the room, the Ripper was creating a literal artistic rendering of Abbot Odo's text, making a squalid East End hovel an apocalyptic revelation of a supposed religious truth. If ripping is the male murder fantasy, the equivalent female fantasy is beheading a male, as if to release the body from a parasitic mental growth. The Biblical figures of Salome and Judith represent this primal urge and we often need to read the label in the gallery to distinguish them. A date with Madame Guillotine would cause many people of both sexes to lose their heads but the story endures of those females in her shadow who were knitting away, as if replenishing the material world.
The soft culpability of female flesh by which they replicate matter, multiplying and embodying error has its corresponding denial in the armour-plated monumental maidens who embody the virtues. Such famous symbols as Britannia, Justice, the Statue of Liberty and the Amazonian Britomart of Spenser engender virtues. Their shields, weapons and armour deny the softness of the skin but these hardened, external shells also emphasize the materiality of the female form. As soon as Salome, Wilde's phallic woman, has shed her skins or veils, she is crushed beneath the shields of the soldiers. Her naked satiation disgusts and she has to be covered and crushed.
The notion of a woman's body as a vessel could be mitigated only by being sealed, otherwise the flawed female was seen as a sieve, forever leaking. The Roman Vestal Tuccia prayed to the Goddess for proof that she was still a virgin and was miraculously granted the ability to carry water in a sieve. Christ's parable of the Wise and Foolish virgins used the image of full and empty lamps to point the moral of female continence.
The epitome of the Wise and Foolish virgins came to be the shadowy figure of Mary of Magdala who follows Christ. The prosperous town of Magdala had a Hebrew name meaning tower. She may have preferred it to the Greek name which meant fish-sauce. Her appearance at intervals with costly ointments suggests she was a monied courtesan or a very worldly woman seeking spiritual renewal. It would be a harsh judge who would suggest that the spiritual was the last thrill left untasted by a jaded sybarite. The Church took her seriously and she became the type of Penitence, her attribute an elaborate pyx or ointment box in the form of a tower; she is also represented as weeping, as if to remind us of the more general leaky state of Woman. In stained glass, the vessel is often depicted as a vase and the Guild of Water-carriers contributed her likeness as a window in Chartres Cathedral. Continence stands for an unimpaired body without puncture or crack. We might also be reminded that Pandora's opening of her box is blamed for unleashing the evils of the world.
According to one medieval legend, Mary Magdalene leaves Palestine in a rudderless and unseaworthy boat with Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome - effectively they go to sea in a sieve. Angels guide them across the Mediterranean and they land in the South of France, where they retire to the grotto of Sainte-Baume or Holy Balm, now called Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue. Here, through penitence, Mary Magdalene regains her sinlessness, miraculously reacquiring her virginity to prove it. Her votive scroll reads "Ne desperetis vos, qui peccare solestis: exemploque meo vos reparate Deo", Do not despair, you who are accustomed to sin: following my example, ready yourselves again for God.
In another legend, which has had more than its fair share of exposure in recent years, the Magdalene escaped Palestine with Joseph of Arimathea and the body of Christ. When reading some of the modern fantasies spun from this tale we may recall how thought itself is often conceptualized as a container, and how an argument can be full of holes, ring hollow or turn out to be empty.
Getting down to basics, the number One can be taken to mean the phallus, the male principle or the Spirit. The number Two encloses or encircles, embodies it and represents the Female principle or Matter. The horizontal passive female and the perpendicular active male constitute between them the most basic building block of human life on earth. The cross represents coitus, as does the circled cross or the crown of thorns. Cross is a term used of breeding and the crossing of fibres is the principle of weaving the material world. The diversity of the fallen world could not be redeemed by the mystic path but contemplation of the energies as a pattern could lead the mind upwards and out of the contradictions of the flesh and towards Union with a higher sphere. So the fabric of the universe became a pattern of energies for contemplation.
Projected onto the human body, the pattern of the Chakras informs Eastern medicine and the mind of the yogi concentrates on the refinement of the spirits through these spirals to a third eye in the middle of the forehead. In this central single point, all contradictions are resolved and the mind withdraws from the fallen world to attain a state of Oneness and closure. In the Cabbala, a diagrammatic form of mystical contemplation, the opposing spines of the contrary states were to be imagined in a mystic and ecstatic conjugation. At a slightly less abstract level, in the laboratory of the alchemist, an elaborate sexual vocabulary described the prolonged processes of distillation and purification of a matter perceived in it original fallen state as excremental. In the matrix or womb of the flask, a hermaphrodite could arise triumphant out of the slaughtered and dismembered body of a King.
We do not have to look far to find denials that women had spirits. The patriarchal system insisted on seeing them as baited honey-traps for men's spirits. They would bring men low by guile who could not be defeated by force. Sexual rôles were perceived in terms of the hunt and penetration, especially the initial penetration of woman, drawing blood, was an aggressive act. This kind of coupling would seem to mark the highest division of the sexes, the male driving from himself the abhorred softness of the female. The female drawing onto herself the piercing hardness of the male. A woman could protect her man against the might of other warriors but not against attack from the rear by a crafty enemy. It is the thin-blooded equivocal Hagen who strikes down Siegfried, though this display of his manhood seems to call it further into question.
Women's spells could protect the flesh of the warrior but there was a flaw always, some part of the skin uncovered, such as the heel or the back. The duplicity of woman was clear. The tale of the death of Robin Hood, in some versions, has his bandages repeatedly undone by an evil Abbess, his Aunt, and he is bled to death in the name of tender ministrations. The vital fluids are tapped and sapped by such female vampires. This is the price of immersion in the world of the flesh. Any trial of strength is a moral combat, a reflection of heavenly powers so defeat cannot come from weapons except by treachery. All the greatest heroes have to be brought low by deceit.
So the defeat of a hero turns out to be a failure of a woman properly to protect him. We weave a web of deceit or double-cross still, as figures of speech; in a more extreme case, we could trap a hero in a net. Siegfried, like Achilles, cannot be fairly defeated and his back is vulnerable. As he will not turn his back on an enemy, it has not been protected. And a failure to cover fully is a feature of the net, hence Achilles heel. The material of life is penetrable and perishable, while the spirit endures. Agamemnon is offered the purple carpet on his homecoming, which he sees as more fitting to a God and an invitation to hubris. In the house he is embroiled in a net, like a gladiator and brought to earth like a stricken animal in the bath. It is emphasized that Clytemnestra's new consort is the effeminate Aegisthus.
Here is Agamemnon, in Aeschylus, hesitating to step on the purple carpet which welcomes him home:
". . . abstain
From delicate tendance that would turn my manhood
To a woman's temper . . . not with purple,
Breeder of envy, spread my path"
He is persuaded by Clytemnestra's arguments however and treads the luxurious carpet barefoot to enter the house, like a temple, which is to be his slaughterhouse. The Tyrian purple of the carpet was a most expensive dye, extracted from shellfish, as Clytemnestra is not slow to point out, making the triumphant entry of the hero, compared to a tree, seem a very explicit symbol of fatal conjugation with the watery world of the female. As he yields and enters the house, it is left to Cassandra to howl out her prophecies on the threshold, like a hound scenting blood.
"Tis a nest of Hades spread -
Tis a snare to snare her Lord
The fond sharer of her bed. . . .She hath wrapped him round with slaughter;
She strikes! and in the water
Of the bath he falls. Mark well,
In the bath doth murder dwell."
Later, justifying the murder to the chorus and claiming the house of Atreus as his rightful property, Aegysthus underlines the material thread of imagery in the play:
" . . .for I, Thyestes' thirteenth son,
While yet a swaddled babe, was driven away
To houseless exile with my hapless sire.
But me avenging Justice nursed, and taught me,
Safer by distance, with invisible hand
To reach this man, and weave the brooded plot,
That worked his sure destruction."
The chorus will not accept this claim, insisting that the invisible, read female, hands which performed the deed make his title doubtful. The bloodshed will not be done until the the last play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, when the youthful figure of Athena, representing the Justice of the city-state, banishes the frightening hag-like spectres of personal vengeance, the Furies, back into the womb of the Earth. It is a political victory which involves the appeasement of the Furies with carefully chosen words and they are led with a great display of ceremonial honours to their subterranean halls. It is a magnificent finale in which the rule of Law is initiated with the feeling of a great social experiment; the unstated subtext is that the Furies have agreed to leave the city while Justice reigns. They are escorted into the bowels of the earth by torchlight, suggesting that the armour of young Justice is a thin crust, beneath which ancient volcanic forces endure and may erupt.
The swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus represent the spiritual hero of heroes becoming wrapped in the fallen world where he will be betrayed by a friend. It was Blake who warned that physical friends were spiritual enemies, for tying us to the earth in bonds of affection. The kiss of betrayal makes Judas an honorary feminine figure, while the clothes that were put on will be reabsorbed into the material world as the soldiers cast lots for Christ's garments. They do this in order that the garment may not be rent, the fate which shortly will afflict the veil of the Temple. The resurrection has the grave clothes left behind in the tomb. The ceremony of circumcision involves the shedding of a material covering, bringing the fallen body one initial tiny step towards the world of pure spirit. According to the Arabic Gospel of the Nativity, this shred of flesh is preserved in a jar of ointment and the same jar used to anoint Christ on the eve of his Passion, as if to mark the final excision of the flesh from the spirit. In another apocryphal book, the Protevangelion, Mary is a virgin of the Temple and given in marriage to the much older Joseph, who is described as a builder of houses. His craft involves long absences from home and it is on return from such a trip that he finds Mary pregnant. It is Joseph who is put to the trial of drinking a poison, swearing he is not responsible for her being with child. In this text, which sets great store by the virginity of Mary, she is selected as the purest of the pure to be responsible for weaving the purple thread in the veil of the Temple, establishing quite explicitly the symbolism of this cloth.
Othello's skin has been the subject of much speculation and debate for at least a generation . How far does he need to be a black man, an outsider? Is he in fact a very dark man or a North African Muslim? To what extent does he need to be a Moor at all? The Elizabethan attitude to such outsiders was not our own. Othello does not perturb us quite in the way that Shylock does; modern critics have however felt uncomfortable at the black-face make-up of Olivier and others in the rôle. We feel the injustice and inhumanity of past centuries will somehow be mitigated if the rôle of Othello is reserved for a genuine black actor. The play does not present him as a demonic or subhuman figure, rather as one goaded beyond endurance. If Iago's game is a kind of bear-baiting, we may feel it could be done with any colour man as victim.
Othello, as Moor, does appear to have been regarded as having highly developed characteristics of warlike bravery, anger, sexual potency and jealousy. There are all vestiges of the beast in the man, whatever his courtly manners. Whether these are real or perceived by those around him, there is for Othello a sense that he is always potentially the outsider and the victim, that his bravery can be bought and rewarded, even to the extent of marriage. Yet this sufferance could be abruptly terminated. More than other men, he is forever put to the proof. He can be nearly an ordinary and accepted member of this society but will be viewed as an exceptional member of his own race and it is upon this tension that Iago will play till the string breaks. If Achilles heel was vulnerable and Siegfried's back, then Othello's whole person can be broken down. Not with a spear but a hanky.
Othello's skin partly detaches him from the world he appears to inhabit and allies him to the serpent Iago. His very visible difference makes his immersion in the material world less complete, enabling him to throw off the toils of attachment. His trust in male friendship and loyalty serves to separate him from his wife; in a sense it would appear to be an excess of masculinity, if we recall the earlier meaning of effeminacy as defining "men who love women's joys" in Donne's phrase. His nocturnal Love Duet at the end of Act One, represents Otello's low water mark: the true union is by flashes of lightning as a God of some sort blesses his bond with Iago in the corresponding moments at the end of Act Two.
The first words we hear are "Una vela!" The chorus, excited yet anxious, spots a sail in the storm. This cloth is a key word - like the winged lion of the standard it takes flight, "vol", in the course of the opera, becoming the fatal handkerchief and ending as "un di quei veli" literally "one of those veils" Desdemona directs is to be used for her burial. Otello is one of the finest librettos ever written and the most untranslatable; it is a notable Italian poem in its own right, quite apart from Verdi's music. The veil suggest hidden meanings, but more important is the suggestion of layers of meanings - writing is itself done on sheets of paper if not of VELum and can be said both to reVEaL and conceal.
To Montano's recognition of the emblem, Cassio responds that it is now revealed by lightening ("Or la folgor lo sVELA") showing how close we are to revelation. Throughout the opera we are kept aware of this turbulent maritime climate and the changing moods of the sea. just as Verdi's score explodes like the Dies Irai of the Requiem, Boïto's libretto casts us into an apocalyptic storm, where God shakes grim Heaven "come un tetro vel", like a dismal veil, "Spasima l'universo", the Universe is shaken.
Each of the characters has an emblematic connection with Christian figures. If Iago is gleefully Satanic, Otello refers constantly to the cross. Desdemona, innocent if not strictly virginal, has her own sanctified space, like a Raphael Madonna among vipers.
At the very start, the mainsail is torn on the ship, like the veil of the temple, alerting us to the apocalyptic nature of the opera. The work of Iago, like that of Blake's Los will be to give a form to error so that the deceptive nature of the world can be cast off. Iago is quick to notice and he wishes the sea to be the tomb of the ship. But Otello steps ashore exultant to declare it is the pride of the Muslims that is "Sepolto e in mar". The English term shrouds for the sails seems to lurk behind this image of death at sea. "Nostra e del ciel è gloria" , "Ours and heaven's is the glory", note the order. Otello's pride is evident, and he means the order quite literally: first their weapons then the storm have sunk the enemy. It is notable that God's part in the victory is ignored by the chorus - the only religious hint in the chorus is the reference to a requiem for the Muslims, which seems deliberately thoughtless. Contrast the religious dimension they put on matters at the height of the storm.
Iago promises Roderigo, "If a woman's vow prove not too difficult a knot for my talent nor for Hell's, this lady shall be yours." This similarity rules out any accident I think. Both Otello and Iago are egotists and they run up their flags early on. Otello stands in the way of the sun, however, and acknowledges only fleetingly the source of his strength. Iago, on the other hand, in his Credo gives full expression to the shadows on which he has been nurtured.
He attributes his hatred to Otello's making Cassio Captain, "Tal fu il voler d'Otello", Such was Otello's will. As Iago takes control of Roderigo by playing on his weakness, he knows that Otello must be brought low by his pride and willfulness. At this point, the victory bonfire blazes up. It is a cheerful pagan blaze to the Cypriots who dance around it but now we know the frame of reference, it is also a symbolic Hell or a refiner's fire.
There is a fractal relationship between the skin of Othello and the material of this woven cloth. The question arises of how far the concept of tragedy relates to the view of nature as irredeemably fallen. All the great tragic figures are ill-suited to the world which expels them. In a sense Othello most nearly resembles Macbeth, who is similarly goaded along the road out of the world, in the one case by ambition in the other by jealousy.
Shakespeare's Othello is a long, complex and ambiguous piece. Boito's libretto is so much more compact and controlled a performance that many have viewed it as superior. It may be that much that in Shakespeare was instinctive and poetic has come onto the surface and been developed in a more conscious way. Certainly the changes that Boito rings on the theme of una vela, a cloth , a sail, a handkerchief, a veil suggest a chain of very deliberate imagery.
Vello d'oro = Golden Fleece;
Velo = Veil or Gauze;
Velario = Curtain or Disguise;
Veleno = Poison or Venom;
Far velo = To blind;
Vela = Sail;
Vegliamento = watching or keeping watch;
Vegliardo = a very old man;
Vegliare = to watch;
veglione = masked ball in a theatre;
Vela = sail, canvas;
a gonfle vele = with full sails set, successfully;
spiegare le vele = to set sail;
Sotto il velame = under the veil of allegory;
Velare = to veil, cover, hide, conceal, disguise, glaze;
velario = curtain, awning, disguise;
velarsi = to veil oneself, put on a veil or to grow dim;
Gli occhi le si velarono di pianto = her eyes grew dim with tears;
velatamente = covertly;
velato = veiled, covered, clouded, dim hazy, muffled;
velenifero = poisonous, venomous;
veleno = poison, venom;
mandar veleno = to spit venom, to slander;
velenosamente = poisonously, venomously;
velenosita = venomousness, wickedness, malice;
veletta = a woman's veil or a ship's look-out;
velino = vellum;
velivolo = aeroplane, glider;
velleità = impulse, whim, inkling, notion, fancy;
vellicamneto = tickling or titillation;
vello d'oro = Golden Fleece;
vellosità = hairiness, shagginess;
velloso = shaggy, hairy, woolly,
vellutato = velvety, soft;
velo = veil, gauze, crape, film, cover, mist, fog;
tessuto di velo = to take the veil;
far velo a = to blind or obscure;
stendere un velo su = to draw a veil over;
cadere il velo dagli occhi = to be disillusioned;
veloce = quickly;
veltro = greyhound.
The Italian masculine noun "velo" is the equivalent of the English "veil" with related phrases such as "to take the veil" and "to draw a veil over" being exact equivalents. "To let the veil fall" is another phrase that is much the same in both languages, meaning disillusion as well as revelation in Italian. There is in Italian also a feminine noun "vela" meaning a sail or canvas with the verb "velare" meaning veiled, covered or hidden. The word is common in Italian opera libretti, especially associated with the moon, occluded by cloud in works such as Norma and notably Un Ballo in Maschera. The association of the veil with the night and the moon and female changeability is clear. The diaphanous veil seems to represent the moment at which the word becomes flesh, the fall into the world of matter begins with a mere film of egg and sperm.
In the liquid medium of Italian poetry, the masculine and feminine words flow into each other, the related male and female words "velo" and "vela" can both be shortened to the hermaphroditic "vel". Boïto as poet makes full use of the soft, labial sounds of these words with related roots and words with similar sound-patterns such as "veleno" meaning poison.
A rhapsody has come to mean a musical piece of free design; through confusion with the word rapt, it is sometimes used to imply a kind of ecstatic transport giving rise to a stream of consciousness but the original Greek term "rhapsode" meant simply a stitcher of songs. Our worst fears are nearly confirmed that a rhapsody is just a pot pourri, one thing after another but it is also a fabrication, an embroidery, the covering of a surface. The term suggests the poet is an assembler of skins into a garment, one who works from a kit of parts rather than one who generates material from his own insides. On the surface, it would seem a more limited and less holy rôle. Yet the writer's work of assembly or bringing together was the imposition of shape onto the imperfect chunks of raw material, a mending of the holes in the net.
Otello was achieved against the odds; it had been many years since Aïda and the composer looked to have retired. Premature publicity for any subject under consideration would lead the notoriously touchy composer to feel he was being bounced. He would resent that and withdraw. Once Otello was under way, it came to be known in code as "The Chocolate Project".
Iago has full self-knowledge, Otello has little; Iago takes the bonds of Society and twists them into a net for Otello and Desdemona. Having spun the thread, he weaves a Tissue of Lies. As a plot-device the handkerchief could be almost anything yet it holds the end of a Golden Thread. Its intricacy and highly intimate nature makes it something to protect from falling into hands of witches, like the personal fabric of nail-clippings or hair. Otello is not black in the Heart or the Soul but in the skin. His blackness is the visible sign that Otello, if not Othello is a Bible of Hell and may be read more satisfactorily as white-on-black.
The liquid word "vela" is kept on the boil throughout the opera. The fabric images come thick and fast: Iago promises Roderigo he will undo the weak knot of Desdemona's vow. The stormy and apocalyptic opening suggests a rending of the fabric, like the veil of the Temple being rent, the laying aside of the swaddling clothes, the blind folds of mockery. A mainsail is rent at opening of the opera. The value of a work of art does not lie in secrets but these meanings appear to arise from a deep level in the artist and sink to a deep level in the audience. How conscious they are to either is questionable. We recognize an apocalypse by instinct and Verdi, by instinct, knew when to draw on his apocalyptic vein. We will not find much discussion of these deep levels in the correspondence of Verdi and Boïto: such matters were tacit and the composer and librettist preferred to think in terms of their craft, of stitching a piece together.
The word Gnostic has been overused in recent years and some scholars would insist that it should be reserved for writings which describe a full-blown mythos of lost sparks of sacred light hidden in the dark matter of creation. By selective reading, almost any text can be made to render up a few stray sparks of Gnostic lore. My own use, influenced no doubt by early exposure to Blake, is to use the term wherever the Creation and the Fall appear to be aspects of the same event: if the created universe is a tissue of lies, the tree of knowledge becomes a sacrament and the serpent a deliverer, as he is a caster off of skins. A diabolic reading of texts as Bibles of Hell, like examining the negatives, might help us to understand some features of works which otherwise remain extremely puzzling. The motiveless evil of Iago and the black skin of Otello would certainly have called on the dark side of the part-Polish composer of Mefistofole and Nerone.
Given this distinction between Flesh and Spirit, Gnostic cults can advocate either a path of ascetic withdrawal or sensual excess; because the flesh cannot be redeemed, it can be indulged or starved. Antinomian cults have arisen at intervals in which pseudo-prophets, feeling themselves to be spiritually free have allowed the flesh off the leash to mire itself with a clear conscience. The Greeks had the naked Diogenes to raise men's minds to Higher things - things in barrels often have. Desdemona, whose name seems to contain daemonic implications, has an apotheosis in which she is adorned with coral and pearls, the harvest of Earth's womb, she is seen as a bounteous Earth-Goddess. The Procession in her honour comes "As if to" a chaste altar, but in fact she is worshipped by generations, "Padri, bimbi, sposi". She is Love and also by implication Death. At the end she distributes coins, like a horn of plenty. The scene is essentially Pagan: she represents the Goddess of the many breasts. These are the more benign aspects of woman as vessel.
The apotheosis begins with a song about a song, one which drifts to Heaven to embellish the Virgin Mary's skirt and robe and her veil. Yet, even the Catholic Church has not tended to make a fetish of the Virgin Mary's garments in any tradition of which I am aware. This is really a veiled Goddess, residing in the harmony of the spheres, a celebration of the matter of the Universe which overcomes Otello. After her apotheosis, Desdemona "intercedes" for Cassio's pardon, just as the Virgin intercedes with her son. When Otello's brows ache, she attempts to bind it with a handkerchief. This maternal binding suggests that the ache is intrinsic to the earthly existence into which the Virgin bound her son. By assuming this rôle, there are hints that Desdemona is a veiled and equivocal Goddess.
"If I have sinned against you" Fanciulla. Incarnation is to be born into the world of meat and a pregnant woman is like the globe. The Biblical language of the supposed handmaiden contrasts nicely with Emilia, whose station really is that of a servant but she is not humble or obedient: In Iago's words, she is an "unfaithful slave." She is the only character who believes in a God outside herself, he is her security blanket, as she rocks back and forth in disbelief at the wickedness of the world. Otello is Bound to his cross, like the serpent. Like Urizen he wishes for a world without change, while Iago struggles, like Blake's Los, to give substance to error. He is the Spirit of Imagination at work in the fallen world of Matter. He paints the truest picture he can: of a man dreaming of possessing a dream, of a man awakening from that dream in anguish.
The two unite in their oath: this is their finest hour, Otello is animated by Iago's Imagination, he takes on the Divine spark of an avenging God and sees the vastness of the Heavens for the first time.
The two great apocalyptic operas of the nineteenth century are Wagner's Ring and Verdi's Otello. Both begin with more or less the same word with it watery implications. In Das Rhinegold, the Rhine-maidens sing as animated waves, undifferentiated matter: their song is an expression of their unity: weia, wala, etc. This is the infancy of the world, pure female materiality, before Alberich prompts them into division and consciousness. Amphibious Alberich, toadlike and cold-blooded, curses love and refuses to embrace the world of Generation. When he does reproduce, by fathering Hagen, it is in order to contaminate a more highly evolved race and bring it down. Similarly at the start of Otello, the hero is immersed in the material world. It is worth mentioning that the pattern of Otello's entrance is prefigured by that of Saint-Saëns' Samson.
The rolling motion of the waves meant that their name came to be applied to that denizen of the deep, the whale. In the dubious Etymology with which Melville prefaces Moby Dick, attributing it to a late consumptive usher, from Moby Dick relating Una vela to Whale. By extension, the waves came to stand for the creatures who were Whales. Deliverance from the belly of the Whale would mean release from the toils of the world.
Duplicity could entrap the hero - they could be resourceful but they were not thinkers. Bronze age warriors could be virile single-minded thrusting types without adverse comment but when Wagner makes Siegfried the same kind of hero, he is accused of intellectual dishonesty. It is a classic case, surely, of the bookworm lusting after the athlete. Siegfried, like most heroes is not allowed female nurture except in the parodic form of Mime's treacherous attentions. Even these must be found out. Homer's remoteness in date and his blindness seem to have exempted him from overmuch scrutiny of the sexually speculative kind.
Otello's near shipwreck at the start of the opera immediately calls to mind that of Agamemnon. It is not the battle which is dangerous so much as the homecoming. The purity of the heroic spirit does not permit the self-division of doubt or thought or questioning. Gigantic strength and courage or exceptional skill with a small weapon are the attributes of the true hero. Cunning peasants who achieve social advance by trickery belong to a later tradition and are a class rather than individuals. The career of a true hero can be halted when he is brought low by trickery and blinded, literally in the case of Samson and brought into the cycles of earthly life. Disobedience as Eve's gift, forked tongue of serpent a necessary division for growth. Fractal mental process by which the very fundamental questions of spirit and matter, good and evil, man and woman: the generation of large structures from the adventures of a simple piece of code. Mystical practices are concerned with the Great One, the undivided, the one hand clapping.
When we go hunting the Devil in music, his habitat seems more limited than we may expect. Beethoven lacks the Devilish side, because his self-belief and ego transcended good and evil. There is a direct apprehension of the Godlike in Man. Whatever his personal conflicts, he seems as an artist undivided in a world where energy was eternal delight. Brahms too lacks Devils, shrinking as he does from extremes. Debussy's predilection for mists clouds, waves and ambiguous states prevents the moral distinctions of hard edges, moral as well as physical. His fascination with Poe was with his hyperaesthesia, not his evil but the dissolving of the ordinary. Ravel preferred catastrophic collapse but his model was that of entropy or internal collapse, like systems and machines.
The association of music with the devil may be ancient but his finest hour appears to have been with the rise of the virtuoso from Tartini and Paganini onwards. The virtuoso soloist seems to represent the ego climbing out of the environment and experiencing the alienation and ennui of isolation. His energies are set against the background and he comes with a bag of tricks. The transcendental school of playing seeks not merely to surpass previous levels of difficulty but to unblock the obstacles in the player which would baulk at the new demands. Teachers such as Liszt did not concentrate on the mechanics of playing and did not aim to turn out playing machines; rather they addressed themselves to the development of the personality, to the building of confidence and to the raising of consciousness. It was a freeing of the paths of energy, the summoning of the inner daemons. The technical difficulty of the music was the discipline of the cabbala or the power of the barbaric names in conjuring: it served to change the landscape and to free the spirit from its world of routine. The rhapsody and the reminiscence were the remaking of the prima materia in the white hot crucible of the virtuoso, a title once applied to scientists. In the symphonic poem, Liszt would seek to embody the spirits of heroic and national figures, giants whose Protean shape-shifting set them at odds with any fixed reality.
Oscar could not resist a display of his ample cleavage by playing Salome.
It is the last thing Herod offers Wilde's Salome to distract her from the head of John the Baptist. After the peacocks, the emeralds, like Wotan paying for his palace with treasure not his own, Herod, almost choking on his own blasphemy, offers his stepdaughter the veil of the Temple in Jerusalem. What he thinks she will do with it is hard to imagine but it represented the despoliation of the Holy of Holies of the subject Jews. The superstitious Herod is awed by its symbolism so that he places it above earthly riches. However, Salome's sexual obsession is as unalloyed as the prophet's faith, at least it is in Wilde's 1893 play. In the Biblical account, Salome is a mere tool of her mother Herodias and the head of the Baptist is the price of insulting her, not the object of an adolescent fetish. The veil would survive to be despoiled by XXX in history or torn in an earthquake at the moment of Christ's death, according to the Gospels. Given the symbolic importance of this veil, we might need to remind ourselves of what exactly it meant to the Jews.
In Wilde's lurid little masterpiece, twisted sexuality becomes a way of undoing the fabric of a suffocating society. The only way out was by death and the new covenant of aestheticism was soon to have its own martyr in the author. Salome will be crushed beneath shields as if her post-coital softness has rendered her as repulsive as a slug. We might have expected her to be strangled by a veil, though the shield can be seen as a kind of male equivalent. Her death at arm's length seems to symbolize the reimposing of barriers that have been allowed to fall.
The adolescent princess monopolizes our gaze and it may seem as if her sexuality destroys her. Jokanaan is her first and only love and in the apocryphal Hollywood strap line, they were a couple who never should have met. Yet she is as much a victim of Herod's sexuality as her own and her casual death at his command represents the casting aside of a middle-aged man's plaything. She is to bought at great expense and abruptly dropped. But the dish she demands holds up to Herod a mirror of his own obsession and, in a very male sense of anticlimax, it is not the hardness of her will that disgusts him but the softness of her satiation. It is as if the Baptist's revulsion passes on to the Tetrarch in his detumescent state.
God's directions to Moses regarding how to build the tabernacle and altar are given in detail in the Book of Exodus. This is an organized and organizing God who supplies a shopping list of materials to be used and specifies how the wood is to be joined. These practical instructions include the institution of the veil:
"And you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twisted linen; in skilled work shall it be made, with cherubim;" Exodus 26:31
The ark of the testimony was to reside within this veil and another piece of fine fabric was to form a screen at the door of the tent. Though described as fine, these hangings appear to have been fairly substantial curtains or tapestries rather than diaphanous gauze. The court of the tabernacle was also to have hangings on all four sides, both sides of the gate and a screen on the gate itself. The Holy of Holies was therefore to be screened three times: by the hangings of the court, by the screen at the tent door and finally by the veil itself. This elaborately embroidered and precious stuff may remind us of the curiously-worked handkerchief of Othello.
The exact nature of the Holy of Holies has been the subject of much speculation and recent writers have developed theories that it was an extraterrestrial apparatus for the production of manna while others have suggested it was a form of radioactive power. This tells us how our own reverence and fear of Science can neatly be put in the place once reserved for God. The reverence in which the ark was held, protected by this veil from even the sight of the faithful makes its brutal desecration all the more offensive. Its symbolism is unmistakable: in the tearing of the veil of the Temple, we are contemplating the rape of a People.
For all its apocalyptic resonances, Otello is essentially a domestic tragedy. Otello may be a General but the fate of an empire does not hinge on his existence: he is useful but politically replaceable. It is this very schooling in realpolitik and replacability which Iago encourages him to apply to his marriage. Iago is usually called Machiavellian but the trap he sets would not catch a Prince, only a man with Otello's exposed selfhood, who does not command by Divine Right but by personal merit. His black skin suggests that he has risen by his exceptional gifts which have overridden all the societal pressures against him. He is thrown back on his own resources and Shakespeare is among the first to question Success with a capital S.
Otello is thrown back on his own ego and it is this frailty on which Iago plays. A King would have kept his consort for political reasons and taken his pleasures elsewhere, the infidelity of a queen might have been punished but certainly not with his own hands and for reasons of State, not personal jealousy; Otello has married for love and Desdemona's imagined infidelity poisons his ceremonial life. He goes to pieces and cannot maintain his face in the presence of important visitors; his domestic life spills into his public life and he sinks. The shipwreck at the start of the opera may stand as an emblem for the whole piece. This oneness, this integrity, this very lack of a compartmentalized life is what destroys Desdemona and Otello himself: he cannot simply lop off a diseased limb and grow another. Once he is holed beneath the waterline, his end is inevitable so we should think not of a slow-acting poison administered by degrees so much as an inexorable process in which demonstrations of Desdemona's guilt are sucked greedily into an unquenchable black hole.
It is this exposure of the ego, rather than any intentional blasphemy or vanity which is indicated in such phrases as "Ours and Heaven's is the Victory". Responsibility weighs heavily upon Otello: failure and success cannot be put down to the will of heaven. He is a very modern figure in that his position seems to depend on his last quarter's results. He is the toast of Cyprus for a season then his downfall will be good gossip for a while after. The irony of Otello as a tragedy is that the apocalyptic orchestration of the events is a function of the egos involved. Neither Iago nor Otello have grasped the true nature of the social machine they inhabit. The emotion which above all others will keep this machine turning is jealousy and ambition.
Iago's motivation is less obscure than is often imagined - it is his plotting which is weak. He cannot fail to ensnare himself. Yet what he wishes to see is his own tormented sense of inadequacy reflected on this alien face. Iago's sexuality has frequently been called into question, though we can only speculate or emphasize according to the performances we have seen. Isolated on the one hand by sexual jealousy and on the other by social envy, Otello and Iago yet seem tied together in a knot of emotions, contestants in a larger social competition which can digest both poisons and thrive. What terrifies them into apocalyptic mode is the brute fact that, when the bloody sawdust is swept away, the world will be back at work in the morning with new puppets.
Othello is a play about stress. The scene in which his domestic unhappiness spoils a ceremonial dinner looks forward to Ibsen and Pinter.
NB: Concept of Tragedy: needs refining here? Otello is basically being contrasted with the History Play type and the downfall of a King which may plunge a country into chaos. Other tragedies are also essentially domestic e.g. Romeo & Juliet, which is a case of adolescent love and bad timing. . . yes but the alliance of two houses depended on it?? or not? probably it causes more bloodshed.
The tragic hero e.g. Caesar, Richard II has a sense of his own mythic significance in a world which is otherwise populated by mere warring ambitions. To put on the crown was in some sense to take on this conflict between the weak self and the holy rôle. Such Divine Right figures call on and feel they have the right to call on powers above themselves which have ordained their position.???? All Kings are in a sense robber barrons or the sons of robber barrons, even if time has kicked over the traces. The difference for a man such as Othello is the time element is collapsed and there cannot be any elegant forgetting.
1: Nabucco
After the lost Rocester, the melodramatic Oberto and the comedy Un
giorno di regno, Nabucco was Verdi's first success, its popularity
indicated by the fact that its familiar name is half the length of
the real title "Nabucodonosor". Verdi was unusually forthcoming about
the circumstances which led to him setting this text. Verdi had lost
his first wife and the failure of Un giorno di regno left him in a
deep depression. So much so that he resolved to give up
composition.
Even so, he was contracted to supply an opera for La Scala and Merelli, the intendant declared his faith in the composer. Nabucco had been intended for Otto Nicolai and Merelli just happened to have this high quality product on his hands now Nicolai had declined to set it. Verdi was negative: if Nicolai wanted a different subject he was welcome to have Il Proscritto, the subject that had failed to enthuse him. Merelli pretended to find this an excellent suggestion and insisted that Verdi at least should read the Solera Nabucco libretto. Verdi makes the point that the libretto was written on large manuscript paper and had to to be rolled up like a scroll to take home. Throwing it on the table with a heavy heart, the script miraculously opens on the page with the lines "Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate" and the composer is enthralled.
In this account, which the writer Arthur Pougin extracted from Verdi around the year 1879, much play is then made of lockings out and lockings in. Merelli will not take back the libretto, perceiving Verdi's interest and locks the door in his face when he tries to leave the scroll behind. Later, when the reluctant librettist is required to make some modifications for the composer, Verdi has to lock him in a room to do it, with the words "You're not leaving here until you have written the prophecy.
Arthur Pougin's Giuseppe Verdi: Histoire Anecdotique of 1879 is probably more anecdotal than historical and the French Histoire means story anyway. I think we can assume the tale of the birth of Nabucco conceals more than it reveals. The idea of a Nabucco by Nicolai seems unlikely but it would appear he did reject the subject. He reflected ruefully on the fact that Verdi had made his fortune with this "dreadful and degrading" music. He did write Il Proscritto for La Scala and it failed.
Solera took the story of Nabucco from the Bible but his more immediate and unacknowledged source was a 1836 French play by Anicet-Bourgeois and Cornu. When the opera proved highly successful, this came to light, the librettist was required to pay a royalty to the original authors.
The story is romantic melodrama set against the struggle between Babylonians and Hebrews for the Temple of Jerusalem. Romance blossoms across the divide and, as usual in such situations, there are two women fighting over a man. In this case the young Hebrew soldier Ismaele woos Fenena, the feminine daughter of Nabucco. To prevent matters running too smoothly, there is another daughter Abigaille, whose self-conscious wickedness makes her one of the most delightful Amazonian figures in music. Spurned by Ismaele, this unnatural woman's frustration has apocalyptic consequences.
The melodrama of Nabucco is at high pressure throughout, rather drowning out in performance the mythic elements which are easy to see on the page. The very physical impact intended when Nabucco enters the Temple on horseback is surely dissipated unless the staging clearly represents both a Temple and a horse. It is meant to be one of those moments when prophecy becomes flesh and an abomination materializes but opera as a medium trades in such materials full-time. The irony is that to regain spiritual intensity, romantic opera had to slow down to the sclerotic pace of Parsifal. The mad succession of extreme situations in Nabucco seems to arise from the political ferment of Italy and it is unsurprising that "Va, pensiero" was a spark which flew from the stage into the streets, becoming effectively the spiritual of the risorggimento.
If Nabucco was found on a scroll in a Temple of sorts - La Scala, whose name means a ladder - and adopted by Verdi, then Abigaille discovers she is an adopted slave by rifling the parchments of her father's palace in Babylon. In the face of continued and oppressive occupation of Jerusalem and their own captivity in Babylon, the High Priest Zaccaria consoles the Hebrews with the news that Fenena, the acting Regent, has become one of themselves. In the midst of these confusions of identity, Nabucco makes a dramatic reappearance and declares himself God. A thunderbolt strikes him down for this blasphemy and madness ensues with Abigaille seizing his crown.
Abigaille at some level is meant to represent the apocalyptic figure of the Whore of Babylon, though she is conceived as being driven by sexual frustration. Her fixation on Ismaele implies that this whore is only lusting for an unattainable domesticity. By nakedly expressing her desires, however, she is a dangerous and unnatural woman. Her gleeful horridness makes the Princess Salome seem a sullen obsessive toy; Abigaille will take what she wants without dancing for it and there is something touching in her conviction that to rewrite her pedigree, she needs only to tear up a parchment. Faced with the execution of Fenena, Nabucco prays to the Hebrew God to restore his wits. The feminine woman is rescued, Abigaille swallows poison and the idol of Baal is shattered. The reverses of Nabucco are like a seesaw which sends the forces flying about the stage in a succession of disorienting jerks. Possession of the stage marks victory and our eyes are not directed outside the frame - God himself sends thunderbolts or mental healing into the midst of the struggle. This is the Old Testament world where rival Gods are tested by their usefulness. As in Elijah, Baal is proved to be a puny deity beside the God of the Hebrews.
I Lombardi
Nabucco is set in Jerusalem and Babylon, Jerusalem is the destination of the Lombards in the first Crusade, where the final scene of I Lombardi takes place. When it was revised and extended for Paris in 1847, I Lombardi was renamed Jerusalem. Again Solera was the librettist, taking his subject from the 1826 epic poem by Tommaso Grossi. Though something of the tradition of Tasso clings to the poem, it is more immediately the product of continental enthusiasm for Sir Walter Scott. It is the extent to which Scott's antiquarianism became a fashion which tends to muddy the waters when we are hunting for esoteric meanings. The arcane resonances of hermits, grottoes, choirs of pilgrims came to be exploited as effects, copied and pasted into any opera as properties without any special significance.
Used as we are to poring over the puzzling ambiguities of ancient myths, the stereotyped forms of the romantic period are disconcerting. Mythic resonances are called on but in conventional ways to heighten certain moments in a melodrama by lending an illusory depth to the foreground events. This is to some extent true in Nabucco, where a tale of love, war and jealousy is played out by characters against a Biblical backdrop with two moments of divine intervention. In I Lombardi, the disguises and confusions of a murky melodrama are dispelled by a baptism which leads to a miracle of fountains in the desert and a vision of the retaken Jerusalem, glimpsed from the flap of a tent. It is as if an echo-chamber of the ancient-past was periodically employed to add resonance to the key moments of an earthly drama. Or, more exactly in the case of I Lombardi, the use of a backcloth of Gold.
Very often it is not the bold outlines of these operas which contain mysteries so much as the details in the poetry, where traditional beliefs may be recalled without being underlined, trapped like ancient flies in amber. There is a book to be written on the footnotes of the romantic poets: Thomas Moore's curious learning was as extensive as his poems and modern readers may find the classical glosses more absorbing than the poetical works themselves. The reading of Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Scott was often well off the beaten track and they did not entirely trust the reader to admire all their ingenuities unaided. If the intention was to excuse their extravagances, the result was paradoxically to draw attention to the synthetic nature of their own productions and suggest that the authentic life lay in the sources.
In Verdi's most ambitious opera, Don Carlo, the hero's assignation which he assumes is with the Queen, turns out to be with the Princess Eboli, who arrives wearing a veil. When she reveals her identity, he is so obviously disappointed that she swears vengeance. The changeability of women seems to extend to their identity. Cherchez la femme.
It is Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera, that epic of masking, whose veiled identity suggests more occult forces at work. The entire opera is one of the more mysterious entries in the Verdi canon, being a masquerade in itself, the unconvincing Boston setting standing in for the historical Swedish court on which it was based, though it has become the norm to revert to the intended Swedish setting in recent stagings. Most of the features of the historical murder of King Gustav III which would fascinate a modern dramatist were obscured in Eugène Scribe's libretto, which was originally set by Auber and performed in 1833. He used the assassination to weave a complex ironic structure which would not scare the patrons of the Paris Opera or their horses.
Scribe had drawn on a 1818 English volume, John Brown's The Northern Courts; Original Memoirs of the Sovereigns of Sweden and Denmark in which Gustav's circle had been described as peopled by "voluptuous and depraved parasites". In Verdi's opera, to a libretto Somma derived from Scribe, the homosexual milieu is merely hinted at in the equivocal travesty rôle of Oscar. Gustav's death at a masked ball in the libretto is operatic enough but the real assassination was more cunningly cloaked - the mortal blow was dealt on the field on battle. The real murderer, one Count Anckarstrøm, botched the job and the King took days to die; his agonies were matched by those inflicted on the regicide, which would these days be termed cruel and unusual.
The remoteness of the events on the stage from any kind of historical truth did not prevent the censors from objecting to the theme of regicide per se. The choice of seventeenth-century Boston seems like a false beard the opera has donned to draw attention to its disguise. It does however introduce a further transformation by introducing the concept of difference in a racial sense: Anckarstrøm becomes a Creole called Renato while the black magician Mademoiselle Arvidson becomes Ulrica, who is black by race.
In an atmosphere of supernatural horror, at the crossroads by a gallows, Amelia, Anckarstrøm's wife, hopes to be cured of her infatuation with the King by plucking a mandrake at midnight. There is a detailed mythology of mandrakes dating back to the Bible, where they are associated with fertility, though the plant may have been translated somewhat along with the Bible. The gallows was a likely spot for the deeply horrible reason that these little green man-plants were supposed to be seeded in the ground by hanged men as they ejaculated at the point of death. Earlier operatic versions of the story had to some extent muted the gruesome tradition by making Amelia go to a burial ground but Somma makes the old association explicit:
"Ecco là le colonne . . . La pianta è la, verdeggia al piè", There is the gallows and the plant is there, growing at its foot.
Like all dealings in magic, there is a double-edge or maybe a black homeopathy at work. Amelia has been told this traditional aphrodisiac will bring her release from her love and she calls it the herb that brings peace. She falters, so we never know what magic the herb would have worked. Gustavus has followed her and at the climax of a highly-charged duet, compels her to admit her love for him. At this point they are interrupted by Anckarstrøm and she veils herself. While Gustav flees a band of possible assassins, the Count has to escort his own veiled wife back to the court. Running into the conspirators, they force her to unveil herself and Anckarstrøm's humiliation is complete. He will now not merely join but lead the conspiracy against the King.
This piling on of delicious ironies makes the scene a classic operatic construction, moving from gothic horror through passionate emotion, high drama and black comedy. It is the Verdian operatic machine working at full pressure and the sheer efficiency is an essential part of its beauty. It uses mystery as an ingredient in a very unmysterious process. The moves in the game are not the kind of art which conceals art: Verdi here offers us a very naked exposition of his craft, the kind that encourages critics to start compiling tables. I have two of them in front of me as I write, one tabulates the actions of the scene as four subdivided movements. The other gives a bar by bar, line by line analysis of the Laughing Chorus, in which the scene climaxes or anticlimaxes. Armed with this information, we may think we know enough to attempt our own Verdi opera. We can save our time, of course, the composer was using mystery ingredients all along and the supposed recipe is useless to explain the success. Ulrica or Mademoiselle Arvidson's magic is initially exposed as a series of very human machinations but there is a sense in which she has the last laugh and, after all, her prophecy of the King's death proves to be exactly correct. Like the witches at the French court or like Simon Foreman in England, these dealers in herbs and gossip seem to have had their hands on the pulse of things in every sense.
Booklist:
Marina Warner, Monuments & Maidens, The Allegory of the Female Form, London, 1985;
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, quoted in translation of John Stuart Blackie, 1846, 1928 reprint;
Moby Dick, Herman Melville, edited by Harold Beaver, Penguin, 1972, 1986;
The Metaphysical Poets, edited by Dame Helen Gardner, Penguin, 1957, 1985.
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001