Ah! Forget My Fate Part II consists of an ambitious three-woman staging of Purcell’s most famous opera, Dido and Aeneas. A courtly drama with a twist, the production asks: how can the most powerful woman in Carthage survive when her worst enemies lie within?
It’s been a little while since we heard from Better Strangers Feminist Opera Collective. Back in November last year, our Sarah C interviewed them about their show – the first part of their Ah! Forget My Fate! project. Hodge and I went to the show – “part-opera, part-cabaret abridged history of women in opera” – and I’d definitely recommend them.
This week – on Thursday 26 July at 10pm – they’re back at the King’s Head in Islington, North London. They sent us this Q&A press release about the show – Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – and their work.
Why would a feminist opera company put on Dido and Aeneas?
“Because in many ways, Dido and Aeneas is where it all started. Whether or not Dido and Aeneas is the first opera in Western classical tradition is up for (interminable and pedantic) debate, but it’s certainly one of the earliest that’s regularly performed – particularly here in the UK where we’re based. And Dido is the first in a noble tradition of heroines who die an arguably completely pointless death (in the context of the opera as a self-contained work, anyway), so to me it makes sense for us to begin at the beginning.
“It was also written, we think, to be performed by a girls’ school, which makes it well suited for modern adaptations with exclusively female voices.
“A personal motivation for me is that Dido is a really interesting feminist figurehead. As a ruler, she refused to submit to any kind of conquest (sexual, emotional or literal) from the men around her, and she earned the respect of her people through an ironclad adherence to an ideal.”
What will audiences take away from BSFOC’s telling of the story? Why does it need to be (re)told?
“As a producer/director, the main question I want to ask of the work is why Dido dies. That’s what’s ultimately led me personally to the staging we’re about to present here. I don’t believe that people die of a broken heart, unless they have some kind of congenital heart defect, and I don’t believe that the queen of Carthage has the kind of emotional pallor that lends itself to dying of a hissy fit after the bloke you’ve known for a couple of days decides it’s time to move on. I want there to be a driving force behind it. I want to know what it is about the witches that gives them such power over Dido.
“People who aren’t familiar with classical mythology, and the Aeneid in particular, aren’t all that likely to know much about Dido, and you’re certainly not going to learn anything about her from the text of Purcell’s opera. Our telling of the story – the recasting of the witches as the shadow selves of the named characters – is intended to help to fill in the blanks. Nahum Tate (librettist)’s Dido is not controlling, masochistic, or even particularly bold, and that is why Dido’s shadow self – and, by extension, the witches – have so much power. The impulse is there, and is all the more irresistible for going unrecognised.
“I want to retell Dido and Aeneas because I love Dido and I can’t stand Aeneas. If you take Tate’s text by itself, she’s nothing but a puppet at his mercy, and I don’t want that for her. I want her to have agency, even if it’s an agency that no-one can quite understand. And I want him to look like a tool, because he is.”
Imagine I know nothing about opera and classical literature. What background knowledge do I need to acquire to appreciate what you’re doing with this production? Is it reasonable to assume the audiences won’t know much either? How will you help them into the opera?
“Basically, I would like to transmit the idea that Dido’s story runs deeper than the text of the opera implies. I think we’re helping the audience along there with the addition of newspapers, which help to flesh out what might be going on beyond the confines of Dido’s palace and what kind of impact her dalliances might be having outside. In the mythology, Dido is a really great ruler who is essentially completely derailed by Aeneas’ arrival on the scene. I want the audience to get a sense of that.
“I also want to transmit the idea that Dido’s death, to me, seems impossible without the impulse towards self-destruction.
“I think – or, at least, I hope – that this production will be reasonably accessible to people who have neither a classical music nor classical historical background, and I’d be interested to hear what needs to be drawn out of the narrative and the staging to make it so.”
You want to take your production to schools/colleges. What do you hope to teach young people about? Opera? Feminism? Purcell’s era? Classical lit? Tropes?
“A variety of things. I’d like to teach everyone in a school – meaning also the staff – how you can adapt a work like Dido and Aeneas to be performable by small forces, because I think that’s one of our major achievements with it. I want to teach performers how to be creative with limited resources, and to encourage them to think about alternative readings.
“I want to teach people to sing, and not to be afraid of singing. That would be a unifying motivation in any educational work I do with Better Strangers.
“Back when I was doing GCSEs, Dido’s Lament came up as a regularly used example of how melody + basso continuo worked, so I think it could be a great set of lessons to people aged 13+ of how Purcell’s music was constructed and how his melodies, instrumentation and word-setting were put together. I think it would be more fun and probably more instructive for people to do this/see it done in performance.
“And, yes, I’d like to use it as an opportunity to teach story-makers of the future that they might want to think about why, precisely, they want to kill off their lead [insert kyriarchal minority here] character rather than resolve the plot some other way.”
- Ah, Forget My Fate Part II: Dido and Aeneas at the King’s Head Theatre, 26 July 2012. Book tickets here. Read more about the show’s development on the BSFOC blog.
I’ve been spending time with opera singers Clouds and Jessie, talking about their company Better Strangers and upcoming show,Ah! Forget My Fate: A Brief History Of Women In Opera (Abridged) at Islington’s King’s Head theatre. I asked them some semi-intelligent questions, and they gave me some pretty damn cool answers.
Tell us a bit about yourselves.
“Better Strangers started with Clouds and Jessie, two queer feminist geeks. We met through LARP and bonded over a mutual love of opera, together with frustration at the lack of available jobs. Clouds is now in her second year of a singing course at music school. Jessie is a youth worker at the East London Out Project, and does freelance community arts with people with profound and multiple learning disabilities. We both have literature degrees. Jessie likes queer theory and graphic novels. Clouds likes metal and baking. Pleased to meet you!”
Men at work. Kinda. Not.
“Better Strangers coalesced into an actual concept some time around May 2010. Our stated aim is to create musical performances by, with and for all kinds of women, and to use these to reach out to people who might normally feel excluded from opera.”
We love the idea of feminist opera – what role does it play in opera as a whole and in the wider arts world?
“To the best of our awareness, Better Strangers is the only feminist opera company in existence. There are occasional feminist productions dotted around, but no other companies dedicated to performing them, as far as we can tell. So that’s a start. In addition to putting on feminist productions of existing operas, we’ll be commissioning new music from female composers, asking female writers to contribute song lyrics and stories, and opening up discussions about women’s roles in opera, and how and why they need to change.
“At least two thirds of any singing class in a music school is likely to be made up of women – most of them sopranos – and yet each commonly performed opera will contain two, maybe three roles for the ‘female’ soprano, mezzo or alto register. It’s a hugely (and in some ways needlessly) competitive world. So, instead of wringing our hands about the dwindling interest in opera and classical music, why not create more? Our commissioned works will address this problem in two ways: firstly, by including more soprano, mezzo and alto roles; and secondly, by scoring many of them for small groups of instruments, so that they can be easily performed with limited space and resources.
“As well as performers, we’re encouraging contributions from female directors, MDs, producers (BadRep’s own Sarah C is working with us right now), composers, technicians, librettists and artists. Women composers are more widely recognised now than they have ever been, with Performing Right Society awarding funding for music written and commissioned by women, but there is still a lot of work to be done. We hope that as we bring the work of stage professionals and writers to light, women might start to be taken more seriously across the arts world.
“Our feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit. We at Better Strangers are interested in stories, and particularly stories that aren’t often told. This means listening to all kinds of different people – women, QUILTBAGs, people of colour, people from lower income brackets, people with disabilities, and anyone else who has something to share with the world.”
Artwork by Alex Campbell
The show features a lot of pieces for women performers. What are your opinions on the roles available to women in opera?
“The premise of Ah! Forget My Fate! is that women are very frequently typecast. The most common types of female characters are the weepy virgin, the terrible slut, the saucy servant girl, or the boy. In operas written before 1820 there were a lot more witches and evil sorceresses, but the villain’s role was handed over to basses later on. That’s it. If you’re a weepy virgin or a terrible slut in an opera written after 1830, chances are you’ll go mad or get consumption and die. Bad luck!
“How does one sing with consumption anyway? A wasting disease of the lungs and throat plays havoc with your timbre. There are a few exceptions, of course. We just want to create more of them. Besides, what about the mezzos who want to play a bold, upstanding young hero? Or the basses who want to play weepy, consumptive virgins?
“There is a heavy heteronormative gender bias in opera, which is kind of silly because not all sopranos, mezzos and altos are women, and not all tenors, baritones and basses are men. CN Lester of En Travesti is a gender neutral mezzo. Florestan of Lashings of Ginger Beer is a female baritone. Yet it’s expected, in opera as in life, that women and men will fit into these nice little boxes with a set type of voice and a set type of role to go with it, and it’s astonishing and disturbing how often the woman’s voice is silenced at the end of an opera.
What’s next for Better Strangers?
“After Ah! Forget My Fate, Better Strangers will be having some fun with devised performance. Alongside that, we’ll be doing some education work in community settings around how awesome opera and feminism are, and how opera does have something to offer people who aren’t rich and white, honest. Also in the works is a show in which all the dead heroines of famous operas rise again as zombies and take their revenge.
No, really. Keep an eye out – it’s going to be awesome.
- Ah! Forget My Fate! is on
Wednesday 16 November1 and Friday 25 November – book your tickets here.
- It seems this date has now had to be cancelled – so all the more reason to try to make the second one!
Marian was born in Philadelphia in 1897, the eldest of three Anderson children. Her mother had previously worked as a school teacher but was unable to do so in Philadelphia due to stricter controls on the qualifications needed by black teachers as opposed to those for white teachers. The family was active in their local Union Baptist church, and Marian’s aunt Mary encouraged her to sing with the church choir.
From age six onwards Marian began to sing at local concerts and functions, encouraged by her aunt. She had a clear talent from the start, and by her teens was earning several dollars for a performance.1 After attending high school – which was paid for by charitable donations raised by her pastor and other local community leaders – Anderson applied to the Philadelphia Music Academy, but was turned away. The reason? ‘We don’t take coloureds.’
As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.
– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning
Undaunted, Anderson sought private tuition from the talented Giuseppe Boghetti.2 Boghetti was a good teacher, and Anderson would credit him with expanding her repertoire to include classical works and arias in addition to choral music. She took these skills to the New York Philharmonic, winning a voice contest there in 1925. The prize was the chance to perform in concert with them, marking the first major critical success of her career.
Despite being critically acclaimed and applauded by all who heard her, Anderson’s career struggled to take off in the United States. Much like Josephine Baker she found difficulty getting bookings due to racism, and like Baker she responded by touring heavily in a more welcoming Europe. She toured extensively through the 1930s, befriending many influential people in the music field who were impressed with her voice. Toscanini, Jean Sibelius, and Kosti Vehanen were all amongst those who worked with her or applauded her voice.
Those Lincoln Memorial crowds. All 70,000 of them.
For all her European success, there were still issues in America. In 1939 Howard University sought to have her perform at Constitution Hall. The hall was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), who denied her the chance to play there on grounds of race. This kicked off a storm with many DAR members resigning in protest, including board member Eleanor Roosevelt. This is where we get that aforementioned lovely example of people stepping up to do the right thing. Eleanor Roosevelt, along with Anderson’s manager, members of the NAACP, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes arranged an open air concert for Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The performance was a huge success, attended by over 70,000 people, and with a million or so more listening in by radio.
Four years later the DAR asked Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall. She accepted.
I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time hating people.
– Marian Anderson
Although she was trained for it and regularly performed operatic arias in her concerts, Anderson shied away from appearing in actual operas. She was offered positions consistently throughout her time in Europe, but felt she lacked the acting talent to accompany her voice. The exception to this was 1955’s appearance with the New York Metropolitan Opera in a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Machera. This was the first time a black singer had been counted amongst the regular cast.
The next decade was studded with achievements for Anderson, almost too many to give each one the detail they deserve here. which frankly is sign of brilliance in itself, when you have too much cool stuff to actually describe at any great length. Between 1955 and 1965, then, she:
- sang at the inaugurations of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy
- was appointed a UN delegate
- was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- sang at the 1963 March on Washington
- … and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- Marian’s autobiography, My Lord What A Morning, which is unfortunately quite hard to get a hold of.
- Raymond Arsenault’s The Sound of Freedom which goes into much more detail on the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert.
- Allan Keiler’s A Singer’s Journey provides an in-depth study of Anderson’s life.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- Which may not sound like much, but for early 20th century America it was pretty damn impressive.
- Born Joe Bogash, he had changed his name to something Italian sounding in the hopes that it would boost his opera career. It didn’t, and he returned to America in 1918 to open studios in New York City instead.
Oh, and she released an album of poetry, songs and spoken word pieces dedicated to her beloved pet cat Snoopy. A busy and exceedingly well spent decade.
Anderson retired from public performance in 1965 with a farewell tour that began at Constitution Hall and ended in New York’s Carnegie Hall. By the time of her death in 1993 she would accrue a list of honours and accolades quite staggering in length, including but not limited to honorary degrees from three different universities, a Grammy, a Silver Buffalo from the Boy Scouts of America, and her likeness on postage stamps and $5000 Series I Savings Bonds.
There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the make the first move – and he, in turn, waits for you.
– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning
For further reading, check the following:
H
HYSTERIA
O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.
– King Lear, II.ii.246
No Reason To Get Excited
In its purest sense, hysteria simply refers to the womb, no more, no less; like all those other lovely hy- words, it comes from the Greeks, and specifically from their word hysterikos – hystera (= yes, ‘womb’. Think ‘hysterectomy’). There may be little trace of its origin in modern usage, but its ‘female’ signification is perfectly in line with the word’s association with legions of Anna Os, Doras and Victorian virgins, eyes rolling, bodies attractively prone.
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, c. 1781
But here we must pause, and take an exciting medical-historical diversion. The Latin equivalent of hysterikos is the homonymic ancestor of our modern term ‘uterus’, and means ‘womb’ or ‘belly’; and this last strangely ambiguous definition seems less odd when you realise that ‘womb’ itself, in its Old English form, refers not to the generative organ but to a ‘belly’ or ‘paunch’ and that history is full of scientists arguing that this now-feminized organ was gender-neutral, with the ‘female’ womb simply some kind of equivalent to the ‘male’ stomach. Well? It does have some kind of logic: both are cavernous places where you, er, store stuff, but the female of the species may be more creative than the male.
Oh, Mother.
So, grasping this information in our sweaty little palms, to Shakespeare. When King Lear complains of ‘this mother’ he is referring to, as he says, ‘Passio Hysterica’, or ‘the suffocation of the mother’ – mother here used as a synonym for ‘womb’, as in Edward Jorden’s Treatise on the subject. Contemporary medical belief held that there were circumstances (Jorden specifies ‘of a wind in the bottom of the belly’, but refuses to elaborate on whether this is indigestion or some meterological force) in which this sexless womb-stomach could physically wander round the body, where ‘it causeth a very painfull collicke in the stomack, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head’. Uh, yeah: ouch. Or, in Lear’s terms: ‘O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!’
She’s Lost Control.
The development of the female-specific womb may be a topic for another day, but hysteria meaning what we would understand by the term, ‘hysteric fits or convulsions, a convulsive fit of laughter or weeping’ was in use as early as 1727. In 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote what is arguably the first attempt to put hysteria into musical form – with The Magic Flute‘s Queen of the Night, also a ‘mother’ – spectacular as the music is (and her arias in particular), its driving purpose is to contrast the hysterical irrationality of women with the enlightened forces of Men and Freemasonry (gendering hysteria explicitly female in the process).
One to be taken each night with a mug of cocoa
There is then a gap in the word’s lexical development until the medical issue resurfaces: hysteria as a diagnosable condition was first officially used in 1801, where, as the dictionary points out, it was in reference to a seeming epidemic of women Going Crazy – or, specifically, experiencing ‘a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by anaesthesia, hyperaesthesia, convulsions, etc., and usually attended with emotional disturbances or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties’. Covering all its bases, you could either have no sensation at all, or hyper-sensation. Brilliant. That’s exactly what today needed.
It’s Not Easy Being Green.
One explanation for its seeming explosion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is its use as a catch-all term for Generic Women’s Troubles (hence calling it, essentially, ‘womb-problem’), and indeed, it does seem to have been partially conflated with chlorosis (a type of anaemia), which is perhaps better known to Renaissance drama fans as ‘green sickness’. Thus, in John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (you’d think you couldn’t top that title, wouldn’t you?) Annabella is thought to be suffering from ‘an overflux of youth’, in which case ‘there is no such present remedy as present marriage’. Translation: get a willy in her, quick.
Something along these lines, dubbed ‘pelvic massage’, was indeed considered to be a helpful course of action for hysterical women of later years, and this, bizarrely, is where the vibrator makes its entrance on the historical stage. Helped along in its retail life by widespread use of electricity in the home, this particular modern gadget was originally a time-saving device for hard-pressed, fee-jealous doctors with hundreds of hysterical women to bring to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ before lunch. It was a young medical man named Sigmund Freud who decided that the ‘talking cure’ might be more helpful, and his early work in hysteria underscored much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis.
Pervert Doc Caged
In its post-medical life (unsurprisingly, it is no longer considered a valid diagnosis), hysteria continues to rejoice in its second definition, a figurative use, meaning ‘unhealthy emotion or excitement’ (1839). Its most common modern usage would probably be in reference to media hysteria, which does, alas, tend to be aimed at women: the Daily Mail, the archetypal screeching tabloid, was, from its initiation in 1896, a newspaper aimed at women, and to this day its readership is over 50% female. As such, it tends to focus on condemning threats to ‘traditional family values’ – primarily immigrants and those on benefits, but it also simmers with barely suppressed homophobia (‘Abortion hope after “gay genes” finding’ was a headline from 1993, and Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately more recently attracted justified ire from all corners).
This, sadly, does tend to suggest that in the eyes of People Trying To Sell Us Stuff, women are still very much the hysterical creatures they were considered in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this does not stop legions of women actually buying what they sell.
NEXT WEEK: I is for Infant.
]]>