Il Trovatore - The Troubadour – was not Verdi’s original
title for this opera – apparently he wanted to call it The Gypsy Woman – and it
is two Gypsy women – a mother and a daughter - who drive the craziness in this
very crazy opera. It just so happens
that I am in New York with a mother/daughter combo – the reluctant wife and
stepdaughter. I am going to the annual
psychoanalytic conference – and they are here to look at a possible college. We decided to take in an opera to round
things out, and what an opera we chose!
Things got rolling long before the current action
starts. A gypsy woman was seen in the
count’s infant son’s room. The count was
concerned about this and chased her out.
Then the son became ill, and the count was convinced that the gypsy had
put a spell on his son, so had her burned at the stake. Her daughter is traumatized by seeing her
mother burned alive (the aria where she sings about remembering this brings the
terror back to life – and has the potential to traumatize those who are
listening – including the guy who thinks he is her son – more on that later). She seeks revenge by throwing the count’s infant
son into the fire that consumed her mother.
But, oops, she threw her own son in instead. Realizing her mistake, she steals the count’s
son (whom most everyone – except his older brother, who becomes Count Ferando
when his father dies of grief – believe was consumed by the fire). She raises this boy as her own child and,
when the opera begins, he is the troubadour, Manrico – singing to Leonora, the
beautiful woman that Count Ferando is obsessed with. Count Ferando has mustered all of his guards
to keep the unknown troubadour away from Leonora, but his song wafts her way
anyway.
To complicate things a bit, Manrico is not just the
Troubadour, but the leader of the force rebelling against the Count. Unaware that they are brothers, they are
rivals in both love and war. Manrico,
despite being the rebel and leading a ragtag group of gypsies and other
outsiders seems to have the upper hand in part because Leonora is, in fact, in
love with him. When Manrico goes to her,
Ferando interrupts them, and he and Manrico have a duel. Manrico gains the upper and was about to kill
Feraldo when he felt restrained by an unknown force and runs off into the
night. We find out about this after he
has been injured in battle and he is being nursed back to health by the gypsy
whom he believes to be his mother. In
return for his telling his story, she now recounts the burning of her mother
and then the burning of the infant, which confuses Manrico because the gypsy
mentions that she burned her son – and yet here he is… She passes it off – but we – and surely
Manrico – are confused by her rendition of the story.
Manrico returns to the fight – he is able to get Leonora out
of the clutches of Ferando, who had interrupted Leonora’s sacred vows to become
a nun when she mistakenly believed Manrico was dead and she did not want to be forced
into a marriage to Ferando. She is
safely in a defensible castle with Manrico, when his “mother”- that darn gypsy
- is caught by Ferando. When Manrico
hears that Ferando is going to burn his mother, he leaves the safety of his
castle to attack Ferando, but he is captured and Ferando intends to put him to
death. Leonora can’t bear this, so she
intervenes. She takes a slow acting
poison and then promises herself to Ferando in exchange for sparing
Manrico. When Ferando agrees and she
takes the news to Manrico, who is imprisoned with his mother, Manrico reacts by
becoming furious because he she is not being true to him. She confesses that she has taken poison,
which sobers Manrico up and he can recognize what a fool he’s been, but all
this dithering has kept Manrico from escaping, as Leonora has been imploring
him to do, and Ferando shows up to discover that Leonora has double crossed him
by taking poison, and orders the execution of Manrico at which point the gypsy
wakes up and decelares that she is happy because she has gotten her revenge on
the count by having one of his sons kill the other – and the curtain comes down…
Wow. What a tale of trauma
and revenge! The Count’s revenge on the
mother for her having, supposedly, put a spell on his son, turns into the gypsy
daughter being put into double hell – losing her mother to the count and her
son to her own hand. She then raises
someone and, despite nursing him and caring for him, is exultant at his
death. She has used him as an instrument
of revenge! How cold and crazy must she
be? Well, this feels like a pretty crazy
gypsy – and, given that Verdi intended to name the opera after her, this is a
pretty crazy opera. As an opera of
trauma and revenge, and with the gypsy at the center of it – it speaks to the
craziness that harming each other creates.
If we see the gypsy as the hero of this opera – as the
central tragic figure – I think it hangs together much better than if we see
Manrico – the Troubadour - as the tragic figure. Manrico, after all, is just pushed around. He doesn’t know his parentage – even when he
is essentially told about it by his “mother” he doesn’t really get a clue. He loves Leonora, but that is a pretty thin
love – he disparages her savagely for saving his life. He is kept from killing his brother by an
unseen force. Both brothers thus have a
sense that something is amiss, but ultimately they end up being pawns in the
gypsy’s game of revenge on the long dead Count – father of the current Count.
And yet she is an odd tragic hero. She seems to randomly introduce chaos into
every scene that she shows up in. She
all but tells her “son” that he is not her son in the first scene she is in,
but then takes it back. She ruins things
for her “son” in the second scene when she becomes his brother’s captive. In the final scene, she is trying to go to
sleep before her “son’s” (and her own) execution and she sings a lullaby to herself
after he agrees to stand watch and then she is not awakened by a series of
interactions between her “son”, Leonora and then Ferando, only to wake up after
her “son” has left to be killed – and her joy at this impending death is, to
put it mildly, a surprise.
The gypsy belongs to a marginalized group – those who wander
without a set home. She is rendered motherless
in a horrific manner. Her description of
watching her mother burn is disorienting to the listener – and clearly was to
her – she ended up confusing her son with the son of the count. But she also kept clear in her mind the distinction
through decades of carrying for the boy she stole. The tie between a parent a child is the most
powerful tie I know – much stronger than that between lovers. I am told by my friends who have adopted that
the strength of this tie is powerful when raising an adoptive child as
well. But the gypsy manages to keep this
child at a distance – to not let him into her heart – to hold him, at least in
part, as an object – as the hated spawn of her arch enemy and thus as someone
she will use to hurt that enemy, long after he is dead and gone.
So I am struck that this is what Verdi is doing to us – he is
wreaking some weird kind of vengeance on us.
That’s not quite right of course.
We weren’t born when he was writing – nor were our great grandparents –
but none the less, he has decided to bring something to our attention,
something horrific and destabilizing. He
wants us to feel – deeply and powerfully – in the way that only music can help
us do – what another person feels. This
person is ostensibly the gypsy, but isn’t she also he?
Does this mean that Verdi is a trauma survivor? Does this mean that he is dissociative in the
ways that it seems she must be? I don’t
think so. Nor do I think that the labels
I have provided to describe the Gypsy’s experience actually capture her or her
experience. I think the music does a
better job of doing that than any diagnostic label. And Verdi has the capacity to convey feeling –
to make us feel deep and powerful feelings with the music he creates. He can wreak havoc in us – and the plot and
libretto of this opera give him a vehicle to do just that. He is the gypsy working on keeping us off
balance – keeping us from feeling secure – from feeling that we have been loved
for who he are – while we hear what it would feel like to be loved like that
from the woman who has the power to do that.
Is Verdi, then, fickle? I think
so. I think that he realizes that this
powerful tool that he wields disrupts us – and he revels in that.
As these things do, I experienced the meetings as helping me
to understand Verdi better. One of the
presenters talked about psychoanalysis as something that exposes those parts of
our affective lives that we would prefer stay under wraps. And Mark Solms today clarified that the brain
spends most of its time on auto pilot – it is only when there is something that
we have no program for that we have to wake up and be conscious. Verdi wants to wake us up – the gypsy’s lullaby
was only for her – she keeps everyone around her wide awake with her
shenanigans – just as Verdi’s opera reveals those feelings that we all have
access too, but would rather keep under wraps – feelings that we need to access
when we want to rework something that has been problematic for us – and feelings
that – in the context of a narrative that veers all over the place, but
ultimately stays on the rails enough for us to observe, to feel, and to walk
away – as from a dream – from the performance – with a sense of it having been
as if we had lived through all that craziness – but without actually having
done it. We are at Verdi’s mercy – but we
ultimately applaud him and the musicians who have brought his feelings to life
in us – because we have been able to feel them in the safety of the opera house
– and not in the confines of our own home.
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