Zerbinetta, the Explosive Sexologist

Ah, the rich and their perverse extravagances that corrupt the pure hearts of artists! Such is their pleasure. Typically, Ariadne auf Naxos is a mise en abyme; theatre appears here not only in theatre, but we see how the organizer of the evening intends to trample on the works he himself commissioned. The crass ignorance that sometimes takes hold of even the most generous patrons seems to have taken hold of him. And to this unenviable quality we must add arbitrariness and cowardice, since he never shows himself on stage; his instructions are brought to life through the voice of his butler. Could it be Don Giovanni, back from the underworld, hiding behind a Leporello even more cowardly than in Burgos?

But here’s the horror: two plays were commissioned for the evening. An ancient drama, in which Ariadne is abandoned by her lover on a desert island, and a lighter play from the tradition of Italian street theatre. And for the sake of convenience, the artists are required to perform their plays at the same time. While this causes the character of the Composer to suffer a psychotic breakdown, a relationship develops between the stone-faced Ariadne and the stoic Zerbinetta – who has clearly studied her compendium of libidines nefandæ – in which men seem to shrink into insignificance.

Strauss’s long road to a certain feminism

In the first part of his opera career, Richard Strauss seemed obsessed with monoliths. In his Salome – adapted from Oscar Wilde’s fussy little play, which the Irish author wrote directly in French in a style that makes Mallarmé look like an adept of the nouveau roman – Strauss chose a vocal style that runs counter to the text. The lines are broad and tense, and the voices must surpass a considerable orchestra, which never shies away from triple forte.

Strauss is often credited with the phrase: ‘Louder! I can still hear the orchestra.’

In Elektra, his second real triumph – with a text by the delicate Hofmannsthal – the Bavarian composer pushed excess even further. The lead roles are notoriously demanding, but that of the young Elektra exceeds the limits of what a human voice can achieve in terms of sound amplitude. Strauss is often credited with a phrase uttered at the end of a rehearsal – and which is so beautiful it may be apocryphal: ‘Louder! I can still hear the orchestra.’ And when we consider that his orchestra would make the galloping elephants of Hamilcar’s armies sound like a delicate chassé-croisé of ballerinas, we can fully appreciate the meaning of this remark.

At this point, one might suspect that Strauss had found his own path in the performative excesses of the Wagnerian tradition. However, what followed would prove the contrary. From Der Rosenkavalier onwards, his vocal writing follows the logic of a Sprechgesang embellished with lyrical flights reminiscent of the delicate interweavings of Mozartian ensembles. The vocal embroidery of the Marschallin and Sophie, in an extremely high register, recalls the Quoniam of the Great Mass in C minor, where the sopranos compete in ductility in the very high register.

The fact is that Strauss – an outstanding orchestra conductor – knew his desires inside out, and these were above all Mozartian. Der Rosenkavalier is, moreover, the key moment when Strauss comes out as an opera fanatic. Is it not in the Marschallin’s salons that we find an Italian tenor launching into a to all intents syrupy cantilena? It is a moment of mockery, certainly, but also one of the most beautiful pages in the opera.

Strauss sees in Ariadne auf Naxos the ideal place to summon the archetypes of the genre and where he seems to revel in sowing confusion. The tormented character of the Composer, performed by a mezzo-soprano, appears as a Cherubino freed from the torments of puberty, but not quite rid of his teenage crisis yet. Zerbinetta, for her part, reveals herself to be a compendium of Mozartian femininity. Not only is her name a combination of two protagonists from the Da Ponte Trilogy: Zerlina (Don Giovanni) and Despinetta (Così fan tutte), but she also readily adopts their characters. From Zerlina, she borrows a seductive coquetry; from Despina, a kind of nihilistic philosophy on the consequences of love: the perfect antithesis of the figure of the Don Juanist aesthete as defined by Kierkegaard.

Zerbinetta could have theorized Bechdel

Is it far-fetched to suggest that Strauss was won over by Mozart’s feminist activism? When viewed through the lens of twenty-first-century sociology, many of his operas pass the Bechdel test with flying colours. This test requires that two women protagonists talk to each other about something other than men. Consider Elektra’s confrontation with her mother Clytemnestra. Admittedly, Zerbinetta, Ariadne’s improvised marriage counsellor, is a sexual monomaniac, a sort of Alain Robbe-Grillet in pink tights. But in her vocality, she is a substitute for Mozart’s most beautiful characters: from Elettra in Idomeneo to Konstanze in Entführung aus dem Serail. Both use the very high register to convey the vertigo that inhabits them. The counter-notes characterize this sleepwalking state that separates reason from the torments of madness (or despair, in the case of Konstanze).

Zerbinetta, on the other hand, does not suffer from this vertigo. She demonstrates, through her vocal explosiveness and extraordinary virtuosity, that this little philosophical clown is the precursor of Giulietta Masina, she who, in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, decides to respond to the vileness of men with a luminous smile of self-determination. When she comes across a group of young people playing music, she lets herself be carried away by the emotion of the music and disappears into the night – cheerful but breathless – convinced that the beauty of the world rests on nothing other than her freedom to be. And what is she, if not, like Zerbinetta, the freest of women?

Translation: Patrick Lennon