BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Women have long been subjected to violence in the name of entertainment. The problem is particularly rife in opera, where characters are often portrayed as the victim of “murders, rapes, suicides, and other tragic fates”. For this reason, Australian poet and writer Sarah Holland-Batt has created a new production that challenges the representation of women in opera — and also highlights the contributions they make to the artform, whether they’re inside the narrative or part of its creation.
The Sopranos will launch Opera Queensland’s 2022 season. Along with being a newly commissioned work, the production will also engage more than 90 local performers and arts workers.
In this interview, Sarah chats with CutCommon about how opera traditionally portrays women, and why she’s drawing from the repertoire to present a new perspective.
Pictured above: Opera Queensland artwork for the 2022 production of The Sopranos. Below: Writer Sarah Holland-Batt.
Sarah, the concept of your new opera The Sopranos is fascinating and topical. There’s been a great deal of discussion in recent years about the representation of women in opera. Before we get into your work, I’d first like to ask you how you’d describe your own approach to this controversial topic.
The question of how women are represented in opera is a complex one. On the one hand, there’s the argument, put forward most powerfully by the philosopher Catherine Clemént, that opera is an artform that historically has glamorised women’s suffering and glorified male violence against women.
I find this a hard position to dispute: you only have to look at some of the most-performed operas in the repertoire to see how frequently women are subjected to murders, rapes, suicides, and other tragic fates. Here, I think of Carmen, Tosca, Gilda, Norma, Butterfly — and the list goes on. And it’s true that, as Clemént says, the power of operatic music can seduce the audience into almost willing its heroines to their deaths.
But on the other hand, opera is an artform all about women’s power: the tremendous power and virtuosity of the female voice, which can rise effortlessly over an entire orchestra and stands on equal footing with the male voice; operatic divas, who are among the most celebrated artists in the world; the power of the highly subtle interpretations of female performers who embody their characters; the power of women’s narratives, inner lives, and free will — and the power and threat a single women can pose to the social order when she refuses to behave.
And then, there’s also the unavoidable reality that the traumas and violence that are visited upon women in opera continue to exist in the real world — and that operas can play a role in reflecting male and/or societal violence against women; and exploring taboo subjects like abortion, infanticide, and rape.
I’m not in favour of discarding the canon due to its perceived sexism. The meaning of art always changes over time; to suggest that the sum total meaning of these operas is fixed, and begins and ends with the composer’s intentions, is to ignore the huge contributions made in the production and performance, which can be transformative, as well as the audience’s sophistication in interpreting what they’re presented with.
I think the more interesting approach is to continue to stage these canonical operas with a contemporary eye and outlook. It’s also critical that more women are given the opportunity to direct and produce these works — and, of course, for women composers to be commissioned to write new works, too.
Ultimately, my approach to these vexed questions is one that tries to hold those tensions and paradoxes in mind, to suggest that opera can be both a vehicle that celebrates the virtuosity of women artists at the same time as one whose representations of women can and should be questioned and challenged.
There’s a lot to unpack there — how did you come up with the idea to turn these thoughts into an opera of its own?
It was through a series of thoughtful and productive conversations with Patrick Nolan, the artistic director of Opera Queensland, that the idea of a work that explored the history and representation of women in opera began to take shape.
The way women are represented across many art forms — visual art, literature, opera, theatre — has always preoccupied me intellectually, as has the related question of the gendered notions that are popularly held about the nature of genius, and how women’s art has been valued or devalued over time.
I feel very privileged to have the opportunity to explore these ideas in the context of opera, collaborating with Patrick and an extraordinary group of women.
You must have listened to so many operatic works, particularly soprano roles, as part of your research into this project. What did you discover that you weren’t expecting — for instance, any surprising patterns among the themes a soprano’s voice might convey, or any roles that inspired or distressed you?
One idea that has struck me in a very deep way is that so many operas are about women in extremis. Plots commonly turn on women who find themselves in untenable, impossible positions — pregnant out of wedlock, blackmailed, forced into a marriage they don’t want, abducted or exiled or imprisoned. These dire circumstances reflect the sociopolitical reality of women’s oppression.
But accompanying the undeniably grim plight of women in many operas is the ever-present question of how women still express their free will and act within those constraints. The protagonists who stay with me are those who rebel against expectations, and puncture decorum or propriety, knowing full well the consequences; or who manage to exert agency in circumstances which seem calculated to remove any. Sometimes, the choices they make are monstrous, violent, self-destructive, sacrificial, or ethically compromised — but ultimately, these are expressions of agency, and can have catalytic consequences.
Another element that has been fascinating to trace are the tropes which repeat across the operatic canon: common figures include the madwoman or outsider, the ingénue, the femme fatale, the witch or sorceress, the martyr, and the rebel or renegade. Of course, there are always exceptions and variations to these tropes, but they do seem to hold true across centuries of opera, and this is another aspect of the representation of women The Sopranos will explore.
Through my research, I’ve also become fascinated by the role of the chorus, which tends to affirm societal values rather than reflect the mores of the female protagonist; though, there are some interesting exceptions, especially in relation to female-only choruses like the female priestesses in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride or the Carmelite nuns in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, whose extraordinary final chorus Salve Regina — during which the Carmelites march inexorably to the guillotine for refusing to renounce their faith — has to be among the most striking and profoundly moving pieces of music I’ve come across.
Tell us about the music in your opera. Where does it come from, and how did you select these works to share your narrative?
The repertoire is chosen from across the history of opera, from progenitors like Monteverdi right through to contemporary 21st-Century Australian work written by women. It’s been difficult to narrow down the repertoire because there are simply so many interesting and complex roles and pieces that could be part of the project: after all, the history of women in opera is a long as the history of opera itself.
In making the selections, I’ve had an eye on the idea of interrogating some of the familiar tropes of women in opera, but also on the notion of stylistic variety, and on finding interesting chimes and coincidence between pieces, too.
I don’t want to give too much away, but two pieces included in The Sopranos which have a resonant symmetry are Tosca’s aria Vissi d’arte, in which Tosca bemoans her fate to God, and the untenable position Scarpia has put her in; and the brilliant final scene of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, in which Onegin bemoans his own fate, and claims that Tatyana’s decision to reject him has destroyed him. Just as men destroy the lives of women in opera, so can women destroy men.
Many of the pieces speak to one another in this way; these mirrorings, echoes, and inversions have been interesting to chart and explore in the structure of the work.
In the OQ program, artistic director Patrick Nolan describes the way you bring your creativity to the characters in these traditional operas “so that we might see them afresh”. How did you reimagine some of these older roles and plots, and in what way do you seek to challenge our interpretations of them?
When we watch an opera, the narrative and music are both so powerful that we can sometimes lose sight of its historical context, and the way it might connect to other works in the canon. It’s exciting to bring some of these disparate works together, and to explore how they speak to one another.
Another facet The Sopranos explores is the figure of the soprano herself as an artist: the virtuosity of her voice, the interpretive freedoms and contributions she makes as a performer, and her embodiment in the role. My approach to these ideas is to simply open up an imaginative space in which the audience can ponder such complexities, rather than to try to guide the way the audience thinks.
Sarah, you are primarily a poet, so I’d be interested to learn if you see any parallels between the representation of women in opera compared to women in literature throughout these centuries.
Many operas originate in literature, having been adapted from plays or other forms of writing, so there certainly are deep parallels. Much of what is considered canonical literature — prior to the 20th Century, when things begin to shift radically — is written by men, and the violence in literary works mirrors that of opera. But I think the difference with opera is that while it often metes out terrible fates to women, and while most of the most commonly staged operas are composed by men, women play very prominent roles in opera in embodying the characters and in bringing them to life through virtuosic performances and interpretations.
Essentially, in opera, as in theatre, women have the opportunity to interpret and embody the roles in a way that is absent, naturally, from visual art — where historically, women were most often the mute subject of the male gaze — or literature, too.
I am interested in the way opera singers contribute to the role through their particular interpretive nuances. Sometimes these nuances are subtle, but at other times we can take away quite radically divergent understandings of a character’s motivation, state of mind, or emotional landscape, depending on the choices a performer makes.
What impact do you hope your new opera will leave on Australian audiences?
I hope that, ultimately, audiences leave The Sopranos with a renewed appreciation for the enormous contributions women make in opera — and perhaps with some new perspective on those women’s roles that are so familiar to us, too.
Visit the Opera Queensland website to learn more about The Sopranos and the 2022 season.
Images supplied.
