Madness and Gender in "Ah! stigie larve" from Handel's Orlando

I wrote this in the summer between my first and second year, for a series of Musical Thought and Scholarship tutorials with Michael Graham. He focused our assignments around the Welsh National Opera's two touring productions that year: Donizetti's I Puritani and Handel's Orlando.

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In her chapter "Excess and Frame: the Musical Representation of Madwomen", Susan McClary shows that feminine madness has been a popular trope in opera "from Monteverdi … and beyond" that has been almost fetishistically received by audiences.[1] In their effort to "explain away" the "embarrassment" of this "somewhat tacky reception history", she writes that analysts have striven to paper over operatic madness, to the effect that "Salome's depravity can become an intricately designed configuration of pitch-class sets, and Lucia's lucidity may be recovered through linear and structural graphing".[2] As a consequence of this analytical attitude, Act II, Scene 11 of Handel's Orlando—the "mad scene"—could all-too-readily be reduced to nothing more than an elaborate accompagnato followed by a ritornello: music that sets the archetypical crisis point of a lover-protagonist (Orlando) rejected by a woman (Angelica) in favour of another man (Medoro), affording a castrato-star seven and a half minutes of relatively unfettered virtuosity before the wizard Zoroastro—staging a deus-ex-machina-type intervention with overt Apollonian reference to the revised ending of Monteverdi's l'Orfeo—carries him away. However, when examined within the broader extra-musical contexts in which it lies, "Ah! stigie larve" is revealed to not only lie at a crucial transformative point in both Orlando's and Orlando's dramatic development, but to provide an insightful window into how gender and madness were constructed, conveyed, and construed in the early eighteenth century.

McClary does not advocate a purely sociological approach to operatic mad scenes, but one which integrates musical analysis into contexts. She writes that "music is not simply another medium. Its priorities and procedures differ significantly from those of literature, and thus we cannot apply directly to music the insights gleaned by … Foucault".[3] Upon even fairly superficial inspection, any analyst would be hard-pushed to "explain away” the eccentric tonal and gestural movement of Orlando's “mad scene”. As shown in the appended table, “Ah! stigie larve” moves from its opening G-major tonality to its closing F-major tonality via an apparently oblique series of established and implied tonicizations and disparate collection of topics, time signatures, and tempi. “This scena is largely episodic,” writes Donald Burrows, “with a succession of short, apparently disconnected musical sections representing the disorder and lack of concentration in Orlando's mind”.[4] On a broad scale, the entire scene can be split into two sections: the first (bars 1-62) is an ever-changing accompagnato which moves from G to its dominant D, and the second (62-193) is a rondo, which alters the D to the relative minor of its F-major tonality (fig. 1).

Fig. 1/2: D major/minor permutation between G and F

The split major/minor treatment of this tonic/submedient D/d—anomalous for a baroque form—constitutes something of a linchpin for the tonal motion of this scene, the F sharp/natural creating a pole around which the tonal context radically shifts. As illustrated in figure 2, far more than bass motion, it is the descending upper voice-leading of g-f#-f that makes the establishment of F possible.

A textual reading of bars 1-62 supports the idea that the establishment of D is a pivotal point in this scene. Bars 1-30, which span Orlando's descent into madness from his first cry to the “Stygian monsters” to the end of his imaginary journey down the river Styx, are structured around  dominant motion (fig. 3). However, rather than being true dominants, the d-minor and a-minor tonicizations have had their thirds flattened. They are made minor. As illustrated by the cells shaded in grey which signal altered chords in figure 3, from whichever tonal centre bars 1-62 are approached, their progression defies being “explained away”. The consequences of this section's fluid approach to diatonic convention are twofold: an overarching “home” key cannot be applied to it, and the manifestation of major or minor modes cannot be predicted. Both of these perversions of convention are intrinsic to the depiction of Orlando's madness and gender.

Key	G	dm	am	gm	cm	Bb	G	F#	D
of G	I	v	ii	ii	iv
of D				iv	vii	bVI	IV	III	I
Of preceding tonicization	I	v	v	vii	iv	bII	VI	VII	VI

                        Fig. 3: Triadic functions within keys

In bars 14-15, Orlando gives voice to what could essentially be viewed as a facet of the opera's central dichotomy. Over a gradually descending chromatic bass, he sings, “I am now a spirit divided from myself”. The lament's quaver texture then breaks into sustained recitative accompaniment as he goes on: “I am a shadow, and this shadow now will sink itself into the gloomy realms of woe!”. This is the point at which his grip upon reality disintegrates, paving the way for his stunted, 5/8 metre vision of hell, described by Anthony Hicks as “notorious” in its unconventionality and by Charles Burney more contemporaneously “a division of time which can only be borne in such a situation” of “perturbation of intellect”.[5] In other words, while his grief in the face of Angelica's rejecting him in favour of Medoro's love is a catalyst for his breakdown, the essence of his madness lies in this “divided spirit”, which manifests itself as a division between his earthly body and spectral shadow.

In the context of a Castrato voice, the division between body and voice is compounded. Roger Freitas locates castrati in the middle-ground an early modern continuum of gender traced by Thomas Lacquer, which did not view male and female bodies as a binary dichotomy, but as different manifestations of the same.[6] Man was seen as the more perfect manifestation, not set aside by his sex organs, but by the “vital heat” received in the womb which was also viewed to effect a person's character and balance of humours. This “more quantitative than qualitative” “vertical axis of infinite gradations” is a configuration of gender that has been traced by Veronique Mottier back to antiquity in the writing of Galen in the 2^nd century AD, and would have been a considerably more obvious performative construct than gender is perceived to be by Western society at large today.[7] With tales of weak men lactating or strong women growing penises “populating [gender's] middle ground”, a society which viewed it in this light would have had no need for Judith Butler to inform it that biological sex was always already gender, or that it was just a “congealed” “style of the flesh”; while this view of  “masculinity-heat-virtue-perfection” versus “femininity-cold-depravity-imperfection” buttresses an overt hierarchy of misogyny, the subjects who inhabited it arguably had a great deal more autonomy of movement within gender than one might today.[8]

Paradoxically, it is precisely this freedom which leads Orlando to the crippling impassé of “Ah! stigie larve”. Zoroastro sets up Orlando's prevailing tension in Act I, Scene 1 when he bids him “leave Venus and follow Mars” to fulfil his military duty and abandon the pursuit of love. This is a statement that resonates with Wendy Heller's “useful formulation” that suggests that “effeminate men were simply those who had 'exchange[d] Mars for Venus'”.[9] As Freitas concludes from the writing of Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass, heterosexuality in the early modern period was deemed to be effeminating for men in the “zero-sum game” of gender, in which “men risked feminization when losing vital body heat, as they might during excessive amounts of sexual intercourse with cold female bodies and loss of liquids through ejaculation … too much of [women's cold, moist bodies] was thus considered dangerous for men”.[10] Freitas reports contemporary, anxiety-provoking beliefs in its physiognomy:

a man who succumbed too much to the pleasures of the flesh, whose existence revolved too much around women, was considered in danger of losing his masculine nature and even physical strength.[11]

Orlando's response—that Hercules seduced queen Omphale and Achilles disguised himself as a woman and both were still masculine heroes—betrays a naïve desire to cheat this “zero-sum game” of gender.[12] The immobilising effect of the choice which he is simultaneously too free to make and not free enough to reject or transcend constitutes what Slavoj Žižek would call an “extremely controlled subjectivity” and, crucially, “the result of this debilitating deadlock can only be an outburst of violence”.[13] The presentation of Orlando's madness here is one of “absolute and destructive freedom”.[14] Orlando simultaneously wishes to gain masculinity in military combat and to lose it in erotic encounters with women, and the immobility of this impossibility leads him to the violence of attempting to murder Angelica, the object of his desire.

A castrato's position at the centre of early modern gender's continuum compounds the perceived danger of eroticism because he is already a highly feminized man. With Freudian castration anxieties realised in him, Orlando's phallic attempt to stab Angelica represents an assertion of masculine ideals that he has already been prevented from embodying. The vocal utterance of his madness thus lends something to an implicitly feminine hysteria; his lust for women might have been viewed by a contemporary audience to lead to an excess of water, and a lack of reason.

Susan McClary locates femininized madness in a specifically baroque vocal context within the cyclic form of Monteverdi's Lamento della Nympha from the eighth book of madrigals. She writes that the Nymph's madness stems from the obsessive quality of her sexual desire, and is reflected in the madrigal's chaconne form: “an unvarying cycle of four bass notes that seem to progress rationally through the A-minor tetrachord, only to double back inevitably to starting position”.[15] “Ah! stigie larve” contains two such cyclical forms: what Hicks dubs the “haunting” rondo in bars 74-193 and the short chaconne which constitutes its first episode in bars 74-106. Like the Lamento della Nympha, Orlando's chaconne presents an “unvarying cycle”, here of four bars in alternating octaves, that “seem to progress rationally” by chromatic downward step from the established tonic (D) to its tonic (A), “only to double back inevitably to starting position” (fig. 4).[16] The text sung here, “Even in this realm of endless tears,/ Pity can awaken”, reflects a microcosm of Orlando's obsession, not just with Angelica (whom he is now imagining to be the goddess Prosperina) but with her tears. Feminine tears form the subject of the D-major rondo refrain sections which Orlando sings with “obsessive recurrence, establishing an anchor point in his battle for self-control” (“lovely eyes, do not weep”): the accompagnato in bars 55-62 which modulates from F sharp to what this essay refers to as the linchpin key of D before the rondo starts sets the words, “ah, but Prosperina weeps”.[17] Tears are not only an object manifestation of Angelica's suffering, but also wet. It is as if she is leaking the feminine sexuality that is denied Orlando, and, fetishistically, he turns his gaze upon this leakage again and again.

FIg. 4: Chromatically descending chaconne bass cycle

However, it is not Angelica on whom the audience's gaze is turned. As McClary suggests, as a “mad scene”, this is one of the “good bits”.[18] In this theatrical display, madness “is being exhibited not merely as ... some disorder, but also as a sexually titillating display”.[19] Such a reading of “Ah! stigie larve” is buttressed by the carnivalesque way in which varying dance topics come and go (see table in appendix), much like the harlequinade “commedia dell’arte succession of gestures” that Wye Allenbrook identifies in Mozart's Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 332.[20] Freitas has shown that the castrato body, by virtue of its middling position on the early modern gender continuum, was viewed as one frozen in boyhood.[21] Consequently, and according to contemporary mores, the boyish castrato is constituted an object of sexual desire—“feminine enough to attract a [heterosexual] man but not so much as to contaminate him” yet with a “graceful effeminate body” to which women were also “particularly attracted.[22] The gilded cage of the aural male gaze which McClary hears embodied in cyclic baroque forms to contain “titillating displays” of “mad women” thus presents a subject preserved in a pre-adolescent state and immobilized by violent insanity, brought forward for a voyeuristic audience's pleasure.

In spite of the evidence that castrati's bodies have constituted something of an erotic ideal, Freitas surveys a twentieth and twenty-first century tradition of “deflect[ing] attention away from castrato's physicality towards abstract concepts” of the voice.[23] He describes scholars, bolstered by Lacanian thought, writing of castrati in terms of lack and loss—as sexless, “hollow”, and “blank”—their bodies epitomizing the ultimate yet unattainable phallic fulfilment desire.[24] A particularly stark example of this is found in Roland Barthes' S/Z, in which Zambinella's castrato voice is the erotic substance with which Sarrasine falls in love, as opposed to his veiled body.[25] Barthes describes this as a  “strictly symbolic inversion” in which “sexual density abandons body and lodges in throat”. According to Freitas' reading, Barthes is suggesting that the castrato body is left hollow and neuter, while the voice is elevated to an “aural incarnation of the phallus”.[26]

As Orlando's “divided spirit” leads him to imagine himself a “shadowy body” that sinks into the underworld, it could be tempting to read his castrato voice as a "key" to the "pure vocal object"as Michel Poizat does.[27] This way of separating music from voice has been traced back to Platonist-Pythagorean cosmological ideas by Bruce W. Holsinger, who writes that it “contradictorily refuses to account for material foundation upon which its entire ontology rests: the human body”.[28]  In many ways, the premodern cosmological ideal of unsullied, bodiless music is a similar gesture to the “Lacanian jouissance at operatic passages” of which Freitas writes, most induced by the “instrumental style” of virtuosic singing popularized by the famous castrato Farinelli.[29] This is an attitude strikingly reified in musicology by Paul Henry Lang, who wrote that a castrato was “an instrument of prodigious versatility and perfection, but still a musical instrument and not a living character”.[30] The heavily melismatic passages heard, for instance, in bars 83-89 (fig. 5), bars 127-130 (fig. 6), and 145-152 (fig. 7) are virtuosic displays of vocal facility that bring this “instrumental” style of singing to the fore; it is even compounded by the accompaniment in such imitative antiphonal entries as those circled in figure 5, or in the repetitive unisons (another manifestation of Orlando's obsession)  exemplified in bars 34-36 (fig. 8). The voice in these snippets is ostensibly an instrument like any other; a tool receiving orders from an absent patriarchal composer.

Fig. 5:

Fig. 6:

Fig. 7: 

In light of the presence of this instrumental treatment of the castrato voice in the score of Orlando, it is worth turning to Joke Dame's reading of S/Z, which is slightly but crucially misrepresented by Freitas. He introduces her as one of the “range of scholars [who] have appropriated” Barthes' “idiosyncratic approach” as an “authority for viewing the castrato as 'void'”, citing Dame's suggestion that “the castrato’s virility, the phallus, has been displaced into his voice”.[31] However, Dame's intention is not to show that Barthes disembodies the castrato's vioce, but “denaturalizes sexual difference”.[32] As her title—“Unveiled Voices”—suggests, Dame seeks to expose the body and, like Zambinella, make explicit that the connection between voice and body (“castrated and castrater”) is not always as it seems: “there is more to the voice than simply pitch …. what you hear is not simply a certain pitch, you also hear a body. As Barthes would say, you especially hear a body.[33]

Amid the ostensibly mechanical, Carolyn Abbate hears a body. Writing of “irrational shrieks, soulless birdsong”, she locates both an automaton and a feminine body of violent hysteria in the Queen of the Night's excessive melisma in Mozart's The Magic Flute.[34] Abbate writes of the Queen, not just as an embodied woman, but as an “incarnation as musical voice, as chimerical being”—both body and automaton, she poses both a divided and a conquering figure, and it is in this intersection that her terrifying power, her violent sexual allure, resides. If the Orlando “mad scene's” pivot from D major as dominant to d minor as relative is heard in a context that integrates the castrato's presence as a chimerical one, this split major/minor condition (reinforced by the numerous diatonic alterations shaded grey in figure 3) is chimerical too. Burrows writes that if Orlando's libretto's intention was to glorify military heroism over love, “Handel's music subverts that intention”, and so the “mad scene's” otherwise incomprehensible, subversive tonal structure (fig. 2) is shown, like Orlando himself, to hang by an intersection: a voice and a body, either major of minor, to both an audience's “horror” and its “excitment”.[35]

Appendix

Bars	Section	Tonality	Time Signature	Tempo	Libretto
1-10	Introductory accompagnato	G (PAC from tutti bassi at end of preceding recit	Common	Moderato	“Ah Stygian monsters, villainous spectres,/ That now hide that faithless woman,/ Why do you not give her up to my wronged love and my just fury?”
10-16	Lament	(via chromatic descending bass) → viiø	Common	Andante	“Ah, miserable, and forsaken, that ingrate has killed me!/ I am now a spirit divided from myself”
16-22	Lament breaks down into recit.	→ viiø/d minor	“”	“”	“I am a shadow, and this shadow now will sink itself into the gloomy realms of woe!/ There is the Stygian boat, in spite of Caronte,/ I ride the waves, the black waves.”
22-30	(stunted 5/8 interjects common time recitative)	(via descending 5/8 sequence) d minor →a minor → g minor	5/8	Andante	“Here the smoking throne of Pluto,/ And the head of the god!”
30-48	Really slow gigue?	c minor	6/8	Andante	“Now Cerberus howls,/ And hideous furies scowl at me from every corner of the dead!”
48-55	Recit.	C → Bb → G	Common	Andante	“But the fury that torments me singly, where is he?/ That is Medoro!/ In Proserpina’s arms he sits, I wrest him from her.”
55-62	Accompagnato	F# → D	“”	Adagio	Ah Proserpina weeps?/ My fury lessens, since even in Hell, love sheds tears.”
	.	.
62-74	Ritornello (gavotte)	F	Cut Common	A tempo di Gavotta	“Lovely eyes, do not weep.”
74-106	Episode 1 (chaconne, 4x8-bar cycles)	d minor	3/4	Larghetto	“Even in this realm of endless tears,/ Pity can awaken.”
106-119	Ritornello (gavotte)	F	Cut Common	A tempo di Gavotta	“Lovely eyes, do not weep.”
119-168	Episode 2	g minor → F → C → E → A → a minor	“”	“”	“But yes, weep, lovely eyes, weep on!/ For lovely as you are, my heart is as hard as diamond now, and nothing will calm my fury.”
168-177	Ritornello (gavotte)	F	“”	(often performed with accel.)	“Yes, weep, lovely eyes, weep on!”
177-193	Tutti coda	“”	“”	“”	[Instrumental]

Bibliography

Abbate, Carolyn. In Search of Opera. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Allanbrook, Wye. “Theorizing the Comic Surface," in Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the      History of Music Theory and Literature for the 21st Century, ed. Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathisen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 195-216.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Burrows, Donald. Handel. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Dame, Joke. “Unveiled Voices” in Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, Gary      Thomas (New York : Taylor & Francis Routledge. 2006), 139-154.

Freitas, Roger. "The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato".             The Journal of Musicology, 2003, Vol.20(2), pp.196-249.

Handel, George Frideric. “Orlando” HWV 31 in Georg Friedrich Händels Werke Band 82 ed.      Friedrich Chrysander (Leipzig: Deutsche Händelgesellschaft, 1881).

Hiley, David. 2001. “Quintuple Metre”. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second           edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, vol. 20:682–83. London: Macmillan        Publishers.

Anthony Hicks. "Orlando (ii)." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Grove Music Online. Oxford           Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed October 17, 2015,           http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O903662.

Holsinger, Bruce W. Music, body, and desire in medieval culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer             (Stanford University Press, 2001).

McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Minnesota Press,             2002).

Mottier, Veroniqe. Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Žižek, Slavoj. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (Zeitgeist Films, 2012).

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[1]McClary 2002, 80.

[2] Ibid, 80.

[3] Ibid, 81.

[4] Burrows 1994, 217.

[5] Burney, Charles 1789, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4:364 cited in Hiley, 2015; Hicks, 2015.

[6] Freitas 2003, 203.

[7] Ibid, 204; ibid, 203; Mottier 2008, 7.

[8] Freitas 2003, 203; Butler 1990, 145; ibid, 190; Freitas 2003, 206.

[9] Heller, Wendy, “Chastity, Heroism, and Allure”, 396 in ibid, 206.

[10] Mottier 2008, 6.

[11] Ibid, 205.

[12] Ibid, 237.

[13] Žižek 2012.

[14] Doerner, Klaus, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie, 1981 in McClary, 83.

[15] McClary 2002, 87.

[16] Hicks 2015; McClary 2002, 87.

[17] Burrows 1994, 217.

[18] McClary 1992, 80.

[19] Ibid, 85.

[20] Allanbrook 2002, 195-6.

[21] Freitas 2003, 204.

[22] Ibid, 212; Chard, Chloe, “Effeminacy”, 152 in ibid, 213.

[23] Ibid, 198.

[24] Ibid, 199.

[25] Barthes,

[26] Freitas 2003, 200.

[27] Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner 1993, 53 in Freitas 2003, 200.

[28] Holsinger 2001, 6.

[29] Freitas 2003, 200; ibid, 198.

[30] Paul Henry Lang, George Frederic Handel 1966, 170 in Dame 2006, 143.

[31] Ibid, 199; ibid, 200; ibid, 199.

[32] Dame 2006, 141.

[33] Ibid, 143.

[34] Abbate 1991, 69.

[35] Burrows 1994, 218; Dame 2006, 139.