Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi's Dramatic Music

Author(s): Susan McClary

Source: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Nov., 1989), pp. 203-223
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Cambridge Opera Journal, 1, 3, 203-23

Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's

dramatic music
SUSAN McCLARY

One of the great accomplishments of seventeenth-century

lopment of a vocabulary by means of which dramatic ch
could be delineated in music. The techniques for emotional a
tion we now take for granted are not, in fact, natural or
deliberately formulated during this period for the purp
Monteverdi's descriptions of how he invented the semiot
finta pazza Licori or of war for the Combattimento di
reveal how very self-consciously he designed methods for 'r
states.1
The achievements of the stile rappresentativo made possible most of the musical
forms with which we still live today: not only the dramatic genres of opera,
oratorio and cantata, but also instrumental music, which is dependent on the
tonality and semiotic codes born on the seventeenth-century stage. Indeed,
we are so immersed in these and other cultural forms of the early modern era
that only recently have their original social purposes been examined critically.
Studies such as Jose Antonio Maravall's Culture of the Baroque, Jacques Attali's
Noise and Lorenzo Bianconi's Music in the Seventeenth Century have begun
to lay bare the post-Renaissance politics of 'representation' and to demonstrate
how opera and other public spectacles of the seventeenth century served as
sites for struggles over power. For if audiences can be made to believe that
what is presented on stage is literally the re-presentation of reality itself, then
questions of what gets represented, how and by whom become vital political
concerns to rulers and ruled alike.2
To be sure, the ideological struggles Maravall, Attali and Bianconi have in
mind are those of the public sphere: those of the Counter Reformation, the
disintegrating courts of northern Italy or the rise of the absolutist state. But
For passages concerning Licori, see Claudio Monteverdi, The Letters of Claudio
Monteverdi, trans. Denis Stevens (Cambridge, 1980), 315, 318, 320, 335-6; concerning
Combattimento, see the foreword to his Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (Venice, 1638),
trans. Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), 413-15.
2 Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans.
Terry Cochran (Minneapolis, 1986);Jacques Attali, Noise, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis, 1985), esp. 46-86; and Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century,
trans. David Bryant (Cambridge, 1987). Bianconi states: 'Attribute of authority,
pedagogical requisite of the ruling classes, instrument of propaganda and persuasion: these
are the three central features of seventeenth-century music as an agent of "publicity"'
(p. 65). See also Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's
Genres (New York, 1986).
For information directly concerned with Monteverdi's patronage at the Gonzaga court

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204 Susan McClary

the crisis of authority in the seventeenth century was not confined to the realm
of princes and popes: it also impinged on the most intimate dimensions of
private life. Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality marks the seventeenth century
as a pivotal moment when the West started to alter radically its attitudes towards
and treatment of human erotic behaviour. He writes: 'Since the end of the
sixteenth century, the "putting into discourse of sex", far from undergoing
a process of restriction, on the contrary has been subjected to a mechanism
of increasing incitement.'3 As Foucault goes on to demonstrate, even if such
public discourses are intended to control and contain sexuality, the obsession
always to talk - or sing - about sex also has the effect of continually stirring
libidinal interests. To a greater extent than ever before, gender and sexuality
become central concerns of Western culture in the seventeenth century, and
the new public arts all develop techniques for arousing and manipulating desire,
for 'hooking' the spectator. Witness, for example, the brand of tonality that
emerges at this time: a surefire method for inciting and channelling expectations
which easily supplants the less coercive procedures of modality.4
In staged 'representations' of the social world, the identification of characters
as either male or female is fundamental. The seventeenth-century composer
writing dramatic music immediately confronted the problem of gender construc-
tion - how to depict men and women in the medium of music. The concept
of 'construction' is important here, for while the sex of an individual is a biologi-
cal given, gender and sexuality are socially organised: their forms (ranges of
proper behaviours, appearances, duties) differ significantly in accordance with
time, place or class.5
It may be possible to trace some of the musical signs for 'masculinity' or
'femininity' that are displayed in opera back to earlier genres such as the madrigal.
Erotic desire undeniably ranks among the central themes of Italian madrigals,
and vivid musical images simulating longing, frustration or fulfilment occur
in abundance in this repertory. But such musical images of desire need not
be marked as gender-specific. Because madrigal texts typically speak from the
and its political dimensions, see lain Fenlon, 'The Mantuan Stage Works', in The New
Monteverdi Companion, ed. Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (London, 1985), 251-87.
For a perceptive theoretical model through which to address these concerns, see Pierre
Bourdieu, 'The Production of Belief: Contributions to an Economy of Symbolic Goods',
trans. Richard Nice, in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins
etal. (London, 1986), 131-63.
3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York, 1980), 12. For a discussion of the 'putting into discourse of sex' for political
purposes in Elizabethan England, see Tennenhouse, Power on Display, 17-71.
4 For discussions of tonality in these terms, see my 'The Transition from Modal to Tonal
Organization in the Works of Monteverdi', Ph.D. diss. (Harvard, 1976); 'The Rise and
Fall of the Teleological Model in Western Music', The Paradigm Exchange II
(Minneapolis, 1987), 26-31; and 'The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year',
in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard
Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge, 1987), especially 21-3.
5 See, for instance, Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The
Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1981); Ian Maclean, The
Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, 1980); and Denise Riley, 'Am I That Name?':
Feminism and the Category of'Women' in History (Minneapolis, 1988).

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 205

masculine subject position that is assumed as normative in Western culture,

they are usually treated as neutral or undifferentiated with respect to gender.
However, there are texts - especially those drawn from Guarini or Tasso -
that are understood to be female utterances, and some musical settings of these
seem subtly coded as 'feminine'.6 Still, the convention of setting texts as mixed-
voiced polyphony tends to make the 'realistic' representation of gendered indivi-
duals a lesser priority in the madrigal than in opera. Music drama provides
the incentive for the full-scale entry of gender construction into music. Opera
emerges and continues to function as one of the principal discourses within
which gender and sexuality are publicly delineated - and are at the same time
celebrated, contested and constrained.7
Not surprisingly, musical delineations of 'the feminine' or 'the masculine'
in early opera were shaped by attitudes prevalent in the societies in which the
composers lived. And those delineations of gender in turn participated in social
formation by providing public models of how men are, how women are - much
as film, television and popular music do today. Some of these early gendered
types in music have survived along with the attitudes that first gave them voice,
and are recognised relatively easily by present-day listeners. But many of the
ways in which gender is construed in this music are alien to us and can be
recovered only if we know something of the historical context within which
they were developed. This may seem counter-intuitive, since many of us are
still inclined to believe in the immutability of gender and sexuality. But recent
research is beginning to establish that even certain fundamental concepts con-
cerning sexuality have changed radically since the seventeenth century, making
it extremely treacherous for us today to depend on what we might assume
to be universal experiences of the transhistorical body.
To give an example, Stephen Greenblatt argues that the dynamic energy char-
acteristic of Shakespeare's erotic dialogues is predicated on a belief that was
then prevalent even in medicine and science: namely, that for purposes of reproduc-
tion, both male and female partners had to be aroused to the point of ejaculation.8
If the woman was not brought to such a state of ardour that she emitted her

6 See for instance Monteverdi's 'Vattene pur crudel' (Book III), with its fierce depiction
of feminine rage; 'Io mi son giovinetta' (Book IV), with its cute, mincing beginning (sung
only by the women); or 'O Mirtillo' (Book V), with its shy, hesitant opening and
subsequent emotional outburst. Very little work has been done on the musical articulation
of sexual desire in Renaissance repertories, perhaps because studies of that music tend
to concentrate on theoretical issues such as modal identity, musicaficta or signs of emerging
tonal awareness, rather than on the ways modes were used to create particular kinds of
images. See, however, 'The Transition' (n. 4). I am at present writing a book - Power
and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Music- that includes an examination of musical
constructions of the erotic in the madrigal.
7 For a provocative discussion of how the standard opera repertory organises gender and
sexuality, see Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing
(Minneapolis, 1988).
8 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley, 1988), 66-93. See also Thomas
Laqueur, 'Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology',
Representations, 14 (1986), 1-41; and Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and
Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, 1988).

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206 Susan McClary

'seed', conception was thwarted - thus the emphasis in many sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century cultural documents on feminine desire and mutual arousal.
Greenblatt suggests that the rapid repartee in Shakespeare's comedies is meant
to simulate this all-important 'friction to heat'. He also notes that when science
discovered that feminine arousal served no reproductive purpose, cultural forms
silenced not only the necessity but finally even the possibility of desire in the
'normal' female. This discussion would seem to shed light on the erotic friction
celebrated in the trio texture so beloved by seventeenth-century composers
from Monteverdi to Corelli - trios in which two equal voices rub up against
each other, pressing into dissonances that achingly resolve only into yet other
knots, reaching satiety only at conclusions. This interactive texture (and its
attendant metaphors) is largely displaced in music after the seventeenth century
by individual, narrative monologues.
Regardless of whether or not they happen to survive, all modes of gender-
encoding are social constructs rather than universals. As such they warrant
historical investigation. The area of research I am describing is vast and would
demand many book-length studies to do it justice. This article will focus on
one issue: the ways gender is organised in early opera with respect to rhetoric
and, by extension, to social power.

It has long been recognised that rhetorical virtuosity was one of the central
concerns of early monody. But rhetoric was cultivated for purposes far more
prestigious than the arts in Monteverdi's time. As Gary Tomlinson has demon-
strated, sixteenth-century society regarded rhetorical skill as indispensable for
effective participation in public affairs: 'Behind the humanist exaltation of oratori-
cal persuasion lay a recognition of the passions as dynamic forces directing
human thought and action, and a felt need to control and exploit these forces.'9
Given the personal and political power ascribed to rhetorical prowess, it is
not surprising that Renaissance humanists sought to regulate who was to have
access to such skills, and thus the 'woman question' arose in many humanist
treatises on behaviour and education.10 Attitudes concerning women and
9 Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1987), 7.
10 For extensive documentation concerning women's rhetorical training and their access to
cultural production, see Joan Kelly-Gadol, 'Did Women Have a Renaissance?', in
Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz
(Boston, 1977), 137-64; Patricia H. Labalme, ed., Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of
the European Past (New York, 1980). For information directly concerning music, see also
the following essays in Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, eds., Women Making Music: The
Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950 (Urbana, 1986): Howard M. Brown, 'Women Singers
and Women's Songs in Fifteenth-Century Italy', 62-89; Anthony Newcomb, 'Courtesans,
Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy', 90-115;
and Jane Bowers, 'The Emergence of Women Composers in Italy, 1566-1700', 116-61.
For more on the 'woman question' in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, see
Joan Kelly, 'Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle desfemmes, 1400-1789', in Women,
History and Theory: The Essays of oan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 65-109; and Riley (see
n. 5), 25-35.

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 207

rhetoric were divided. On the one hand, St Paul's injunction that women remain
silent still informed etiquette. Bembo declared that under no circumstances were
women to be trained in rhetoric. On the other hand, Castiglione advocated
the same humanist education for female as for male children - although he
also made it clear that males developed rhetorical skills in order to operate
effectively in the public realm, while females were to exercise their abilities
in order to enhance their charm in the private sphere.11
Rhetoric in the mouth of a woman was understood as a different phenomenon
from that issuing from a man. A man skilled in oratory was powerful, effective
in imposing his will in society at large. A woman's rhetoric was usually under-
stood as seduction, as a manifestation not of intellectual but of sexual power.12
So pervasive were the constraints on feminine utterance in the public sphere
that even those few women who exercised political power had to cultivate images
that made their speech socially acceptable: Elizabeth became 'the Virgin Queen'
and Catherine de' Medici identified herself in official iconography as Artemis.13
In essence, both women had to disavow or elaborately redefine their sexualities
in order to secure credibility and voice.
There are many fine musicological studies that analyse the devices used to
heighten the texts of characters - male and female - in early music drama.
But most do not differentiate according to gender or consider portrayals up
against the contemporary social apparatus that would tend to privilege male
utterances and to silence women. However, even a cursory survey of the ways
the issues of gender, speech and power intersect in early opera raises many
questions about the politics of representation in the early seventeenth century.
For despite the fact that aristocratic patrons had extensive control over the
subject matter of their entertainments, the works themselves often appear -
at least at first glance - to undercut assumed social hierarchies and call into
question the authority of patriarchy and nobility. The remainder of this article
examines the ways in which Monteverdi deals with the rhetorical options avail-
able to male and female characters in his operas.

l See Brown, 'Women Singers', 62-7; and Ann Rosalind Jones, 'City Women and Their
Audiences: Louise Labe and Veronica Franco', in Rewriting the Renaissance: The
Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson,
Maureen Quilligan and Nancy I. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), 299-301.
12 For a discussion of how this attitude informed the phenomenon of the female writer of
the Renaissance, see Jones, 'City Women', 299-316. See also my discussion of Poppea
on pp. 218-19 below. This attitude has persisted in Western culture. See Sandra M. Gilbert
and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979), especially Part I, 3-104.
13 For an examination of Catherine's imagery, see 'Catherine de' Medici as Artemisia:
Figuring the Powerful Widow', Rewriting the Renaissance, 227-41. For Elizabeth's
imagery, see Louis A. Montrose, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies
of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form', Rewriting the Renaissance, 65-87.
However, the fact that England's monarch during the reign of Elizabeth was female
strongly influenced the constructions of femininity and sexuality in the arts developed
under her patronage. See Tennenhouse (n. 2), 17-71.

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208 Susan McClary

More than most subsequent operas, L'Orfeo appears to reproduce the stable
Renaissance world. It includes instances of the old-fashioned musical genres
characteristic of court entertainments; its formal structure is organised in self-
contained, ultimately static symmetries and palindromes; and its themes are
easily recognised as humanist. As we might expect, it also re-inscribes, for
the most part, traditional hierarchies of authority: mortal women defer to men
and the shepherds to their 'semi-god'. Likewise Orfeo submits - although some-
what more ambivalently - to the deities who ground this imaginary universe.
How does rhetoric operate within this stable order?
Orfeo is, of course, the quintessential rhetorician of mythology and of early
music drama. His eloquence was able to sway the passions of humans and
gods alike. Writing music for such a character was far more difficult than simply
asserting that Orfeo had such powers: Monteverdi was faced with the task of
actually moving the passions of listeners, otherwise the representation would
have proved hollow. He created two kinds of rhetoric - two discursive practices
- for Orfeo, both of which continue to resonate (though in different ways)
in subsequent operas.
The first I will call the rhetoric of seduction - a process of artificially arousing
expectations and then wilfully channelling the desires of listeners. The sexy,
arrogant, charismatic Orfeo is best illustrated by his first utterance - the wedding
song 'Rosa del ciel'. There are three sections to this oration, each with a different
rhetorical strategy. In the opening section, Orfeo commands that the sun stand
still to listen to him as he spins his virtuosic apostrophe out over a single chord
(Ex. la). Modern listeners and performers are accustomed to similar recitations
over sustained bass notes in later recitativo secco, and thus the power of Monte-
verdi's strategy may be lost on us. Monteverdi's contemporaries were used
to modal syntax, in which the melodic line carried the relevant information
and in which the bass usually supported the mode-bearing melodic pitches on a
one-to-one basis. 14 Underlying Orfeo's opening strain is one of the most familiar
and most predictable progressions for that time: the generating modal line
initiates a descent through the G-dorian diapente from the fifth degree to the
mediant and is harmonised in the strongest fashion available (Ex. lb). Yet instead
of simply singing that modal line as his melody (as might be the case in a
14 The theoretical discussions that follow are based on my 'Transition' (n. 4). Orfeo's
headstrong impetuousness and Euridice's reticence do not exist in the notes per se, but
in the qualities of motion indicated by the designated pitches up against particular norms.
Thus understanding the syntactical norms and expectations of this music affects critically
the ways in which one perceives compositional strategies and, consequently, performance
choices.
The reductions in the examples may resemble Schenkerian graphs, but they represent
the linear modal processes that guarantee the coherence of the passages in question. These
pieces are not tonally conceived (except for a few moments prolonged by cadential
harmonies, such as the conclusion of Ex. 1); yet the strategy of implying long-term goals,
persuading the listener to desire those promised goals, and manipulating expectations in
the process of attaining the goals is crucial to the emergence of common-practice-period
tonality.

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 209

madrigal or a Caccini monody), Orfeo embellishes its first element to an extra-

ordinary degree, given the expectations of the day. Listeners (including Apollo
- the sun) must wait until he is ready to move on before the syntactical progres-
sion may proceed. We are instilled with a longing to hear motion, yet dazzled
by the audacity and control with which he stretches out ... and out ... his
initial appeal.15
The second section teases us - repeatedly moving purposefully through the
standard Romanesca progression towards the final, g (Ex. 2a). Twice the listener
is encouraged to expect the promised resolution, and twice - after tricking us
into investing libidinally in hearing that final - Orfeo interrupts the descent
on the penultimate pitch (Ex. 2b). What occurs in the rarified, suspended anima-
tion that follows the ruptures is extremely significant. His initial, self-
consciously Petrarchan figures ('Fu ben felice il giorno' and 'e piu felice l'hora'
invoke Petrarch's ecstatic sonnet 'Benedetto sia '1 giorno, e '1 mese, e l'anno')
are sung with the confidence we might expect of the orator who sang the opening
section. But when he approaches the source of his happiness - Euridice and
her responses to his sighs - his forthrightness is sidetracked by Eros. Gradually
that moment of rupture on a becomes the pivot to another pitch centre that
lies deep within his modal ambitus: d. After the second interruption deflects
him towards d, he submits to this alternate reality - the site where he abandons
his G-dorian orientation to join with Euridice - through an elaborate cadential
confirmation of d. He thus delivers a different final from the one promised,
but he does it so compellingly (and for such agreeably sentimental reasons)
that the listener cannot object. We are seduced along with him as he reports
this crucial event through the stammering resimulation in music of his desire-
laden frisson.

15 Many of Monteverdi's and Striggio's rhetorical strategies are indebted to a venerable legacy
of devices and tropes developed in literature. For a discussion of this literary tradition,
see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard
R. Trask (Princeton, 1967). For two seventeenth-century attempts at borrowing rhetorical
terminology for the purposes of music theory, see Joachim Burmeister, Musica poetica
(1606; Kassel, 1955), and Christoph Bernhard, 'The Treatises of Christoph Bernhard',
trans. Walter Hilse, The Music Forum, 3 (1973), 31-196. Claude Palisca discusses
Burmeister's rhetorical theory and offers an analytic demonstration in 'Ut oratoria musica:
The Rhetorical Basis of Musical Mannerism', in The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. F. W.
Robinson and Stephen Nichols (Hanover, N.H., 1972), 37-65.
Because I am concerned with indicating how the music itself creates its rhetorical effects,
I will not burden the discussion with Latin literary designations or correspondences.
However, Orfeo's opening here might be fruitfully compared with the rhetorically dazzling
opening of Milton's Paradise Lost (discussed briefly in Curtius, 243-4). Just as Monteverdi
launches an extraordinarily prolonged 'upbeat' that is released finally on the word 'Dimmi'
(tell me), so Milton too directs all the energy of this passage - a synopsis of the entire
Christian history of humankind - towards 'Sing'. In both instances the listener is swept
up in an onrushing flow towards the suspended outcome.
The sexual connotations of such musical devices seem at least implicitly recognised by
Joseph Kerman, 'Orpheus: The Neoclassic Vision', Claudio Monteverdi: 'Orfeo', ed. John
Whenham (Cambridge, 1986), 129: 'Monteverdi met this ideal with a perfect genius for
declamation [.. .] And to whip the recitative line into passion, he harrowed every available
musical means for tension. Declamation guided him to sudden halts and spurting cascades
in rhythm, and to precipitous, intense rises and falls in melodic line.'

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210 Susan McClary
Orfeo

- I r" r- r '' .F. . 7 . .r r-

Ro - sa del ciel vi - ta del mon - do e deg-na Pro-le di lui

fb,. _ J cJ
31b~_:_ J -_,r
- _ _J :
(+- - -) J)' ,, J P p
che l'u - ni - ver - so af-fre - na Sol che'l tut - to cir- con- di e'l tut - to

9: o . -.__ .jo _ o_

b f r *7 af f f ' r r
mi - ri Da gli stel- lan - ti gi - ri Dim - mi ve

(4J _ J J -' !r

f=^r f ' r f
I< -de - stu mai Di me piiu lie - to e for -tu - na - toA-man -te

:': ' r Pb r r
Rosa del ciel vita del mondo
Prole di lui che l'universo af
Sol che '1 tutto circondi e '1 t
Da gli stellanti giri fr
Dimmi vedestii mai tell me, did you ever see
Di me piu lieto e fortunato Amante? a happier, more fortunate lover than me?

Ex. la: 'Rosa del ciel', section 1. Note: Examples transcribed from the edition p
in 1615 in Venice

5) b 3lI

Ex. lb: Syntactical reduction

The third section begins verbally as though it were b

a rhetorical triad (felice, piu felice, felicissimo), but it
as distinctly new. It both absorbs the deferred energy o
progressions and serves as a final push for the caden

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 211

5 4 3 2 1

-,9 1 2Z1I

10 4- a t 0 II

Ex. 2a: Syntactical reduction (Romanesca)

, Orfeo

Fu ben fe- li - ce il gior- no Mio ben che pria ti vi

(+-: - - a--v A J J 1 X 7-

< -di E pii fe- li - ce l'ho- ra Che per te so - spi-

oi:j : -Xo - si-Ar t7 -

<? - ra -i Poi ch'al mio so - spi- rar tu_ so -spi - ra - sti

. . :-.::! :.-: - J J __ . vJ F

Fu ben felice il giorno Happy was the day,

Mio ben che pria ti vidi my love, when first I saw you,
E piu felice l'hora and happier still the hour
Che per te sospirai when I sighed for you,
Poi ch'al mio sospirar tu sospirasti for to my sighs you also sighed;

Ex. 2b: 'Rosa del ciel', section 2

remains G-dorian (Ex. 3a), though this becomes clear only with the re-establish-
ment of the Romanesca-based progressions beginning at 'Se tanti cori havessi'.
Instead of moving methodically towards g as in earlier instances, in this section
the progression rushes impulsively, exuberantly through the whole cycle (Ex.
3b). Orfeo pauses only once (at 'tutti colmi sarieno') and, as he does so, we
learn how truly manipulated we are: we hang on his every pitch as though
he constructed reality for us - which indeed he does. Once again at the last
moment he surrenders his own final (g) for an unexpected, dramatic yet some-
what self-effacing conclusion on d, thus opening the way to Euridice's answer.
The extraordinary difference between the modes of rhetoric traditionally avail-
able to men and to women is evident in Euridice's reply. As we shall see in

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212 Susan McClary

A A A h A A A A A

5 4 5 5 4 3 4 3 2 (d)

(ib ? . |
(9 b J G
Ex. 3a: Reduction

the examples of Proserpina and Poppea, it is feasible for female characters to

be rhetorically skilled; but it is significant that both of these counter-examples
are mature, experienced women. Euridice is an untouched maiden. If her speech
were too compelling, her innocence might well come into question (how did
she learn to manipulate - or even to express - desire?). The librettist, Striggio,
already creates a kind of speaking void of Euridice, as she begins haltingly
with 'I cannot say', then tells Orfeo her heart is with him and he must look
to himself for her answers.16
Monteverdi has the difficult task of creating music for this moment that is
lovely yet self-deprecating, that lacks rhetorical force but charms us all the
more for that lack. He uses several rhetorical devices towards this end (Ex.
4). Whereas Orfeo's speech is intensely teleological, Euridice finds it difficult
to move directly towards a goal without apologising. Her very first, forthright
move from d" to a' is immediately qualified by a move to g#'. She makes her
linear descent (a' to d') seem erratic by establishing tiny unexpected tonics
here and there - on a', c" and g'; yet she does finally reach out and match
Orfeo's pledge on d'. She backs away immediately, however, as if afraid she
has been too forward. Her last phrase is even ambivalent with respect to its
own final: if d' is still her final, then she returns to the equivocal species of
fourth (d"-a') for her conclusion and hovers indecisively on the fifth degree.
If, however, G-dorian can still be heard as organising the entire exchange of
vows (with Euridice's reply simply elaborating the intimate domain Orfeo estab-
lished and circumscribed for this purpose), then this conclusion may be heard
as lingering shyly on the penultimate second degree to g', hesitating to state
the bottom-line tonic. In any case, this bottom line is cheerfully supplied for
her by the chorus, which leaps in with its boisterous 'Lasciate i monti' to seal
the marriage contract in G major.
I am not suggesting that Monteverdi wrote inferior music for Euridice, still
less that he thought of women as inferior. But his musical construction of
'maidenhood' is informed by what his audience would expect to hear as the

16 This figure of the exchange of hearts between lovers is a convention of lyric verse and
romance narratives since medieval times. It is significant here that Euridice alone testifies
to this condition. A similar kind of speaking void can be found in Mimi's self-deprecating
'Mi chiamano Mimi' in Puccini's La boheme. See the discussion in Arthur Groos and
Roger Parker, La boheme (Cambridge, 1986), 71-3.

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 Orfeo

Fe - li - cis - si - mo il pun - to Che la can - di- da ma - no Pe

bhJ _ _ _ _ i _J J
gno di pu - ra fe - de a me por-ge - te

(:bJ J J J J J J
^k i r"?- r" -^LJ 1 ~ _ h_
Se tan - ti co - riha- ves - si Quant' oc chiha'l ciel e

2b6J J f r
($b^ r r: 7~ r- p J
- ter - no e quan - te chio - me Han que - sti col - li a

4):b : J J f f

I ' J r r r
me - ni il ver - de mag - gio Tut - ti col - mi sa

:9 f r f

4b^ J rr
- rie - no e tra- boc-can - ti Di quel pia-cer ch'og - gi mi fa con-ten- to
p
(b J Jj. . J 1J .J I
Feliscissimo il punto Happiest the moment
Che la candida mano when your white hand
Pegno di pura fede a me porgete pledge of pure faith, you give to me.
Se tanti cori havessi If I had as many hearts
Quant' occhi ha '1 ciel eterno as the eternal heaven has eyes
e quante chiome and these pleasant hills
Han questi colli ameni il verde maggio leaves in verdant May,
Tutti colmi sarieno e traboccanti all of them would be full and
Di quel piacer ch'oggi mi fa contento with this joy that today make
Ex. 3b: 'Rosa del ciel', section 3. 'There is a pitch missing here in the
This is the solution provided in the Malipiero edition

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214 Susan McClary

5 4 3 2 1 5 * (g;3 2 I)

(^ -. .> . I - 0 ~ <- J,> 3J 1 -

(~~~~~~~~~-- ??~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~r , 1, P - v_-

Chiedilo
Chiedilo (i or v?) Lasciate

Ex. 4a: Reduction

I
r n p- J r J J--F
mi a Che non ho me - co il co - -re Ma

9 r J-_J J ?f F

( J J j -j 'j. J> Ji ^^ f--j _J :

te - co stas - si in corn - pa- gnia d'a - mo - re Chie- di -lo

1 r J J J j . J f gf
(+Tr F P 4I JJ -JfJ'- f - - rF
dun-que A lui_ s'in- ten - der bra - mi Quan - to lie - to gio- i - sea e quan- to t'a

( ": f J r J J J ; J J .-
Io non diro qual sia I cannot say how great
my joy is, Orfeo, at your joy,
Nel tuo gioir Orfeo la gioia mia
Che non ho meco il core for I do not have my heart with me,
Ma teco stassi in compagnia d'amore
but it remains with you together with my
Chiedilo dunque a lui s'intender brami
ask it then if you desire to hear
Quanto lieto gioisca e quantohowt'ami
happy it is and how much it loves y

Ex. 4b: 'Io non dirb'

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 215

utterance of a young girl.17 This tiny speech, painstakingly composed out of

the available rhetorical devices to produce anti-rhetoric, might well have been
more difficult to accomplish than the flamboyant oratory of the Orfeo character.
The rhetoric of seduction is also practised by a female character in L'Orfeo:
Proserpina, who intercedes with her consort Plutone as an advocate for Orfeo's
case. The text of her intercession seeks very frankly to arouse and manipulate
Plutone's desire, as she recalls her own courtship and the joy of their marriage
bed. She even echoes the Petrarch-inspired 'fu ben felice il giorno - e piu felice
- felicissimo' sequence of Orfeo's early vow. The music Monteverdi gives her
closely resembles that of Orfeo's wedding song, as she likewise prolongs her
recitations dramatically over suspended basses or fuels her arguments through
the logic of Romanesca-type progressions. Three circumstances legitimise Pro-
serpina's rhetorical skill: first, she is communicating with her own spouse -
a situation in which sexual pleasure is socially condoned; second, her rhetoric
is in the service of Orfeo - her manipulation is for a worthy cause; and third,
she appeals directly to Plutone, whose replies (at once legalistic in that he tends
to sing the bass, and yet arbitrary in that his movements are difficult to predict)
make it clear that he maintains patriarchal authority. He yields to Proserpina's
wishes, though by his own choice and for his own interests. However, despite
the obviously patriarchal relationship (and ignoring for the moment the circum-
stances that cause Proserpina to be in Hades in the first place), this scene is
unusual: the mutual and explicit acknowledgment in music by a man and a
woman of sexual desire and pleasure untainted by a sense of shame or impending
punishment.
The other form of rhetoric displayed by Orfeo is the lament: his expressions
of pathos following Euridice's two deaths (the end of Act II and most of Act
V). Laments are typically performed in traditional societies by women, and
they are often ritual rather than personal. Orfeo unwittingly participates in
a female genre - and without the protective shield of ritual. In his erratic out-
bursts, he frequently seems to lose control of his own speech, and this turns
out to be crucial. For if the glory of opera is its ability to give the illusion
of depth to characters - to deliver both the verbal text and an additional dimen-
sion that inflects the text affectively - then a great deal depends on who seems
to be wielding that second dimension.
When Orfeo is operating as a rhetorician (at the beginning of his wedding
song, in his appeal to Caronte, 'Possente spirto', etc.), he appears to direct
the musical flow himself. But in the laments it is Monteverdi rather than the

17 For another reading of this passage, see Robert Donington's treatment of Euridice's vow
in 'Monteverdi's First Opera', The Monteverdi Companion, ed. Denis Arnold and Nigel
Fortune (New York, 1972), 263-4. Donington rightly argues that the pitch-centre A is
associated in the opera with death, and he thus sees in Euridice's own utterances the
foreshadowing of her doom. I accept this argument concerning long-term symbolism, but
would interpret the details of Euridice's speech on the more local and immediate level
in which her gendered identity is delineated, for Monteverdi here creates a perfect musical
instance of the 'enclosed' woman. See Peter Stallybrass, 'Patriarchal Territories: The Body
Enclosed', Rewriting the Renaissance (n. 11), 123-42.

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216 Susan McClary

orator who constructs the signs of Orfeo's temporary insanity - the disorientat-
ing fluctuations in modal centre, the rapid changes in rate of declamation, the
discontinuous melodic lines, and so on. Madness, like gender and sexuality,
is socially organised, and definitions of what it means to be mad vary greatly
with respect to time, place, class and especially gender.18 Orfeo's version of
madness is defined precisely in opposition to his former rhetorical prowess.
His speech remains affectively heightened, but now the gestures that once per-
suaded us have become unglued from their sustaining logic. He can no longer
assemble those shards and fragments rationally, and the illusion of secure reality
his oratory had previously created is literally deconstructed before our ears.
Instead of wilfully seducing the audience, Orfeo's involuntary utterances
appeal to the pity of the listener, all the more because they seem 'authentic',
not manufactured for purposes of manipulation. These anguished outbursts,
not his calculated seductions, move the gods finally to relent, though at consider-
able cost: in having his innermost thoughts exhibited as public spectacle, Orfeo
is rendered vulnerable, even impotent. The audience has auditory mastery over
him, as it is permitted to 'eavesdrop' on his private grief; likewise the provisional
nature of his powers - his dependence on aristocratic liberality - is laid bare.
The traditional hierarchy of class authority may be preserved and reinforced,
but Orfeo's masculine authority is severely threatened.
If the audience has invested too much in Orfeo's charisma, these sections
- brilliant as they are - are bound to provoke discomfort.19 Catherine Clement
argues that, in later opera, men who lose control and display their pain are
marked as somehow feminine, and are often subjected to fates similar to those
of tragic heroines:

But now I begin to remember hearing figures of betrayed, wounded men; men who
have women's troubles happen to them; men who have the status of Eve, as if they
had lost their innate Adam. These men die like heroines; down on the ground they
cry and moan, they lament. And like heroines they are surrounded by real men, veritable
Adams who have cast them down. They partake of femininity: excluded, marked by
some initial strangeness, they are doomed to their undoing.20

18 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady:
Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York, 1985); and Klaus Doerner,
Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel and Jean Steinberg (Oxford, 1981). Compare, for instance, Orfeo's madness
with that of Monteverdi's sexually obsessed woman in 'Lamento della ninfa' (Book VIII).
I am at present preparing a study of the musical representation of madwomen from various
historical moments.
19 This reading of Orfeo's undoing in his moments of rhetorical excess is informed by Kaja
Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington, 1988), especially 51-4. See also Kerman (n. 15), 132-7, for a discussion
of the dramatic problems created by Orfeo's unconstrained passion.
Of course Orfeo's mourning of Euridice owes much rhetorically to Petrarch's reactions
to Laura's death. But the two media- carefully constructed sonnets versus staged, enacted
representation - produce very different effects, especially with respect to implied authority.
20 Clement (see n. 7), 118. Kerman (see n. 15), 136-7, explains how Gluck's eighteenth-
century Orfeo avoids this dilemma.

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 217

Orfeo could stand as a prototype of Clement's feminised hero.

Iain Fenlon has noted the strangely cool reception of this opera, which modern
musicologists regard as one of the monuments of music history. We know of
only two contemporary performances; and when reminiscing later about his
accomplishments in the stile rappresentativo, Monteverdi usually cited
L'Arianna rather than L'Orfeo as his first great achievement in the new
medium.21 It is not at all clear that Monteverdi and Striggio stumbled on this
problem inadvertently. Indeed, they seem to have intended from the beginning
that Orfeo be sacrificed, one way or another: they had originally concluded
the piece in accordance with classical models, in which Orfeo is ripped to shreds
by the Bacchantes. This version establishes a stronger resonance with the figures
of Christ or Prometheus, as Orfeo becomes the supreme artist whose talents
challenge traditional authority and who is punished for his insubordination,
his violation of 'natural' class boundaries (this at a time when Monteverdi was
feeling unappreciated by his patrons). For whatever reasons, the patrons appar-
ently demanded the substitution of a less inflammatory lietofine in which Orfeo
is rescued and brought up to the heavens by Apollo. It is this ending that
is preserved in surviving musical sources.
Even without the expurgated ending featuring the Bacchantes, the mere fact
that Orfeo's psyche is publicly displayed already strips him of discursive agency
and dismembers him. The opera delivers a host of mixed messages: is Orfeo
a hero or a transgressor? virile or effeminate? rational or mad? Along with
other ways of accounting for the lesser success of this opera, I would suggest
that Monteverdi's depiction of Orfeo may well have precipitated a crisis in
gender representation for the musical stage: a crisis that perhaps influenced
both its own reception and subsequent operatic conventions. While sexuality
and madness remain favourite themes of music drama, they prove extremely
problematic when enacted by male characters. The 'mistake' was rarely repeated,
for in operas by Monteverdi and others after L'Orfeo (with the intriguing excep-
tions of the feminised males analysed by Clement), both forms of rhetoric -
seduction and lament - come to be practised almost exclusively by female
characters.22

21 Iain Fenlon, 'The Mantuan "Orfeo"', in Whenham (see n. 15), 1-19. See also Tomlinson's
discussion of the differences between monodic style in L'Orfeo and L'Arianna in
Monteverdi (n. 9), 136-41.
22 Robert Walser's work demonstrates that it is precisely these taboos - the taboos
traditionally circumscribing representations of masculinity in opera - that are seized and
deliberately violated in Heavy Metal, today's answer to baroque spectacle. Metal bands
regularly flaunt rhetorical and sexual excess, simulations of madness and androgynous
dress as anti-patriarchal signs of hypermasculinity. See his 'Running With the Devil:
Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music', Ph.D. diss. (University of
Minnesota, forthcoming).

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218 Susan McClary

The principal Monteverdian wielder of the rhetoric of seduction after Orfeo

is the courtesan Poppea, who operates outside both the humanist ethical code
that grounded Orfeo and the patriarchal context that legitimised Proserpina.
Much has been written about the courtesans of Renaissance Venice and their
rhetorical prowess. Thomas Coryat, an English traveller, advised in 1608: 'Also,
thou wilt find the Venetian Courtezan [...] a good Rhetorician, and a most
elegant discourser, so that if she cannot move thee with all these aforesaid
delights, she will assay thy constancy with a Rhetoricall tongue.'23 Like
Woody Allen's 'Whore from MENSA', Venetian courtesans were often highly
educated so that they could converse intelligently with the elite men who fre-
quented them. It is largely from their ranks that women poets and intellectuals
emerged. They were also, of course, skilled in the arts of seduction, so as to
be able to sustain two essential illusions: first, that they really meant what
they said and did with their clients (even though they performed their services
for hire); and, second, that they acted on passive male victims, who could
then disavow responsibility for their erotic adventures (even though it was the
men who sought out these women and who sustained such institutions of high-
class prostitution).
The traditional repositories of patriarchal authority in L'incoronazione di Pop-
pea - the husband, Ottone; the head of State, Nerone; the philosopher, Seneca
- are all depicted as passive and impotent. Seneca habitually reverts to silly
madrigalisms, which destroy the rhetorical effect of most of his statements.24
Each of Ottone's lines droops flaccidly to its tonic; and Nerone's utterances
are almost all reactive - we witness the volatile flux of his emotions as the
direct result of Poppea's manipulation. Only Poppea seems capable of sustained
manipulation, and, significantly, many of her speeches use precisely the same
devices as did Orfeo's wedding song. The major difference is, however, that
we are also given glimpses of the 'real' Poppea who pulls the strings so skilfully,
so cynically. For instance, immediately after her passionate farewells to Nerone
in the first act, we witness her throw off the mask of sincerity and gloat trium-
phantly over how successfully she has ensnared him. The illusion of 'authenticity'
(always to some extent manufactured in rhetorical situations) is here unambi-
guously revealed as contrived deception.

23 Quoted in Jones (see n. 11). As Jones comments: 'Coryat reverses the gender roles on
which love poetry was conventionally based. Constancy was assumed as a feminine trait,
to be admired or overcome by men's uses of rhetoric; for Coryat, men's chastity is
endangered by women's manipulations of language, and to encounter a "public woman"
is to risk the casuistries of a previously masculine discourse. Practically speaking, he was
wrong; a man who had sought out a courtesan could hardly claim to be seduced by her
rhetoric' (303-4). See also Arturo Graf, 'Una cortigiana fra mille', Attraverso il cinquecento
(Turin, 1926), 174-284; and Georgina Masson, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance
(London, 1975).
24 For a different reading of Seneca's musical characterisation, see Ellen Rosand, 'Seneca and
the Interpretation of L'incoronazione di Poppea', Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 38 (1985), 34-71.

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 219

Tomlinson argues in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance that by

this moment in the seventeenth century, humanist rhetoric had lost its authority
and had gradually been replaced by the fetishised imagery of Marino and his
followers. I am suggesting that as the potency of humanist discourse evaporated
so did crucial assumptions concerning the potency of patriarchy, male domina-
tion and masculine sexuality. The nadir of this decline is dramatised in L'incoro-
nazione di Poppea, as Poppea usurps and perverts to her own ends the tools
of patriarchal persuasion, making pathetic 'victims' of these last refugees of
humanism.
Not only is the role of seductive orator often reassigned to female characters
in later operas, but most of the lamenters celebrated in dramatic works after
L'Orfeo (Arianna, Penelope and Ottavia) are female: women who have been
betrayed by treacherous, absent or ineffectual male authority and who express
their righteous indignation in tirades as blistering as any present-day feminist
critique. In contrast to Orfeo's apparent delirium, these women state their
appeals in carefully organised speeches that enumerate grievances with the most
self-possessed rhetorical skill. As they condemn the male authority that would
make them submit to silence, their eloquence is doubly electrifying: the fact
that they speak their cases in defiance of the traditional prohibition is as powerful
as the arguments themselves.25

What happened in the course of the early seventeenth century that permitted
these reversals in the representation of gender? How did the rhetorical skill
so jealously guarded as a male prerogative in the Renaissance come to be put
almost exclusively into the mouths of women in the predominantly masculine
realm of opera? The answers are as complex and contradictory as the tangle
of competing ideologies, cultural forms and social institutions within which
the pieces took shape.
First, the range of behaviours considered appropriate to men began to alter
considerably in the seventeenth century. From this moment on in Western
history, men are encouraged to stifle their feelings, while women are expected

25 There was, in fact, a notable feminist presence in the seventeenth century. See Kelly (n.
10); and Riley (n. 5), 25-35. There seems even to have been an occasional feminist voice
in opera, made feasible by the extraordinary coincidence of a female patron and a female
composer. See Suzanne Cusick, 'Francesca Caccini's La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola
d'Alcina (1625): A Feminist Misreading of Orlando furioso?', paper presented at the
American Musicological Society Meeting, Baltimore (November 1988), and Ellen Rosand,
'The Voice of Barbara Strozzi', in Bowers and Tick, Women Making Music (n. 10), 168-90.

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220 Susan McClary

to indulge in emotional expression.26 Both the extravagant sensuality and the

extravagant anguish exhibited by Orfeo come to be regarded as 'effeminate'.27
Indeed, I have argued above that even within L'Orfeo the very success of the
hero's rhetoric is also his undoing, for the more Monteverdi's representational
genius convinces us that we witness Orfeo's agony or erotic transport, the less
tenable we find that character's rhetorical and masculine authority. Such symp-
toms of vulnerability are increasingly projected onto women - both on and
off the stage. Surrendering rhetorical flair to women may thus be seen as a
way of redefining the spectacle's proper object. In subsequent operas, it is
constructions of feminine sensuality and suffering that are exhibited - for the
pleasure of the patriarchal gaze and ear.28
Second, the extensive soliloquies of abandoned women and the seduction
tactics of Poppea offer what are supposed to be insights into the inner workings
of the female mind. They purport to reveal without mediation what women
are really like: not docile like Euridice, but insubordinate or threatening unless
they can be reconciled (like Penelope) with a strong male authority. These
characterisations are motivated in part by the increasing social power of women
at that time. But they can also be construed as playing on the male fear of
women so prevalent in the seventeenth century. For this was a time when more
women than ever were managing to emerge into the musical profession
(Monteverdi had women colleagues at the Gonzaga court who made ten
times his salary)29 and when images of female eroticism proliferated in

26 For studies of the differences in social and emotional development between males and
females in Western culture, see Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering:
Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, 1978), 180-90; and Carol Gilligan,
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge,
1982).
27 The Orpheus legend often makes it explicit that Orpheus turns to homosexuality after
his loss of Eurydice. See Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore, 1989).
Linda Austern has compiled extensive documentation demonstrating that music itself, often
personified as Orpheus, was regarded by the Elizabethans as effeminate because of its
tendency to rhetorical excess. See her' "Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie": Music
and the English Renaissance Idea of the Feminine', paper presented at the
American Musicological Society Meeting, Baltimore (November 1988). See also John
Guillory, 'Dalila's House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labor', in
Rewriting the Renaissance (n. 11), 106-22, for a discussion of how male sexual pleasure
(even the heterosexual variety) comes to be regarded as effeminate during the seventeenth
century.
28 See Clement (n. 7). Film theory has dealt extensively with the organisation of masculine
desire and constructions of femininity. See, for instance, Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16 (1975), 8-18; Silverman (n. 19); and Carol
Flinn, 'The "Problem" of Femininity in Theories of Film Music', Screen, 27 (1986),
56-72.
29 See Stevens (n. 1), 56. Stevens protests this situation by lumping women professionals
together with other fads he finds deplorable when he condemns 'the Dukes with their
lavish and uncontrolled devotion to dwarfs, alchemists and lady singers' (187). See also
Bowers, 'The Emergence of Women Composers' (n, 10). Bowers documents some of the
ways in which women's activity as professionals begins to be curtailed during the
seventeenth century (141-6).

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 221

music.30 It was also, however, a time when some thought that castratos enacted
women better than women themselves,3' and when thousands of women were
being executed as witches. In this paranoid world, in which women were often
selected as scapegoats for the crumbling social order, such 'powerful' construc-
tions could also serve to justify patriarchal backlash. As a case in point, Nino
Pirrotta argues that Monteverdi's audience would have known about Poppea's
ultimate fate - that Nero later murdered the pregnant Poppea by kicking her
in the stomach -and could thus have supplied for themselves the missing patriar-
chal retribution for her apparent triumph at the conclusion of L'incoronazione
di Poppea.32
But these constructions of powerful women may also be understood as poten-
tially liberating, for the shift in gender representation was bound up with the

30 Representations of feminine desire abound in seventeenth-century music and then disappear

with the eighteenth-century insistence on patriarchal values. See, for instance, the settings
of texts from the Song of Songs by Schutz or Grandi, Frescobaldi's 'Maddalena alla Croce'
or Stradella's malignant San Giovanni Battista. This obsession with charting female
sexuality is again something that needs much more research. It has fascinated me, however,
to note that my women students immediately pick up on the erotic imagery of seventeenth-
century music, while most of the men fail to recognise it as having anything to do with
the erotic. They claim to associate sexuality rather with the forceful thrusting [sic] of
Beethoven. See my 'Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice
in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II', Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter (January
1987), for a discussion of the constructions of masculinity in nineteenth-century
symphonies.
31 In fact, the female characters in the premiere of L 'Orfeo were all played by castratos (some
of whom were scarcely able to learn their parts), despite the availability of virtuoso women
singers. See Fenlon (n. 21), 9-16. As late as the 1780s, Goethe could still write that by
observing female impersonators on the Roman stage, 'we come to understand the female
sex so much the better because some one has observed and meditated on their ways'.
See 'Women's Parts Played by Men in the Roman Theatre', Goethe's Travels in Italy,
trans. Charles Nisbet (London, 1883), 567-71.
The phenomenon of the castrato needs rethinking in terms of social gender construction.
It stands as an extreme example of gender re-construction: the social 'need' for adult males
who could sound like women was literally and violently inscribed on the body itself.
While the motivation was not as simple as the desire to usurp jobs that otherwise would
have been held by women, the practice did emerge at the same time as women virtuoso
singers were rising to fame and creating a new demand. If it is not easy to puzzle out
quite what this practice meant, it most certainly is tangled up with notions of gender
organisation. For an imaginative reconstruction of the world of the castratos, see Anne
Rice's novel, Cry to Heaven (New York, 1982).
32 Nino Pirrotta, 'Scelte poetiche di Monteverdi', Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 2 (1968),
254. An extraordinary misogynist backlash followed the reign of Elizabeth and can be
traced chillingly in Shakespeare's Jacobean plays. See Tennenhouse (n. 2), 102-46. For
discussions of similar periods of masculine paranoia and attendant anti-feminist portrayals
of 'powerful' women, see Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Sexuality, Race,
and Madness (Ithaca, 1985), 15-33; my own discussion of Bizet's Carmen in 'Sexual
Politics in Classical Music', in Alternative Musicologies, ed. John Shepherd (New York,
forthcoming); and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 'Tradition and the Female Talent',
in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York, 1986), 183-207. Although
they have been heavily criticised for presenting somewhat prurient accounts of their
subjects, see also Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-
Siecle Culture (Oxford, 1986); and Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, I: Women, Floods,
Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis, 1987). The recent film Fatal
Attraction is an instance from our own time.

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222 Susan McClary

more general crisis in all forms of authority - political, economic, religious

and philosophical - during the first half of the seventeenth century.33 Signifi-
cantly, composers and librettists grant the right to launch attacks on traditional
authority not only to women characters, but also to servants, who complain
constantly about class oppression. Although such grievances are blunted some-
what by being put into the mouths of women and grotesque comic characters,
these moments of resistance may reveal - and yet conceal - more general dissatis-
faction with powerful social institutions: critiques are safer, after all, when dis-
placed onto marginalised others.34
Displaced or not, complaints from the disenfranchised against traditional auth-
ority were registered in this public forum with surprising candour. Indeed,
the reforms at the end of the century served to purge opera of precisely these
carnivalesque 'impurities': to guarantee consistency of style, but also to silence
troublesome voices from the margins.35 Patriarchy and the nobility returned
with a vengeance in later court operas: musical and dramatic structures became
formulaic; impulsive tonality was domesticated and even 'naturalised' through
Enlightenment music theory; the comedians were quarantined; and victimised
female characters such as Scarlatti's Griselda were trotted out to sing hymns
of faith to male authority.
However, between L'Orfeo and La Griselda there existed an anomalous
moment in culture when power relationships associated with gender and rhetoric
were oddly reconfigured. If, as Maravall, Attali and Bianconi indicate, operatic
spectacles are bound up with the reproduction of aristocratic - and, I would
add, patriarchal - interests, they may not actually have served their masters

33 In addition to Bianconi (n. 2), 28-33 and Tomlinson (n. 9), 243-60, see Trevor Aston,
ed., Crisis in Europe 1560-1660 (London, 1965), and Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith,
eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1985).
34 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington,
1984), for an explanation of how celebrations of the 'grotesque body', taken from popular
carnival festivities, can be used to challenge authority and official order. See Tennenhouse
(n. 2), 17-71, for an effective reading of Shakespeare in terms of Bakhtin's model.
Tennenhouse argues that Shakespeare's inclusion of the carnivalesque in his Elizabethan
plays served not to subvert authority, but rather to create the image of a more inclusive
society in a way that flattered the queen, his patron. See also Attali (n. 2), 21-4, for
a discussion of Carnival's Quarrel with Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Attali uses this
painting as a preliminary way of illustrating the opposition between collective and official
musical cultures. This model would seem to offer valuable insight into the use of comic
and female characters in seventeenth-century opera.
35 Bianconi (n. 2), 183-4, explains the presence of these comic figures as the result of the
merger in Venice between imported court opera and the network of professional commedia
dell'arte theatres already established. He also argues (208-9) that they disappeared from
opera at the turn of the century because of increasing specialisation: comic episodes became
autonomous and were eventually detached from the dramma per musica. That there are
formal and practical considerations involved in the elimination of comic characters from
serious opera is unquestionable. Yet even the increasing segregation of serious and comic
figures in the later seventeenth century (a necessary step if the comic scenes were finally
to be detachable) is part of a cleaning-up process that gradually rectifies their promiscuous
intermingling in mid-century. The impudent interventions by comic characters in some
of the most serious scenes in L'incoronazione di Poppea could not be excised without
destroying the piece.

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 Constructions of gender in Monteverdi's dramatic music 223

in as monolithic a way as we might expect. Indeed in Venice, where a degree

of free enterprise tempered the administered culture of the courts, it seems
actually to have been in the interest of some of the elite to underwrite spectacles
that displayed a more varied, more liberal social network.
For instance, Gianfrancesco Busenello, the librettist of L'incoronazione di
Poppea, was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti. Bianconi describes
this group as

a club of libertine intellectuals whose apparent praise of deceit in reality cloaks nothing
but an underlying attitude of bitter philosophical scepticism, intolerant of all preconsti-
tuted authority (political, moral, rational, religious) [... ] Only the pessimistic scepticism
and subtle immoralism of the Incogniti can explain the fanciful yet disenchanted mockery
of certain scenes of this opera.36 (my emphasis)

The mere fact that some patrons and artists subscribed to the tenets of or even
belonged to groups such as the Accademia degli Incogniti indicates that Venetian
social power was organised along substantially different lines from those prevail-
ing in earlier Mantua and Rome, or in later Naples. Monteverdi's Venetian
operas quite clearly testify to a more complicated web of interests than we
have thus far been able to explain. We need to know a good deal more about
what is 'cloaked' by this 'underlying attitude of bitter philosophical scepticism'
and intolerance 'of all preconstituted authority'.
For a variety of reasons, traditional hierarchies of authority were subjected
to extraordinary questioning during this period of doubt and shifting alliances.
In the name of 'entertainment', many contradictory models of power slipped
by as guileless representations of the world itself - at least until the art police
clamped down to dictate what was and was not to be heard on the stage.
And much of this crisis in power was played out dramatically in terms of
gender, which thus became one of the principal sites of contestation in the
new cultural media. If we are to make sense of early opera - its achievements
and its discontents - we must begin to unravel that tangle of gender, rhetoric
and power which first found its voice in the musical conventions of the stile
rappresentativo.37

36 Bianconi (see n. 2), 188.

37 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Musicological Society
Meeting, Baltimore (November 1988). I wish to thank Linda Austern, Barbara Engh and
Robert Walser for their helpful reactions to that draft. I am also grateful to Leonard
Tennenhouse and Nancy Armstrong, who made valuable suggestions for this revision.

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