Lucia Madness at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City

Last week, the Secret Victorianist, along with some student friends, attended MetStudents’ #LuciaMadness event before a production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera.

The Secret Victorianist at the Metropolitan Opera

Mary Zimmerman’s production has a mid-nineteenth-century setting, although Donizetti’s opera premiered in 1835, and Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (the historical novel on which Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto was based) was published in 1819 and set in the seventeenth century.

Mara Blumenfeld’s sumptuous costumes are instrumental in suggesting this period in the production (with Daniel Ostling’s striking sets more focussed on creating a Romantic Scottish landscape), so it was apt for the drinks event to encourage young operagoers to don Victorian dress of their own. There was even the opportunity to pose in Lucia’s blood-drenched gloves and veil and brandish her knife (check out #LuciaMadness on Twitter for more photos).

The Secret Victorianist as Lucia Ashton

The emphasis on Lucia’s madness isn’t just a marketing ploy. The plot (familial feuds, love, betrayal) and the music move towards the climatic scene where Albina Shagimuratova’s blood-splattered bride loses her mind and hits the high notes in the beautiful aria ‘Il Dolce Suono’.

That Lucia’s madness is especially important to this production in particular is suggested from Act One, where Zimmerman chooses to stage the ghost during Lucia’s ‘Regnava Nel Silenzio’. Madness seems the natural result of a young girl living out her life on these misty moors, surrounded by ghosts, and torn between the passions of her brother and lover.

The Secret Victorianist brings nineteenth-century
dress to the streets of New York

Joseph Calleja sang Edgardo with strength and passion, producing a second climactic moment after Lucia’s mad scene, but the scenes between the siblings (Shagimuratova with Luca Salsi’s Enrico) perhaps showed more connection between the performers.

Other highlights included the injection of humour during the wedding scene. The cast pose for photographs as Lucia turns away from her groom and the camera, raising some titters from the audience just prior to the tragic and murderous turn of events.

Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera with a timeless plot of love and betrayal, but a nineteenth-century setting seemed an ideal one, given how Victorianism can at times be a sort of shorthand in popular culture for the repression of women in marriage and their resulting madness.

The production is running until April 10^th so catch it if you can.

Do you know of any other nineteenth-century-based plays or productions the Secret Victorianist should attend in New York? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Misconceptions about Victorian Literature

In a previous post I took on the view that Victorian fiction is by default long and unwieldy by recommending some shorter works you might want to give a go. Today it’s time to debunk a few more myths about nineteenth-century writing which I've come across whenever I tell people what I like to read.

1. There’s no sex: Yes, yes – we all know those Victorians. They fainted at a glimpse of ankle, right, and covered up table legs. They were all so prudish it’s a miracle they had any children at all, regardless of the massive population increase in the UK in the period, and the example of the very fertile monarch herself. Victorian literature is crammed with sex, even if the novels are (thankfully) not quite Fifty Shades of Grey. Try George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) for discussion of prostitution and bawdry, Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) deals with rape and John Sutherland even detects a reference to sodomy in Hardy’s earlier The Woodlanders (1886-7). Meanwhile, Ellen Wood’s bestselling sensation novel East Lynne (1861) centres on a heroine who commits adultery because she wants to, finds her lover attractive and is bored by her dependable husband, in a initial plotline which could easily be taken from a modern paperback (before a railway disaster, facial disfigurement and high levels of infant mortality situate it firmly in the 1860s!). If you want even more, you can always trust the French to turn things up a notch, but once you've glutted yourself on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), I’d suggest turning to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s A Doctor’s Wife (1863). Laurie Garrison argues surprisingly convincingly that while here the heroine Isabel doesn't commit adultery like her model Emma Bovary, her novel-reading obsession is code for an addiction to masturbation. Erotic rewrites of Victorian novels are hot property for publishers right now, but often the sexual content is already there in the originals.

The Secret Victorianist spots Wuthering Heights erotica on sale at a European airport

2. It’s only for girls: First up, this is sexist. And I very much doubt Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson, Browning and the rest of the century’s celebrated male writers would agree. My guess is when people say this they mean that the literature is all about marriage and relationships, even if these (whisper it) obviously affect men too. But don’t despair, those who’d rather die than wear pink, there are battles (try Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson), trade union disputes (Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855)), aliens (H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898)) – all sorts of things girls couldn't possibly understand.

3. It’s very romantic: The reality is that reading nineteenth-century novels has seen my romantic notions disposed of as brutally as Marianne Dashwood’s. Marriage is a mercantile business and the century’s novelists are much more likely to go into the details of household economy (cf. particularly Braddon’s Hostages to Fortune (1875)), than rhapsodise over weddings. Marriage ceremonies are, despite their ubiquitous concurrence with end credits in television adaptations, usually dispensed with in their entirety – to take three famous examples, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). When they are detailed, it is also for their legal irregularity (Wilkie Collins’s ‘Miss or Mrs?’ (1872) and The Law and the Lady (1875).

4. It’s all about the rich people: It doesn't get much grittier than Arthur Morrison’s tale of London slum life A Child of the Jago (1896), or Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), set the other side of the Atlantic. Inner city life in all its squalor and violence is rendered hyper-realistically, with Morrison’s attention to dialect particularly impressive. Both works are the products of research and firsthand experience – unapologetically un-sanitised and not for the faint-hearted.

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