Last week San Antonio Opera did a stripped-down Covid-friendly live performance of Donizetti's Lucia de Lammermoor with rising stars Brenda Rae (Lucia), Scott Hendricks (Enrico), Scott Quinn (Edgardo), and Musa Ngqungwana (Raimundo). This semi-staged production cut to the chase: the chorus was eliminated, so the drama had to be carried by key soloists. It worked very well, and Rae did a spectacular mad scene.
Composed by Gaetano Donizetti and his librettist Salvatore Cammarano and first produced in 1835, the plot was based on The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott, written on commission in 1835. Scott himself based it on a late 17th-century historical incident concerning a noblewoman named Janet Dalrymple, who, forced to renounce her true love and marry a suitor approved by her family, stabbed him on their wedding night and though he survived, she shortly afterward died insane.
Scott's novel has many plot twists and retained the real villain-- the girl's ambitious mother, who engineered the estrangement of the original suitor via fake news (in this case, forged letters). The novel, set in 17th-century Scotland, is full of the complicated politics of the time, and pits the heroine's (here renamed Lucy) family against that of her true love (Edgar), who are on opposite sides both politically and as the result of a feud that has been going on for generations. On both sides there are crises of property ownership and many machinations and changes of plan that eventually lead to Lucy's forced marriage to Arthur
Bucklaw, whose wealth and influence can salvage her family's fortunes. Lucy, like Janet, loses her reason, stabs her husband, again not mortally, on their wedding night, and she soon after dies.
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The novel proved very popular. In the early 19th century, Scotland was considered wild and exotic, a perfect setting for romantic tragedies (think Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture and the ballet La Sylphide). At least five operas by others, all now forgotten, were based on The Bride of Lammermoor before Donizetti and Cammarano took it in hand, all with plot variations and various characters from Scott's novel that didn't make Cammarano's cut.
Donizetti and Camarrano trimmed the story down and modified it, basically reducing it to the family feud and Lucy's cruel fate. The wicked mother and Lucy's two brothers of Scott's novel are conflated into Enrico Ashton, Lucia's (whose name is now Italianized, as are all the characters) older brother. Even though Enrico and his family have ruined the clan of Edgardo her true love, Enrico, as a result of backing the wrong party politically, is on the verge of ruin. His only hope of salvation is to marry off his sister to someone rich and influential: Laird Arturo Bucklaw. No matter that Lucia and Edgardo have secretly gotten engaged, Enrico forges letters he gives to Lucia, allegedly from Edgardo, saying that he's renouncing the betrothal because he's fallen in love with someone else.
Lucia is already in a fragile state: her mother, presumably kinder and gentler than Scott's wicked Lady Ashton, has recently died, and she's in mourning. She sees Edgardo not only as a lover and a protector, but the way out of a terrible family situation. She's worried though and sees the ghost of unhappy ancestor girl who had died as the result of the family feud out in the family park.
Browbeaten and lied to by her family and an allied clergyman, she agrees to marry the laird, but just after signing the marriage contract, Edgardo comes back. Since he doesn't know that she was tricked by the forged letters, he's furious, denounces and curses her, and storms out, without listening to any explanation she might have. For Lucia, that's the final straw, with nowhere to go, and the prospect of a lifelong loveless marriage, she goes mad, stabs her new husband to death, and vents out in a spectacular mad scene in front of the wedding guests, then dies. In despair, Edgardo kills himself in the family graveyard.
It all sounds over-the-top and ridiculous now (could Edgardo have been so easily deceived today in the age of cellphones and twitter)? But this opera remains a perennial favorite even if it's melodramatic and contains many set pieces of its period in its solos and ensembles--and the sextette and mad scene are high art and brilliantly crafted.
But I think there's a more important reason that Lucia still resonates, for it is a stark (though theatrically over-the-top) tale of extreme bullying. Lucy has to be one of the most helpless and bullied people in operatic and theatrical history. Her brother sees her only as a means of saving himself--her life and self-fulfillment count for nothing. Her true love is her whole world; he has two preoccupations--her and the purity of her love, and his own ambitions, including his feud with her brother, and the minute she appears to renounce him, he objectifies her as tainted and brutally curses her out, refusing to hear her side of the story (as Gordon Lightfoot put it: "Heroes often fail"). Lucy's approved bridegroom seems to be an entitled, brainless snob--his expectation of her is to be a virgin (this is implied not stated), and she'll be ornamental--perhaps soon to be cheated on. Probably worst of all is the clergyman Raimundo who seems to be sympathetic to the girl, but eventually accepts the ruse and who warmly counsels her to go through with the marriage and carry on. In his smooth and silky way, he, another authority figure, is a bully too. Even her female companion, Alicia, doesn't dare to speak out--after all, Enrico is probably paying her salary.
The story transcends its historical time. I watched the Met Opera production of Lucia online with Natalie Dessay, the great Lucia of her generation from 2011. The Met version updated the story from the 17th century to the 1880's--that's fifty years later than when Donizetti wrote it, and it still works.
Of course, in those days, once married, as a woman you would probably be ostracized perhaps a pariah if you divorced or were found to be unfaithful. The man you married would control your financial assets, could fool around outside the marriage, and could keep you sequestered at home if he wished--or even commit you to an asylum if you proved too unmanageable. And you had to be a virgin and never be unfaithful--in those pre-DNA testing days, how else could he be assured that the children you bore were really his? And if you were a noblewoman, you probably had better clothes and food than your working-class sisters, but you lived your life more in public. If you "escaped?" what would you do? Where would you go? How would you support yourself? If you were Catholic, you could retreat to a convent: that would exempt you from the childbearing marathon, but you would be essentially shut off from worldly society, and certainly not having any more guys as friends.
In the past century, things have changed, and we are now freer to pick and choose, although some studies seem to show that the odds of a happy marriage in this day and age are about the same whether a person chooses or is chosen for.
What has not changed since the era of Lucia is the issue of bullying. As humans, we seem to be hard-wired to bully others when the situation arises. Although woman have always historically been viewed as potential victims, bullying certainly transcends gender and knows no real social class: it's been done by American Presidents, any number of dictators, bosses or superiors at work, kids at school. Up until recently at least, most of us have at least assumed civility and respect in public, but this doesn't account for what goes on behind closed doors. Newspapers, television and social media as well are full of it; as a matter of fact, it seems to drive or at least be a major factor in so many books, films and TV series (think Game of Thrones for starters). Mostly we are glad to see endings in these media where justice is ultimately done, but its bullying behavior that is often responsible for its initial miscarriage. After all, aren't mass murders and school shootings ultimate forms of being a bully, though ultimately the homicidal killer probably learned this behavior by being bullied him or herself.
We have more social tools, resources and therapies to help avert it now, but it's not always available to those who need or can afford it. Poor Lucia had nowhere else to go, put her only egg in Edgardo's basket--and there it broke.
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Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor is available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/471/471-h/471-h.htm
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The San Antonio performance is live-streaming until June 6. It can be accessed at: https://www.operasa.org/lucia-livestream?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=609ac803b71af84e5a362052&ss_email_id=609adc6ab306544dc31ecfc3&ss_campaign_name=Curtains+Up+-+May+11%2C+2021&ss_campaign_sent_date=2021-05-11T19%3A35%3A15Z
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Natalie Dessay's 2011 performance at the Metropolitan Opera can be rented for $4.99 at their website.
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Several free You tube full performances are available on their site, as well as some full sound recordings, and plenty of mad scenes too. See the list at: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Lucia+di+Lammermoor
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An article on the other operas based on Scott's novel is at: https://utahopera.org/explore/2017/03/the-brides-of-lammermoor/
