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Operatic Prisons: Carcerality on the Stage and in Music

2020; Canadian Comparative Literature Association; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/crc.2020.0026

1913-9659

Rudolf Denk, Monika Fludernik,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Operatic Prisons: Carcerality on the Stage and in Music1 Rudolf Denk and Monika Fludernik In the context of the publication of the 2019 monograph Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy (Fludernik), British prison drama has received extensive attention. Metaphors of Confinement includes discussions of plays with prison settings, ranging from George Chapman’s collaboration with Ben Jonson and John Marston, Eastward Ho (1605), and John Cook’s Greene’s Tu Quoque; or, The City Gallant (1614), via John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), to Susan Glaspell’s The Inheritors (1921), Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow (1954), and Edward Bond’s Olly’s Prison (1993).2 It also analyzes plays that use metaphorical images of confinement, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1602); Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (wr. 1612–27), John Dryden’s All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1677), and drama that combines prison settings with metaphorical carcerality. Its examination of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, focusing on its literary aspects, pointed out a lacuna in literary studies of the prison, namely the (to our knowledge) total absence of a discussion of operas with prison settings. This realization led to the cooperation between a literary scholar in English studies—and, alas, musical analphabet—and a scholar in German studies with a training in musicology, which gave rise to this article. This article traces two lines of development in the dramatic and musical representation of carceral settings in the tradition of European opera. On the one hand, the tradition that runs from the Italian operas of the seventeenth century to what is called the romantic “opera of liberation” (Befreiungsoper), could be argued to reflect tragedy [End Page 271] on the operatic stage, in which political issues dominate the plot, and the characters’ heroism, and villainy, provides focal thematic material. This article discusses three major instances of this genre: Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814), Puccini’s Tosca (1900), and Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero (1949). On the other hand, a counter-tradition reacts to the seriousness of operas, including the Befreiungsoper, and parodies its bathetic excesses with satirical inversion, as the villains become the heroes. Here we provide a bracket for the first tradition by beginning with John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and closing with an appreciation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 masterpiece, the Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera). This selection of works naturally does not allow us to study even the most important operas in these two lines of tradition. Thus, we will have to forgo a consideration of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (The Troubador, 1853) for the genre of the tragic prison opera and of Richard Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (The Bat, 1874) for its parodic counterfoil. Our specific focuses in this study are the dramatic and musical peculiarities of the prison opera. Therefore, this article concentrates mainly on The Beggar’s Opera and Fidelio, since these two works are prototypical and exemplary of the two traditions discussed here. Both of these works emerged in opposition to the popular and highly lucrative business of opera performances at their time, but still achieved immediate success, continuing popularity, and critical esteem. The Italian Tradition and Gay’s Parodic Response In his Beggar’s Opera of 1728, John Gay was the first to introduce into the genre of the opera a setting in a contemporary prison, in parallel with Jonathan Swift’s idea to write a “Newgate pastoral.”3 There was, in fact, an earlier play set in Newgate, namely Christopher Bullock’s Woman’s Revenge; or, A Match in Newgate (1715); and seventeenth-century Italian operas had extensively incorporated prison scenes. Gay’s parody of the prison opera, therefore, consisted not merely in choosing protagonists among thieves and highwaymen and, as we shall see, inverting the moral outlook of the respectable and the criminal classes; it also substituted the classical and mythical settings of the heroic drama that subtended the plots of the seventeenth-century prison opera with a domestic setting in London. Prison scenes as such, as in the romance plots on which they were based, were common in early operas (Loughrey and Treadwell 11...