Spurned women

I saw three operas this week, all centrally concerned with spurned women. That’s not surprising, given the general subject matter of the art form, but it sometimes makes me wonder why we prefer to see, and more importantly to hear, love-tormented women more than men. The only major exception to spring to mind is Wagner’s Ring, which gets under way with a dwarf teased and rejected by three mermaids. But even Alberich spends much more time elaborating on his plans for world domination than on lamenting lost love; the Ring is quite a big exception, but one still wonders why it is female suffering from despised love rather than the male version of the same complaint that excites operatic composers and their listeners so much.

A lot has been written on this subject, much of it dubious. Opera North’s new double bill, of Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, gives us extreme examples: the first is a monologue for an hysterical and suicidal woman, the second really has only one character, her lover Aeneas an even bigger cipher here than in Berlioz’s Les troyens. Dido actually does commit suicide, in a ritual way, but what makes her so moving is that, like Butterfly (to mention one of the greatest instances of the genre), she clearly sees what her fate is and embraces it with dignity and nobility.

Whatever other characteristics Cocteau’s and Poulenc’s Elle displays, those are not among them. Lesley Garrett performs Elle as a Marlene Dietrich figure, who begins gazing petrified into her dressing-room looking-glass. All Elle’s troubles with the telephone seem a bit dated now, with recalcitrant operators and crossed lines things that many in the vociferous audience at the Grand Theatre in Leeds must have been bemused by; an updated version incorporating the more sophisticated exasperations of cell-phones is required.