How can I love an artform that is so consistently, insistently cruel to its female characters? Operatic heroines are delivered into numberless violent deaths. In Rigoletto, Gilda sacrifices herself to save the life of the faithless duke. Leonora in Il Trovatore takes poison in order to die in place of her lover. There is Liu in Turandot, who knifes herself for love. Cassandra and Dido in Les Troyens are also self-stabbers – Dido using the sword of her faithless lover, a not-very-occluded symbol of male penetration and destruction. Norma, from the opera of the same name, clambers atop a funeral pyre, nominating herself as the victim whose sacrifice to the gods is necessary for the Gauls to throw off the Roman yoke. Lucia (di Lammermoor), who does not love the person she is supposed to love, kills her husband, goes mad and dies. Leonora in La Forza del Destino gets stabbed to death by her brother for loving against the rules. La traviata (“she who has deviated from the path”, ie, the fallen woman) succumbs to consumption. Katya (Kabanova) drowns herself, filled with guilt for her adultery. Isolde dies a transcendental love-death. Tosca flings herself off the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. And on and on and on. The messages are barely encrypted. A woman must love only where she is directed to love by men. Women who transgress are goaded to death for their sexual appetites. Pure and chaste women offer themselves up, voluntarily, to the knife or the pyre.

Even when the women are allowed to live, you have to question their happiness. Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (after Pushkin) is a deeply sympathetic character. A country girl, she falls in love with the glamorous visitor Onegin. She decides to declare herself, in writing: the opera’s famous letter scene, in which her naive, heartfelt, tremulous feelings pour out of her. Onegin – bored, superior, embarrassed by Tatyana’s letter – flirts with her sister, Olga, at a dance. Olga’s fiance, Lensky, challenges him to a duel, during which Onegin shoots Lensky dead. Years later, in St Petersburg, he encounters the grand and lovely Princess Gremina – she is Tatyana herself, now married. Onegin loves her: too late. They meet. She confesses she still loves him, but sends him away.

Venera Gimadieva, Saimir Pirgu and Sarah Pring in the current La Traviata at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The opera is a perfectly constructed thing: Tatyana’s irrepressible emotion as a young girl is mirrored by her iron self-control as a woman; the country dance of the first half is mirrored musically and visually by the austere and grandiose ball in St Peterburg. The apparently uninteresting Lensky bursts forth into astonishing music and deep emotion at the moment of his death, showing us what real love looks like, among all the feints and self-deceptions and idle flirtations. The ideal feminist ending would be for Tatyana to be wonderfully happy in St Petersburg and to have Moved On, rather than to be husbanding the flame of teenage love in the pomp of her maturity. But that would not quite be tragic enough. Tatyana lives – but she suffers a kind of emotional death.

You might expect that, in the modern era, women’s roles would have changed, but opera is a big and expensive artform whose repertoire is not easily refreshed. Women composers of opera on the grand scale are few and far between. In Britain there have been works by, among others, Tansy Davies, Kaaija Saariaho, Judith Weir and Olga Neuwirth. Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland is heading for the Royal Opera House; Weir and Saariaho also have new commissions for Covent Garden. Their librettists have sometimes been women (Elfriede Jelinek, for example, was librettist for Neuwirth). Other women librettists of recent decades have included Louise Welsh; Sally O’Reilly, Alice Goodman; Lavinia Greenlaw; Meredith Oakes; Amanda Holden; and Zoe Strachan – a very few compared with the endless tides of operatic men. Alban Berg’s Lulu is the most complex and dazzling of 20th century operas and has left a long shadow (written in the 1930s, it was completed from Berg’s sketches after his death). Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, it has its glorious and terrible heroine rampage through life, adored, greedy, manipulative, passing through lovers and husbands – to a score of frenetic and sumptuous beauty and strangeness. She is arrested for the murder of one of her husbands, and ends up servicing clients in a brothel. She and Countess Geschwitz, her abject, and of course self-sacrificing, lesbian adorer are slaughtered by Lulu’s last trick, Jack the Ripper, about as ugly an operatic death as you can get. It is harsh and sharp and expressionist and modernist – and punishes Lulu’s autonomy deeply.

Lisa Saffer in Lulu (2005). Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Like Onegin, Lulu is an opera full of mirrorings: it is “a palindrome in every detail”, Philip Hensher has written. She clambers to great heights and then plummets. Hensher also wrote the libretto for one of the finest chamber operas of the last 50 years, Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face – a work that carries many traces of Lulu. The story is based on the life of the real Duchess of Argyll. The Duchess is, in old age in 1990, living at the end of her resources in a grand hotel. The action reverts to her past: in the 1950s, she is photographed giving a blowjob to a Waiter (the fellatio is wittily depicted in Adès’s score) and her husband divorces her. Finally (back in 1990) she is given a notice to quit the hotel by the Manager; a final attempt to seduce him is unsuccessful.

“There is a whiff of misogyny about the libretto,” announces the New Penguin Opera Guide of Hensher’s words, though as that volume contains an endless frieze of elaborately destroyed women, it seems harsh to pick out this particular work. The opera does not in fact castigate the Duchess for fellating a waiter and enjoying it, and if anything the most jokes are on the absurd and priggish Judge at the divorce trial. But even so: it is hardly a good ending for the ignominious Duchess. “I don’t know how I’d have written a story about someone going on very happily with lots of money and dying without any regrets at 99 – I think actually opera won’t let you do it,” said Hensher when we discussed his character.

It is as if genre itself seems to devour women. It is partly because opera is the form par excellence, not of argument like theatre, not of story like film, not of character like TV, but of emotion. Deep, unspeakable, ravenous emotion: the kind of emotion that can carry a character’s breaking out into song. Opera is not vanilla, opera is not beige, it is blood red and boiling. Opera is the artform of human catastrophe, the inheritor of the mantle of the darkest aspects of Greek tragedy. The tragedy is of course not just female tragedy (plenty of dead men, too). But the patriarchy makes sure that the women are marked out for special cruelty. Opera, and especially 19th century opera, allows dangerous women to coruscate thrillingly on the stage for a few short hours – then murders them.

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In the mid-1980s I was taken to the opera for the first time. Among the first that I saw were three at the English National Opera: Aida (she dies), Madame Butterfly (she kills herself) and Carmen (she is murdered). I was about 14. Looking back on it I am exasperated by the canonical narratives that young women are and were expected to swallow. (For instance: is there any more thankless, underwritten character than Ophelia, compared with the dark complexities of Hamlet?) It is true that all readers and watchers shed gender (and race and sexuality), attaching their understanding and sympathy to people vastly unlike themselves – this is the basic act of readerly empathy. Women learn to be more adept at this transgender game than (white, straight) men, simply because of the overwhelming dominance of male stories. Male characters get to carry the whole weight of human experience (they can be “everyman”). Women don’t.

I don’t remember being horrified by the dead women of the opera season of 1986-7. Perhaps I had already been inoculated by an even more troubling genre, ballet. Some years previously I had been taken to see Giselle at Sadler’s Wells theatre in London. In the interval a kind adult asked, “Are you enjoying it?” Violently, I replied, “No!” The truth was that I couldn’t bear what was happening to the titular heroine. Five minutes earlier, she’d gone mad and died (of course) having been jilted by her faithless aristocratic lover: it was terrible.

Male characters get to carry the whole weight of human experience (they can be 'everyman'); women don’t

Gradually, I came to love opera for its music, of course, but also for its preposterousness, for its extremity, for its magnificent lack of truck with realism. I loved it for its deep plunge into the secret emotions of humans on the edge; emotions that require the contradictory, magnificent swirl of great music for their articulation. It is by way of its glorious unreality that it is possible to make peace, in a way, with the artform’s violence to women. Its dying, fading, lost, flailing females are performed by magnificent artists, stars of the show, in control of strong and sexy instruments – their voices.

Traditionally, this went hand in hand with a splendid disregard for “realistic” casting, meaning voluptuous (starving) Mimis and magnificently orotund Isoldes – rather a progressive blindness to body shape. But these days, confusion reigns: the strictures of realism and credibility, borrowed from film, theatre and TV casting, have caught up with opera, but only inconsistently, because voices of greatness do not always inhabit bodies conventionally regarded as acceptable. This confusion plays itself out, often destructively and hurtfully, in the bodies of individual women. In 2004, soprano Deborah Voigt had gastric bypass surgery after being dropped from a production at the Royal Opera House because of her size. In 2014, there was a row played out in the media when mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught – singing the role of Octavian, a young man, in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne – was described as “stocky”, “chubby” and “dumpy” by (male) critics. In other words: too round to pull off their idea of the role of sexy young cavalier. A later self-defence by one of the critics centred on the argument that opera is a visual as well as musical form. The Mail, in customary style, poured fuel on to the already lively flames by saying Erraught had “the face and figure of a goodish pork pie”. Some forms of misogyny in the opera are subtle. Some less so.

Barbara Hannigan and Christopher Purves in Written on Skin (2013). Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

As in ballet, there is an essential contradiction between what the form is telling you is happening and what is actually happening: Giselle may die at the end of act one, but in act two she’s back as a ghost – a ghost who, with theatre’s double vision, one also perceives as a woman with sinews like iron, marvellously unwraithlike. The choreography of Giselle’s second act does everything in its power to render weightless its ranks of ghostly jilted virgins, straining for the illusion of floating and flight. But those dancers, light as they are, crash back to earth with a satisfying thud. They live! So it is in opera. Operatic heroines are silenced, yes: but the opera can’t go on without them. The dying operatic woman – full voiced and magnificent till the last – takes the work down with her. Written on Skin (2012), by George Benjamin, with a libretto by Martin Crimp, is a fascinating case of a contemporary opera that manages to inhabit both the template of its genre and to subvert it. Like Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande and Berg’s Wozzeck (both important operas for Benjamin), the opera has a love triangle at its heart and ends with the suicide of its female lead. The story is based on an Occitan medieval tale in which a cuckolded husband forces his wife, Agnès, to eat the heart of her lover. In Crimp and Benjamin’s version, Agnès insists at every turn on her autonomy – she defiantly brings down the denouement, tells her husband how much she relishes the taste of her lover’s heart, and chooses the manner of her own death. She is a character who simultaneously exists within, and rejects, the inherited traits of the operatic heroine.

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How many operas pass the Bechdel test? To leap American cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s feminist hurdle, a work of fiction must contain two women, who have a conversation, not about men. Opera has a pathetically small pass rate. The powerfully voiced women are so often defined by brother, father, lover, son. Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, for example (based on an 1890 play by Gabriela Preissová), is dominated by two women – Jenůfa herself and her stepmother (both remain upright at the end of the opera, though one is maimed, and the other is tamed and about to be tried for infanticide). Despite this vocal and dramatic dominance, the action revolves around the man by whom Jenůfa got pregnant, the man whom her stepmother would have liked her to marry, and the (male) baby she has had in secret. But Janáček was clearly fascinated, if not obsessed, by femininity, and all his most important operas are powerful and complex works about women (and for female singers), even the one that is apparently about a fox (The Cunning Little Vixen).

She was sexy as hell and completely ageless; Garbo one minute, Dietrich the next; a powerful woman in control

Of all of his operas, The Makropulos Case – with its extreme, otherworldly score, full of galloping tympani and strident lyricism – is my favourite. Deeply strange, it has a wildly complex backstory. Suffice it to say that the main character, Emilia Marty, took an elixir some 300 years ago, and at the time of the opera’s setting is still youthful and is earning her way as an opera singer. She is worshipped by the young Kristina. There is a series of complicated events including former lovers, dusty legal documents and Marty’s attempt to retrieve a mysterious envelope – which, we learn, contains the formula of the elixir. At the end of the opera Marty confesses to the existence of the elixir, reveals that she was born Elina Makropulos, and prepares for the end of her life. She offers the elixir’s formula to Kristina (thus allowing the opera to pass the Bechdel test) who sensibly sets fire to it. In my mind it is forever bound up with seeing Anya Silja, aged 61, sing it at Glyndebourne. Men fluttered around her like moths. She was sexy as hell and completely ageless, Garbo one minute, Dietrich the next. A powerful woman, in control.

Anja Silja in The Makropulos Case at Glyndebourne (1995). Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The Bechdel test has its limits. For example, those operas with a single character, such as Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (in which a woman talks to her lover down the telephone) and Schoenberg’s expressionist Ewartung (with a Freud-soaked libretto for soprano by Marie Pappenheim), cannot pass. Dialogues des Carmelites by Poulenc, on the other hand – set in a convent during the French revolution – passes with ease, but it does end with the cast of holy sisters being guillotined one by one, each with a hearty musical thwack.

I cheer for Gerald Barry, whose two most recent operas pass the test: his all-female work The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a dark and claustrophobic tale of lesbian obsession that takes its libretto from the 1972 film by the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder; and his hilarious opera The Importance of Being Earnest, adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play. But playing the Bechdel test game does lead me to think about the fact that so many female characters in opera do not ever get to sing with each other (or sing about matters not of the heart). Puccini’s La Bohème revolves around two couples. We learn much about the two male characters’ friendship. But what do Mimi and Musetta say to each other? What hopes and fears do they express? We shall never know. Opera is full of missing scenes between women.

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Barry’s adaptation of Wilde leads us into more helpful territory: that of the comic opera, where there is much more room for shrewd and wily female agency, and less call for female characters to be destroyed. Even apparently highly misogynist works such as Mozart’s Cosí Fan Tutte – in which two men test their girlfriends’ fidelity by apparently leaving town but then turning up again, disguised, to woo the women – come off as less misogynist than they seem at first sight. “Cosí fan tutte” (“In such a way do all women behave”; or “all women are the same”) is merely a claim made in the piece by a male character, points out Kasper Holten, director of opera at the Royal Opera House. Any viewer of the opera can easily conclude that the male characters are just as, or even more, absurd as the women. The opera is about the ridiculousness of human behaviour.

Another helpful avenue to explore is the baroque age, before the romantic era gets its claws into the genre and insists on immense tragedy. Take Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, for example – which James Conway directs for English Touring Opera this spring. The opera, based on the play by Euripides, sees the titular heroine as a priestess of a temple by the Black Sea. (It riffs on a version of the Trojan war story in which Iphigenia is not in fact sacrificed to secure the Greek forces a fair wind to Troy, but is whisked away to the Crimea by divine intervention at the last minute.) Her brother Orestes, whom she has not seen since childhood, and his friend Pylades, turn up. Any foreigners arriving at the shore are customarily sacrificed. Iphigenia does not fall in love, nor does she exist only in relation to the male characters, and she is the author of the important device (freeing Pylades) that will see all of them escaping from the fatal shore. Thanks to its chorus of Scythian women the opera even passes the Bechdel test.

Handel’s Alcina, too, bursts with powerful female characters. The story, taken from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, concerns Alcina and her sister Morgana, witches who preside over a magical island. Male visitors are forced to become their lovers or are turned into trees, animals, rocks or waves. Alcina is holding the knight Ruggiero captive, but his beloved, Bradamante, turns up (disguised as a man) to rescue him. Katie Mitchell directed this opera at Aix-en-Provence in 2015 and took a feminist line: she saw the sisters as women who run an efficient matriarchy that serves their own pleasure, downplaying any element of romantic comedy. Which brings us to another important element of opera: it does not exist inscribed on the page, but as a living, performed act of the theatre, and part of the responsibility of the director is to not accept unscrutinised the assumptions of the time in which it was composed. Mitchell will also direct Lucia di Lammermoor at the Royal Opera House in London this spring, and part of her job is to flesh out the woman who so famously goes mad and dies.

Patricia Petibon in the title role of Handel’s Alcina in Aix-en-Provence (2015). Photograph: Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images

Alcina’s male lead, Ruggiero, was written for a castrato. At Aix it was sung by a countertenor, Philippe Jaroussky. But the decline of male castration in the service of art has led to job openings for female singers, who have been able to take the roles written for these men. Here is another solace for those weary of operatic misogyny: the subversive pleasures of women playing men. When Alcina was performed in a concert at the Barbican in 2014, Ruggiero was sung by a mezzo-soprano, meaning all the most important roles – Alcina, Morgana, Ruggiero, Bradamente – were taken by women. As Margaret Reynolds has written in her essay “Ruggiero’s Deceptions, Cherubino’s Distractions” (1994), the result is that “all the love interest, all the wooing and the teasing, all the betrayals and reunions, happen between women”. There is a pleasure in watching women having, at last, the chance to play the hero, to sing about power and ambition, to think about more than heartbreak (though that, too). I remember Sarah Connolly swaggering about in military garb as Handel’s Giulio Cesare; Alice Coote striding across the stage as his Xerxes. Coote has written beautifully of her life as an operatic man. “I have to change my balance and physical movements from the minute to the large. I have to edit my very approach to the world I find myself in and make my interactions and responses male. This last task is particularly sophisticated, subtle and – perhaps – elusive.” She has so thought herself into a male physicality, she writes, that occasionally she has blundered into the men’s toilets after rehearsals, she says. It is a pleasure to watch women make their gestures expansive on the stage: for once to allow themselves space. “Cross-dressing on the stage reveals less to me about gender than it does power,” Coote has written.

Aside from the opening up of baroque castrato roles, there are also the parts that are boys written for girls: most importantly Mozart’s wonderful, mercurial Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro (libretto by Da Ponte after Beaumarchais). Cherubino, who “loves all women”, is petted and spoiled by the countess, whom he adores. In the course of the opera’s joyful ridiculousness, he will be disguised as a girl: thereby becoming a woman playing a man playing a woman. This delicious gender-shifting fades as the tragic 19th century sets in – but is gloriously revived by Strauss in the early 20th century. Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier is the inheritor of the risqué mantle of Cherubino. In the first scene, we see him waking up from a night of passion with his mistress, the Marschallin (“wife of the field marshal”). It is a sexy scene. Why do lesbians go to the opera? Reynolds asks in her essay. She answers her own question: “Because where else can you see two women making love in a public place.”

Sarah Connolly and Danielle de Niese in Giulio Cesare (2005). Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is an intricate and sophisticated nest of Russian dolls. We are in Vienna. A party is about to begin. An opera is to be part of the evening’s entertainment. After a great deal of backstage quarrelling by the composer and the performers, we see the staging of the opera within an opera – its title is “Ariadne auf Naxos”. The composer of the work within the work was, Strauss insisted, to be sung by a woman. This was in the teeth of librettist Von Hofmannsthal’s resistance, who thought the idea “odious”. Michael Kennedy’s biography of Strauss records his explaining: “A tenor is impossible ... a leading baritone won’t sing the Composer: so what is left to me except the only genre of singer not yet represented.” Strauss’s explanation – that he made the decision on purely musical grounds – seems especially liberating now, in an age when gender is being questioned, ripped up, performed with invention and with a sense of choice. It also means that for once a woman gets to sing a role with an actual job, and a creative job at that. She is not someone’s daughter, or a nymph, or a rhinemaiden, or a princess. The soprano is, at last, the composer.



Iphigénie en Tauride is at the Hackney Empire, London E8, on 5 March, then tours. La Traviata is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2E, until 19 March and Lucia di Lammermoor from 7 April to 19 May.