Here’s my request for today to creators of contemporary opera: How would it be if we had a new work that didnotturn on a female character sacrificing herself to redeem a man?
There are plenty such operas out there, of course. But the Bay Area’s operatic stages this month have been weirdly rife with women eager to throw themselves overboard for a man’s sake, and honestly my patience is starting to wear a little thin.
First there was“如果我是你,”the musically resourceful but maddening new opera by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, which had its world premiere this month at the Merola Opera Program.
Toward the end of the piece, the male protagonist, Fabian, faces a little problem. He’s traded away his immortal soul for the ability to instantly become anyone he wants, and to say that he’s squandered that gift would be an understatement.
What Fabian is really after is love and happiness, which makes him rather like you and me. Instead, he’s merely shuffled his way through a long series of meaningless alter egos, and now the souls of all the people whose identities he’s assumed are lost in some kind of metaphysical void.
Fortunately for all concerned, there’s a woman on hand to clean up the mess. Diana, Fabian’s love interest — a woman whose well-established character note is her joyous determination to exult in the world and its splendors — is nevertheless ready to toss it all away if it will mean redemption for a man.
In the end, that’s not the way the story plays out. But it’s Diana’s first instinct as soon as things get rough.
Maybe she got the idea from“Breaking the Waves,”which also opened a three-performance run this month at West Edge Opera. Here again, we have a selfless female ready to give up her own physical and spiritual well-being to save her man.
Like theLars von Trier filmon which it’s based, the opera by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek throws a spotlight on Bess McNeill, a simplehearted (perhaps also simpleminded) saint on the Scottish coast.
When her husband, a worker on an offshore oil rig, suffers a life-threatening injury, Bess comes to believe that the only way to persuade her wrathful Calvinist God to heal him is by sexually degrading herself. Miraculously, or at least surprisingly, God takes the deal.
Opera lovers know these stories all too well. We’re devoted, often in spite of ourselves, to an artistic genre built in large part around female mortality. We’ve watched women dive off of church rooftops, throw themselves into the pyre, collapse into fatal paroxysms of madness or tuberculosis.
In her brilliant, flawed and transformative 1979 book “Opera, or the Undoing of Women,” the French writer Catherine Clément serves up a fierce catalog of the ways in which operatic women play out their downfalls on the stage. It’s a sobering thing to take in just how central this trope is to the form.
For the specific version in question here — the woman whose death serves to redeem the man — the main reference point is Wagner, who returned to the idea repeatedly over the course of his career. Senta in “The Flying Dutchman,” Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” Brünnhilde in the “Ring” cycle: These women live to die, and they die to save someone else.
But the operatic canon is full of variants on this theme. In “Rigoletto” and “Madama Butterfly” and “La Traviata,” sopranos give up their lives and chances of happiness so that tenors may thrive.
Granted, these bare-bones summaries leave a lot out of the equation — among other things, the music that breathes lives into the stories. (Clément’s neglect of music is the clearest and most obvious weakness in her book.)
“如果我是你,”based on a 1947 novel by the French American writer Julien Green, tackles questions of fate and identity, in the course of which Diana’s noble sacrifice is just one plot point. Heggie’s buoyant and expressive music illuminates many of those points.
And although Bess’ self-abnegating transformation from ingenue to harlot forms the central dramatic arc of “Breaking the Waves,” the stark, sinewy lyricism of Mazzoli’s score — a musical counterpoint to the expressive virtuosity of von Trier’s cinematic technique — lends this tale a sanctified luster, like something out of a medieval morality tale.
Still, how much longer are stories like this going to form part of our cultural landscape? How many more fictional women must be sacrificed — or, more to the point, sacrifice themselves — to ensure that men are made whole? Even in opera, surely, a woman can find other things to do than die for her man.