Marschner's Villains, Monomania, and the Fantasy of Deviance

Marschner's Villains, Monomania, and the Fantasy of DevianceAuthor(s): Stephen MeyerSource: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Jul., 2000), pp. 109-134Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3250709 .

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 12, 2, 109-134 C 2000 Cambridge University Press

Marschner's villains, monomania, and the

fantasy of deviance

STEPHEN MEYER

Abstract: Marschner's villains occupy an important place in the history of operatic style, forming a bridge between characters such as Dourlinski or Pizarro and Wotan or the Dutchman. His villains may also be understood against the background of early nineteenth-

century pathology, and particularly the syndrome of 'monomania'. Marschner's music, which

partially 'heroicizes' the villains in keeping with the contemporary rise of the sympathetic villain, parallels efforts to redefine the nature of madness. Marschner's operas could thus

simultaneously construct and undermine the hegemony of bourgeois values, and become a vehicle through which composers, performers, and audiences could explore the contradiction between social/sexual order and the fantasy of deviance.

Diagnosing the vampire

In 1825, Parisians were shocked by a repellent crime. During the preceding year, M. Leger, a winegrower from the region just outside of Paris, had grown increasingly anti-social. At length he withdrew to a secluded grotto in order to avoid all human contact. Overcome by cannibalistic urges, he apparently murdered a

young girl and dismembered her body in order to drink her blood. As appalling as it was, Leger's vampirism was perhaps less extraordinary than a brochure published that same year, in which the young medecin alieniste Etienne-Jean Georget attempted to explain the winegrower's actions, along with those of four other criminals who had been convicted of violent crimes. In his brochure, Georget was careful not to attack the judges directly; nevertheless, he clearly felt that in passing their sentences

they had paid insufficient attention to the perpetrators' mental condition. Medicine, Georget argued, had a vital role to play in criminology, particularly in those obscure cases in which the perpetrator did not appear to be acting out of clear motives.

Anticipating, at least to a certain extent, more modern defence strategies, Georget put forward the idea of the 'homicidal monomaniac'. In most ways the homicidal monomaniac was able to function as a normal member of society, but he or she was in fact diseased, obsessed or overwhelmed with a particular idea or emotion over which he or she had no control. Leger, Georget explained, was not a criminal or a

monster; he was suffering from a mental illness. In Georget's opinion, Leger should not have been executed, but rather placed in an asylum.1

1Georget's response to these crimes and his criticism of the penal code are described by Jan Goldstein in Console and Classfi: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 162-5. Georget is also famous for commissioning the painter Gericault to complete ten portraits of lunatics. The paintings that survive (from the period 1821-4) are all of monomaniacs. For a discussion of visual representations of madness in the nineteenth century, see Sander Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identiy and

Difference (Baltimore and London, 1995).



Stephen Meyer

Three years after Leger was sentenced to death for murdering and drinking the blood of his innocent victim, the same gruesome crime was enacted on the operatic stage, first in Heinrich Marschner's Der Vampyr, then later in Peter Joseph von

Lindpaintner's opera of the same name. There is no evidence that Marschner or his

librettist, Wolfgang August Wohlbriick, based their choice of subject matter for their opera on reports from the Parisian newspapers, or that they directly incorporated ideas from Georget's brochure into their characterization of Lord Ruthven, the demonic anti-hero of Der Vampyr.2 Indeed, the original source for the

opera's plot is not medical literature but rather a story by John Polidori entitled The Vampyre, a work that enjoyed significant popularity in the decades after its

publication in 1819. Although there is no direct connection between Georget's brochure and Marschner's opera, we may read both texts as evidence of a more

general fascination with a particular character type: the violent, ultimately self- destructive loner who haunts the borders between sanity and mental disease. This character type stands at the centre not only of Marschner's Der Vampyr, but also of his two other most important operas, Der Templer und die Jfdin and Hans Heiling. He

is, in other words, both a medical and an operatic subject. In his anguished voice we

may hear a broader and deeper resonance between opera and pathology. My purpose in this essay is to uncover this resonance and to trace its aesthetic and

political significance in early and mid-nineteenth-century European society. Other types of opera might at first present themselves as more logical places to

look for the intersection of music and madness. Insanity is, after all, a topos of the

early to mid-nineteenth-century operatic stage, which finds famous manifestations in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Verdi's Nabucco, among other places.3 Unlike Lucia or Nabucco, Marschner's villains are not mad, even in the fictional, operatic sense. Yet in many ways their music is not dissimilar to the better-known mad scenes of Italian opera, and suggests a more general connection between opera and

insanity. My concern in this essay, however, is not with operatic madness per se, but with the ways in which concepts of insanity inform the characterizations of the early nineteenth-century operatic villain. For this purpose, Marschner's operas offer a

nearly ideal subject. Marschner was a highly skilled and successful composer who wrote effective, even emotionally moving music, but not even his most ardent fans (and I count myself among their number) would place him in the first rank of

nineteenth-century composers. Yet it is precisely his status as a successful

mediocrity that makes him such a valuable source for the history of more general trends in cultural history. Indeed, these trends may appear more clearly in 'second-rate' composers than in the works of extraordinary geniuses such as Mozart

2 The most comprehensive biography of Marschner is A. Dean Palmer, Heinrich August Marschner 1795-1861: His Life and Stage Works (Ann Arbor, 1978).

3 For an overview of mad scenes in nineteenth-century opera, see Sieghart Dohring, 'Die Wahnsinnszene', in Die 'Couleuer locale' in der Oper des 19. Jahnrhunderts, ed. Heinz Becker (Regensburg, 1976), 279-314. For precursors of the mad scene in the operas of Mozart, see

James Parakilas, 'Mozart's Mad Scene' Soundings 10 (1983), 3-17. In her article 'The

Silencing of Lucia', this journal 4 (1992), 119-41, Mary Ann Smart gives a stimulating reading of Lucia's mad scene.

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Marschner's villains, monomania, and the fantasy of deviance

or Wagner. This is particularly true of Marschner, whose music borrows from such a wide variety of operatic styles and traditions. Although Marschner made many original contributions to the genre, his oeuvre can be regarded as a compendium (albeit incomplete) of early to mid-nineteenth-century vocal styles. The diverse and

synoptic nature of his compositions can be clearly seen in the three operas for which he was most famous: Der Vampyr (1828), Der Templer und dieJiidin (1829), and Hans

Heiling (1833). For these three works, Marschner used many different musical and dramatic conventions; each one gestures towards a different operatic (sub-)genre. Der Vampyr, with its two-act structure and lurid violence, alludes to the turn-of-

the-century Schauerromantik. In contrast, the quasi-historical subject matter of Der

Templer und dieJiidin, as well as its battle scenes and choruses, make it a not-so-distant cousin of the French grand opera. Hans Heiling, perhaps Marschner's most adven- turous work, seems most indebted to the world of Der Freischitg.4 But despite their differences, each of these operas features a baritone villain in the title role; these characters clearly belong to the same operatic lineage. Lord Ruthven the vampire, Bois-Guilbert the Templar, and Hans Heiling, the half-human King of Earth Spirits, are by no means interchangeable, but their personalities are constructed along the same lines. They are supremely conflicted characters, in whose personalities the forces of evil - bloodlust, desire for revenge, and hatred - do battle with softness, tenderness and love. Competing with the tenor for the affections of the soprano heroine, their desire challenges borders that cannot be crossed: between the human world and the world of spirits, for instance, or between Christian and Jew. Through their lust for the heroine they are alienated from society and driven inexorably towards their tragic end.

Marschner was certainly not the first or only composer to use this character

type - the Flying Dutchman is only the best known of a host of other early nineteenth-century tormented baritones. The most immediate precursors of Heiling, Guilbert, and Ruthven may be found in the German Romantic operas of the

preceding decades, in characters such as Spohr's Faust and most notably in the

figure of Lysiart from Weber's Euzyanthe. Like Marschner's villains, Lysiart harbours an unrequited passion for the soprano, which drives him ever more deeply into the embrace of evil. As with Heiling and Bois-Guilbert his personality is divided against itself: softness and tender love do battle with hatred, pride, and vengeance. If certain

plot elements of Marschner's operas recall those of Weber, Marschner's musical

style is also heavily indebted to Eugyanthe, Der Freischiit and to a lesser extent Oberon.5 Weber's large-scale, multi-sectional arias expressing rapidly shifting emotional states with highly colouristic harmonic/melodic language - Agathe's 'Leise, leise' and Max's 'Durch die Wilder' from Freischiitz or Lysiart's 'Wo berg ich mich?' from Eugyanthe, for example - are direct ancestors of the arias for

4 Contemporary reviews frequently compared Der Vampjr to Der Freischitg. See, for example, the anonymous reviews in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 30 (1828), cols. 253-9, 269-74 and 671-3.

5 Marschner conducted Weber's operas frequently, and worked under Weber for a brief period in the 1820s. When Weber died in 1826, Marschner was a candidate for his job as director of the German opera in Dresden.

1ll



Stephen Meyer

Marschner's villains. More distant precursors of Marschner's villains include the various tyrants and oppressors from late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century rescue operas: Dourlinski in Cherubini's Lodoiska or Don Pizarro in Beethoven's Fidelio. What is new about Marschner's villains is not so much their musical gestures or even the dramatic situations in which they are entwined, but rather the way in which those musico-dramatic tropes function within a larger whole. Marschner

departs most significantly from his precursors in placing the villain at the centre of the work. Ruthven, Bois-Guilbert, and Heiling are the most fully developed characters in their respective operas. Behind all of these figures stands Mozart's Don Giovanni, whose connection to Marschner's villains is perhaps less apparent in Mozart's score than in nineteenth-century interpretations of Mozart's music. In much early nineteenth-century German criticism, and especially in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story Don Juan, Mozart's anti-hero emerges as a figure closely related to Marschner's villains. Like Ruthven, Guilbert, and Heiling, he is driven by over-

whelming, superhuman forces; he disdains social customs and knows no higher law than his own heart.

Indeed, the figure of the tormented exile at war with himself, whose virtues and faults seem larger than life, seems to have held particular importance in early nineteenth-century Europe, and was by no means confined to the operatic stage. The same traits that link Lord Ruthven, Bois-Guilbert and Hans Heiling to one another also connect all three to a prominent literary topos of the early nineteenth

century, the Byronic hero. This kinship is hardly surprising when we consider the

literary works that served as sources for Marschner's three operas. Indeed, for many years the Polidori story upon which Wohlbriick based Der Vampyr was thought to be by Byron himself.6 The story proved widely influential (Goethe felt that it was the best thing that Byron had written), stimulating a wave of 'vampire literature'

throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in Bram Stoker's Dracula of 1897.7 Marschner's Der Templer und die Jidin is one of a group of works produced in the

period from 1825 to 1840 based more or less directly on Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.8 In

many ways, the libretto for the opera (also by Wohlbriick) follows the novel quite closely; compressing the action as befits an operatic text. The most significant difference between Scott's novel and Wohlbriick's libretto concerns a shift in the

6 Polidori was a physician who accompanied Byron on his travels to the Continent in 1816-19. He based the plot for his story The amre on a discarded fragment from Byron.

7The secondary literature on the vampire is quite large. A good introduction to the topic may be found in James B. Twitchell's The Living Dead A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature

(Durham, N. C., 1981). Wohlbriick based his libretto only loosely on Polidori's story. Many plot elements, including the names of the characters, are drawn directly from The Vampyre, but others appear to be original, or are drawn from a French source that was itself based on Polidori, or even other sources (such as the Don Juan story).

8 The immediate source for Wohlbriick's libretto was a play by J. R. Lenz entitled Das Gericht der Templer. Other early nineteenth-century operas based on Ivanhoe include Giovanni Pacini's Ivanhoe, with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi (1832) and Nicolai's II Templario, with a libretto by Girolamo Maria Marini (1840). Although Eugene Scribe did not base La Juive directly on Ivanhoe, he was certainly aware of Scott's novel, and probably drew upon it for many of the dramatic motifs in his libretto. For a discussion of these operas, see Jerome Mitchell, The Walter Scott Operas (University, Alabama, 1977).

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'centre of gravity' away from the relationship between Ivanhoe and Rowena, and (as the title of the opera implies) towards the relationship between the Templar Bois-Guilbert and the beautiful Jewess Rebecca. In both of these libretti Wohlbriick

pares down his source material in order to foreground the inner life of the villain. The theme of the 'Byronic hero', already present in the literary works upon which these libretti are based, attains even greater prominence when it is transferred to the

operatic stage. A similar process may be seen in the libretto for Hans Heiling, which, unlike those for Der Vampyr and Der Templer und die Jiidin, finds its origins in the folktales so avidly collected and transcribed in early nineteenth-century Germany. Eduard Devrient (who also sang the lead role in the first performance) constructed the plot for the opera from various legends about the Hans Heiling cliffs in Bohemia. By combining conflicting versions of the folktale character, Devrient created a profoundly ambivalent figure, part hero, part villain, full of love and

hatred, tenderness and vengeance.9

Monomania

Marschner's villains, then, may be regarded as representatives of a much more

broadly disseminated hero (or anti-hero) type. Indeed, the themes of the Byronic (or Marschnerian) hero - alienation, obsession, self-torment, destruction - reflected the concerns not only of musicians, artists, and writers, but also of scientists, especially those interested in human behaviour and the function of the brain. For if the narrative of desire, frustration and tragedy is the central topos in Marschner's

operas, it also plays a large role in early nineteenth-century discourses of insanity, particularly in the diagnosis of what scholar/practitioners defined as 'erotic monomania'. This disease was a subspecies of 'monomania', a term that made its first appearance around 1810 in the writings of Georget's teacher and mentor Jean Etienne Esquirol. By the last decades of the nineteenth century the diagnosis of monomania had been superseded by other concepts and categories of mental

disease, but in the first half of the century the term was in wide use, not only among doctors, but also the broader public. In her book Console and Classi: The French Pychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Centugy Jan Goldstein cites numerous examples to show the broader dissemination of the idea of 'monomania' in early nineteenth-

century public life. By the late 1820s, she writes, 'the term had already percolated down to the nonmedical ... intelligentsia and been incorporated into their

language'. Monomania, she continues, acquired the status of a general cultural

category, a process that culminated 'when the Academie franpaise officially admitted the neologism "monomanie" into the French lexicon in 1835 ... an achievement all the more noteworthy when it is compared to the linguistic fate of "nostalgia", a late

seventeenth-century coinage that required almost a century and a half to win the same approval'.10

9 For an overview of the sources for the Hans Heiling libretto, see A. Dean Palmer, s.v. 'Hans

Heiling', New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London, 1992). Devrient originally produced the libretto for Mendelssohn; it was later revised for Marschner.

10 Goldstein, Console and Classif (n. 1), 153.

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Stephen Meyer

The term gained such widespread currency in part because it corresponded to

many early nineteenth-century concepts about the structure of the brain. Esquirol's concepts about the human mind intersected with those of contemporary physiog- nomists and phrenologists, who thought the brain was divided into discrete regions, each of which ruled over a particular 'faculty': i.e. 'amativeness', 'religious devotion', 'philoprogenitiveness', 'acquisitiveness', etc. Mental disease, Esquirol thought, might in some cases be confined to a particular region of the brain, leaving other areas completely unaffected. This diagnosis seemed to fit the many mentally ill

patients he had observed who were able to function normally in almost every sphere of human activity. Only with regard to a certain idea or emotion did these sufferers exhibit abnormal behaviour. Esquirol articulated the diagnosis of 'monomania' to describe just such cases. Depending on the particular part of the brain that was

affected, there were therefore 'acquisitive monomaniacs', 'erotic monomaniacs',

'religious monomaniacs', and monomaniacs who thought they were the king of Sweden. The diagnosis found unique resonance in early nineteenth-century society. As Goldstein writes:

It is arguable as well that monomania was so quickly assimilated into the early nineteenth- century vocabulary because of its special relevance at that historical moment. It corre-

sponded to - indeed, it magnified and even caricatured - a salient mind-set and behavioural

pattern of early bourgeois society, with its new possibilities for 'self-making': a single- mindedness and goal directedness, an intense and exclusive fixation on particular ends and

rigidly defined patterns of striving, as opposed to a dedication to the spontaneous, diverse, and well-rounded 'good life'. As a kind of obsessive narrowing, monomania may have seemed to contemporaries an apt name for what they intuitively sensed was the characteristic mal du demi-siecle.ll

Doctors and lawyers first diagnosed monomania among the criminally insane, but

by the 1830s it had become a much more general part of everyday discourse, not

only in medical and scientific circles, but also amongst the broader intelligentsia; the

term, we might say, moved out of the prison and asylum and into the drawing room.12

The symptoms that Esquirol describes in his case histories of monomaniacs:

increasing delusion centred around a fixed idea, lack of fever or other physical signs of disease; the ability to reason on topics unrelated to the delusion, etc. are hardly new. Earlier writers, however, saw these symptoms as indications of another

disease, the disease of melancholia. By articulating a new syndrome, Esquirol was

self-consciously positioning himself both against and within the discourse surround-

ing this ancient diagnosis: foregrounding certain traditional characteristics of melancholia while suppressing others. His terminology does not so much reflect a fundamental change in the conceptions of mental disease, but rather a transformation and reformulation of traditional paradigms. His descriptions of monomania

11 Goldstein, Console and Classjy. (n. 1), 161 12

Esquirol first used the term 'monomanie' in an article on the subject in the Dictionaire des sciences medicales (Paris, 1812-22) vol. 34, 115. For a fuller discussion of monomania, see Goldstein, Console and Classif, 152-96.

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echo earlier works on melancholia; what is new is the way he classified and

organized the traditional symptoms of insanity. An essential facet of this process of transformation and reformulation is inherent

in the term 'monomania' itself. Esquirol was certainly not the first to describe this

aspect of mental disease - the idea that too great a concentration on a single idea could lead to insanity stretches back at least to Roman times, and was particularly associated in the works of many authors with melancholia. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition, 1621), for instance, Robert Burton develops the idea of

'love-melancholy', a kind of mental disease growing out of an erotic fascination.13 The association between obsession and melancholia was widespread and consistent: in his Dictionary (1755) Samuel Johnson defined 'Melancholy' as 'a kind of madness, in which the mind is always fixed on one object'.14 Esquirol's ideas were thus not

completely original; nevertheless, by singling out the idea of 'fixed delusion' as the

primary cause of a separate disorder he refocused the discourse surrounding insanity.15 One of the effects of this new focus was to draw attention to the process whereby the healthy mind became disordered, and at least in part, to efface the boundaries between sanity and mental disease. The monomaniac, as Esquirol described him or her, was not altogether distant from the normal person. Indeed, Esquirol begins the chapter on 'Monomania' in his Treatise on Mental Maladies (first edition, 1838), by emphasizing the partial or limited nature of the disease:

At one time, the intellectual disorder is confined to a single object, or a limited number of objects. The patients seize upon a false principle, which they pursue without deviating from

logical reasonings, and from which they deduce legitimate consequences, which modify their affections, and the acts of their will. Aside from this partial delirium, they think, reason and act, like other men ... monomaniacs are not deprived of the use of their reason, but their affections and dispositions are perverted.16

This perversion, Esquirol goes on to show, arises as part of a gradual process. In the remainder of the chapter, he narrates numerous case studies that trace an incremental path from normalcy to insanity. In the mind of the sufferer, certain ideas become persistent fantasies; these in turn become an obsession, and, if

13 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, intro. J. B. Bamborough (Oxford, 1989). Burton's work was by far the most comprehensive seventeenth-century work on melancholia, and was still being used as an authority on the subject by writers in the late eighteenth century.

14 Quoted by Stanley Jackson in Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Moder Times (New Haven and London, 1986), 144.

15 The broader currency of this idea of 'fixed delusion' finds its most famous musical

expression, of course, in the idee fixe of Berlioz's Syjmphoniefantastique. According to Goldstein, the term idee fixe was probably coined by the phrenologists Gall and Spurzheim in connection with Esquirol's delineation of monomania. See Goldstein, Console and Classiy, 155n21. The German writer Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806-49) did not use the term 'melancholia' at all, substituting the idea of a 'fixed delusion'. See Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 158ff. for a discussion of Feuchtersleben's ideas.

16 Jean Etienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insaniy, trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia, 1845), 319.

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Stephen Meyer

untreated, develop into monomania. In an account of an 'erotic monomaniac', Esquirol describes just such a progression, in which a woman at first becomes enamoured of a man not her husband. Finding her married life impossible, Esquirol writes:

She goes into the family of her father, discourses constantly of the object of the passion, and becomes difficult, capricious and choleric. She also suffers from nervous pains; she escapes from the house of her relatives to pursue him. She sees him everywhere, and addresses him in passionate songs. He is the handsomest, the greatest, the most humorous, amiable and

perfect of men, she never had any other husband. It is him who lives in her heart, controls its pulsations, governs her thoughts and actions, animates and adorns her existence. She is sometimes motionless: her look is fixed, and a smile is upon her lips.17

By articulating a continuum from ordinary thoughts and emotions to monomania, Esquirol was thus challenging conceptual borders between the health and disease, between normal and pathological, perhaps even between obedience and criminality. There is no absolute division between 'passion' and 'monomania', for the seeds of mental disease lie within each one of us. As F. B. Winslow asks in his On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, and Disorders of the Mind (1860):

Is there any mind, pure and untainted, which has not yielded, when the reason and moral sense have been transiently paralysed and God's grace ceases to exercise an influence over the heart, to the seduction of impure thought, lingered with apparent pleasure on the

contemplation of physically unchaste images, or delighted in a fascinating dalliance with criminal thoughts? ... Is not every bosom polluted by a dark, leprous spot, corroding ulcer, or portion of moral gangrene? Does there not cling to every mind some melancholy reminiscence of the past, which throws at times a sombre image over the chequered path of life?18

Moral gangrene

The progress of this 'moral gangrene' is clearly illustrated in Der Templer und die Jidin, based on Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, through the relationship between Bois-Guilbert and Rachel. Each of the three acts is anchored by an extended number in which this

relationship is explored and developed. In the first-act Grosse Scene und Duett mit Choren (No. 6), the Templar, stung by the beauty of the Jewess, offers Rebecca gold and jewels if she will accept him as a lover. When Rebecca resists, reminding Guilbert that Jew and Christian can never be joined together, the Templar attempts to rape her. Only by threatening to hurl herself from the window of her tower cell does Rebecca save herself from Guilbert's advances.

The Jewess is off stage for much of the second act, appearing only in the trial scene finale. Immediately before this number, Guilbert sings his Scene undArie 'Mich zu verschmihen', the longest and most formally complex aria of the opera. Here the

Templar reveals the hidden wellsprings of his conflicted character, giving voice to

17 Esquirol, Mental Maladies (n. 16), 336. 18 Quoted in Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves: An Anthology of

Psychological Texts 1830-1890 (Oxford, 1998), 269.

116




intense anger as well as fervent love. He is, we discover, not 'merely' or 'only' a

villain; like the criminals that Georget discussed in his 1825 brochure, he is also a sufferer. In the first section of the aria Bois-Guilbert recalls the battle from which he has just come, in which he defended Rebecca from the fierce attacks of the

enemy. Rebecca, however, is ungrateful for his services, and as he ruminates on the

strange mixture of resentment and attraction that he feels for the Jewess, his

thoughts turn to the more distant past and his failed romance with 'Adelheid von Montemar'. In lyric phrases he sings of his chivalrous love for the unworthy lady, adopting the 'romanza'-style more commonly used by the tenor. His love, however, was given in vain. Adelheid married another, and this betrayal sent Guilbert into

paroxysms of anger, stilled only when he murdered the bride and the groom on their

wedding day. In the final section of the aria Guilbert's thoughts turn once more to

Rebecca, whose love he expects to fulfil all the hopes and desires that Adelheid left so frustrated. As he imagines a future life united in love to the Jewess, he sings an ecstatic cabaletta, resolving the E minor opening of the aria into an agitated, even

manic, E major. We understand, both from the context of the drama and from the nature of the music itself, that Guilbert's vision of marriage to Rebecca is nothing but a deluded fantasy. The aria thus dramatizes thwarted desire in both the past and the future. The 'Adelheid story' and the story of the Templar and the Jewess follow the same trajectory from obsession and delusion to tragedy - thus, in this aria Guilbert both narrates and enacts his inexorable fate.

Transformed into a narrative, 'Mich zu verschmihen' reads remarkably like one of the many case histories of the 'erotic monomaniac' that can be found in the pages of early nineteenth-century books on mental or moral insanity. As in the description of the erotic monomaniac quoted above, Guilbert's 'obsession', or 'fixation' with Rebecca (early nineteenth-century writers would probably not have used these

terms), begins with a specific idea: the remembrance of Rebecca's 'beautiful body' and the fierce battle in which he served as her protector. In the course of the aria the specific thought becomes more general, as it is transformed, to use the language of monomania, from a fleeting whimsy into an idee fixe. In the final section of the aria the Templar loses touch with reality: obsession becomes fantasy, and Rebecca

appears to his deluded mind as his sole hope of redemption. We may trace the Templar's deepening erotomania not only in the libretto, but

also through Marschner's transformation of particular musical motifs and gestures. One hesitates to use the word 'leitmotif because of its Wagnerian associations. There is nothing here to compare with the network of motifs that underpins the

Ring tetralogy; nevertheless, certain musical phrases do recur in a variety of

contexts, taking on ever-deeper layers of dramatic meaning. A particularly note-

worthy example is a phrase that first occurs in bars 29-32 of 'Mich zu verschmahen' with the words 'besorgt nur war ich, dass den zarten K6rper . . .' (see Ex. 1). The

phrase marks an important emotional turning point in the aria. Bois-Guilbert is

narrating the events of a battle, addressing an imaginary Rebecca with a violence that at first seems to bear an isomorphic relationship with the tumult of war. But

here, as he remembers that all of his efforts were expended only to guard the Jewess, his anger melts:

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Stephen Meyer

Bois-Guilbert 92 # r r C r r r b r 29

besorgt nur war ich dass den zar - ten Kor - per A^ I I I I I I II

f ? ?J I b tJ J J

J bJ

_# ' bo ho o8 ho 9: ?> O O O O

Piano

Ex. 1: Marschner, Der Templer und die Jiidin Act II scene 6 (no. 12), bars 29-32.

Zahlloser Pfeile Ziel war meine Brust, nur dich zu schutzen braucht' ich meine Waffen, besorgt nur war ich, dass den zarten Korper kein Pfeil erreiche keines Schwertes Spitze die Lilienhaut verletzte! Ha! und jetzt! zum Vorwurf machst du meine Liebe mir! Preis hitt'ich dich dem Feinde geben sollen - Und sterben willst du lieber, als dein Leben Mir danken. Grausam, lieblos nennst du mich! Ach konntest du mein Herz erkennen, Du wiirdest mich nicht lieblos nennen

[My breast was the target of countless arrows; I used my weapons only to guard you; I cared only that no arrow should reach the tender body, that the point of no sword should injure the lily-white skin! Ah! and now! You throw my love back to me as a reproach! You would rather have been given as a prize to the enemy, or died, than to thank me for your life. Cruel! you call me loveless! Ah! could you only know my heart, you would not call me loveless.]

Significantly, it is the memory of the Jewess's 'tender body' that provokes this emotional transformation. By virtue of its dramatic context, this motif thus takes on connotations of yearning, of the erotic, of the villain's passage from proud warrior to tender lover. Marschner expresses these affects in the motif primarily through harmonic tension and resolution, in particular, by the dense chord on the downbeat of bar 30 accompanying the peak of the melodic phrase ('besorgt nur war ich', marked in the example with a cross). The harmonic gesture might be understood as an F7 chord with a 6-5 suspension placed over a Bb pedal in the bass, or alternatively as a Bb' chord moving towards a dominant substitute and eventually to the local tonic of Bb. The precise labelling of the gesture is less important than the way it embodies Bois-Guilbert's passion. Adopting the language of early nineteenth-

century theory, we could say that the chord contains two 'leading notes': an Eb

resolving eventually to D, and an Ah that moves two bars later to Bb The motif

appears twice more in this section: first in F-sharp in bars 55-8 (in the

accompaniment alone), and then almost immediately afterward in G, in bars 61-5

(together with the vocal line). Marschner does not merely transpose the motif to a new key, but transforms it. At the beginning of bar 56, for instance, which

corresponds to bar 30 in Example 1, Marschner uses a 'triple leading-note' chord; Guilbert's yearning, we might say, has been intensified by the addition of another dissonance (see Ex. 2).

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Marschner's villains, monomania, and the fantasy of deviance 119

Bois-Guilbert 9: # | - F -

l

danken! Grau - sam, lieb - los

Piano * #J

nennst du mich! Ach, knn test du mein Herz er

I591* St , ?i rL

-,.^^4 r Piano 96 __ _ . ___- _ _

Bois-Guilbert f#r I I I rr r r - l

ken - nen, du wiir - dest mich nicht lieb - los nen-nen

?63 r C ; f n f J J

Piano r

r

Ex. 2: Marschner, Der Templer und die Jiidin Act II scene 6 (no. 12), bars 55-65.

This 'tenderness' motif is particularly associated with Rebecca, and plays no role in the next sections of the aria. Here Guilbert's thoughts turn to Adelheid, and the

betrayal that he suffered at the hands of his former lover. But the motif returns for the final section of the aria as a C major bridge section within the E major cabaletta, with the words 'und mir winkt was ich vergebens suchte in des Drang des Lebens'

(see Ex. 3). The musico-dramatic transformation of the motif thus parallels the

deepening obsession that informs the discourse of monomania. At first Bois- Guilbert yields only to the 'seduction of impure thought' - he is, to use Winslow's

language, merely 'lingering with apparent pleasure on the contemplation of a

physically unchaste image', namely, the tender body of the Jewess. But that yearning roots itself ever more firmly in his imagination, until it blossoms forth in the manic coloratura of his cabaletta. In the first section of the aria, Guilbert recounts actual

events, but by the final section, he is completely absorbed in the fantasy that Rebecca will dispel the darkness of his soul and become his lifelong partner, moving from unrequited passion to the very borders of erotomania:

Das thatest du mit heil'gem Feuer, Drum wirst du mir ewig theuer,



120 Stephen Meyer

288

Bois-Guilbert 9): ### r r f r T

(er)freut und mir winkt, was ich ver

n # d---"r 3 3 Piano

3

Bois-Guilbert 9 #### u f

ge - bens such - - te in dem Drang des

Piano

Bois-Guilbert. :2 r r r'a L 'r Le- bens, lacht der Lie be Se - lig - keit,

Piano

Ex. 3: Marschner, Der Ter Te ner d die Jidin Act II scene 6 (no. 12), bars 288-94.

Ich dir treu ergeben sein; Deine Liebe zu erringen, Will das Schwerste ich vollbringen, Setze kuhn das Leben ein.

Alles, alles soil dir werden Ruhm und Liebe, was auf Erden nur ein weiblich Herz erfreut Und mir winkt was ich vergebens suchte in dem Drang des Lebens, Lacht der Liebe Seligkeit!

[All this you do with sacred fire, and so you will be eternally faithful to me [as] I am faithfully devoted to you; In order to earn your love I will complete the most difficult tasks and

bravely wager my life. You shall have all: Fame and love, and everything on earth that brings

joy to a woman's heart. And to me will appear what I vainly sought in the struggles of life: the blessed laughter of love!]

Mania, melancholy, and music

If the dramaturgy of 'Mich zu verschmahen' resonates strongly with Esquirol's

emphasis on the progressive nature of mental disease, we may also see in the

-- 3- 3 3 3 \ # #F# r a 0"

0

92 : ####u 1 u4, I

2




broader characterization of Bois-Guilbert a reflection of another key element in the

syndrome of monomania: the rapid alternation between contrasting emotional states. Indeed, it was precisely this aspect of his patients' behaviour that prompted Esquirol to articulate 'monomania' as a distinct syndrome. Eighteenth-century writers tended to divide insanity into three main categories: sufferers from phrenitis, the first category of mental illness, manifested fever and other more purely physical signs of disease. Melancholics, by contrast, showed no fever. Traditional descriptions of melancholia, with their connections to ancient humoral theory (the term itself derives from the Greek for 'black bile', an excess of which was thought to cause the disease), emphasized lethargy, sadness, and a general slowing down of

corporeal systems. Mania, the last of the three traditional forms of insanity, was also

distinguished by the lack of fever. It was typically thought to affect the entire mind, and result in uncontrollable physical gestures - acceleration rather than a retardation of corporeal systems. This classificatory system was only loosely followed - the

nosology of mental disease was in fact quite fluid. The presence or absence of fever, for instance, may have distinguished phrenitis as a separate category, but the

relationship between melancholia and mania was less clear. Many eighteenth-century writers described patients who manifested signs of both diseases; some even

thought that melancholia and mania might be related in a circular fashion. In his Medical Precepts and Cautions (1751), for instance, Richard Mead noted that 'these two disorders [melancholia and mania] sometimes take each other's place, and undergo various degrees of combination'. 'Medical writers', he continued:

distinguish two kinds of Madness, and describe them both as a constant disorder of the mind without any considerable fever; but with this difference, that the one is attended with audaciousness and fury, the other with sadness and fear: and that they call mania, and this melancholy. But these generally differ in degree only. For melancholy very frequently changes, sooner or later, into maniacal Madness, and, when the fury is abated, the sadness generally returns heavier than before.19

Monomania may be seen in part as a way to describe the symptoms of patients whose rapid alternation between seemingly contradictory emotional states defied conventional classifications of insanity. In place of the dichotomy between mania and melancholia, Esquirol posited a three-part scheme. 'Melancholia', with its references to an outmoded concept of human physiology, had no place in Esquirol's system, and he replaced it with the new term 'lypemania'. Esquirol retained 'mania', and inserted his new diagnosis, so to speak, in between the two. 'Monomania', he states in the Dictionarie des sciences medicales (1819) 'is the type intermediate between mania and lypemania; it shares with lypemania the fixity and concentration of ideas and with mania the exaltation of ideas and the physical and mental activity'.20 The

monomaniac, in other words, moves rapidly from a state of deep despair to one of

exaltation, or (as is the case with the baritone villain) from feelings of love to

19 The Medical Works of Richard Mead, M.D. (London: C. Hitch et al., 1762), pp. 485-6. Quoted by Jackson, in Melancholia and Depression (n. 14), 258.

20 Quoted by Goldstein, Console and Classij (n. 1), 156-7.

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Stephen Meyer

feelings of hatred and revenge. Flexible and compelling, the diagnosis of monomania could thus ascribe a variety of contradictory behaviours to a single source, and make sense out of precisely those cases that seemed most obscure and

troubling. Here again it is the focus of Esquirol's classificatory system, rather than his

clinical observations, which was innovative. Esquirol may not have been the first to draw attention to the interplay between mania and melancholia, but his diagnosis of monomania drew increased attention to the rapidly shifting emotional states that characterize certain types of mental illness. These kinds of rapid emotional shifts find a direct musical corollary in Marschner's characterization of the villain, not only in Der Templer und die Jidin, but also in Hans Heiling and Der Vampyr. Indeed, Hans

Heiling is in this regard an even more classic case example of the 'erotic monomaniac' than Bois-Guilbert. Heiling's compulsive desire is concentrated on Anna, the peasant girl to whom he becomes engaged before the action of the opera begins. But if Heiling appears at first to be closer to Anna than Bois-Guilbert is to

Rebecca, he too is separated from the object of his desire by barriers comparable to those that divide Christian and Jew. Heiling is the offspring of a union between a mortal man and the Queen of the Earth Spirits; he is able temporarily to conceal his half-human identity, but ultimately unable to move fully into the 'upper world'. Like

Bois-Guilbert, Heiling's moods change rapidly from manic exaltation to dark

despair, and from passionate love to the most hateful thoughts of revenge; like the

Templar's, his desire for the soprano is tragically thwarted. But if the lineaments of his character recall those of the Templar, he begins his

most famous aria in a very different emotional state than Bois-Guilbert's at the

beginning of 'Mich zu verschmahen'. Heiling's aria begins, we might say, where 'Mich zu verschmahen' ends. Unlike the Templar, who addresses his second-act aria to an imaginary Rebecca, Heiling sings 'An jenem Tag' directly to his beloved. He

begins the aria by describing, in exalted tones, the day on which Anna promised herself to him. That Marschner chose the same key for this opening section as he had used for the cabaletta of Bois-Guilbert's aria is not accidental, for both sections

express a kind of manic, deluded happiness in which the baritone believes himself to be eternally united with the soprano. Heiling's joy is insufficiently motivated by the dialogue that immediately precedes 'An jenem Tag'. In this exchange, Heiling gives Anna a costly chain, and the soprano wishes that she could feel more truly thankful towards her strange and unsettling bridegroom. The 'normal' progress of the courtship has been inwardly derailed, even if the outward forms are being observed. In this context, then, the opening gesture of Heiling's aria, a rising E

major arpeggio played forte by the brass instruments, seems incongruous and somehow excessive.

That Heiling's excessive joy masks a deeper anxiety becomes apparent in the section that begins with bar 26, towards the end of the first section of the aria (see Ex. 4). Here Heiling's thoughts turn away from the betrothal day to an earlier time, to the 'triiber, freudenloser Nacht' from which she has (he thinks) delivered him. Marschner depicts this emotional shift by a modulating to C major via an E pivot tone, a rapid diminuendo, and a sudden shift to a woodwind-dominated orchestral

122



Marschner's villains, monomania, and the fantasy of deviance 123

25

Hans Heiling t P - -

Drang Aus triiber,

Pianor

?I,oaB r j f f : L t r ? - 4-t J I ^

Hans Heiling 9 ? , r r r

freu- den - lo - ser Nacht bin ich zum

Hans Heiling ## r r r l 7 i - hel- len Le- ben da er - wacht

Piano i I I --3-- --3 -

3**r^t^^^-J 3-,

Ex. 4: Marschner, Hans Heiling Act I scene 1 (no. 3), bars 25-33.

texture. C major is also the key in which the 'tenderness motif appears in the cabaletta of Bois-Guilbert's 'Mich zu verschmahen' - indeed, when the motif recurs in bar 317 of the Templar's aria it is prepared by a set of musical gestures almost idl to t entical to this moment in 'An jenem Tag'. This harmonic gesture seems to have had particular resonance for Marschner, and it occurs prominently at two other

points within Heiling's aria. In bar 75, midway through 'An jenem Tag', it introduces another, more terrifying shift in the baritone's mood, inaugurating a section in which Heiling fantasises about Anna's heart 'growing cold', and the terrible consequences that will follow (see Ex. 5). The sudden shift from E major to C major occurs for the final time in the unusual melodrama with which the aria ends. After his final cadence, according to the stage directions, 'Heiling falls to Anna' feet e hs feet and ries his face in her lap' as the orchestra plays a quasi-Italianate melody in E major. Anna responds to Heiling's excessive action by admonishing him not to be so wild, to leave off his constant studying and be more cheerful. As she begins to speak, Marschner deflects the melody once more towards C major. These three instances of harmonic deflection do not carry the same dramatic

significance; it would be difficult to argue that this harmonic gesture had a specific



Stephen Meyer

Heiling

Piano

74

g5)i### f t V r pr i r'r z $

[mit] H6 - - len-qua - len lieb' ich dich!

9r r . .. . r; 5 J

76

_

_

HTT uI; i w f 1 1) I I 1 ) I1 ) I I ! 4 r I I I

Konn- test du je von mir las - sen, konn - test

i ## K i .I -l , J k i . I _ 7

Piano -

q -W . _ I I - -I I_ , = I _ =

I I I I I I i I I i I I I i h 7 N

ig :: #### H l

s

b

e

je dein Herz er- kal ten, Weh! uns bei - den

?:)^r 474; ^ ir ' f tt C t

80 if dann! Weh!

##

tt#J.. f

J

-

7 #### # 9 : 9: #: X # Ex. 5: Marschner, Hans Heiling Act I scene 1 (no. 3), bars 74-80.

meaning in Marschner's operas. Indeed, the sudden modulation to the flat submediant is broadly disseminated in dramatic music from this period: Robert Schumann uses the same effect (in the same key!) for the first words of the Lorelei in his song 'Waldesgesprach' (Op. 39, no. 3).21 In both the Schumann song and the

21 It was certainly not uncommon for composers during the 1820s and 1830s to use a chromatic third-related key as a secondary harmonic area: there are numerous examples of this, for instance, in the symphonies of Schubert.

Heilin

Piano

Heilin

Pianc

___----a , T, v v I I ' r r r I I I r I

_ r I

\ T v L 6 * ib qI ; j ? - LJ 1

1 a

124




Marschner arias the modulation inaugurates a dramatic dislocation, a sudden shift from one emotional state to another.

What is unusual about these moments in 'An jenem Tag' and 'Mich zu verschmihen' is not the gesture itself, nor even its general semiotic meaning, but the

way in which it functions within the two arias. Strong musico-dramatic contrasts are

certainly not the sole province of Marschner; indeed, we might even argue that 'dramatic dislocation' is the central topos of the early nineteenth-century aria. Conventional double-aria form, after all, features a dramatic contrast between the slow section and the cabaletta, and the characters who sing these arias experience a range of emotions that is every bit as extreme as Heiling's. Marschner's villain arias

depart from double-aria form not so much in the range of emotions to which the characters give voice, but rather in what we might call the formal relationship between different emotional states. In the conventional double aria, it is the opening section and the tempo di me~Zo that are dramatically kinetic, introducing new ideas or

plot elements that motivate the slow section and the cabaletta respectively. In Marschner's style, however, moments of emotional dislocation may occur at any point, derailing expectations and breaking large sections into subsections. Although many of his arias can be analysed in terms of the double aria, Marschner's departure from the conventions of the form points towards subtle, but important differences in musical dramaturgy. These differences reflect, at least in part, the new concepts about madness and the human personality articulated through the syndrome of monomania.

The distinctness of Marschner's formal procedures can best be clarified against the background of what is the probably the most famous early nineteenth-century example of operatic insanity: the Mad Scene from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. This scene falls into a kind of modified double-aria form, in which the dramatically kinetic sections are greatly expanded. In the opening scena Lucia's madness takes the form of hallucination, framed by a stage full of knights and ladies, as Mary Ann Smart points out. Smart draws our attention to what is surely the most uncanny moment in the first part of the scene: a remembrance from the first-act duet between Edgardo and Lucia, played by the flute and clarinet. Like recalled themes in other mad scenes, Smart writes, this section 'intrude[s] on an already existing musical discourse, fragmenting and interrupting it, perhaps in this case mimicking Lucia's confused thought processes'.22 Just as the melody approaches the half cadence it is cut off by a timpani stroke and a forte chord, the musical analogue for Lucia's shock as she imagines a phantom rising between her and her lover. Although Donizetti relies on texture and dynamics rather than harmony in order to create dramatic dislocation, the moment is akin, at least superficially, to the flat submediant harmonic shifts in 'An jenem Tag'. Both gestures create a sense of formal disruption that we read through the lens of what Smart earlier calls the 'time honoured

metaphorical connection between unsettled form and an unsettled character'.23

22 Smart, 'The Silencing of Lucia' (see n. 3), 137. 23 Ibid., 134. See also Ellen Rosand, 'Operatic Madness: A Challenge to Convention' in Music

and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992).

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Stephen Meyer

Sudden musico-dramatic dislocations such as the one inaugurated by the timpani stroke do more than anything else to convince us (and the on-stage observers) of Lucia's insanity. And although Heiling is not literally insane, Marschner uses the harmonic shifts from E major to C major within 'An jenem Tag' to signify strangeness and abnormality - like Lucia, Heiling is driven from one emotional state to another not by any 'external' events, but by the disordered logic of what we are

tempted to call his moral disease.

Despite their dramaturgical similarity, however, the timpani stroke in Lucia and the harmonic shifts in 'An jenem Tag' have quite different formal meanings within their respective musical numbers. Donizetti's gesture creates a more comprehensive sense of dislocation than Marschner's does: the timpani stroke is accompanied by a tempo change and a dramatically different orchestral texture. The abrupt modulations in 'An jenem Tag' also create formal disjuncture, but Marschner elides the boundaries between the different subsections of the aria, linking them together by common themes and motifs. The orchestral motif in bar 75, for instance, is a

transposition of the motif to which Heiling sings 'O lass die Treue niemals wanken'; the further modulations of this motif in bars 76-7 extend a harmonic procedure that

typifies the entire section of the aria. Marschner likewise uses the same theme for the E major and C major subsections of the postlude, modifying the sense of dislocation produced by the sudden harmonic shift. Donizetti's timpani stroke creates a more absolute separation between subsections of the mad scene; whereas in 'An jenem Tag' these formal divisions are attenuated by a sense of ongoing thematic and harmonic transformation.

The formal distinction between the Mad Scene and 'An jenem Tag' might be

explained by the difference between Heiling's and Lucia's mental states: Heiling is

certainly disturbed but he is not, like Lucia, completely insane. Yet there is more at stake here than simply a difference in the degree of mental derangement. By combining harmonic dislocation with thematic coherence, Marschner is illustrating a kind of madness that is different in quality as well as degree from that suffered by Lucia. In Heiling's aria Marschner combines the contradictory impulses of both

disruption and continuity, creating a musical portrait that more nearly resembles that of the monomaniac. On one hand the monomaniac displays a Lucia-like instability: his thoughts and affections, to quote Esquirol once more, 'are the more disordered as they are concentrated or exasperated by opposition. Fear, hope, jealousy, joy and

fury', he continues, 'seem unitedly to concur, or in turn, to render more cruel the torment of these wretched beings'.24 Yet this emotional fluctuation is caused by fixation and obsession: like Heiling, the monomaniac suffers from both too much and too little mental stability.

Lord Ruthven, the sympathetic villain, and the birth of the asylum

The moments of emotional dislocation in 'An jenem Tag' are perhaps closer to Weber than to Donizetti, and particularly to Der Freischbiit which more than any

24 Esquirol, Mental Maladies (see n. 16), 336.

126




other opera forms the starting point for Marschner's style. For example, the slow section of Max's first-act aria 'Durch die Wilder' ends with a gesture similar to the E major/C major modulation in bar 75 of Heiling's aria. Here Max's reverie about

Agathe is prolonged by a kind of postlude, in which the orchestra recapitulates the section's main theme. Just as this melody arrives at its cadential point, however, Weber deflects its emotional trajectory by introducing new orchestral textures: tremolo cellos that lead inexorably towards a diminished chord and the Samiel motif. Instead of Agathe, the devil appears. Weber's gesture not only creates emotional dislocation, but marks the intrusion of the demonic into the aria. Max is not merely emotionally disturbed; his soul is a battleground between the forces of

good and evil. In this sense his condition anticipates the vampire Lord Ruthven more than Hans Heiling or Bois-Guilbert. Ruthven and Max follow different fates, but they are both involved in bargains with the powers of darkness, and for both characters feminine love appears as a redemptive force. In the first scene of the Marschner's opera 'the Master' (presumably the Evil One himself) offers the

vampire another year 'among free people' if Ruthven will bring him three tender sacrifices before the stroke of midnight. The vampire's criminal bargain with the devil seems at first to set him apart from Bois-Guilbert and Heiling. The soft and tender femininity that both Heiling and Bois-Guilbert harbour beneath their hard exterior plays a critical role in both Hans Heiling and Der Templer und die Jidin, for in both of these operas the baritone's desire for the soprano is central to the plot. Lord Ruthven's lust seems quite different from that of the Templar for the Jewess, or Hans Heiling for the mortal woman. Unlike Heiling or Bois-Guilbert, he does not need the sopranos' love; he needs their blood. Yet throughout Der Vampjr, murder and romance are commingled. In order for Ruthven to ensnare the souls of his

victims, he must make them believe that he adores them - he must seduce the

sopranos before he kills them.25 Moreover, Ruthven's heart is itself not immune to the power of love. His devouring lust is in this sense a darkened and more criminal version of the erotomania that drives Heiling and the Templar. In his music, even more than in Hans Heiling or Der Templer und die Jiidin, we hear the destructive and demonic power of desire.

Nowhere in the opera is the sexualization of violence and demonization of the erotic more fully explored than in Ruthven's first-act aria 'Ha! welche Lust!' In the

opening recitative the vampire rejoices that he has been given another day in which to murder his three victims, and the aria itself begins as a manic celebration of the

joys of the kill. Marschner sets the vampire's violence to a heavily accented, chromatic head-melody. But as early as the second vocal phrase, it becomes clear that this violence is inextricably mixed with desire. As Ruthven begins to describe the beautiful eyes and blooming breast of his victim, and sings of the blissful

trembling kiss through which he will drink her blood, his music becomes more

impassioned. Like Heiling and Bois-Guilbert, he expresses his desire in the lyric mode, with soaring, arch-shaped phrases over a pulsating triplet accompaniment.

25 The idea that the vampire must be 'invited in' by his victim is a common motif. See Twitchell, The Living Dead (see n. 7), passim.

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Stephen Meyer

He modulates first to F major, and then, as he describes his loving embrace of the

victim, even further away from the home key of the aria, to A flat major. Only with the devilish laughter that ends the first section of the aria is he led back to D minor, via a diminished seventh chord.

Ruthven begins the middle section of his aria by celebrating the new life that

glows in his body after he drinks his victim's blood. Here Marschner uses a local tonic of B minor, a choice of key that seems dictated not so much by the kind of harmonic logic that I described above, but rather by the convention of what we

might call the minor/major aria. For a moment, it appears as if we are going to follow the harmonic trajectory of many other early nineteenth-century villain arias that begin in a minor key and end in the parallel major. The grand aria 'Wo berg ich mich' sung by the villain in Weber's Euyanthe, for example, moves from C minor to C major, and Caspar's 'Schweig, Schweig, damit dich niemand warnt' from Der Freischiit begins, like 'Ha welche Lust!' in D minor, but moves to D major for the final sections. Towards the end of the middle section of the vampire's aria, it seems that Marschner is going to follow the same harmonic procedure. Just as in the first section of 'Ha! welche Lust!', the vampire's violence is mixed with desire, and as he

sings of the victim's pain and anxiety his music veers away from the minor mode, first towards G major and then again into D major (see Ex. 6). Here the vampire is remembering the pain that he once felt, when he was himself a victim, with a heart 'created by Heaven'. It seems for a moment as if Ruthven's bloodlust will be

replaced by tenderness and sympathy - the vampire is about to lose his fangs. But instead of the D major resolution implied by the preceding phrase, Marschner gives us a kind of 'deceptive cadence' to a D diminished-seventh chord. This chord is one of the central harmonies in the aria, indeed, in the score as a whole, and leads the

vampire back into D minor and a recapitulation of the opening section. The gesture creates another example of emotional dislocation similar to those in 'An jenem Tag' or 'Durch die Wilder' - indeed, it is immediately followed by piccolo shrieks that seem to come directly from the Wolfs Glen. But here the diminished chord does

not, as it does in Max's aria, mark the literal appearance of the devil. Samiel has no need to appear on the stage, for he has already captured the vampire's soul.

This particular section figures prominently in the most important early critique of the opera, an article by Amadeus Wendt in the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1828).26 Although Wendt praises Marschner's music, he is quite critical of the

libretto, particularly of its subject matter which, he feels, oversteps the boundaries of art. 'Given the [dramatic] circumstances', he writes:

the scene of Lord Ruthven, No. 2, which concerns the fulfilment of his oath, is quite effective. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental contradiction in the work, which lies in the material itself, that is to say, in the choice of such a phantom as the principal character of the opera. The vampire ... expresses the desire to drink the sweet blood of beautiful maidens. But Art must eschew the portrayal of this type of horrible, bestial lust.27

2( Amadeus Wendt, 'Ueber die Oper "der Vampyr" von Marschner', Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 5 (1828), 246-8, 256-7, 265-7, 271-5, 282-3.

27 Ibid., 265.

128




103 P.

Ruthven : bC e F | f |I das der Him - mel fiih - - lend

Piano

Ruthven }: r I schuf, das der Him - - mel, der

3 37

108

Ruthven 9: b -

Him mel fiihl end schuf

A +... a top

~b.$ .K rJ Sqt-~ 6y R' a iLL:: 7'1

Piano

I C)y L o t -<-=c o f

V Ex. 6: Marschner, Der Vampjr Act I scene 2

V I

(no. 2), bars 103-10.

The poet himself, Wendt continues, acknowledges as much with the words from the 'moment of tenderness' that I quoted above. Wendt sees this as merely an attempt to win some audience sympathy for the vampire. Despite Marschner's compo- sitional skill, this attempt, in Wendt's view, is a failure: 'the vampire becomes a

vacillating figure'; he writes, 'the audience does not completely believe in him, and with this fundamental precondition everything else vacillates as well. We hear a seducer whose personality is torn apart, in whom sensual love, yearning, and devilish

laughter alternately press forward'.28 For Wendt, the moment of tenderness within 'Ha! welche Lust' is thus symptomatic of structural problems with the libretto that follow inevitably from the ill-fated choice of a vampire as the principal character in the opera. But we might also read the episode in another way, through the discourse not of music criticism, but of psychiatry. Lord Ruthven is not properly a

monomaniac; nevertheless, Wendt's description of the ways in which his aria

transgresses the rules of Art read remarkably like Esquirol's descriptions of the ways in which the erotomaniac transgresses the margins of sanity. Ruthven's 'vacillation'

28 Wendt, 'Ueber die Oper "der Vampyr", (n. 26), 266.

I I

- v as as --- Mr n r n -

129

I I

\ I



Stephen Meyer

between emotional extremes may undermine his credibility as an operatic villain, but within the context of early nineteenth-century psychiatry his behaviour makes

perfect sense. In a recent article Derek Hughes reads this 'moment of tenderness' in a very

different way.29 The vampire's 'vacillation' between bloodlust and sympathy for his victims is for Hughes the source of the aria's dramatic power. Unlike Wendt, Hughes concentrates on the connections between different sections of the aria, showing how the motif to which Ruthven sings 'Ach, einst fiihlt ich selbst [den Schmerzen]' is ultimately derived from the chromatic head motif that begins the number. Violence and love are thus inextricably linked: 'the character who most

vividly evokes scenes of compassion', Hughes writes, 'is the vampire himself.30

Hearing Ruthven's compassion, I would argue, itself evokes another kind of

compassion: that of the audience for the plight of the vampire. This sympathy is all the more remarkable when we consider the nature of Ruthven's crimes. This 'moment of [audience] tenderness' thus functions similarly to the brochure Georget wrote in defence of M. Leger. The rise of the 'sympathetic vampire' occurred

simultaneously in the Parisian courts and on the operatic stage. The rise of the sympathetic villain in Der Vampyr runs parallel not only to the

articulation of monomania, but also to a further-reaching development in the history of psychiatry, the birth of the asylum. Here again Esquirol was a central figure. During the period 1810-17, Esquirol undertook systematic tours of the facilities for the insane in France. The conditions in which the mentally ill were kept shocked him, and impelled him to take positive action. Building on the work of his teacher and

mentor, Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), Esquirol advocated, in 1819, a state-sponsored system of mental institutions, dedicated to the cure of patients rather than their incarceration. In these new asylums the insane would be kept in humane conditions and subjected to a course of treatment that would be determined according to the latest scientific principles. Esquirol was not alone in his desire to replace the

eighteenth-century madhouse with a more modern, humane, and scientific institution. In his book Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insani'y, J. G. Spurzheim approached the subject with unmistakable fervour, comparing the conditions of the madhouse to those in which common criminals are kept:

[T]he thing which strikes me as the most shocking and abominable is, that the villains who have disturbed the peace of society live in palaces, have an airing, sometimes a playground, have often the whole building, even their place of worship, warmed, fresh water in the yards, often cold and warm baths, and everything comfortable and clean, while the poor insane, who want and deserve our pity, lie on straw and dirt, exposed to all vicissitudes of season and weather, reduced to the mercy of the turnkey, and less attended to than a horse or a wild beast.31

29 Derek Hughes, ' "Wie die Hans Heilings": Weber, Marschner, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus"' this journal 10 (1998), 179-204.

3( Ibid., 190. 31

J. G. Spurzheim, Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity (London, 1817), 213-14.

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Spurzheim devotes the final third of his book to describing the modern asylum, the

remedy for this state of affairs. A more concrete model for the modern asylum was the famous Retreat at York,

run by the Quaker William Tuke. The Retreat, which admitted its first patients in

1796, was devoted to the treatment of insane members of the Society of Friends, and was particularly devoted to the principle of non-restraint. In place of the

prison-like atmosphere of the eighteenth-century madhouse, Tuke attempted to create a pastoral, domestic atmosphere, in which patients would be controlled by their own sense of propriety rather than chains or bars. The fear of restraint was still

used, but as William Tuke's grandson Samuel says in his description of the Retreat:

the desire of esteem is considered, at the Retreat, as operating, in general, still more powerfully. This principle in the human mind, which doubtless influences, in a great degree, though often secretly, our general manners; and which operates with particular force on our introduction into a new circle of acquaintance, is found to have great influence, even over the conduct of the insane.32

Like Pinel, Spurzheim, and Esquirol, Tuke saw himself as allied to the forces of

progress, committed to a more humane treatment of the insane, and above all, dedicated to their eventual cure and reintegration into society.

Michel Foucault challenged and deconstructed this self-image in his famous work Madness and Civilization (1961). In the final chapter of the book, entitled 'The Birth of the Asylum', Foucault directly attacks what he regards as the 'myths' of Tuke and Pinel, in an effort to expose their deeper meaning for nineteenth-century society. He

begins by describing a famous scene from the annals of the Retreat at York:

Samuel Tuke tells how he received at the Retreat a maniac, young and prodigiously strong, whose seizures caused panic in those around him and even among his guards. When he entered the Retreat he was loaded with chains; he wore handcuffs; his clothes were attached by ropes. He had no sooner arrived than all his shackles were removed, and he was permitted to dine with the keepers; his agitation immediately ceased; 'his attention appeared to be arrested by his new situation'.33

This passage illustrates what early nineteenth-century doctors regarded as the 'moral cure': speaking calmly and deliberately to their patients so that they became ashamed of their condition and essentially 'cured themselves' of their disease. The 'moral cure' was an essential part of the birth of the asylum - a development seen in its day as a tremendous advance. Foucault, however, argues that Tuke achieved his cures

by making the patients internalize the restraints of the eighteenth-century mad-

house, by replacing the physical shackles with psychological ones:

We must therefore re-evaluate the meanings assigned to Tuke's work: liberation of the insane, abolition of constraint, constitution of a human milieu - these are only justifications. The real operations were different. In fact Tuke created an asylum where he substituted for

32 Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat, an Institution Near York ... (York, 1813), 157-8. Quoted in Taylor and Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves (see n. 18), 231.

33 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civiligation: A Histo{y of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965), 245-6.

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the free terror of madness the stifling anguish of responsibility; fear no longer reigned on the other side of the prison gates, it now raged under the seals of conscience. Tuke now transferred the age-old terrors in which the insane had been trapped to the very heart of madness.34

Foucault's observations give insight, curiously enough, not only into the birth of the

asylum, but also into the social meaning of the sympathetic villain in the early nineteenth century. For despite fundamental differences of genre, there is a

compelling parallel between the story of the maniac at Tuke's Retreat and the dramatic dilemma of Marschner's villains. Here too we may speak about an 'internalization', not so much of the dialogue between madness and reason, but of a related discourse, between the baritone's erotic obsessions and the social/sexual order that thwarts their fulfilment. On one hand, each of the villains to some extent

adopts the stance of the Romantic hero and plays, either literally or figuratively, the role of the bridegroom. In Ruthven's courtship and engagement to Malwina, in Bois-Guilbert's fantasies of union with Rebecca, in the betrothal of Anna and Hans

Heiling, we see and hear the conventionally Romanticized lineaments of bourgeois marriage. Like the sympathetic madmen in the accounts by Tuke and Spurzheim, these villains are potentially 'normal' members of society. Hans Heiling does not want to destroy bourgeois marriage but rather to enter it, and even the vampire, bent as he is on seduction and death, hears the voice of God calling him to moral

redemption. Yet the yearning of the baritone for the soprano, couched in the lyric gestures and tender melodies of the love song, can never be the vehicle through which the villain is rehabilitated, because that yearning threatens to undermine

precisely those borders - between Christian and Jew, or between the natural and

supernatural worlds - which order society. Der Vampyr, Der Temp/er und die Jiidin, and Hans Heiling thus centre around essentially the same story, of the villain's thwarted desire. That desire has both an erotic and a social meaning - the villains, in other

words, are both frustrated lovers and political subversives. The struggle over the

soprano's body, to put it another way, is a struggle over the body politic. Just as in early nineteenth-century case studies of the insane the 'moral cure' is

effected in the heart of the patient, rather than through any external action, so too the drama through which the baritone's desire is thwarted takes place primarily on an internal plane. The internalization of dramatic action is particularly evident in the finales to Der Templer und die Jiidin and Hans Heiling. The last scene of Marschner's Ivanhoe opera actually follows the plot of Scott's novel quite closely. The Grand Master of the Templars has accused Rebecca of alienating the mind of Bois-Guilbert

by her seductive sorcery, and threatens to burn her at the stake unless a champion arrives to defend her honour (we might wonder if Wagner was aware of this scene when he was drafting the first act of Lohengrin). The Grand Master has commanded Guilbert himself to fight against this champion, therefore presenting the proud knight with an insoluble dilemma. If he wins the battle, the charge that Rebecca is a sorceress will be proved, and the great love of his life will be burnt at the stake. To lose the conflict means to lose his knightly honour, and perhaps even his life.

34 Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (n. 33), 247.

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Guilbert offers Rebecca one final chance to escape her fate and elope with him, but the valiant Jewess would rather face death than life together with a man she

despises. Guilbert feels madness overcoming him, and is roused from his torpor only by the arrival of the Jewess's defender. Ivanhoe, still weak from previously acquired wounds, arrives on the scene to be Rebecca's champion, and Guilbert takes

up arms against him. In the ensuing battle, Guilbert dies, but not by the hand of the Saxon knight. 'He lies lifeless there', observes the Grand Master of the Templars at the end of the battle, 'untouched by the enemy's sword, a judgement from God, the like of which I have never seen'. The 'external' battle between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert provides merely the context for the true battle, which is completely internalized. If (to follow Foucault's argument) in Tuke's Retreat and the asylums of Pinel and Esquirol, the tension between sanity and insanity moves from the walls of the madhouse to the conscience of the madman, so in Der Templer und die Jiidin the main tension of the plot moves from the space in between characters into the heart of the villain.

The Finale of Hans Heiling begins with preparations for the wedding of Anna and Konrad. As part of the festivities, Anna is blindfolded by her bridesmaids as they sing a song. They turn the happy bride around in circles, with the idea that she will end up in the arms of her beloved. When the volksthiimlich bridesmaids' song moves towards its final cadence, Heiling interposes himself so that Anna grabs his hand rather than Konrad's. He threatens Anna with revenge, but also nostalgically remembers the day on which she promised to be his bride. Here he sings again the

opening phrases of 'An jenem Tag'. Anna appeals to the Almighty for help, and Konrad rushes in accompanied by townsfolk and guards. But when he attempts to kill Heiling with his dagger, the blade breaks. Because Heiling a supernatural being, he cannot be wounded. His true identity at last revealed, Heiling swings his sceptre and calls forth his underworld minions in order to wreak revenge on the villagers. The tragic conflict between the natural and supernatural worlds is averted only when the Queen of the Earth Spirits appears. She calls Heiling away from the path of

revenge and back to his true self. In the arms of the mother, she says, all pain is ended. Heiling, as the score indicates, struggles with himself, for his decision to return with his mother to the underworld will be irrevocable. Only by rejecting the

hope of love, we have learned, can Hans Heiling assume the sceptre and become

King of the Earth Spirits (Alberich and Wotan face a closely related dilemma in Das

Rheingold). He has promised to return to the underworld when his heart breaks, and

ultimately realizes that he cannot struggle against fate. Accepting his destiny, he bids farewell to the pain and love of the upper world and vanishes forever into an

underground chasm.

Employing the paradigm that Foucault uses to explain the birth of the asylum, we

might say that the Queen of the Earth Spirits has taken the role of the psychiatrist, who, by the patient application of reason, ultimately effects a 'moral cure'. Physical conflict is averted, the drama is transferred on to the plane of Heiling's own heart, and the 'patient' is cured of his madness. The opera ends in an unambiguous F

major, as Anna, Konrad, and the villagers celebrate the almighty power of God who has delivered them from evil. Yet beneath the surface of this resolution, a deeper

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tragedy abides. A part of us sympathizes, perhaps even identifies with the rejected King of the Earth Spirits, who in all of his vengefulness, passion, tenderness and

pride, is perhaps the most human of all Marschner's characters. As in Der Vampyr and Der Templer und die Jiidin, Marschner explores the emotional state of the villain so extensively that, I would argue, the audience begins to interpret the events of the

plot through his eyes. Marschner focuses so intently on the inner tragedy of the baritone that other plot developments, such as the growing love between the tenor and soprano, may seem insipid or shallow by comparison. In this musico-dramatic context, even a demonic character such as Lord Ruthven becomes at least to some extent sympathetic. Indeed, we may question the extent to which Hans Heiling is a 'villain' at all. Marschner's music heroicizes his baritones, so that the audience may simultaneously condemn and sympathize with their actions. Der Vampyr, Der Templer und die Jiidin, and Hans Heiling all end either with the death of the villain or his

departure, yet in this 'purging' of the body politic there is also a sense of loss. We may find an analogy to this sense of loss in the final sentences of Foucault's

chapter on the birth of the asylum, which eloquently express a kind of nostalgia for the 'life of unreason':

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the life of unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning-flash of works such as those of Holderlin, of Nerval, of Nietzche, or of Artaud - forever irreducible to those alienations that can be cured, resisting by their own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling, doubtless by antiphrasis, the liberation of the insane by Pinel and Tuke.35

I would not be so bold as to put the operas of Marschner alongside the works of Holderlin or Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the figures of Lord Ruthven, Bois-Guilbert, and Hans Heiling, might, in their own way, have offered nineteenth-century audiences a way of resisting that 'gigantic moral imprisonment' whose bars were

becoming ever more firmly entrenched. At least for the space of an opera, audiences could share the baritone's deviant obsession, and imagine with him a love powerful enough to break down all borders. Perhaps, if we listen closely enough to the music, we may ourselves be able to feel the pain of his thwarted desire.

35 Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (n. 33), 278.

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Documents

Marschner's Villains, Monomania, and the Fantasy of Deviance