Welsh National Opera to perform Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème at Dubai Opera

Poisoned. Stabbed. Driven to suicide. These are just some of the unpleasant ways women in 19th-century opera meet their demise. Mimi, from La Bohème, is no different.

Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece – which comes to Dubai Opera for three performances from today until Saturday – sees the opera’s heroine end her days in poverty, coughing up blood, too poor to buy medicine, and estranged from her one true love Rodolfo.

You could say that she got off relatively lightly, however. Let’s spare some thought for poor Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera, murdered by her husband because he erroneously thought she’d cheated on him with the king. His reason? He sees them together. “Together”, as in walking side-by-side.

Meanwhile, in Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, the king hits his wife, publicly insults her and later kills her – despite her innocence – all because of some gossipy insinuations and a stolen handkerchief.

That is what happens when the female character is innocent. When they are guilty, things really kick off. In Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Nedda’s adultery causes her husband to stab her to death in a frenzied attack witnessed by the entire village and her lover.

Yes, whether it’s Carmen, Isolde, Tosca, Cio-Cio-San, Lakme or Desdemona, it is clear that if you are a women in 19th-century opera – comic opera excluded, of course – don’t bother taking out a pension.

Of course, men die in opera, too. But the nature of their death is different, something Australian soprano Lorina Gore commented on in The Sydney Morning Herald. “The women always seem less deserving of their end, their sacrifice is greater,” says Gore. “But opera is designed to move you and an undeserved death is one of the most moving things of all.”

But is that really the whole story? The French philosopher Catherine Clément tackled this question with a searing feminist critique in her seminal book Opera, or the Undoing of Women.

“Opera … is no different from the other artistic products of our culture; it records a tale of male domination and female oppression,” she writes.

“Only it does so more blatantly and, alas, more seductively than any other art form.

“All the women in opera die a death prepared for them by a slow plot, woven by furtive, fleeting heroes, up to their glorious moment: a sung death.”

This view has proved influential and certainly strikes a chord. Art, in the 19th century, was a supertanker ploughing through society powered by Romanticism. And the idealised Romantic heroine was always supremely sensual. Like all Romantics she was very much in touch with her emotions – indeed, often a prisoner of them. But European operas created during this time were also public works – performed in places like the newly unified Italy – to both the high society and the working classes. They expressed and confirmed the societal norms of the time – norms that viewed men as very much in charge.

A woman deciding her own fate, particularly when love or passion was concerned, would have raised more than a few eyebrows – she would have been seen as a threat to the status quo. So these female operatic characters, therefore, act as a form of catharsis and also a warning. That said, not everyone is in agreement with Clément’s view.

Some critics point to the fact that she concentrates solely on the libretto and, by doing so, ignores one of opera’s most sublime features – the music.

According to musicologist Carolyn Abbate, the plot lines may suggest that female roles get killed off when they get “dangerous”, but the singing actually undermines this. Think about it. These big opera divas are about as opposite as you can get to the cliché of a shy and retiring woman: passive and voiceless.

In fact, she describes opera – from Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo to Strauss’s – as “a secret narrative, a history that traces symbolically opera’s capacity to disrupt male authority”. She adds: “Its story tells of women who take over musical sound.”

Interestingly, by the time La Bohème had its premiere in 1896, society was already starting to shift. Much like today, the fin de siècle in Europe was an era of doubt. The status quo was being questioned, new classes were jostling for rights and Sigmund Freud was spreading ideas about the impact our unconscious can have on behaviour. This influence can be seen in operas from the turn of the century and beyond.

Female characters start to posses more autonomy and also love doesn’t necessarily equal marriage. In La Bohème Mimi dies, but she doesn’t die for love. Of course, that still doesn’t stop us reaching for the tissues.

• La Bohème will be performed by Welsh National Opera at Dubai Opera from today until Saturday. Tickets, from Dh300, at www.dubaiopera.com

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