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Paper Abstract

In June 2015, the Royal Opera House staged a now-infamous production of Guillaume Tell that depicted gang rape when army officers violently strip and molest a young woman. The production drew sharp criticism from audience members, but director Damiano Michieletto defended the scene’s sexual violence, arguing that “if you don’t feel the brutality, the suffering these people have had to face, if you want to hide it, it becomes soft, it becomes for children.” Both the production and Michieletto’s unapologetic statement demonstrate how much of the opera world refuses to consider the implications of sexually violent staging choices. Using Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell as a starting point, I consider the ethical implications of representing women’s trauma on the 21st-century operatic stage through examinations of recent performances of Brett Dean’s Hamlet (2017), Gounod’s Faust (1859), and Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia (1946). While some of the productions discussed treat trauma exploitatively, others serve as models of ethical engagement with painful subject matter.

Through analyses of the controversial performance of Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet; the representation of maternal trauma in several productions of Gounod’s Faust; and the Boston Lyric Opera’s thoughtful production of The Rape of Lucretia, I discuss the implications of staging women’s trauma for both audiences and performers, foregrounding the ever-relevant question of empowerment versus exploitation. My analyses show that, despite opera’s long history of idealizing and exploiting women’s suffering, operatic performances can ethically portray trauma and even reshape19th-century texts to better address past and present traumas shared by women. Productions, I show, have the power to bear witness to historical and current instances of women’s suffering, turning spectators into sympathetic witnesses and raising questions about the ethical responsibilities of performance. Relying on methodologies from trauma and performance studies, I ultimately suggest a three-tiered approach to ethical engagement with women’s trauma on the operatic stage: 1) performances must be framed by educational opportunities outside of the performance itself; 2) staging decisions must represent women’s trauma by bearing witness to suffering without exploiting it; and 3) the performance’s ethical implications for audience and performer must be considered by directors and others involved in the production process.

Molly Doran is Assistant Professor of Music at Wartburg College, where she teaches courses ranging from music history surveys to ethnomusicology to women in music. Her research considers issues of ethics, trauma, performance, and gender in 19th-century French opera and in 21st-century opera productions. Recent and current projects include an article for Women and Music about maternal trauma in Gounod’s Faust; the “Arias” entry for Oxford Bibliographies (co-created with Hilary Poriss); and an essay about the ethical implications of operatic representations of women’s trauma for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies. The summer 2024 issue of JAMS features an interview with Doran and two other scholars in which they discuss their application of trauma studies to their musicological scholarship. Her work has been supported by various awards, including the Chateaubriand Fellowship to enable research in Paris.