Due date

L's theoretical due date is today, although it looks like it'll still be a few days before she enters actual labor. We're just taking it easy: spent some of yesterday afternoon floating in a pool, with friends, and today's for reading, writing, and maybe a movie. The sense of imminence, though, is almost palpable, and the days thus have something of the quality of Ann Beattie's wonderful story "Waiting." All of which is to say that I've had a little bit of time to pursue rather obscure questions like this: how has the world of opera traditionally viewed pregnancy and childbirth?

Not too favorably, I'm afraid. A quick Google search of "opera synopsis and pregnancy" turns up a few relevant hits. Gounod's Faust is well known, but most of the examples were comparatively obscure: an apparently didactic bio-opera about the Prohibition advocate Carry Nation, for instance, and a Chinese opera called Madame White Snake. And while I've certainly heard of the Czech composer Janacek (and, in fact, took a tram to work past the Brno theater named for him almost daily in 1992-3), I didn't know his opera Jenufa, which seems to have settled into a comfortable reputation as a second-tier work(available on ITunes, but only in two recordings).

In any event, a quick look at summaries and libretti revealed that pregnancy, in each of these examples, leads to real problems. In Faust, Valentine, felled by Faust in a duel, manages to curse Faust and his pregnant lover before expiring. In Carry Nation, our virtuous heroine is pregnant when she asks her husband to quit drinking; he doesn't, and she's soon single. In Madame White Snake (who is a sort of Asian Little Mermaid, as far as I can tell), Xu is horrified to learn that she's pregnant. And in Jenufa, the unmarried title character conceals her pregnancy and then gives birth in secret - only to be given sleeping medicine by her foster mother, who drowns the baby boy.

Not exactly an inspiring set of exempla, then. But why would pregnancy be seen so consistently as the source of difficulty? Well, several responses come quickly to mind. Certainly, composers need narrative conflict, and pregnancies can provide that - a successful pregnancy, after all, is an uneventful one, and that would hardly please a dramatist. And of course operas can be seen as part of the vast artistic machinery that reinforces social norms; viewed from such a perspective, Jenufa served as an advertisement for conventional marriage. Or this: childbirth was commonly dangerous in the cultures in which these operas were first produced; most listeners, I presume, would have had some experience with loss in that direction.

But I wonder if there might also be another, psychological reason. As many writers have pointed out, writing and composing are not unlike the process of pregnancy: one grows fecund, and then produces a sort of surrogate child, on the page. Could these pregnancies gone wrong be a sort of protective hedge against unsuccessful artistic labor, then? By imagining a misdelivery, perhaps Janacek and Gounod hoped to forestall actual difficulties.

I certainly can't prove that, but it made some sense as L and I sat down this morning to listen to a portion of Jenufa - to the aria, that is, in which she awakes from the spell of the sleeping elixir, complains of a sore head, and then begins to wonder where her lover and her son are. It's a sad moment, to be sure, but I hoped that listening to it might prevent, in some mysterious way, problems of our own in the coming days.