'The Firmness of a Female Hand' in "The Corsair" and "Il corsaro"Author(s): Heather HadlockReviewed work(s):Source: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1/2, Primal Scenes: Proceedings of aConference Held at the University of California, Berkeley, 30 November-2 December, 2001(Mar., 2002), pp. 47-57Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3878282 .Accessed: 07/02/2012 16:21

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 14, 1 & 2, 47-57 (0 2002 Cambridge University Press DOL- 10. 1017/S0954586702000046

'The firmness of a female hand' in The Corsair and Il corsaro

HEATHER HADLOCK

The dramatic climax of Byron's poem The Corsair comes when Gulnare, a harem slave, seizes a weapon to free herself and Conrad, the pirate whom she loves, from the prison of their common enemy the Pasha Seyd. Gulnare declares:

If thou wilt perish, I will fall with thee.

My life, my love, my hatred - all below Are on this cast - Corsair! 'tis but a blow! Without it flight were idle - how evade His sure pursuit? - my wrongs too unrepaid, My youth disgraced, the long, long wasted years, One blow shall cancel with our future fears; But since the dagger suits thee less than brand, I'll try the firmness of a female hand.'

This is an example of the aesthetic of gesture that Gilles de Van has analyzed as fundamental to Verdi's style, particularly in the early operas like II corsaro. The

gesture is a physical movement - Gulnare's clasping of the dagger - but also a moral or ethical act, a moment of action that at once reveals and transforms the character.2

Although the usual defining gesture for a Verdi heroine - her 'primal scene' - is self-sacrifice, I! corsaro turns on a different, less familiar action. In the climactic Act III duet Gulnara does not sacrifice herself, but rather rescues herself and her lover. Still more unusual is the fact that both Byron's and Verdi's heroines resort to violence; when Conrad refuses to kill the sleeping Seyd, Gulnare does it herself. In taking up a weapon, the woman steps out of the passive femininity that the opera has established as her proper sphere, crossing over into the masculine realm of action.

Although this transgression occurs in The Corsair and in two Italian operas based on it, it has a strikingly different ethical valence in each work. In Byron's dungeon scene, with its overtones of Gothic horror, Gulnare's rescuing action almost

destroys Conrad's spirit even as it saves him. But IK corsaro operas by Giovanni Pacini and Verdi present the female rescuer in a more positive light. Pacini's version (1831-32) departs completely from Byron, eliminating the dungeon scene, the murder, and Gulnare's rescue of Conrad. Gulnare's gesture, however, is not omitted; rather the opera displaces it on to another female character and situation. Verdi's opera, while it follows Byron's plot closely, endows Gulnare's gesture with positive revolutionary force and shelters the hero from its 'unmanning' effects.

1 This and all subsequent quotations from The Corsair are from Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (Oxford, 1970), 293-303.

2 Gilles de Van, Verdi's Theater: Creating Drama through Music, trans. Gilda Roberts (Chicago, 1998), 88-91.

48 Heather Hadlock

It may be useful to introduce a discussion of gender transgression with a review of Romantic gender norms, which The Corsair establishes primarily through sharply distinguished masculine and feminine spheres of action. Both on the pirates' island and in Seyd's palace, women reside in enclosed spaces while men range freely and widely. Medora, Conrad's beloved, lives cloistered away in a tower where she perpetually waits for Conrad's visits. Medora epitomizes a feminine condition of enforced passivity, being limited to expression - soliloquies, prayers and laments - rather than action. While Conrad is away, she sings out her window and listens for messages from the waves. The open sea and the ships, predictably, are masculine territory. When in desperation Medora ventures down from her tower to watch for Conrad on the shore, the very ocean seems to object to her leaving her proper sphere: 'the spray ... dash'd her garments oft, and warn'd away' (III, 79-80). The poem's other female protagonist, the pasha's favourite slave Gulnare, is of course kept in a harem.

But when, during a raid on Seyd's palace, Conrad rescues Gulnare from the burning harem, the poem's boundary between masculine and feminine spaces begins to break down. This is the first step in Gulnare's liberation: although the raid fails and she remains Seyd's slave, her encounter with Conrad has freed her spirit to rebel. After this she rejects feminine passivity and enclosure, visiting Conrad secretly, stealing a weapon, plotting their escape, and ultimately killing Seyd. Gulnare in short 'unsexes' herself, moving into the masculine condition that the poem has associated with Conrad himself: she is fierce, armed, embarking on a campaign of liberation and retribution. Meanwhile, the imprisoned Conrad is in the condition that the poem has established as 'feminine': enclosed, immobilized, and unable to act in the face of danger. (The stage directions for Verdi's opera even specify that the prison is connected to the harem - both spaces under the despot's control.) Now he, like the poem's abandoned and enslaved women, is 'bound and fix'd in fetter'd solitude / To pine, the prey of every changing mood ...' (III, 222-3). Indeed it is Conrad's immobility and despair that creates a space for Gulnare's action. And although she hopes to restore Conrad's masculine vigour by her

liberating act, it drives him deeper into psychological and physical passivity. The unhealthy symbiosis between this 'unmanned' hero and 'unsexed' heroine

drives the action and creates the horrific atmosphere of the dungeon scene. The poem strikes its most nightmarish note when Gulnare returns after Seyd's murder. Initially she had seemed to Conrad 'a guardian saint / and beauteous' (III, 274-5), but now she inspires a dread and disgust that drive out gratitude. To the appalled Conrad, the mere sight of Gulnare's hair falling forward over her face and shoulders evokes the spectacle of her leaning over to stab the Pasha. The bloodstain on her forehead, token of her murderous violence, unmans him:

... ne'er from strife, captivity, remorse - From all his feelings in their inmost force - So thrill'd, so shudder'd every creeping vein As now they froze before that purple stain. That spot of blood, that light but guilty streak, Had banish'd all the beauty from her cheek! (III, 422-7)

'The firmness of a female hand' in The Corsair and II corsaro 49

The 'purple stain' is evidence of a gender transgression that shocks even Conrad, who is inured to bloodshed in the course of his normal activities: 'Blood he had view'd, could view unmoved - but then / It flow'd in combat, or was shed by men!'

(III, 428-9). Even after Gulnare has freed him, he does not resume his masculine

energy and freedom, but follows her passively to the waiting ship. Its sailors, former slaves of the Pasha, have become 'her vassals - Greek and Moor'.

One could imagine a context in which Gulnare's strike for freedom would be

presented as heroic, but The Corsair has no place for a female hero.3 Although Gulnare gives up her claim to feminine virtue, she cannot be considered virtuous by masculine standards either, for she has treacherously murdered her enemy in his

sleep. Conrad had rejected this strategy in the gendered terms of male honour:

Seyd is mine enemy; had swept my band From earth with ruthless but with open hand, And therefore came I, in my bark of war, To smite the smiter with the scimitar; Such is my weapon - not the secret knife; Who spares a woman's seeks not slumber's life. (III, 360-5)

Within the terms of the poem, 'Gulnare, the homicide' (III, 463) - 'whom blood

appall'd not' (III, 515) - can be neither a hero nor a proper woman. Rather she is

consigned to a third category, 'at once above - beneath her sex' (III, 514). Her

assumption of the hero's masculine role 'unsexes' her, and the perversity of that

gesture unmans Conrad even further. Their two unnatural conditions mutually reinforce each other throughout the events of the denouement - the rush to the

ships and the voyage back towards the pirates' island. Proper gender roles are not re-established until the poem's end, when Conrad is reunited with his comrades:

Up rose keen Conrad from his silent trance, A long, long absent gladness in his glance; 'Tis mine - my blood-red flag! Again - again - I am not all deserted on the main!'

He, half forgetting danger and defeat, Returns their greeting as a chief may greet, Wrings with a cordial grasp Anselmo's hand, And feels he yet can conquer and command!

Likewise, as Malcolm Kelsall has pointed out, this encounter returns Gulnare to a feminine status: 'Precipitated by her act of liberating force from the harem to the centre of the pirates' world, she is at once subjected again by what one would call in the language of our times "sexual harassment", and she resumes a submissive

role'.4 Nor does the formerly fierce Gulnare resent this, but waits patiently for whatever treatment Conrad and fate will award her: 'The worst of crimes had left her woman still!' (III, 522). 3 On the harem slave as a figure for humanity's suffering under tyranny, see Malcolm Kelsall,

'The Slave-Woman in the Harem', Studies in Romanticism, 31 (Fall 1992), 315-31. 4 Malcolm Kelsall, 'Byron and the Women of the Harem', in Rereading Byron, ed. Alice Levine

and Robert N. Keane (New York, 1993), 167.

50 Heather Hadlock

'Duce una donna avremmo' In his discussion of Giovanni Pacini's opera I corsaro (1831-32), Markus Engelhardt points out the difficulty posed by the poem's lack of a proper heroine. If Medora is passive and, worse still, absent from the action, Gulnare's unwomanly violence makes her an inappropriate object for the hero's love. A narrative poem could accommodate these two complementary female protagonists, but such symmetry was inappropriate for an opera in which one and only one woman must be prima donna.5 To make The Corsair into an opera, either Medora or Gulnare would have to be elevated to a clear starring role. Each opera invents a different solution to this

problem, and in the process reframes Gulnare's ferocity and her murderous deed. Pacini's librettist Jacopo Ferretti followed the Byron source up to the point where

Conrad is captured in the raid on Seyd's palace, and then took off in a new direction.6 Ferretti's preface (ironically?) asks his readers' indulgence for 'several trivial infidelities to the tale invented by the English poet', and to modern eyes these infidelities are anything but trivial: the rewritten plot, together with the use of a cross-dressed contralto hero, inspired Julian Budden to describe Pacini's IR corsaro as 'a travesty in every sense of the word'.' The new plot eliminates the prison scene for Gulnara and Corrado; Gulnara neither kills the pasha nor rescues the pirate. The 'fierce woman' topos would thus seem to have been dropped, but actually it is still

present, displaced on to the story's other female protagonist. In Pacini's opera it is the gentle Medora who sets out to rescue Conrad, first disguising herself as a man. Like Byron's Gulnare, Pacini's Medora steps in the heroic-active role that the

captured pirate has left vacant. She becomes in a sense a new Conrad: his first mission having failed, she will replay it with the full support of his pirate band. "Duce una donna avremmo" [We shall have a woman as our leader], the pirates exclaim. Ferretti and Pacini celebrate the female transgression that was a problem in Byron's poem.

Although this rewritten IR corsaro might seem no more than an absurd 'travesty' of the original, it does respond to two moments in The Corsair whose vision and

potential Byron had not developed. The first such moment occurred when Medora, waiting at home for Conrad to return from the raid on Seyd's palace, became convinced that he had died. Byron tells us that in this moment, Medora's natural 'softness' gave way to a new fortitude:

All lost - that softness died not - but it slept; And o'er its slumber rose that Strength which said, 'With nothing left to love, there's nought to dread'. (III, 98-100)

Byron, however, did not develop this image of a strong and fearless Medora. Instead his heroine faints immediately after this stirring moment, leaving the reader

5 Not until Don Carlos and Aida would Verdi create secondary female characters whose musical-dramatic vitality matches that of the prima donna heroines. Indeed Gulnara's character may be seen to foreshadow that of Amneris, another anti-heroine constrained within an odalisque tableau and thwarted in her love for a hero who prefers a gentler, more feminine object.

6 Giacopo [sic] Ferretti, II corsaro, melodramma romantico in tre parti (Milan, 1830). Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols., rev. edn. (Oxford, 1992), I, 386.

'The firmness of a female hand' in The Corsair and Il corsaro 51

uncertain of what her 'Strength' will accomplish. The poet consigns Medora to the care of her handmaidens, while the pirates set out to rescue or avenge Conrad: 'Whate'er his fate - the breasts he form'd and led / Will save him living, or appease him dead' (III, 127-8). Again the poem reinforced its gendered spheres of action: Medora's dignified faint is a quintessentially feminine response to the news of her lover's probable death, while the pirates' resolve to act is the manly response we would expect from comrades in whom 'still lingering there / breath'd Conrad's spirit' (III, 124-5).

In Pacini's opera, by contrast, this moment provides an opportunity for the action to diverge radically from the plot and the rigorous gender divisions of its Byronic source. Here Medora does not faint; instead we witness her transformation from 'softness' to 'Strength' in the most graphic way. Rather than retire fainting to her tower, Medora enters in masculine disguise to lead the pirates back to Seyd's palace. Her transformation takes place in the Act II double aria, 'Care sponde', in which she bids farewell to the feminine sphere, assuming a new masculine-heroic role. The

change may be measured by her new costume and by her altered relationship to her 'beloved shores':

Care sponde, che pietose Eccheggiaste ai miei lamenti, Quando il core i suoi tormenti Sospirando a voi narr6: Parto, addio ... per sempre addio

Forse pid non torner6; Ma beato e il fato mio Se il mio ben io salver6! Fortunate le mie pene, Se per lui morir dovrb!

[Beloved shores, who once sympathetically echoed my laments, when my sighing heart told you all its torments: I depart, farewell ... forever, farewell ... Perhaps I will never return; but happy my fate if I shall save my love! Blessed my sufferings, if I should die for him!]

Until now, Medora has regarded the sea as a sympathetic but distant friend who echoed her lonely sighs and carried them to Conrad, but as the pirates' leader she will make the sea her ally in action. In the cabaletta she claims a new identity as a fearless woman warrior, stepping into the hero's place fully and unproblematically. Henceforth shouts of battle will replace gentle sighs:

Della battaglia il grido Parmi suonar sul lido. Fatto di se maggiore Piti freno il cor non ha.

11 pianto che ho sul ciglio Non e pel mio periglio; L'idea del caro amante Gelar, tremar mi fa. Ma se cadr6 pugnando La morte orror non ha.

52 Heather Hadlock

[The din of battle seems to resound upon the shore. Strengthened by its own effort, my heart hesitates no more. The tear in my eye is not for my own danger; the thought of my beloved makes me freeze and tremble. But if I should die fighting, death holds no terror.]

This radiant, positive image of the armed woman as rescuer is exactly what Byron's poem had refused to authorize. Yet neither was this frame of mind completely absent from the poem, for Byron gave Gulnare a speech that described it perfectly. Gulnare had challenged the traditional masculine-feminine polarity that governed Conrad's and Medora's relationship, declaring that if she were Conrad's lover she would join him in his exploits. Given the chance, she would be a worthier and more truly loving 'outlaw's spouse' than the stay-at-home Medora:

Though fond as mine her bosom, form more fair, I rush through peril which she would not dare. If that thy heart to hers were truly dear, Were I thine own thou wert not lonely here: An outlaw's spouse and leave her lord to roam! What hath such gentle dame to do with home? (III, 298-303)

The Corsair does not contain such a woman: Byron's Conrad neither wants nor has such a partner, and the poet invokes this egalitarian vision of femininity only to make the reader aware of its absence. Within the poem, this heroic type of 'gentle dame' existed only in Gulnare's imagination. But Ferretti and Pacini make over the character of Medora to conform precisely with Gulnare's vision, displacing Gulnare's militancy on to her gentle rival.

Indeed we might say that Ferretti and Pacini shaped Byron's gothic adventure tale into something more like an old-fashioned rescue opera, with its idealistic vision of the woman as liberator. A heroine's desire to 'rush through peril which [an ordinary woman] would not dare', and her transgressive condition 'above - beneath her sex', are not horrifying or unnatural, but admirable. Pacini's Medora has more in common with Beethoven's Leonore than with Byron's 'Gulnare, the homicide'. The librettist and composer might well have had Fidelio in mind as they rewrote The Corsair with the cross-dressed rescuer Medora as its central character, for the musical-dramatic climax of Act II turns on a 'Fidelio'-moment. Medora, having infiltrated Seyd's palace and discovered Conrad just moments before Seyd is about to execute him, gives herself away with a cry of horror and defiance. As in Fidelio, the woman's natural voice breaks out at the critical moment, changing the terms of the conflict, and the chorus briefly exclaims in admiration: 'Oh eroica fedelti, che paragon non ha'. But then, Gulnare herself had dreamed of being a Leonore - if only Byron had allowed it. Unlike its source, Pacini's II corsaro accommodates the woman of action, even the armed woman in warrior drag, within its definition of femininity.

Perhaps the most important limit on the adaptation of Byron's Gulnare into Pacini's new Medora is its rewriting of Seyd's death. Medora's resolve and defiant gesture - her willingness to kill the tyrant - does not culminate in anything like Byron's horrific scene of midnight assassination. In the first version of the libretto (1830), the plot ends with the report that the captive Medora has killed Seid,

'The firmness of a female hand' in The Corsair and KI corsaro 53

sacrificing her own life in the process. She thus becomes a martyr rather than a murderess, a far more honourable status. Corrado flees, reluctantly, with Gulnara. This rather unsatisfactory ending, with the disappearance and off-stage murder of the heroine Medora and the last-minute promotion of the seconda donna Gulnara to heroine status, was revised the following year. In the new version, Medora escapes from Seid but learns in the final scene that he and Corrado have killed each other. But whether she ends as martyr or survivor, Pacini's heroine remains idealized because (unlike Gulnare) she never gets her hands dirty. Her gesture remains only in the realm of intention and image, untainted by blood. Thus Pacini's II corsaro

partakes of a revolutionary ethos, not only authorizing but celebrating 'the firmness of a female hand'. Medora, in her warrior garb, is no usurper of masculine privilege but rather a worthy surrogate for the hero when he is temporarily removed from the action. This opera seems unconcerned about emasculating its hero, and nothing in the libretto or music condemns Medora's stepping into his place. Perhaps the

presence of a female musico as the hero Corrado (evidence of an apriori assumption that female performers could embody male protagonists) created a space for other

gender transgressions within the plot. Despite its Romantic subject matter, Pacini's

IK corsaro presents a pre-Romantic conception of heroic action as something not

essentially linked to or limited by gender.

Verdi's avenging angel

Taking up The Corsair more than a decade after Pacini, Verdi and Piave followed

Byron's poem closely.8 Their Medora does not go on rescue missions, but

languishes on the island throughout the opera. The dungeon scene is once again the climax of the action, and with it Gulnara's unsettling mixture of feminine devotion and masculine violence. Verdi, like Byron, does criminalize Gulnare's transgression in taking up a weapon against the tyrant. Given the similarities between Gulnare and

Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth - as Kelsall points out, 'the sign of the act, called a "crime" is, as with Lady Macbeth, a spot of blood' - the resonances between this scene and the parallel one in Verdi's Macbeth are worth noting.9 Verdi had sketched the Corrado-Gulnara duet in 1846, and its events and ambience foreshadow the

Macbeth-Lady duet in several important ways. Both involve a resolute woman and reluctant man, a woman running off with a dagger, and a crime scene immediately off stage. In both the music evokes a stormy night, looming thoughts of crime and

guilt, and above all the urgency of being half-finished with a perilous deed. In both duets Verdi rose to the occasion with unprecedented musical continuity and variety, the music shaping itself freely to the twists and turns of dialogue rather than

imposing patterns of repetition. Yet Verdi's Gulnara is not a second Lady Macbeth. I! corsaro, for all its fidelity to

Byron, omits that blood on Gulnare's face: Gulnara bears no ineradicable mark of

8 According to Elizabeth Hudson, Piave's libretto was based on an Italian translation, I1 corsaro, by Giuseppe Nicolini (Milan, 1824, repr. 1834 and 1837); see Hudson, 'Introduction', I1i corsaro in Works of Giuseppe Verdi (Chicago and Milan, 1998), xvii.

9 Kelsall (see n. 4), 166.

54 Heather Hadlock

her crime, and the sight of her guilt will move Corrado to pity and action rather than horrified passivity. In Verdi's hands, Gulnare is again remade, this time as a female avenger, a compromise between Byron's virago and Pacini's idealized rescuer. Verdi endows her ferocity with positive revolutionary value and (equally importantly) sets limits on it so that it does not so thoroughly disable Conrad as in the source. Without overhauling The Corsair so drastically as had Ferretti and Pacini, Verdi and Piave prepared Gulnare's gesture and rewrote its aftermath in ways that moderate its horror and transgressive force.

Her most 'monstrous' moment comes at the start of the duet's tempo di mejzzo, when she taunts Corrado for his cowardice and rushes out to kill Seid. Abandoning the lyric exhortations of the preceding slow movement, she declaims on one note: 'Then you disdain to follow me? Are you afraid of a dagger - you, a robber, a pirate? Shall a weak woman teach you how to use it?' This is the closest Verdi's Gulnara comes to 'unsexing' herself. Her strenuous and exposed declamation on E, an effect of vocal power fraught with maximum tension, is analogous to the 'baritone C' of other Verdi operas. She leaves, 'brandishing (with the greatest exaltation) the dagger'.

The stormy interlude that follows has little purely musical interest, but its narrative importance should not be underestimated. First, it does the work that Byron's breathless rhetoric had done in the poem, supplying a tone of terror and violence. The storm also answers and gives voice to the hero's own emotions, as Corrado, alone on stage, raises his chained hands to the window and implores the lightning to strike him. But although the heavens seem to sympathize with Conrad's inner tempest, this proves to be no more than a coincidence, for the raging storm passes over him. At the crucial point the apparent connection between his emotion and the elements is broken. The storm's limited response to Conrad's plight suggests an ironic limit to the old-fashioned poetic device of seeing natural events as reflections of or responses to human feelings. But Verdi gives the storm one more, unironic purpose, using it as a theatrical device to evoke off-stage events. The storm music extends the space of dramatic action beyond the visible stage - not by literalist depictions of specific events such as footfalls or blows, but by evoking the absent Gulnara's emotions as she commits the murder. The rising and abating of the storm traces for us her violent rage, its peak, and its 'break'. Furthermore, this storm has been foreshadowed in such a way that we may interpret it as a sympathetic reflection of Gulnara's deed rather than a judgement on it. The storm fulfils a promise of revolutionary violence that has been brewing in Gulnara over the course of several earlier numbers.

Byron had made Gulnare's violence innate, an essential aspect of 'the fire that lights an Eastern heart' (III, 353). This ethnicity is marked in the poem by such

stereotypical features as flashing dark eyes, dark hair, and occasional invocations of Allah. Although she remains nominally Eastern in Verdi's opera, her cavatina bears no orientalist markers, and indeed her very first utterance is to scorn Seid as a 'vile Muslim'. If the number is designed 'merely to introduce the prima donna by means of the most conventional of all formulae, the cavatina with chorus', it is nevertheless significant in presenting Gulnara as an object of identification for the Western

'The firmness of a female hand' in The Corsair and Il corsaro 55

audience, out of place among Seid's other women.10 Her solo movements set her apart from the chorus of 'odalisques bearing embroidered veils and jewels', whose orchestration alla turca, with prominent triangle, cymbals, and trombone, evokes a harem tableau by Delacroix:

Oh qual perenne gaudio t'aspetta, tu prima gioia sei del Pasciai. Vieni, Gulnara, vieni, diletta, per te qui brilla sol volutti. Di vesti seriche, di ricche gemme cingi ed adorna la tua belta. Tu sei la stella di quest'Haremme, Uri pini vaga il ciel non ha.

[O what pleasures await you, the favourite of the Pasha. Come, Gulnara, come, delight, for you shines only desire. Your beauty will be adorned with silken robes and rich gems. You are the star of this harem; the heavens possess no more beautiful houri.] Gulnara however refuses to delight in her status as the Pasha's favourite: 'M'ama Seid! io l'odio!' [Seid loves me! I hate him]. Scorning his rich gifts, she expresses her longing for freedom and love in the clear air of an unspecified 'ciel natio' [native sky], a 'ciel d'amor' beneath which her soul might forget its chains. The characteristic instruments drop out, not to return until the danced tempo di mezzo. Her barcarolle rhythm and liberal leanings invite us to perceive Gulnara, despite her rich Oriental costume, as another stranded Italian girl.

Nothing in this scene or the first-act finale prepares us for the ferocity she will exhibit in Act II. It is in the cabaletta of her duet with Seid that Gulnara emerges from the generic presentation of her entrance aria and begins to reveal her potential for violence; but there too she remains unmarked by 'Eastern' ethnicity. Instead her anger and desire for revenge are sung to music that evokes a gathering storm. When the Pasha, angered by Gulnara's pleading for the captive pirate's life, informs his favourite that she will no longer be his bride but his slave, he threatens her con forza, accompanied by a conventional martial rhythm. Gulnara responds with a truism about the rebellious strength that accumulates in the souls of the oppressed: 'Ei minaccia, e non conosce / quanto possa un' alma offesa, / ei non sa qual furia accesa / v'ha qui dentro ira ed amor' [He threatens, and does not know what an offended spirit can do; he does not know the inner fury kindled by rage and love]. One could imagine this defiant sentiment accompanied by music as energetic as Seid's, but instead Verdi shifts to the relative minor and introduces winding chromatic figures under Gulnara's sotto voce melody. Her melodic phrases alternate between stifled middle register and trumpeting high register, and not until Seid has departed does she give voice to an unfettered fffconforza exclamation 'Guai, tiranno!' on sustained high Bb. The total effect is of repressed energy about to break free, of distant

10 Budden, I, 374. Rita Zambon finds the prototype for this harem scene in Giovanni Galzerani's 1826 ballet Ii corsaro, and notes that all subsequent Italian operas on the subject introduced Gulnara with female chorus at this point. Zambon, 'Quando il ballo anticipa l'opera: I1 corsaro di Giovanni Galzerani', in Creature di Prometeo: II ballo teatrale. Dal divertimento al dramma: Sutdi offerti a Aurel M. Milloss, ed. Giovanni Morelli (Florence, 1996), 305-13.

56 Heather Hadlock

thunderclouds lit by flashes of lightning. But her tempestuous personality seems less a cliche of 'Oriental' character than a product of her situation as a woman oppressed by a man, and a subject oppressed by a tyrant.

The prison scene that follows fulfils both Gulnara's revolutionary energy and her connection with storms. The orchestral prelude and solo scena for Corrado, brooding alone in his cell, establishes the hero's physical and psychological immobility, against which Gulnara will struggle in the duet. Gulnara's entrance sets in motion what Scott Balthazar has described as 'the most dramatically complex tempo d'attacco of Verdi's early career, rivalling his most adventurous tempi di mezo in its presentation of an evolving situation'." This section includes Gulnara's ringing rejection of the notion that she might love Seid; her proposal that they should kill Seid and escape; and Corrado's refusal of the dagger on honourable grounds. It ends with a sweeping chromatic E minor melody as Gulnara evokes the 'tempesta' that threatens Corrado and herself. In the slow movement they stake out these opposing positions, Gulnara urging flight and Corrado refusing.

Although his duet conforms to the poem closely on the level of plot, Verdi seems more sympathetic to Gulnara than Byron was. Her themes in the tempo d'attacco and slow movement have heroic energy. A polonaise rhythm accompanies her declar- ation that love is impossible under slavery, and its 'revolutionary' significance is confirmed when we hear it again at the climax of the tempo d'attacco, as she offers Corrado the dagger that will kill the tyrant. The urgency and sensuous warmth of her 'Ah, fuggiam da queste mura' is strongly contrasted with Corrado's pessimistic response. While Gothic darkness broods over Corrado, Verdi 'envoices' Gulnara as a liberator, a revolutionary, a Romantic heroine. Thus Verdi's Gulnara is a murderess, but (unlike the coldly ambitious Lady Macbeth) she is also a freedom fighter, an oppressed woman avenging her own 'stained' honour. If she is guilty, so was her tyrant-victim. Most importantly, the storm of rage that drives her is situational, not innate.

This is confirmed immediately after the murder, when her ferocity evaporates and she returns to the stage a figure of pity rather than horror. Verdi effects a restoration of traditional gender roles immediately, specifying that Gulnara, who had stormed off 'brandishing (with the greatest exaltation) the dagger', should now 'ritorna volgendo lo sguardo inorridita dentro di se ... cammina vacillando e cade ...' [enter, turning her horrified gaze inwards ... she walks unsteadily and collapses ...] (316). Halting unison figures in the strings choreograph her faltering steps. Verdi's instructions to the soprano Marianna Barbieri-Nini, the first Gulnara, indicate that it would be impossible to overplay her new manner after the murder: 'when you return pale and unsettled, take each step virtually as the music indicates, until the moment when you can no longer stand on your feet: you should utter the following words lying on the ground: "gi. ... l'opra 6 finita, per destarsi egli stava". Say them without following the tempo, without paying attention to the notes, but with a

11 Scott Balthazar, 'Evolving Conventions in Italian Serious Opera: Scene Structure in the Works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, 1810-1850', Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania (1985), 369.

'The firmness of a female hand' in The Corsair and I1 corsaro 57

stifled voice that is barely audible'.12 Gulnara begins the cabaletta with a theme sapped of its traditional vigour: the minor mode, muffled dynamics, and piangente marking all undermine its martial accompaniment and declamation. Most impor- tantly, Corrado finds his voice in the very moment that Gulnara loses hers, rousing her out of despair with a vigorous major-mode response. Her situation as a damsel in distress has reactivated Corrado's sense of honour in a way that her taunts and exhortations could not. The opera contrives to have it both ways: as soon as Gulnara's unwomanly ferocity has freed Corrado, it self-destructs, creating a space for him to be an active hero again.

These three works, then, offer three Romantic perspectives on the fierce woman who, by seizing a weapon and rushing into danger, proves herself to be 'above-beneath her sex'. To Byron she is a fascinating monster, a beautiful yet nightmarish figure (though not beyond redemption). Gulnare is the feminine counterpart to the Byronic anti-hero, her fiery temperament and murderous determination a complement to his tendencies towards introversion, pessimism and passivity. She is the partner of Conrad's dark side, just as the gentle Medora complements his idealized aspects. The taboo pairing of Conrad and Gulnare is if anything more essential to the poem's Byronic sensibility than is the conventional love between Conrad and Medora. Verdi's and Pacini's IK corsaro operas suggest that there were limits on how far Italian opera could follow Byron's 'unsexing' of the heroine and consequent 'unmanning' of the hero. In order to revel in the extroverted aspects of the Byronic hero - his colourful, adventurous, rebellious side - and at the same time to repress his darker tendencies towards introversion, pessimism and passivity, it was necessary to rewrite the plot, or at least to temper the fiercest aspects of the woman who acts when he cannot.

12 Letter of 6 October 1848, in Marcello Conati, ed., Encounters with Verdi, trans. Richard Stokes (Ithaca and New York, 1984), 320.