Opium addiction, Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone

Opium addiction, mixed-race parentage, same-sex affection, and anti-imperialism: all feature in what T. S. Eliot called 'the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels,' Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) [1].

Collins' novel isn't actually the first English detective novel; that honor, according to crime writer and critic Julian Symons, belongs to The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) by the pseudonymous 'Charles Felix' [2] (recently discovered to be the publisher Charles Warren Adams, thanks to detective work by Paul Collins [3]). Mention should also be made of Inspector Bucket (in Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), and the Chevalier Dupin (in American writer Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and other stories) as precursors. But Collins' novel remains compelling, less for the implausible solution of the mystery than for what it reveals about its author's unconventional life and unusual attitudes.

The Moonstone is a huge (and, legend has it, cursed) diamond brought back from India by a British soldier, who looted the jewel and murdered its guardians during the storming of Seringapatam. This is only the latest in a series of thefts of the diamond: it was originally taken from a Hindu temple by a soldier in the army of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb; all of its owners have met untimely ends. Decades later the British soldier bequeathes the sacred diamond to his niece, Rachel Verinder, on her 21st birthday, and at midnight the same night it is stolen from her bedroom.

Three mysterious Indian "conjurors" have been seen in the neighborhood, and at first suspicion falls on them. But when the famous detective Sergeant Cuff is brought in to solve the mystery, he deduces that someone in the house has stolen it. The housemaid Rosanna Spearman and Rachel herself are soon the chief suspects. But after Rosanna's apparent suicide and Rachel's refusal to tell all she knows, Sergeant Cuff's investigation reaches a dead end. A year later, the case is reopened by Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, who had been in the house the night of the theft, aided by the physician's assistant Ezra Jennings.

Mixed-race parentage: Jennings' skin is "of gipsy darkness," his nose "presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West," and his "thick closely-curling" black hair is turning white, but in irregular piebald patches [4]. The description is clearly intended to suggest that Jennings has mixed-race parentage, which indeed he confirms just a bit later in the novel. While some of the other characters view him with suspicion on this account, Blake treats him with sympathy and respect. And as it turns out, it is Jennings who largely solves the mystery of the theft of the Moonstone.

Opium use: We also discover that Jennings is suffering from a debilitating disease, to allay the symptoms of which he regularly uses opium. Jennings complains to Blake about the general "ignorant distrust of opium" [5] and gives him a copy of Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). But Jennings also tells us about the "dreadful night[s]" that are "the vengence of...opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams" [6]. Jennings is caught in a double bind: he needs opium to free himself from the pain of his disease, but it is gradually destroying his ability to function:

"The one effectual palliative in my case, is—opium. To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted for a respite of many years from my sentence of death. But even the virtues of opium have their limit. The progress of the disease has gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it. I am feeling the penalty at last. My nervous system is shattered; my nights are nights of horror. The end is not far off now." [7]

Collins knew whereof he wrote. He had begun using laudanum (opium powder dissolved in alcohol) in the mid-1860s to alleviate chronic pain and headaches, and his use of the drug quickly became habitual. Jennings reports that his own "full dose" is 500 drops [8], and he tells Blake that this is "ten times larger" [9] than a typical dose given to an unhabituated adult. Since Collins had been using laudanum regularly for several years by the time he wrote these passages, we can guess that his own levels of use were approaching those of Jennings.

The Koh-i-Noor Diamond

There is a legend, promulgated later on by Collins himself, that he dictated large sections of The Moonstone while under the influence of the drug and virtually unconscious of what he was producing. Editor John Sutherland's recent examinations of the manuscript, though, found that there was only a portion of the "Miss Clack" section (about eight pages in the 1999 Oxford edition) that aren't in Collins' own handwriting, although the twelve pages that follow the dictated section are in pencil, which may indicate that Collins wrote them while laid up in bed [10].

Mixed-race parentage and opium use are not the only subjects about which surprisingly positive attitudes are expressed in The Moonstone. Other areas where monolithic assumptions about Victorian points of view are challenged include:

Same-sex affection: In an era where middle- and upper-class men and women occupied virtually separate spheres, feelings of friendship between members of the same sex could be expressed in terms that may strike modern ears as rather heated. Jennings, for example, when writing of Franklin Blake, uses the words "attraction" and "yearning":

"What is the secret of the attraction that there is for me in this man? Does it only mean that I feel the contrast between the frankly kind manner in which he has allowed me to become acquainted with him, and the merciless dislike and distrust with which I am met by other people? Or is there really something in him which answers to the yearning that I have for a little human sympathy—the yearning, which has survived the solitude and persecution of many years; which seems to grow keener and keener, as the time comes nearer and nearer when I shall endure and feel no more?" [11]

Such impassioned declarations also occur between women in the novel. Lucy Yolland, the daughter of a local fisherman, says of the housemaid Rosanna Spearman,

"'I loved her...She was an angel. She might have been happy with me. I had a plan for our going to London together like sisters, and living by our needles. That man [Franklin Blake] came here, and spoilt it all...I meant to take her away from the mortification she was suffering here...Where is he?...Where's this gentleman that I mustn't speak of, except with respect? Ha, Mr. Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.'" [12]

Anti-imperialism: The Moonstone would seem to be full of orientalist exoticism: a cursed Indian diamond pursued across the centuries by mysterious, inscrutable and murderous Hindu holy men. But a closer look reveals something a bit different. In his preface to the first book edition Collins wrote that he based the Moonstone in part on the Koh-i-Noor Diamond, "the subject of a prediction, which prophesied certain misfortune to the persons who should divert it from its ancient uses" [13]. Since the Koh-i-Noor had become part of the British Crown Jewels in 1850, Collins would seem to be issuing a warning to his fellow Britons about imperial plunder.

And on the night of the re-creation of the Moonstone's theft, among Franklin Blake's reading material is Scottish novelist Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), which includes the following sentence: "You tell me of immense territories subject to the English; I cannot think of their possessions, without being led to enquire by what right they possess them" [14].

There is also the ultimate fate of the Moonstone. In the final pages of the novel (spoiler alert!) the English adventurer Murthwaite, in disguise as a Hindu pilgrim, travels to a religious ceremony outside the western Indian city of Somnauth (where there is indeed an ancient temple). He describes the setting and the huge crowd as "the grandest spectacle of Nature and Man, in combination, that I have ever seen" [15].  When the image of the four-armed god Shiva is revealed to the ecstatic celebrants, Murthwaite sees the gem gleaming from the statue's forehead. It's difficult not to feel that Murthwaite, and his creator Collins, think that this is the stone's rightful place.

Film and TV adaptations: The Moonstone has been filmed three times, in 1909, 1915, and 1934, and was adapted for television by the BBC in 1959, 1972, and 1997. The 1997 version stars Keeley Hawes (later of Wives and Daughters (1999) and Tipping the Velvet (2002)) and Greg Wise (of Sense and Sensibility (1995)); the 1972 version features Vivien Heilbron and Robin Ellis (earlier featured in Sense and Sensibility (1971) and Elizabeth R (1971), and later the star of Poldark (1975-77)). If I see any of the BBC Moonstone adaptations I'll update here.

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1. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: New Edition, Harcourt Brace, 1950, p. 413.
2. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, Faber and Faber, 1972, pp. 53-54.
3. Paul Collins, "The Case of the First Mystery Novelist," New York Times, January 7, 2011.
4. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, edited by John Sutherland, Oxford World's Classics, 1999, p. 319. Mention should be made of Sutherland's excellent introduction and notes to this edition, which raise many of the issues discussed in this post.
5. The Moonstone, p. 381
6. The Moonstone, p. 392.
7. The Moonstone, pp. 375-376.
8. The Moonstone, p. 405.
9. The Moonstone, p. 387
10. John Sutherland, "A Note on the Composition," in The Moonstone, p. xxxvii.
11. The Moonstone, p. 393.
12. The Moonstone, p. 184.
13. The Moonstone, liii.
14. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, Oxford World's Classics, 1987, pp. 102-103.
15. The Moonstone, p. 465.

Second- and third-generation stars, and films: Student of the Year, Bol Bachchan, Teri Meri Kahaani

Last week we caught up with three movies released in the second half of 2012 that feature second- and third-generation Bollywood actors: Student of the Year, Bol Bachchan, and Teri Meri Kahaani. Unfortunately, it wasn't only the stars that were second- and third-generation.

Student of the Year feels like a pile of old scripts in Karan Johar's office got accidentally shredded and then randomly reassembled. It combines the "son seeking domineering father's approval" plot of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes joy, sometimes sorrow, 2001) with the "two boys in love with the same girl" plot and flashback structure of Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow may never come, 2003) and the swishy gay stereotypes of Dostana (Friendship, 2008). But most of all, SOTY feels like the college scenes from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is happening, 1998) stretched into a feature-length movie (and that's not intended as a recommendation).

Shanaya (Alia Bhatt, daughter of director/producer Mahesh Bhatt and actress/director Soni Razdan) is the queen of St. Teresa's College; the role seems modelled in equal parts on Kareena Kapoor's Pooja (from K3G) and Alicia Silverstone's Cher (from Clueless (1995)). Despite her queen-bee status she's taken for granted by her boyfriend Rohan (Varun Dhawan, son of director David Dhawan), who wants to be a rock star but at the same time craves the approval of his father Ashok, a corrupt business tycoon. New man on campus Abhimanyu (Sidharth Malhotra, not a star kid) decides to help out Shanaya by flirting with her to make Rohan jealous, but soon realizes that he's really falling in love with her himself—the subtext of "Radha":

(Music: Vishal-Shekar; lyrics: Anvita Dutt Guptan; playback singers: Shreya Ghoshal, Udit Narayan, and Vishal Dadlani)

We didn't recognize her, but Rohan's dance partner Tanya is Sana Saeed, who played Rahul's daughter Anjali in KKHH.

Meanwhile, Rohan resents the way the self-made Abhi has ingratiated himself with Rohan's father. The tensions among the three come to a head during the annual Student of the Year competition, when something happens to cause a final break between Rohan and Abhi.

That "something" is referred to by the other characters throughout the film in the hushed tones usually reserved for mass catastrophes. What happened isn't revealed until the film's final scenes, but my partner and I had guessed it by the interval, making the second half pretty suspenseless. And despite the attempts by director Johar and screenwriter Rensil D'Silva to give the wealthy Shanaya and Rohan troubled home lives (see, even rich kids have problems!), the sheer level of privilege on display made it hard to feel like anything truly significant was at stake for these characters. Family money will clearly enable them to come out ahead in "the competition of life," as one of the film's taglines has it.

On the plus side, Alia Bhatt has striking, unconventional looks, and Sidharth Malhotra is tall, hunky and has an assured screen presence. On the negative side, Rishi Kapoor's Dean Vashist is a compendium of offensive gay stereotypes, such as fawning over the straight sports coach (Ronit Roy) and acting with undisguised hostility towards his wife (Prachi Shah).

The four friends/sidekicks of Shanaya, Rohan and Abhi, who include the unhappy Sudo (Kayoze Irani, son of actor Boman Irani), are woefully underdeveloped even though they narrate the film. In particular, I thought the subplot involving Shruti (Mansi Rachh), Shanaya's best friend, had a lot of unexplored potential. Shruti clearly has a major girl-crush on Shanaya, and it's not clear whether those intense feelings are developing into romantic ones. But that subplot and its possible complications are dropped, alas, and the film seems overeager to heterosexualize the present-day Shruti. Giving her story more screen time would have made SOTY a different and more interesting film.

Bol Bachchan (Say "Bachchan") is also a mashup, this time of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Gol Maal (Confusion, 1979) and Rohit Shetty's slapstick Golmaal series. After breaking into a locked Hindu temple to rescue a child, Abbas Ali (Abhishek Bachchan, son of actors Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri Bachchan) is asked for his name by the village strongman, Prithviraj (Ajay Devgn, son of director Veeru Devgan). Before he can answer, a friend (played by Krishna Abhishek, nephew of actor Govinda) blurts out "Abhishek Bachchan!" That Abhishek Bachchan's character is called Abhishek Bachchan is one of the movie's recurring gags; others include Prithviraj speaking in mangled English, and the moustached Abhishek pretending to have a clean-shaven twin named, of course, Abbas Ali.

This alleged comedy does have its (few) moments of brainless fun, and it's clear that Abhishek (the actor) is quite comfortable in comic roles. But for me the high point of the movie was the opening credit sequence, featuring Amitabh Bachchan schooling both younger actors in screen charisma, grace, comic timing, and elocution; it goes swiftly downhill from there:

(Music: Himesh Reshamiya; lyrics: Farhad-Sajid; playback singers: Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Himesh Reshamiya, Mamta Sharma and Vineet Singh)

Teri Meri Kahaani (Our Story) features three love stories set in periods fifty years apart: 1960, 2010, and 1910. In 1960, Govind (Shahid Kapoor, son of actor Pankaj Kapur and actress/dancer Neelima Azeem) is an aspiring music director in Bombay who meets starlet Ruksar (Priyanka Chopra, not a star kid); love and misunderstandings ensue. The costume, hair, and musical styles seem modelled on movies from significantly later in the decade, such as Teesri Manzil (The Third Floor, 1967); nonetheless, it's fun to watch Shahid channel his inner Shammi in "Jabse Mere Dil Ko Uff":

(Music: Sajid-Wajid; lyrics: Prasoon Joshi; playback singers: Sonu Nigam and Sunidhi Chauhan)

The 2010 section tries to show a modern romance conducted via Facebook and Twitter, but director Kunal Kohli's onscreen use of texting acronyms feels self-conscious and instantly dated. Krishna (Shahid) is a college student who has just broken up with his girlfriend Meera (Neha Sharma) when he meets—who else?—Radha (Priyanka). Meera takes revenge by posting embarrassing photos of Krish online, and he retaliates in kind. Radha can be excused if she wonders about this guy's emotional maturity.

In 1910, Javed (Shahid), a poet of wine, women and song, woos Aradhana (Priyanka), the daughter of a freedom fighter. However, she is distressed by his lack of commitment (both political and emotional), and her father disapproves of the match. This part of the film feels like it lost crucial pieces of its conclusion in the editing room; director Kohli makes the ending feel rushed and incomplete.

We also discover here that Javed and Aradhana have vowed to be together in all their lives to come. But if that is what is supposed to tie these stories together, either our lovers are short-lived (are they reborn every 50 years?), or Kohli and his screenwriter Robin Bhatt (one of Alia's uncles, to bring this full circle) couldn't be bothered to be coherent and thought we wouldn't notice.

My advice, for what it's worth: for a better Shahid Kapoor movie, watch Vivah (Marriage, 2006); for a better Abhishek Bachchan comedy co-starring his father, watch Bunty aur Babli (2005); and for a better Karan Johar-associated film, watch Kal Ho Naa Ho.

Rebecca

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The famous opening of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (Doubleday, 1938) evokes dreams, or perhaps nightmares, and nostalgia for what is irrevocably lost, encapsulating (though we don't know it yet) the journey its heroine will undertake over the course of the novel.

The heroine—whose name we never learn—is a young, shy and naïve girl who has been hired as a ladies' companion. While staying with her overbearing employer in Monte Carlo, she encounters the brooding widower Maximilian de Winter, and they begin to spend time together. When de Winter learns that she is about to leave for America with her employer, he abruptly proposes marriage, and she accepts, although her first prescient response is "I don't belong to your sort of world." And no sooner does she return with de Winter to Manderley, his family estate on the southwestern coast of England, than she begins to discover how right she was.

At Manderley the couple's honeymoon idyll is shattered, as the new Mrs. de Winter everywhere encounters the indelible traces of de Winter's first wife, Rebecca. Rebecca was seemingly perfect: beautiful, graceful, tasteful, at ease in every situation, a gracious hostess and a beloved mistress of the household. In contrast the new Mrs. de Winter is uncertain, clumsy, and feels at every turn her inferiority to the worldly Rebecca. Anyone who has ever felt the awkwardness of entering a social situation governed by unstated rules that everyone else seems to know instinctively—and that's pretty much all of us—can't help but empathize with her.

Our heroine's feelings of inadequacy are made infinitely worse by the malevolent housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who preys on her insecurities and has an identification with Rebecca that is unhealthily close.

Looming over everything is the mystery of Rebecca's fate: she apparently drowned in a boating accident, and Maxim de Winter identified the battered body that washed up on shore. But then her sunken boat is discovered, and inside is a woman's corpse...

The film rights to Rebecca were bought by producer David O. Selznick (who also produced Gone With the Wind (1939)), and it became the first movie Alfred Hitchcock directed in Hollywood. The two men clashed over the script of the film, to which Hitchcock ill-advisedly tried to add scenes not in Du Maurier's book that appealed to his earthy sense of humor. One of Selznick's notorious memos to Hitchcock read in part:

"[Every] little thing that the girl does in the book, her reactions of running away from guests, and the tiny things that indicate her nervousness and her self-consciousness and her gaucherie are all so brilliant in the book that every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology, has cringed with embarrassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind....[Your changes in the script] have removed all the subtleties and substituted big broad strokes which in outline form betray...just how bad a picture it would make without the little feminine things which are so recognizable and which make every woman say, 'I know just how she feels...I know just what she is going through...'" [1]

Despite the many brilliant Hitchcockian touches in the film, the director claimed in his famous interviews with François Truffaut that "it's not a Hitchcock picture" [2]. In fact, as Truffaut points out, with its emphasis on the heroine's state of mind and its theme of over-identification, the film is a template for several of Hitchcock's later masterpieces such as Notorious (1946) and Vertigo (1957). Franz Waxman's haunting, evocative soundtrack for Rebecca also seems to have been a model (in emotional, if not musical terms) for Bernard Herrmann's great score for Vertigo.

Although the solution to the mystery had to be changed to satisfy the Production Code, the film is remarkably faithful to the atmosphere of the book. And the touches added by Hitchcock, including the slightly altered dénouement, are highly effective. In one example, as Maxim and his bride drive up to Manderley for the first time a sudden rainstorm breaks. (In the novel, it's sunny.) The new Mrs. de Winter is quickly soaked to the skin, and so as she meets the impeccable Mrs. Danvers and the household staff who have been assembled to greet her, she looks bedraggled, lost and forlorn—an outward representation of her inner anxieties.

The casting is perfect, from Joan Fontaine's tremulous heroine, to Laurence Olivier's dark, enigmatic Maxim, to Dame Judith Anderson's creepily effective Mrs. Danvers. Rebecca went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the only Hitchcock film to be so honored (although the award was actually given to Selznick, the film's producer). George Bruce also received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, but Hitchcock was bypassed for Best Director (as he would be throughout his career).

Rebecca was also adapted into an Indian movie, Kohraa (Fog, 1964), directed by Guru Dutt's former art director Biren Nag and starring Waheeda Rehman. For an excellent review with many tantalizing stills, please see MemsaabStory.

Update 20 July 2013: Thanks to Rajshri Films, Kohraa is available for viewing on YouTube with English captions, for free.

Update 21 July 2013: M. Lapin has alerted me that there are a number of people who profess to love du Maurier's novel, but hate the Hitchcock film. In her post "Hitchcock Got 'Rebecca' Dead Wrong: Sucking the Soul out of a Classic Novel," Elizabeth Langosy complains about Joan Fontaine's "flirty smile and curled hair...[and] too-sophisticated voice" and Judith Anderson's physiognomy, which "looks nothing like the skeletal housekeeper described in the book." She also dislikes the screenplay's differences from the novel, in particular a scene where Olivier's Maxim de Winter is standing on a cliff in Monte Carlo, staring mesmerized at the crashing waves below and evidently on the verge of throwing himself over the edge.

To take her objections one at a time, I guess a "flirty smile" is in the eye of the beholder; I thought Fontaine embodied the heroine's shyness, uncertainty and desire to please painfully well. As for her hairstyle, the heroine is described by du Maurier as having "straight, bobbed hair," and indeed Fontaine's hair is shoulder-length. But it is often pulled back, flattened down, and otherwise deglamorized or made to look schoolgirlish. It's not a literal interpretation of du Maurier's description, but it captures its plain, unstylish essence:

As for her too-sophisticated voice in the opening scene of the film, the narration is in flashback, after the events of the film have taken place. As Maxim tells her in both book and movie after the revelation of Rebecca's fate, "It's gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won't come back again...You are so much older...." (p. 299 of my Avon paperback edition). I think the contrast between the halting, naïve girl who marries Maxim, and the more sophisticated woman recounting her dream at the opening of the film, is deliberate. Whether the effect is overdone is matter of taste, but I don't find it out of keeping with the character.

As for Judith Anderson not looking skeletal, I disagree. She is often lit by cinematographer George Bruce in a way that emphasizes her eyes, forehead and cheekbones, leaving the lower part of her face in shadow. With her severe, pulled-back hair, it indeed makes her face look skull-like:

And as for the scene where Maxim is apparently contemplating suicide, it is a substitute for one in the book where he drives the heroine to a Monte Carlo clifftop and stands looking over the edge, lost in thought. As we and the heroine discover later, he isn't thinking about suicide, but revisiting a place where he contemplated murder. This is another case where I think Hitchcock's change works very well on its own terms, making the aloof, enigmatic Maxim a more sympathetic figure than he might otherwise have appeared.

None of the differences between the novel and Hitchcock's film version "suck the soul out of the novel," in my view. As I wrote above, despite these differences, "the film is remarkably faithful to the atmosphere of the book." So I have to think that the objections of Langosy and others are rooted in something else; perhaps they simply can't tolerate any deviation from the letter of the book. But representing this novel, or any novel, that faithfully would require hours and hours of screentime. To bring in a version that is merely feature-length necessarily requires compressions, elisions and changes to the source. In Hitchcock's Rebecca, those differences from du Maurier's novel seem to me to be thoughtfully considered and effective.

Longosy praises the 1979 BBC adaptation written by Hugh Whitemore; she writes, "Although this adaptation takes four hours to tell the story, it replicates as closely as possible du Maurier’s depiction of the characters and events." That "although," I think, is curious; shouldn't it instead be "because"? While sheer length is not sufficient to guarantee scene-by-scene faithfulness to a literary source—see The Pallisers—I think it is a necessary precondition. The BBC miniseries features Joanna David (later Elizabeth Bennet's Aunt Gardiner in the great 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice) as the heroine, Jeremy Brett (later Granada TV's Sherlock Holmes) as Maxim, and Anna Massey (later Miss Stanbury in the BBC's 2004 adaptation of He Knew He Was Right) as Mrs. Danvers. The cast is certainly promising; if I have a chance to see it (it has never been issued on video, to my knowledge) I'll make a further report.

Update 31 July 2013: A (micro-)mini review of Kohraa is included in the comments below.

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1. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Routledge, 1988, p. 43.
2. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 127.

Was Mozart a misogynist?: Così fan tutte

Miah Persson as Fiordiligi and Anke Vondung as Dorabella
in the 2006 Glyndebourne production of Così fan tutte

Two soldiers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, make a bet on the fidelity of their girlfriends, the sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi. The men pretend to get called up to war, and then disguise themselves as copiously-mustached Albanians (!?) to try to woo each other’s sweethearts: Ferrando tries to seduce Fiordiligi, while Guglielmo makes a play for Dorabella. At first (to the men's secret delight) the women rebuff these strange and ardent new suitors. But over the course of a single day both sisters, to the men's dismay, unexpectedly yield. When the men reveal their disguises, the original couples are abruptly restored, and the chagrined and contrite women promise to remain true from now on. "I believe you," both men tell their lovers, "but I won't put it to the test."

Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (All women do the same, or the School for Lovers, 1791) was the third and final collaboration between Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The first two, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) and Don Giovanni (Don Juan, 1787), regularly vie for the title of the greatest opera ever written (my vote goes firmly to Figaro in that contest). But Così—at least for the first 150 years or so after its premiere—had a very different reception.

In 1791 Friedrich Schröder called Da Ponte's libretto "a miserable thing, that debases all women." An anonymous reviewer that same year called it "a miserable Italian piece of work" [1]. Nearly a century later, the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that "the boundless triviality of the libretto everywhere deals a death blow to Mozart’s lovely music." Richard Wagner thought that the libretto would have "desecrated" Mozart's music if the music had been any good, which (according to Wagner) it wasn't [2].

It's hard not to agree with Schröder's judgment about the libretto's misogyny. Ferrando and Guglielmo may be foolish and manipulative, but Dorabella and Fiordiligi are unfaithful (and a bit dim-witted)—as all women are, according to the title. Peter Sellars' modern-dress production attempted to redeem the story by indicating that the sisters see through the men's half-hearted disguises immediately, and decide to teach them a lesson (or, perhaps, explore their mutual curiosity). But unexpectedly, each of them really begins to fall for her "Albanian." Sellars' version ends without the couples reuniting; instead, the characters reel about the stage as the curtain falls, their former bonds of friendship and love forever shattered. But Sellars' version goes against the grain of the libretto (he's even been accused of mistranslating it to make his points [3]). There's nothing in Da Ponte's words to suggest that the women aren't really taken in by Ferrando and Guglielmo's absurd disguises.

Another intriguing possibility that some directors have explored is that the original couples—Ferrando and Dorabella, Guglielmo and Fiordiligi—are mismatched, which in terms of sensibilities (and operatic conventions) they are. Ferrando and Fiordiligi have both comic and serious elements in their characters, while Guglielmo and Dorabella are more straightforwardly comic. In other Mozart operas, the "mixed" characters (the Count and Countess in Figaro, Belmonte and Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Harem, 1781)) are coupled, as are the buffa characters (Figaro and Susanna, Pedrillo and Blonde). Also, in terms of the emerging conventions of voice type (though they were conventions that were not yet fully established, and which Mozart did not generally follow), the leading tenor (Ferrando) was usually matched with the leading soprano (Fiordiligi). But if the original couples are mismatched, a new arrangement would be better for everyone, no?

The problems presented by Così are only deepened by Mozart's music, because it is among the most sublime he ever wrote, especially in the numerous ensembles. In "Soave sia il vento," Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and the cynical Don Alfonso (who has goaded the men into their bet, and is working to make them lose it) bid farewell to the men as they head to war—or so the sisters think:

The words in Italian and English are: "Soave sia il vento, / Tranquilla sia l'onda / Ed ogni elemento / Benigno risponda / Ai nostri desir" (May the breezes be gentle, and the waves be calm, and all the elements smile on them in response to our wishes). This video is from the 1996 production at the Palais Garnier, Paris, with Susan Graham as Dorabella, Susan Chilcott as Fiordiligi, and William Shimell as Don Alfonso.

As Bernard Williams has pointed out about this trio in his brilliant essay "Passion and Cynicism: Remarks on 'Così fan tutte'" (included in the collection On Opera, Yale University Press, 2006), "already at that early moment—the earliest possible moment—we can hear something of the reserves of desire which are going to engulf these ladies' conventional commitments" [4].

The depth of feeling expressed by Mozart's music complicates the cynical farce of Da Ponte's plot, and in Williams' view, contradicts its misogyny. Through Mozart's music, "if Così...says anything special about women's feelings, it is that they are more serious than men's" [5]. This is especially apparent in the character of Fiordiligi, who resists seduction longer, and who is more anguished about her newfound desire, than the light-hearted Dorabella. In "Per pietà," Fiordiligi begs for pity from her absent lover for the new feelings that have overwhelmed her, and which she is trying, unsuccessfully, to resist:

Susan Chilcott in the 1996 Paris production

In Williams' view, the attachments of the original couples, based on social expectations and convention, are overthrown when both women (but especially Fiordiligi) discover their true desires. But this means that there is a bitter, even tragic, dimension to the restoration of the social order at the end, where the women "are briskly, indeed brutally, returned to a conventional arrangement which was grounded, as we were shown, in shallower sentiments." As Williams concludes,

"If one feels that Mozart in this work agreed that it was better so, then one may be able to hear the ambivalent end of the second act as a convinced, if rather wry, celebration of a return from danger. If on the other hand one finds, as I do, that the end makes a rather stunned and hollow sound, one may feel that this work is more concerned to display the demands of the world against feeling than it is to justify them." [6]

There are several excellent recordings of Così. For more than a generation the standard was set by the 1962 version featuring Elizabeth Schwarzkopf as Fiordiligi, Christa Ludwig as Dorabella, Alfredo Kraus as Ferrando, Giuseppi Taddei as Guglielmo, and Walter Berry as Don Alfonso, conducted by Karl Böhm. More recently a superb period-instrument version was issued on Harmonia Mundi, with Veronique Gens, Bernarda Fink, Werner Güra, Marcel Boone, and Pietro Spagnoli accompanied by Concerto Köln conducted by René Jacobs. On DVD the Glyndebourne production from which the still above was taken features a cast of youthful, good-looking lovers (Miah Persson, Anke Vondung, Topi Lehtipuu and Luca Pisaroni) in handsome costumes and settings.

Live, the recent San Francisco Opera production (seen June 12) was a disappointment. It featured an excellent Fiordiligi (Ellie Dehn) and Guglielmo (Philippe Sly). But Christel Lötzsch as Dorabella, in the difficult position of stepping in for the previously announced Heidi Stober, had such a disconcertingly wide vibrato that her voice did not blend well in the ensembles; nor did the slightly nasal tenor of the Ferrando, Francesco Demuro. The greatest problem, though, was the slack-paced conducting by SFO music director Nicola Luisotti, who wallowed in Mozart's lovely melodies as though he were instead conducting a Puccinian tragedy. It completely drained the production of comic energy, did the singers no favors, and made for a long and oddly dispiriting evening in the theater.

By far the best live performance I've seen was by the young singers of the Merola Opera program in a 2001 production directed by John Copley, with musical direction by Scott Bergeson; it was so good that it transformed my view of the opera. At the beginning it was clear that the sisters (Elizabeth Caballero and Sarah Kleeman) were enjoying the theatricality of their own emotions; later, those emotions deepened, and real feelings came powerfully into play for all of the lovers. By the way, the cast we saw included Bryan Hymel as Ferrando, who triumphed last year in Les Troyens.

Copley also staged the comic bits with Despina (Saundra DeAthos), the women's maid, with such cleverness that they were actually funny—a rarity, in my experience. The direction was highly detailed, but never fussy, and made the piece work onstage in a way that it generally hasn't for me before or since. But given the work's complexities and contradictions, perhaps the scarcity of productions so carefully thought through, well performed, and emotionally satisfying shouldn't be a surprise.

Update 7 June 2020: Glyndebourne is streaming its 2006 Così beginning today at 5 pm London time (in the U.S.: noon Eastern / 9 am Pacific time); the stream will be available for viewing until the same time on 14 June. This excellent production gets even better each time we view it: Nicholas Hytner's direction is detailed and observant, and the young, fresh-voiced cast is superb. A special mention should be made of Anke Vondung, whose wide-eyed Dorabella reveals her to be a brilliant comedienne. Mozart's music is ravishing, of course, and is ravishingly performed. Highly recommended.

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1. Otto Eric Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 394-395.

2. Bruce Alan Brown, W. A. Mozart: Cosi fan tutte (Cambridge Opera Handbooks), Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 172.

3. Brown, p. 181.

4. Bernard Williams, "Passion and Cynicism: Remarks on 'Cosi fan tutte'," On Opera, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 46.

5. Williams, p. 45.

6. Williams, p. 47-48.

Teesri Kasam

Indian cinema is often divided into commercial movies (Bollywood, Kollywood, et al.) and art films (parallel cinema). However, there are films that bridge the two categories: they have the look, subject matter, and ambiguity of parallel cinema, while using the stars (and often the song sequences) of mainstream Bollywood. Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow, 1966), directed by Basu Bhattacharya, features major stars in Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman; and in its wistful, melancholy scenario (based on Phanishwarnath Renu's short story "Maare Gaye Gulfam") it employs parallel cinema's narrative compression and simplicity of means.

Hiraman (Raj Kapoor) is a bullock-cart driver who is hired one night to transport the nautanki dancer Hirabai (Waheeda Rehman) to a village fair for her next engagement.

The sleeping Hirabai

The gorgeous cinematography of Teesri Kasam is by Subrata Mitra, Satyajit Ray's cinematographer for the Apu Trilogy, among other films. Bhattacharya himself had been an assistant to another towering figure of Bengali film, Bimal Roy. As a result, Teesri Kasam looks as though it could have been filmed in the 1950s, and that's intended as a high compliment.

The trip takes 30 hours, and over the course of the journey the naïve Hiraman and the worldly Hirabai form a friendship that for him, at least, borders on love. She insists that they call each other "Meeta"—close friend—because of the name they share ("Hira," meaning "jewel").

When they reach the banks of a river and she decides to bathe, he tells her to use the area reserved for unmarried girls. Since most men she encounters assume that she's not only sexually experienced but available, she's surprised and touched by Hiraman's insistence.

Hiraman and Hirabai at the river

Hiraman helps the long hours pass by singing songs from "older times,"  such as the lovely, sad "Sajanwa Bairi Ho Gaye Hamar" (My beloved has become my enemy):

The song tells of a woman who is forever estranged from a distant lover, and who feels alone and bereft; Hirabai's tears suggest that this is a story with personal resonance, although we are never given her backstory. Teesri Kasam is filled with superb music, composed by Shankar-Jaikishen with lyrics by Shailendra. "Sajanwa Bairi" is sung by Mukesh; the film's other playback singers include Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, and Manna Dey, among others.

As they travel, Hirabai insists that they share the hardships and pleasures of the road as equals. When Hiraman serves a lunch of rice and yogurt bought from a nearby village, Hirabai refuses to eat unless he eats with her rather than waiting for her (as his paying guest) to finish. And when they finally arrive at the fair, Hiraman buys Hirabai some tea, but won't drink any himself. When Hirabai asks him why not, he says that unmarried men shouldn't drink tea:

Hirabai's amused response:

This sly suggestion of mutual attraction is surprising in both its subtlety and its acknowledgement of female desire and sexual agency.

Hirabai joins her dance company and invites Hiraman to come see her perform the next night. The film's wonderful dance sequences were choreographed by Lachchu Maharaj, and Rehman is a skilled and expressive dancer. In "Paan Khaye Saiya" she complains about a lover who is too caught up in his betel-leaf habit to pay her any attention; her mock-pouting expressions are delightful:

When a drunken customer starts making crude remarks about Hirabai, Hiraman becomes outraged and starts a fight. Hirabai later quarrels with him over this incident. "Are you going to fight with the whole world?" she asks him; rude and suggestive comments are clearly something she has to deal with constantly.

As are outright propositions. After her first show the local thakur (landlord) comes backstage and makes her a blunt money-for-sex offer. In the past, clearly, Hirabai has accepted similar deals, which her manager treats as a matter of course. But Hiraman's respectful treatment of her has given Hirabai a new sense of self-worth, and she refuses the thakur. He assumes that she's sleeping with Hiraman, and sneers at her choice of lover; she realizes that neither man sees her for who she really is:

She also realizes the impossibility of living up to Hiraman's idealization of her. One of the dances in the company's repertory is the legend of the pure and steadfast love of Laila and Majnu. "We can play Laila every night," Hirabai tells one of the other dancers, but

Hirabai's illusions were thoroughly smashed long ago, and as a result she can't bear the thought of shattering Hiraman's. And although she allows herself a brief moment in which to imagine herself in the role of a rural wife and mother,

she also realizes that she is utterly unsuited to such a life. Even though she cares deeply about Hiraman, Hirabai recognizes that they inhabit different worlds. Sometimes, no matter how much we might wish otherwise, love can't conquer all, and Hirabai finds herself faced with making a Laila-like self-sacrifice...

Teesri Kasam is a minor-key masterpiece that rewards multiple viewings. For an insightful essay about the film, please see Philip Lutgendorf's Notes on Indian popular cinema.