Il dolce suono

Il dolce suono
Mi colpì di sua voce !

With these words⁴, following the flute introduction, begins the arioso of the madness scene of Lucia di Lammermoor.

In Donizetti’s opera, adapted from Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor located in Scotland, Lucy Ashton is in love with Edgard Ravenswood, in spite of the conflicts opposing their families for generations.
Forcedly married to another man by her family, she murders him during the wedding ceremonies, then goes mad. She imagines herself married to Edgar near the fountain where they met, then dies at the end of the scene.

I re-redicovered this spellbinding air, after a succession of amusing events. First with the interpretation of a young Russian prodigy, Витас (Vitas Bumac⁵ ), who interprets Lucia’s part. Which reminded me of the Diva’s memorable interpretation in Luc Besson’s Fifth Element.

The madness scene echoes another important element in the novel (used differently in the opera): the infamous fountain (or well) where the lovers first met.
In this mythical Scotland full of old tales, the fountain (“Mermaiden’s Fountain”) becomes the symbol for Lucia of doomed influence from past ghosts. One of Edgar’s ancestors is said to have murdered a young maid there, and the fountain became ever since doomed for the Ravenswoods. Lucia sees her ghost there, as if a lethal warning.

The well symbol is interesting when paralleled with one of the Yi jing’s sentence, precisely about the 48^th hexagram, 井 [jǐng] (the well).

It goes like this: 《改邑不改井》
That is : “change the town don’t change the well”. This well is indeed a symbol for the fundations, or the connection with one’s own (well-)being. In Lucia, this source is tainted by the crime of the ancestors, just like both families’ relationships.
To those refusing to heed the warnings is a dear price to pay.

Incidently, Flaubert beautifully describes a scene in Madame Bovary where Emma, deeply entranced, assists at a performance of “Lucie de Lammermoor”.

She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies, and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery, the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the velvet caps, cloaks, swords —all those imaginary things that floated amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the warbling of birds. Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life, would have liked to fly away in an embrace.

[…]

She was filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn out to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that charmed her as some very thing of her own life.

(trans. Eleanor Marx-Aveling)

Emma’s gazing at her own emotion’s play ends with much à propos just before the madness scene, when she decides to leave the play. Eventhough, as for Lucia, she is to embrace a world of sham and illusions, eager to be seduced by her future young lover.

What I find so sublimely moving in this opera’s part is that madness comes to represent shunning away when faced with this inability to be loved, the characters renouncing to true intimacy, preferring to do it through a final illusion.

The doomed well itself ends representing the weight of an original fault which is but illusory, just a reflection of the characters’ renouncement to feel worthy of love.
Lucia, accepting the lies of her brother that she was betrayed by Edgard, or Emma fleeting from disenchantements of marriage to those of adultery.

And the drama is that under the layers of generations, or lovers for Emma, deep within them, as the foundations of the well under the town’s evolution, therein lies the very source of their distraught sufferings…