I picked up Alexander Chee’s exhilaratingly over-the-top historical fiction melodrama The Queen of the Night to revel in 19th-century opera lore. I know I’m late to the party, but when the book dropped in 2016, I didn’t know a mezzosoprano from a heldentenor. It wasn’t until the pandemic years that the subject held much interest for me. My brother was once as opera-ignorant as I was but he’d become so fluent in bel canto and opera buffa that those sheltering in place with him were soon infected with a rapidly metastasizing cultural virus. Before 2020, I had never sat through a full-length opera. Six years later, I’ve seen almost all of the established canon via 24 live performances at Chicago’s Lyric Opera, three at the Met in New York, 19 at other regional theaters or concert halls, 34 in movie theaters, and at least 20 through streaming services and physical media. So let’s just say I came to Chee all in for thematic and narrative intersections with sung-through dramas from Aida to Zelmira. On the other hand, I did not come expecting the nuance of psychology, thought, and expression that is the hallmark of great literature. For the most part, The Queen of the Night aligns with my expectations. It is as self-indulgent as my reasons for reading it and as grand and silly as most 19th-century libretti. Still, there is a certain gravity to the book, derived from the way the broadly shifting fortunes of its heroine—from frontier orphan to kept woman to pampered superstar—reflect the broader condition of women in the historical period it explores.
NOT JUST OPERA
This, I think, is the reason Chee exercises more restraint in his celebration of the operatic artform than I’d anticipated. For most of the novel, he plays hard-to-get with his target audience, teasingly doling out the operatic allusions here and there for roughly the first 400 of 549 pages. Only then does the heroine and narrator, soprano Lilliet Berne, land a breakthrough role in Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula that permits the author to rev up his operatic engines at last. Prior to that, his mode is that of a more traditional purveyor of historical fiction. Chee opens with a mouthwatering fanfic morsel: risotto night at the home of maestro Giuseppe Verdi. But Chee soon flashes back to her origins as a dutifully churched orphan girl raised on Iroquois land in Civil War-era Minnesota. From there, she runs away and joins le cirque in Paris, voluntarily signs up for grisette duty, is purchased as a courtesan by a patriarchal villain known only as “the Tenor,” scores a gig as a servant to Empress Eugénie de Montijo during France’s Second Empire, and shacks up with a Chopin-esque composer of piano nocturnes during the ensuing Siege of Paris. Not too long after that, she ascends at last to the pinnacle of the diva hierarchy.
A PERSONAL VENN DIAGRAM
The long opera-less swaths surprised me, but not as much as the way The Queen of the Night intersected with so many other books I’ve read or plan to read this year. This took me back to junior high, my brief but intense comic book period, when the most thrilling of all literary concepts was the Marvel/DC crossover: Superman meets Spider-Man! The X-Men tussle with the Teen Titans! The Queen of the Night has that kind of cross-pollinated energy. The depiction of Louis Bonaparte’s Second Empire echoed an Émile Zola novel I’d just read (The Fortune of the Rougons) and another on my To Be Read list (Mysteries of the Court of Louis Napoleon). Additionally, Lilliet vacations in Baden-Baden, where she meets Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose Fathers and Sons sits on my TBR shelf, and German composer Johannes Brahms, the subject of a Jan Swafford biography I’m working my way through. At one point, I got confused about which book detailed an opera-writing brainstorming session between Brahms and Turgenev. (It was Swafford.) I also started to feel relief that opera characters die in such perfunctory abundance. The comic book characters died a lot too (Superman, Jean Grey, the Flash), but it always turned out to be a marketing gambit. At least opera corpses don’t pop back up after the stretta is over.
FOLLOWING THE E19 MODEL
Chee’s plot is sprawling and digressive, but it loosely follows the narrative structure that critic Conrad L. Osborne claimed was common to all but two operas in the “Extended Nineteenth Century” (that is, extended to include Mozart and Strauss). That structure, explained in Osborne’s massive critical tome Opera as Opera, is essentially this: a protagonist (usually male, but reversed here) who lacks the social standing she desires (a courtesan and royal servant rather than an opera star) falls obsessively in love with a reciprocating lover (the aforementioned composer) who occupies the social position (professional musician) she aspires to.
FACH AS DESTINY
For obvious reasons, I won’t reveal how closely the novel maps to the E19 on this last point but suffice to say that Lilliet is haunted from the opening chapters by an oppressive sense of encroaching Fate. Chee is at his most clumsily melodramatic when he identifies this destiny as Lilliet’s “curse” and at his most arcanely clever when he associates it with her indelibly fixed type as a singer. This type is known in German opera lingo as a fach, a term that pinpoints a singer’s vocal characteristics at a more granular level than terms like “contralto” or “mezzo.” Lilliet defines fach as follows.
It is a singer’s fate, for it describes the singer’s range and the type of roles the singer will sing. Some soprano tones are associated with virtue, others with seduction, others with grief. If your voice is a collection of the highest notes, you are to play the good girl. If your voice reaches only to the near heights, you are the spurned one or the dishonored. A bit lower and you are the rival or the seductress, and still lower, the maid or matron…. Mine was a voice that sounded at first as if it did not have the capacity for high notes, until they emerged, surprising, with great force. A voice for expressing sorrow, fear, and despair. The tragic soprano is what I was called, also known as a Falcon.
Lilliet’s fate is determined as inescapably by society, class, and gender as by her fach. She spends the whole novel trying to free herself from constraints imposed by authority figures. As a tyke, Lilliet is prevented from realizing her staggering potential when her devout mother tries to curb her emerging pride by gagging her singing voice. In Europe, she voluntarily signs a sex worker registry to help a prostitute friend. On most pages, she is desperately plotting an escape from the contract that ties her to the doting but abusive Tenor. She escapes him and finds love with the composer, but her aristocratic mistress steps in and ships her back to servitude. Lilliet’s laundry list of socially degraded roles gives her an implausibly Zelig-like ubiquity in the salient events of the era. But realism is not Chee’s priority, and he quietly employs her breadth of experience to establish her as a 19th century Everywoman. Lilliet is addressing more than just opera convention when she asks, “Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?” The question bears thematic weight when applied to women in general.
CAN’T LIVE WITH ‘EM, CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT ‘EM
As a genre, opera alternates between gynolatry and misogyny. From the bel canto era on, sopranos have always been the unquestioned stars of the show. Early 19th century composers like Bellini, Gioachino Rossini, and Gaetano Donizetti deployed coloratura sopranos like Fourth of July firework displays; the feminine arias were the dazzlingly virtuosic main event of the evening. Men could only win arias of equal power by literally emasculating themselves, as did the castrati to preserve their girlish youthful voices. Rossini was denigrated by critics just for assigning arias to bass voices at all. Yet for all that upper register idolatry, the female characters in operas were consistently and brutally victimized. “Dead women,” wrote Catherine Clément in her 1989 book Opera, or the Undoing of Women, “But no matter how hard I laugh there is always this constant: death by a man.” She proceeds to catalog opera’s female casualties: Nine knifings, three incinerations, two fatal jumpers, two consumptives, and so on. It is a crushing compilation, one that Lilliet knows well, and she consciously strives to stay off the list.
L’AMOUR LA MORT
Death, and its equally momentous abstract partner, love, are the foundation upon which opera is built. Wagner united the two in the immortal compound word, Liebestod. In the novel, Chee points out that the juxtaposition is not unique to German opera: “L’amour, la mort, [Carmen] sings [in the Habenera], by turns gaily and seductively. Love, death. Love. Only in French do they rhyme.” This is what gives so many opera libretti their visceral emotional power and also what makes them sometimes feel overweening and gaudy. Operas do not draw their artistic seriousness from their words but from their glorious music. The music elevates the maudlin earnestness of operatic scripts to an intangible poetry of universal power. In emulating the overreach of opera, Chee harnesses some of that raw artistic heft, but he cannot reproduce it. His prose is skilled and sometimes ambitious, but it is not a substitute for the kinetic polyphony of a Rossini quartet or the blustery innovation of a Wagner interlude. To those untutored on opera’s finer points by their brothers, or any surrogate thereof, The Queen of the Night may read as pseudohistorical schlock. But to those ripe for the indulgence, it is a sustained high C.