The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [294]
In Wagner's version, there is none of this. All we see is the story of how, once the treacherous, heartless power of egotism comes into the world, symbolised by the ring, everyone is corrupted by it. We see nothing but an endless vicious cycle of greed, rivalry, deceit, trickery and murder, until ultimately the self-destructive power of egotism destroys first the hero, then the anima, finally the entire world: leaving behind only an empty darkness. Beyond egotism, from the ego's point of view, there is nothing. Only that archetypal awareness buried deep in our unconscious that, even as the dark power in a story brings about its own destruction, the light must always re-emerge, leads people to want to imagine that they see a glimmer of light in the ending to the strange, dark story of the Ring of the Nibelungen. It is not there.
The lost anima: Bizet and Puccini
In 1875, the year before Wagner finally brought the central work of his life, on which he had worked for more than a quarter of a century, to its first performance at Bayreuth, an outwardly rather more conventional opera had its premiere in Paris. We earlier looked at Bizet's Carmen as a perfect example of a story shaped by the five-stage archetypal pattern of Tragedy. Although the weak little hero Jose is in love with an infantile anima-figure, Micaela, he becomes infatuated with the Temptress, Carmen. Throwing off his soldier's uniform, as a symbol of losing his outward manhood, he rejects his loving anima and passes completely under the emasculating spell of the Dark Mother. There then looms up the bullfighter Escamillo, the shadow of the masculinity he will never realise; and finally, in futile, self-destructive rage, he lashes out at the Dark Mother, who symbolises his impotent immaturity. As in Rigoletto or the Ring cycle, there is very little sign of any redeeming victory for light.
It is interesting to look at this story in the context of Bizet's own psychology. He was another of those nineteenth-century artists, like Stendhal, with a mother complex, who therefore had serious difficulty both with his own inner feminine and with his masculinity. He wanted, as Robert Donington tells us, to live next door to his mother, yet have `his mistresses come and go in spite of her, almost as it would seem by proxy for her'. In his severe attacks of angina pectoris, he had visions of his mother laying her hand on his chest, when `the agony would increase. I would suffocate, and it seemed to me that her hand, weighing on me so heavily, was the true cause of my suffering.' Bizet was liable to ungovernable rages, and once in Venice when he received a letter from his mother addressed from hospital, he fell into such acute anxiety that, at the mere sight of the letter unopened, he `attacked a gondolier as if to strangle him.'
He must unconsciously have recognised this central problem of his own identity when he chose Merimee's story to provide the basis for his last and most famous opera. When it finally went into production, at the Paris Comedic Francaise, Bizet entered a psychosomatic crisis. Three months later, the singer playing Carmen, at the scene where her death is foretold in the cards, was filled with such foreboding that she fainted in the wings. Next day came the news that the composer had died that same evening, at the age of 36.
A composer whose operas continued those of Verdi in reflecting the obsession of nineteenth-century storytellers with the tortured, persecuted anima was Puccini. At the end of Manon Lescaut (1893), the heroine dies on a vast, desolate plain, singing of how she is `alone, lost and abandoned'. At the end of La Boheme (1896), Mimi dies painfully of consumption in the garret where she had once enjoyed the greatest happiness of her short life. In Tosca (1900), the heroine, having heard the groans of her lover being tortured in the next room on the orders of the Tyrant Scarpia, desperately tries to save him by betraying their