Opera Is Still Obsessed With the Suffering of Women

Opera’s job is to show us what’s bigger, wilder and more intense than ordinary life. It’s a terrarium in which we watch a condensed version of ourselves, with more ecstatic loves and more savage suffering.

It’s no secret that a disproportionate amount of that suffering has been endured by women. With its bounty of female mad scenes, wasting sicknesses and tragic deaths, opera has been viewed with suspicion by some feminist critics. In a classic 1979 book, the French theorist Catherine Clément observed that “on the opera stage, women perpetually sing their eternal undoing.”

“Glowing with tears, their décolleté cut to the heart,” Clément wrote, “they expose themselves to the gaze of those who come to take pleasure in their pretend agonies.”

Opera, in this reading, is the product of a male-dominated society that has both celebrated female beauty and limited female action: hence the virtuoso singing paired with the punishing downfalls. There’s a dark aspect to the fact that women losing their minds and their lives is clearly central to what bewitches so many of us about “La Traviata” and “Madama Butterfly,” “Elektra” and “La Bohème,” “Faust” and much else in the standard repertoire.

Not every opera, and certainly not every contemporary one, revolves around suffering women. But two major new works — Jeanine Tesori’s “Grounded,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, and Missy Mazzoli’s sly, poignant, darkly funny “The Listeners,” which had its American premiere at Opera Philadelphia on Wednesday — are reminders that this fascination is strong enough to have lingered into our own time.

Neither of these works has a traditional opera heroine. Jess in “Grounded” is a fighter pilot (no décolleté for her) and Claire in “The Listeners” teaches high school. And unlike Carmen or Salome, they don’t die; these new operas end with their main characters in a position that can seem a lot like composure. But the main spectacle of both plots — the climactic meat of the action — remains the same as in “Lucia di Lammermoor”: a woman coming undone.