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Why do we find self-confidence attractive?
Why do we find self-assurance, in a potential
romantic partner, sexy?
Why does timid, cloying Nemorino, hero of Gaetano Do
nizetti’s
L’Elisir D’Amore
, fail to win over wealthy, fickle Adina until he stops smothering her
with adoration and adopts a strategy of feigned disinterest?
What is it about human
psychology that makes us, in the initial stages of a relationship -- all else being equal --
more likely to prefer an admirer capable of evincing some indifference toward us than
one who follows us around like a sad puppy?
When we say indifferenc
e, we’re really talking about autonomy, self-sufficiency,
which assure us that our p
otential romantic partner isn’t going to be a liability.
A project.
Surely some women
are attracted to a project – a man to rescue, nurture, improve.
Others, like Adina, prefer a man who has other prospects in life
– other hopes and dreams
–
besides herself, thus insuring that he won’t get overly attached to her, weigh her down,
restrict her freedom.
Nemorino’s challenge is to convince Adina that he’s not dependent
on her alone for happiness
.
The fact that he can’t do so WITHOUT A LOVE POTION tells us
how difficult and unnatural it is to appear detached
when YOU ARE CONSUMED BY LOVE and
scared of rejection.
The most famous love potion ("filtro", "elisir d'amore") legend is that of Tristano and Isotta, which
Wagner would make into an opera.
The legend has many sources and
many variations.
At the beginning of
L’Elisir D’Amore, Adina is reading a version in
which Tristano buys a phial of magic potion to make Isotta, who has a hard heart, fall in
love with him.
Tristano drinks the potion. But the transformation occurs in Isotta.
Isotta's heart
softens toward him.
In
L’Elisir D’Amore, when Nemorino drinks the potion -- which is
actually just red wine, an intoxicant --
he is the one who is transformed.
--------------------------------------- DONIZETTI'S GENIUS ------------------
The particular
effects of this transformation
, and Adina’s reaction, are what save L’Elisir from being
just another
opera buffa romp – scheming characters, clever plot, pretty music -- and
make it an illuminating study of the dynamics of courtship.
We should look closely at the way Nemorino and Adina interact before, and then
after, Nemorino drinks the love potion.
When Nemorino approaches Adina in Act I, she’s
just been hit on by the swaggering, self-enchanted sergeant Belcore, who arrived in town
with his platoon and said to Adina, in essence,
Hey babe, you’re hot, I’m incredible, let’s
get together
. Adina chides him for his conceitedness and tells him she’ll have to think
about it.
Nemorino watches from the sidelines, intimidated by Belcore’s bravado, envious
of his courage.
How will Nemorino respond to the competition?
He approaches Adina
and asks to speak with her. “The usual nuisance! The same old sighs!” she says. He’s
pestered her before. She tells him he’s a good, modest guy, but that he doesn’t inspire her
with love, and never will.
She calls Nemorino’s exclusive love for her “madness” and
advises him to do as she does: “take a new lover every day.” “One nail drives out
another, so l
ove dislodges love,” she says. Nemorino insists that she can never be driven
from his heart. Adina shoos him away.
The love potion which Nemorino buys from the traveling swindler/apothecary
Dulcamara, has a placebo effect even before Nemorino drinks it.
Just having the love potion in
his possession works magic
. “Dear elixir! You’re mine! …How powerful your strength
must be if, without having drunk any yet, you
fill my breast with so much joy!”
He takes
a sip, then another. “Oh, what a pleasant warmth thrills through my veins!”
He wonders if
Adina will “begin to feel the same fire.”
Dulcamara has told Nemorino that the elixir
won’t take
effect for 24 hours, which isn’t true.
Though Nemorino is mostly unaware of it,
the love potion IS already working, getting him drunk, relaxing him, boosting his ego.
This,
combined with his (FALSE -- but who cares?) belief
in the potion’s power, gives him confidence, and he sings
cheerfully as he eats some fru
it.
Adina hardly recognizes him. “So cheerful. Why?” she
wonders.
Nemorino nearly approaches her but decides to keep his distance, to play hard
to get
.
“Tomorrow that pitiless heart will have to adore me,” he says.
The word
pitiless means everything here.
Has Adina really been pitiless to him in
the past, or has his strategy to win her by making her pity him been a poor one?
Adina is
alarmed that
he’s paying no attention to her.
Clearly part of her enjoyed his servile
adoration.
She wonders if he’s pretend
ing not to care about her, which is a kind of
defense mechanism against the possibility that he might
not be pretending – that he
might, in fact, be in love with someone else.
She approaches Nemorino and makes a joke
about him “profiting from the lesson,”
meaning her advice to play the field, to take a new
lover every day, and Nemorino says he is indeed giving it a try.
“So your former
suffering?” Adina asks. “I hope to forget it,” Nemorino answers. She asks, “The old
fire?” and he says, “Will soon be extinguished.”
So it’s not a love potion: it is a CONFIDENCE potion.
If Nemorino were alive
today, he might not buy a potion, but opt to go on-line to so.suave.com or
datebeautifulwomen.com or one of many other sites that promise to improve
men’s selfassurance
and self-esteem
– their “inner game.”
Nemorino would learn how to approach
Adina without nervousness or fear, how to come off as cocky and funny, how to give
Adina
that “I have to have you” feeling, how to stay out of the “friends zone,” the 6 dead
giveaways that
he’s needy and insecure.
Nemorino might shell out and buy a book or a
DVD.
He might attend a seminar at the local Sheraton.
If he were in a big city, he might
go to a “live workshop” in a bar or
nightclub taught by one of the many “seduction
gurus” plying
their trade across the dating landscape.
Poor Nemorino wouldn’t realize
that these gurus are better at seducing desperate, gullible men than beautiful women.
Now that Nemorino is self-assured and detached
, thanks to the love potion, he’s a
challenge, and Adina becomes obsessed.
Earlier in the opera, she told Belcore that she
would not be easily conquered.
Clearly
Clearly
she’s tantalized by a similar invulnerability in the
opposite sex.
Is Adina simply interested in the chase, the hunt, and when she gets her
man, the triumph?
Is she a thrill-seeker? A love-surfer?
She was until now.
On the other
hand
, in pursuing someone with whom we don’t initially have a lot of currency, a person
who has other interests and opportunities and accomplishments, we aspire to be loved on
par with, or in excess of, those other valuables, which will in turn be a measure of our
self-worth.
This might mean we have healthy self-esteem and want to be valued for what
we are, or that we have low self-esteem and need an impressive catch on our arm to make
us look good, to contradict our low opinion of ourselves.
In either case, we aspire to feel good about ourselves, and to have others feel good
about us.
Is this why we’re so eager to
become more attractive and desirable?
Is this why
we’re often
willing to cross the fuzzy border between using drugs and injections and
surgical procedures to improve our health and using them to make our skin look less
wrinkled, our bodies slimmer and/or more muscular, our hair thicker and more lustrous?
We want to look sexy.
We want to look young.
We don’t want to age and die. We’ll fight
it tooth and nail, by hook or by crook.
L’Elisir D’Amore suggests that we have always
been like this.
Look at Dulcamara, who advertises
“specifics” for “apoplectics,
asthmatics, as
phitics, hysterics, diabetics” as well as “innumerable marvels” to rejuvenate
arthritic bones, erase wrinkles, increase sexual potency.
It’s hard to hear Dulcamara’s
cocky, rapid-patter spiel and not think of all the advertisements on TV today urging us to
ask our doctors about contemporary remedies
– many effective, others dubious – for
arthritis, high cholesterol, obesity, depression, anxiety, shyness, insomnia, erectile
dysfunction, heartburn and indigestion, acne and cellulite and facial wrinkles and hair
loss.
Some of these are health conditions, others related to beauty.
Others are somewhere
in between.
The advertisers purposefully make it difficult to distinguish.
Like Dulcamara,
they want us to consider all conditions worthy of medicat
ing.
And we’re often eager for
the green light.
How does
L’Elisir D’Amore manage to explore so many complicated questions
and issues when it was written in under a month?
The librettist, Felice Romani, was able
to draw heavily on a libretto written by Eug
ene Scribe for Auber’s opera Le Philtre,
which was in turn derived from an Italian text,
Il filtro, by Silvio Malaperta.
ROMANI'S LOVE POTION
Romani took
what was clearly an old story of (Celtic) mythological stature, refined and chiseled over centuries
by successive writers, and refined it further, making the language more elegant, cutting
superfluous material,
adding scenes.
Donizetti’s score is gorgeous and variegated, robust
and brilliant, tender and sweet.
He’s capable of swiftly,
seamlessly changing tone from
light to dark, from c
omedy to longing; he’ll be skimming along a bright, flickery surface
and dive suddenly into sorrowful depths. He paints with a rich palette, and his brush
strokes are alternately brisk and lively, languid and lustrous. Now and then we hear Verdi
in Donizetti
– the darkness, the turbulence, the romantic intensity. Verdi was a great
admirer of Doni
zetti, and vice versa. “My heyday is over,” Donizetti wrote in 1844, “and
another must take my place…I am happy to give mine to people of talent like Verdi.”
Whether he knew it or not, Donizetti was referring to more than just a torch
passing between two great composers. Not only was the age of
bel canto drawing to a
close
– that movement in Italian opera led by Bellini and Rossini and Donizetti in which
the vocal line, more than the orchestra, communicated the emotions of the characters
–
but so was the age of
opera buffa, which had reached cruising altitude in the 1790’s with
Mozart and was piloted into the nineteenth century by Rossini and Donizetti.
By 1832,
when
L’Elisir premiered in Milan, Romantic opera, with its emphasis on emotional
intensity, the beauty and terror of nature, and the supernatural, had begun to compete
with
opera buffa for the public’s affection.
Donizetti had composed a great Italian
Romantic opera,
Lucia di Lammermoor, and Bellini – pale, hypersensitive, tormented –
lived and died (young) like a Romantic.
But the gold medal for nineteenth century
Romantic opera would go to the Germans: Beethoven, Hoffmann, Spohr, von Weber, and
above all, Wagner. The silver would go to Verdi. The bronze to Gounod, in France.
Donizetti died in 1848, at the age of 51, physically and mentally paralyzed, in
Bergamo, Italy,
the town of his birth. He’d spend the previous few years at a mental
institution in Paris, suffering from dementia brought on by syphilis.
Perhaps he wished, in
his last lucid days, that Dulcamara’s
miraculous remedies existed in the real world -- that
there was an love potion capable of alleviating his own
suffering.
Let’s hope Donizetti was
comforted by the knowledge that with
L’Elisir D’Amore, he had accomplished what
every great artist strives for: to create a work
– a novel, a painting or sculpture, a
building, a symphony
– that will act as a love potion on its audience, causing us to fall in love
with the work, and with its creator, for eternity
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