…backstage slice of life in which a music hall star discovers her lover is already married. Furious, she appears at his family home, only to find his sweet little daughter playing the piano. Zazà’s scene with the child, who speaks throughout to the background of a little piano sonatina, is one of the most queasily sentimental scenes in all opera. The encounter causes Zazà to reflect on her unhappy upbringing – abandoned by her father and brought up with an alcoholic mother … Duly disarmed, she renounces her own happiness to spare the child.

Butterflies and swallows

The kept woman, or rather geisha, with the largest heart, and who renounces most, has to be Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904). Pinkerton, an American naval officer and certified love rat, marries her, makes her pregnant and leaves Japan. Three years later she is still insisting he will return, even rejecting a lucrative offer of protection and consolation from local Prince Yamadori. When Pinkerton does come back, accompanied by his bona fide American wife, Cio-Cio-San relinquishes their child and takes her life. She is so ennobled that she transcends any concept of a fallen woman, attaining an heroic magnitude that makes her comparable to Wagner’s mythical female redeemers.

By contrast, Puccini’s last tart-with-heart, Magda in La rondine, a semi-successful foray into the world of operetta (1917), is a watered-down Violetta who cannot face meeting her respectable prospective mother-in-law. In short, she knows her place and she stays there.

French kisses

The Frenchman Jules Massenet (1842-1912), sixteen years Puccini’s senior, was both prolific and successful. His trademark, like Puccini’s, was his convincing and varied gallery of heroines. He also had a penchant for the rituals of Catholicism, and returned time and again to the conflict of sex and religion.

The work which exploits this most fully is Thaïs (1894), based on a sensational novel by Anatole France – who was in fact excommunicated for his provocative views on the Church. Thaïs, an Alexandrian grande horizontale, is converted to Christianity by a desert monk, Athanaël. The transformation, accomplished to the ‘heavenly’ strains of the famous Méditation for solo violin, makes her into a saintly figure. Unfortunately, the sight of Thaïs doing penance, and in particular her bloodied feet, converts Athanaël the opposite way … The final scene sees him overcome with lust, as she describes the vistas of heaven opening before her.

Thaïs has always had a tawdry reputation and it was originally perceived as too ripe to catch on in Anglo-Saxon countries. The opera was written for a young American soprano, Sybil Sanderson, who bewitched Massenet, but whose life degenerated as dramatically as any on-stage courtesan’s. At the premiere, pre-empting Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ on MTV by more than a century, Sanderson accidentally – or not – revealed a breast during the striptease that the Act 1…

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