Playing the Fool

Mark Thomas Ketterson casts an analytical eye on opera’s clowns — the greatest of which can be seen at HGO this season.

In one of opera’s most iconic moments, a weeping clown delivers this passionate outcry: “Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore in franto! Ridi del duol che t’avvelena il cor!” — “Laugh, clown, at your broken love, laugh at the pain that poisons your heart!” It is an emblematic interlude. Ask the man on the street to describe an operatic character, and chances are if he doesn’t offer up Brünnhilde and her breastplate he will mimic Pagliacci’s itinerant clown Canio, cynically masking his agony with a painted smile.

    OK, hold it right there. Agony? Poisoned hearts? Clowns are supposed to be funny, aren’t they? Well, yes and no. There is a decidedly dark side to these allegedly lighthearted beings. Clowns have a way of eliciting a plethora of emotional responses, from hilarity to pathos — and for some, out-and-out terror. Check out the kids on Bozo’s Big Top; more than a few of them look antsy in the guy’s very presence. Or consider Heath Ledger’s chilling performance in Dark Knight. An irrational fear of clowns is not uncommon, and often persists into adulthood. A clinical term for it has even entered the lexicon — coulrophobia. As Lon Chaney, the Silent Screen’s master of horror, famously commented, “There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”

    Clowns have entertained audiences in virtually every culture since the earliest rumblings of the theatrical arts. The ancient Greeks rendered their clowns with exaggerated facial features (the influence of the classic comedy / tragedy masks survives through intricate make-up designs to this day) and with huge comic phalluses. Clowning reached a zenith with the Italian commedia dell’arte of the sixteenth century. The stock characters and archetypal plots of the genre (Columbina, the nubile minx, is snatched from her foolish protector Pantalone by the roguish Arlecchino, and so forth) subsequently found their way into opera — manifestly so in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, but also in the effervescent comedy of opera buffa, as in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville or Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. Even there we find a tricky balance of sun and shade; Pasquale may be a buffoon, but Norina’s cruelty towards him upsets the audience as much as the old roué himself.

    These emotional dichotomies have manifested themselves throughout various derivatives of the clown’s art well into modern
times. “It’s easier for a comic to make an audience cry than anyone else,” the great Bert Lahr once observed, “because the sympathy of the audience is with them.” Few remember today that our beloved Cowardly Lion enjoyed the great triumph of his long career with his heart-wrenching performance in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Ed Wynn and the Yiddish theater’s Menasha Skulnik, both famous for comedy, were known to be very serious individuals in real life; and it comes as little surprise that Bill Irwin, who won a Tony for his  performance in the recent Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s stinging Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is an alumnus of the celebrated Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

    Given their uniquely multi-faceted nature, clowns are particularly well equipped to illuminate those elusive operatic antiheros who gain our sympathy even as we are repelled by their actions. Canio is a prime example. The inspiration for Pagliacci has never been definitively verified. The composer, Leoncavallo, frequently said his police magistrate father brought home the story of the deranged clown who so confused actual and theatrical reality that he murdered his fellow performers onstage, and Leoncavallo once even claimed to have witnessed the crime himself. Most musicologists think the composer lifted the typical commedia dell’arte scenario from two popular plays of the period. Whatever the case, it is impossible not to pity poor, bedeviled Canio, even if he’s not someone you would want to meet in a dark alley.

    Canio possibly found a psychological antecedent in his ancestral cousin, Rigoletto. A recent production for Opera Australia even utilized the Verdi opera’s gloomy prologue to underscore an opening image of the hunchbacked jester bitterly applying a smiling mask of greasepaint before leaving his cloistered abode. Based upon the excellent play Le Roi s’amuse by Victor Hugo (Edwin Booth made a specialty of the title role), Verdi’s masterpiece presents a far more complex protagonist than does Leoncavallo’s. Canio is all impulse; Rigoletto is a creature of finely calibrated calculation, his rage tempered with the tenderness of a father. Moreover, he has the more difficult job — while Canio can drop his pretense once the curtain falls, Verdi’s jester is trapped in his milieu, grinning through his deformities at his cruel tormentors throughout the day. Rigoletto’s great Act II scene, with its myriad of shifting emotions from the stealthily upbeat “La ra, la la,” through the explosion of “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” to his pathetic cry for pity, is one of the most moving interludes in all of Italian opera. We would likely cross the street to avoid Canio, but we weep with “povero Rigoletto.”

    Shakespeare’s clowns (more descriptively called “fools”) often display wisdom well beyond their drolly rendered miens. With Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we encounter one of the most intriguing clowns in the operatic canon. Nick Bottom — changed into an ass by the mischievous Puck — may not be a complicated man, but he is an extraordinarily complicated character. Bottom is the comedic locus of the piece, so his antics amuse us, but we laugh through a filter of bittersweet self-recognition. After all,  how many of us average jackasses haven’t longed for the attention of a Fairy Queen? Upon awakening from his sojourn among the fairies, Bottom realizes that his fantastic adventures can be related only in a ballad or a poem, as common language would be inadequate for the task; so once again the modest clown becomes an unlikely ambassador for the lyric theater, an art form in which emotion too transcendent for speech is conveyed in song.

    There is much to learn from clowns if we are honest and observant. Clowns mirror our souls, revealing our essential humanity. Their transfiguring power has recently found a surprising expression in the emergence of “clown ministries,” which encourage spiritual examination through humorous insight. One parish offers a provocative analysis on its website: “Clowns represent the underdog, the lowly, the remnant people. Their foolishness is a call to unpretentiousness. They take incredible risks — balancing on tightropes, eating fire, keeping silent, being poked by others or getting soaked in water. Clowns are parables in themselves, spending great amounts of energy uncovering small things, then showing forth the hidden treasures of life.”

    And so it is with these hapless and often poignantly perceptive clowns of opera.

Mark Thomas Ketterson is the Chicago correspondent for Opera News. He has also written for Playbill, USOperaweb, Chicago magazine and for Lyric Opera of Chicago.