A series of blogs identifying five general categories of the nurse character’s role in operas from the mid-seventeenth through the early twenty-first century. The categories are fluid and overlap, so that the nurse character can and usually does appear in more than one category within an opera. Taken from a careful study of librettos and available performances of a hundred-plus operas with at least one nurse character.
Knowledgeable Nurses: Ericlea
The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland by Claudio Monteverdi, Libretto by Giacomo Badoaro
Premiered in Venice, 1640
King Ulysses had left Ithaca, his wife Penelope, and their young son Telemachus 20 years previously by sea to fight in the Trojan War; his journey back home took 10 years. While Ulysses is away, persistent Suitors descend on his home, since they think him dead, with intent to marry Penelope for her wealth and position. Almost at her wit’s end, Penelope devises a test of skill using her husband’s bow and arrows; the Suitor who can complete the test successfully will win her hand. Ulysses returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar to whom Penelope offers hospitality. When nurse Eryclea helps him bathe, she recognizes Ulysses from a scar on his thigh. Caught between love for Ulysses who has sworn her to secrecy and for Penelope who deserves to know the truth, Eryclea ponders her dilemma. Should she, or should she not tell all? After much musical anguish, the nurse has decided it prudent to hold her tongue.
Francis Bacon’s dictum that knowledge itself is a power, from his 1579 Meditationes Sacrae, has relevance to opera’s nurse characters as women and as servants. Valued in drama of Renaissance England only “for their sexual relationship to men and their powers of propagation,” older women – Roberts specifies crones – who outlived men were considered a social burden, repellent because of their imagined “voracious and unproductive lust,” and were feared “as a reminder of death.” Men also may have retained “some archaic memory of her mysterious wisdom and power,” derived in part “from old women’s contact with the mysterious, disturbing and polluting events surrounding birth and death.” 1 Servants protected their masters and mistresses from those “defiling contacts” and for that reason were kept out of sight. But the very fact that these servants were associated with the potentially disruptive and disorderly fundamentals of life – birth, infancy, childrearing, illness, old age, death – gave them a specialized knowledge derived from these activities that transcended their subordinate status in the household. 2 With that knowledge came a certain amount of power over their superiors.
Gillian Russell, who explores the representation of the public by and in eighteenth-century British theater, writes about the pervasive power structure evident in the relationship between master and servant. Situated on the boundary between the household and the outer environs, the servant occupied a position “between the family and the public world beyond, between intimacy and impersonality, between mastery and subordination.” 3 Roberts attributes nurses, as household servants, with “the power to subvert patriarchal law through their pragmatic accommodations. Their association with fertility makes them doubly hazardous, connecting them with other families, especially at the crucial moment of birth, and regularly facilitating female regression to the wild.” 4
Robbins, whose focus is on the working class in nineteenth-century British novels, notes that Western literary tradition typically has offered servants “as mere appendages of their masters,” exiled to the “choral margins” of the text to serve as messengers and “authorial mouthpieces,” to double the protagonist as foil or parody, and to describe and explain the action which they may complicate or resolve in an “annoying sameness” of “prefabricated tropes.” 5 Yet such utterances give the servant an edge, for, as Robbins points out, “in a sense the teller of a tale is a holder of power.” 6 Literary servants to whom an author “gives the floor” emerge “at some strategic point … in order to deliver messages, commit indiscretions, impart family secrets, administer consolations, emit prophecies, make recognitions, and so forth – through whom, in short, the business of divulging decisive information is largely carried on.” 7
As servants, opera’s nurse characters are given the stage to fulfill some of these same functions. Arnalta philosophizes about her new life in L’incoronazione di Poppea Euryclea’s recognition of Odysseus (Greek) or Ulysses (Latin) in Homer’s The Odyssey, a subject of scholarly literary discourse retold on the opera stage, offers a vivid example of how knowledge is power for a former nurse with an eye for detail.
To Roberts, the old nurse in The Odyssey is neither knowledgeable nor powerful: “Eurykleia, who survives his return and identifies him [Ulysses] by his scar, seems in something of the same category as his aged dog who lives only long enough to recognize his master. 8 But Robbins assigns the nurse, whom Ulysses identifies as his former wet nurse, far more importance:
The ragged, as-yet-unrecognized master has sunk to a low point, and when recognition occurs, there is a sudden, exceptional moment of equality or identification between the temporarily dispossessed Odysseus and a servant who, as we are abruptly encouraged to see, is structurally dispossessed. Power has been redistributed. As Odysseus acknowledges, Euryclea holds the power to destroy him: “Nurse, why are you trying to kill me?” 9
Whether Euryclea was aware of her power before Ulysses alludes to it remains untold. It is clear, however, that Ericlea, the nurse in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, is aware that, if revealed, her newfound knowledge gained from viewing the scar on her disguised master’s thigh will cause repercussions. She has the power to influence events, but does she want that responsibility?
When dealing with the private angst of keeping Ulisse’s identity secret from his wife Penelope, Ericlea agonizes over making the right decision in a situation that lacks a best answer, for whatever she decides, one of the two people concerned will suffer at least temporarily. Guarding her secret keeps Penelope in suspense; telling her secret betrays Ulisse’s trust in his old nurse. Ericlea’s deliberative thought process leading to a successful resolution prompts Ringer to see the nurse in a meaningful operatic role: “A figure who could easily be portrayed as a two-dimensional commedia dell’arte character is allowed to think and change through the music and its structural logic.” 10
King Ulysses had left Ithaca, his wife Penelope, and their young son Telemachus twenty years previously by sea to fight in the Trojan War; his journey back home took ten years. While Ulysses is away, persistent Suitors – 108 of them by Homer’s account, but Monteverdi’s opera includes only three – descend on his home, since they think him dead, with intent to marry Penelope for her wealth and position. Almost at her wit’s end, Penelope has devised a test of skill, a contest using her husband’s bow and arrows to shoot through a succession of a dozen axes; the Suitor who can complete the test successfully will win her hand. When Ulysses returns to Ithaca, at the beginning of the opera, his first order of business is to dispense with the unwanted guests. Disguised as a beggar, he joins the competition, besting all the Suitors, whom he then kills. As was custom, Penelope offers the hospitality of her home to the beggar, and when Eryclea helps him bathe, she notices the scar on his thigh inflicted by a boar’s tusk when the youthful Ulysses was out hunting. The nurse’s joy at her master’s return is stifled when Ulysses warns her not to tell anyone about his identity. Once the Suitors are gone and Eryclea is at liberty to reveal the beggar as Ulysses, Penelope needs more convincing than the nurse’s testimony, so the wife devises another test involving details of the marriage bed to which only she and Ulysses are privy. When Ulysses describes its unique construction, Penelope at last is convinced that her husband has returned home.
In Monteverdi’s opera, Ericlea is identified in some cast lists as Penelope’s nurse, in others as Ulisse’s nurse. In The Odyssey she is identified as former wet nurse for Ulysses and his son Telemachus. Ericlea stays with Penelope in the home while Ulisse is away, and over time has grown to love her mistress. In Act 1 scene 1 of the opera when Penelope laments the lengthy absence of her husband that has consigned her to a life of sorrow, grief, and bitter crying, Ericlea empathizes, for she also misses Ulisse. “I, unhappy Eryclea, your nurse and your companion, would share your grief, O my beloved sov’reign,” she sings, adding words of hope: “Parting that knows no returning is not in heaven’s decree, it cannot be.” 11
After seeing the identifying scar and feeling caught between love for her nursling Ulisse, who has sworn her to secrecy, and love for Penelope, who has endured her husband’s absence and held out as best she could against the unwanted Suitors and deserves a happy ending to that time of trial, Eryclea ponders her dilemma. Should she, or should she not tell all? Speaking would bring comfort to Penelope, but in keeping silence she would obey Ulisse. Weighing her options is portrayed musically in three verses with refrain separated by short orchestral ritornellos, the first one identified as a Sinfonia. Ericlea’s initial thought process is in recitative spanning an octave with most pitches keeping within the range of a fifth, marked by repeated notes, chromaticism, dissonance, and minor mode (Act 3 scene 7). Once she thinks she has made up her mind, Ericlea’s decisiveness is reflected in a shift to an arioso refrain in a lilting triple meter in major mode with a wider octave range for her conclusion. “It is best not to tell all that you know,” she sings, a phrase repeated three times at progressively higher intervals, perhaps to convince herself of having made the right decision.
The Sinfonia that follows gives Ericlea time to rethink her decision, and with the next verse her mind starts wavering. Thoughts of Penelope’s distress are represented musically by a chromatic ascent – a pattern that reveals Ericlea’s distress as well. “Keeping secrets is prudent now and then,” she resolves, back in her triple meter and major key as a repeated refrain. More doubts surface as Ericlea ponders her cruel dilemma, and her continued mental self-questioning again is resolved in the major key refrain when she considers “But regrets if you have them last longer if you tell than when you don’t.” Another intervening Ritornello, another bout of indecision: “Precious secret well guarded quickly can be reveal’d; yet what is once uncovered can never be concealed. Eryclea, Eryclea, what should you do? Should you tell, should you tell, what should you do?” The nurse’s final resolve is heard in the final refrain: “Plain old silence is best and breaks no law.” By the end of the concluding Ritornello, Ericlea has made up her mind in favor of holding her tongue.
Nurses Arnalta and Ericlea – and perhaps Nutrice – share in common a maternal instinct for their nurslings. Although not a birth mothers, intimate association with their mistresses as infants has forged a bond extending beyond the nursery. Whether as former wet nurses or trusted companions, opera’s nurse characters often are cast as surrogate mothers, a role well represented by the nameless nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and given in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette to nurse Gertrude. She provides the motherly concern and support that Juliet’s mother – present yet aloof in the Shakespeare play but absent in Gounod’s cast list – cannot give Juliet, especially in matters of the heart.
A comprehensive list of the hundred-plus operas that include a nurse character is found on my website under BOOKS > The Nurse in History and Opera > Book Extras.
To learn more about how the nurse is portrayed on the opera stage, see Judith Barger, The Nurse in History and Opera: From Servant to Sister (Lexington Books, 2024).
Notes
- Roberts, Literary Criticism as Dream Analysis, 289; Henderson, “Older Women in Attic Old Comedy,” 126.
- Leonore Davidoff, “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Journal of Social History 7 (4) (Summer 1974): 406–28.
- Gillian Russell, “‘Keeping Place’: Servants, Theater, and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The Eighteenth Century 42 (1) (Spring 2001): 23.
- Roberts, Literary Criticism as Dream Analysis, 295.
- Robbins, The Servant’s Hand, x, 87.
- Ibidl, 91.
- Ibid., 92.
- Roberts, Literary Criticism as Dream Analysis, 286.
- Robbins, The Servant’s Hand, 30 (line 19: 482 in The Odyssey).
- Ringer, Opera’s First Master, 206.
- Monteverdi, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria [vocal score], ed. Curtis. Sources differ on the spelling of Ericlea (Grove) and Eryclea (Curtis vocal score).
