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.
Specialized Nurses: Florence Nightingale
Florence: The Lady with the Lamp by Timothy Sullivan, Libretto by Anne McPherson
Premiered in Elora, Ontario in 1992
Chafing at her privileged and confined upbringing and perceiving a calling from God to do something special with her life, Florence Nightingale trains as a nurse at Kaiserwerth, Germany for three months in 1851 despite her family’s objections. After working as Superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances in London for just over a year, Nightingale responds to her nation’s call to take her nursing skills to the Crimean War. In October 1854 Nightingale takes 38 volunteer nurses from England to Scutari, Turkey where she battles disease, battle wounds, and bureaucracy. A fictional love interest – an Anglican clergyman and cousin who is the love of her life, but whom she cannot not marry – offers access to Nightingale’s thoughts when she communes with him mentally about her confining home situation, her quest for a life of meaning, and her doubts about her worthiness.
Nurses have been special and specialized from the time they were set apart from other servants in the household as wet nurses to nourish newborn infants. Their specialization, however, involved no additional skills outside of what came naturally to a postpartum mother. In this Blog, specialized refers not to natural inclination but rather to knowledge and skills in the field of nursing that are learned through organized training and experience. Florence Nightingale was the first Specialized Nurse whose story is told on the opera stage.
Timothy Sullivan’s Florence: The Lady with the Lamp with libretto by Anne McPherson, revisits the story of Nightingale’s life. Like Young, McPherson includes a romantic interest – Nightingale’s cousin, The Reverend John Smithurst. A second nurse, The Reverend Mother Mary Bridgeman, also has a leading role.
In McPherson’s libretto, Nightingale’s cousin John Smithurst, an Anglican clergyman and missionary in Canada, is the one love of her life, but because of proscriptions against the relationship, the two never married. Also in the cast is Richard Monkton Milnes, a jilted suitor who is willing to make her work his own, but whose offer Nightingale rejects, declaring: “A woman must yield / To a man’s destiny. / So to reach my goal / I must not marry.” 1 Nightingale, who was subject to strange dreams – nightmares, trances, or spells – when growing up, communes with Smithurst throughout the opera, giving operagoers access to the nurse’s innermost thoughts in which she expresses her desire to break away from the home circle and find a worthy cause for her life, then doubts whether she deserves the honor bestowed upon her after the war.
Smithurst frames the opera, reading in the Prologue, set in Saint John’s Church, Elora in 1856, that Nightingale is to be honored by the Queen for her service in the Crimean War. “My dear astonishing Flo! / To think that strong-willed, frenzied child, / Should become a heroine,” he muses. “I doubted her then, / The girl who was always dreaming. / Is this the goal her dreams intended, / I wish I knew.” 2 In the Epilogue (scene 6 in the libretto), again in Saint John’s Church, Smithurst reads that Nightingale has been presented with a diamond brooch, and reprises his monologue first heard in the Prologue about the changing of the seasons in which one presses toward a goal, reminiscent of the passage from Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (3: 1 KJV). “But the struggle to heal this wounded world / Keeps us going. After all, / It’s the only world we’ve been given / For the working out of our dreams,” Smithurst concludes the opera. The seasons feature prominently in the opera, beginning with the social season (Act 1 scenes 1 and 2), which Nightingale considers “a silly waste of time,” and in the voices of the soldiers returning from the Crimean battlefield (Act 2 scene 4) who sing, “It’s a very bad season for war, / Rain or frost or blazing heat, / How do you prefer to die – / Bit by bit as your toes drop off, / Or hour by hour as cholera strikes. / Or day by day in a feverish state, / While death wears a playful smile.”
In Act 1 of Florence, set in the family home, Nightingale declares her intention to become a nurse. Her family is horrified and join forces to equate her choice with numerous imputations that vividly portray the status of nursing at the time: “A nurse! a whore! An addict! / The dregs of the city, / Women in disgrace, / Driven to the lowest form of work – Nursing! / Lurching through the wards, Leering at the sick, / Offering their bodies to help relieve the pain.” They add “a life of sin” and “spinster” to their list of accusations. Nightingale was not to be deterred, however: “I will make nursing / A worthy profession / So that other women / May choose it without shame,” she declares. By the end of Act 1, Nightingale can sing, “I’m in my element now. / The nightingale flies from her gilded cage, / I cast off these satin bonds / Of family, society, / Of parents, sisters, lovers.” Her pronouncement is heard over a repeated motif reminiscent of a bird pecking at its cage, over an ascending arpeggiation in the accompaniment. The pecking motif is echoed by the flute an octave higher, reinforcing the bird image. 3
After an Interlude, Act 2 opens with the letters exchanged between Nightingale and Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War, each hoping that the other will grant their request to send nurses to the Crimea under Nightingale’s leadership. Scene 2 shifts to a group of seasick nurses whose misery is evident in their moaning sung in a minor key over a slow, undulating accompaniment depicting the rolling sea: “Oh! Oh! Oh! When will this voyage end?” Nightingale turns inwardly to Smithurst in her impatience to arrive on shore but dismisses his advice to keep her eyes open and her heart firm in case she is unwanted. “Unwanted? Wait till you hear the cheering / When we arrive in port,” Nightingale replies optimistically. Arriving in Turkey, with no welcoming committee in sight, Nightingale claps her hands, “Come, nurses, as best you can, / We must make our own way” – perhaps the understatement of the opera. On reaching their destination, the nurses encounter antagonistic doctors who have no use for the “little angels of mercy” – at least for patient care. Nightingale’s assertion “We are trained nurses, as capable as you” is met with laughter. “She’s not your usual nursey-nurse. / She’ll find out what’s really needed,” the doctors quip. Whether “usual” refers to her social class or to her training and experience, and whether “what’s really needed” refers to patient care or the doctors’ off-duty expectations is left unclear, but the laughter that follows implies the latter. 4
An exchange of professional qualifications (nurses) and personal expectations (doctors) follows. The nurses’ “We cans” include holding hands, saying prayers, writing letters, bringing comfort, washing sheets, changing beds, boiling water, bathing bodies, making slings, dressing wounds, cooking meals, scrubbing floors, and killing vermin. The doctors’ “You coulds” include holding hands, smiling nicely, rubbing backs, singing sweetly, cuddling closely, scratching itches, raising pulses, and bringing comfort. Despite some similarities in the two lists, the anticipated recipients differ. The nurses’ litanies are sung harmoniously against the doctors’ rejoinders, neither side giving in to the other. When Nightingale interjects that “The enemy here is not Russian guns, / It is disease,” she might more aptly have said that the enemy is the doctors. The exchange becomes more frantic, turning into a musical shouting match that ends abruptly at the sound of soldiers returning from the siege, singing a hymn to Queen Victoria. The doctors think they have won the match when Doctor John Hall, chief military surgeon of the Scutari hospital, insists, “We have our rules, / There will be no women here,” claiming that Nightingale has no mandate to remain in the Crimea. 5 But when she presents her commission from the Secretary of War, Hall has to concede that the women will remain, ushering in a dreadful day for the British army.
Sullivan has not missed an opportunity to depict musically the Lady with the Lamp on the hospital wards in a lyrical passage in Act 2 scene 4 in close harmonies as Nightingale’s voice soars above, promising to bring the soldiers home again: “See, her shadow passes by, / The lady with the lamp. / As she visits each soldier, one by one, / The ward is hushed, the cussing stops. / We begin to believe there is hope for us, / That we’ll see home again. / We cheer each time her shadow appears, / The lady with the lamp.” 6 Scene 5 depicts the nurses at work in the hospital ward during a battle, with a repeated ostinato pattern in the keyboard indicative of their unending, wearying round of duties when battling disease, battle wounds, and bureaucracy. But the real battle is a verbal one between the nurses. The Reverend Mother Mary Bridgeman, an Irish nun whom Herbert, against Nightingale’s wishes, has sent to the Crimea with a group of nurses, all Sisters of Mercy, challenges Nightingale’s authority and insists that her nuns be given more time off. “You look only at the wounded!” Bridgeman criticizes Nightingale. “Look at your nurses. Soon they will be bedridden. Have sympathy for them too.” But action, not sympathy, was Nightingale’s style. “You disobey me!” Nightingale shrieks. “Beware, Sister!” Doctor Hall, who overhears the “ladies’ squabbles” that have evolved into a tit-for-tat and urges them not to start another war, is put in his place: “With all due respect,” Nightingale counters, “This is not a ladies’ squabble / But a genuine dispute / Such as you men have.” Like the previous altercation in which the nurses were involved, the lengthy war of words, over a repeated ostinato pattern in the accompaniment, ceases when soldiers notice that the shelling has stopped and the war has ended.
In the final scene of the opera (libretto scene 6, Epilogue in the music score), Nightingale and Smithurst have one last heart-to-heart conversation, with the nurse questioning, “I wonder, was it all worth it? Did I do right? … I was so inefficient out there, … So impatient, so angry,” she confesses, for which some people hated her. “Yet out of your errors / God has raised up / Real training for nurses,” Smithurst replies. “Is it too great a price to pay?” She will pay the price, Nightingale insists, angrily, “to make sure / It never happens again.” History would be the judge.
Notes
- Timothy Sullivan and Anne McPherson, Florence: The Lady with the Lamp [libretto] (Toronto: Canadian Music Centre, unpublished, 1992), 18. Unless otherwise indicated, lyrics are from this libretto.
- John Smithurst (1807–1867) was an Anglican clergyman and missionary of evangelical persuasion who emigrated to Canada in 1852 and was minister of Saint John’s church in Elora. Sister Mary Bridgeman (1813–1888) was an Irish nun with the Sisters of Mercy who took a group of nurses to the Crimea to assist Florence Nightingale during the war.
- Timothy Sullivan and Anne McPherson, Florence: The Lady with the Lamp [music score] (Toronto: Canadian Music Centre, unpublished, 1992), 149–152. The analogy of the nightingale in the gilded cage brings to mind Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1899 poem Sympathy, in part: “I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, … / It is not a carol of joy or glee, / But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, / But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings – / I know why the caged bird sings!”
- Sullivan and McPherson, Florence [libretto], 26–28; Sullivan and McPherson, Florence [music score], 219–220.
- Sullivan and McPherson, Florence [libretto], 31; Sullivan and McPherson, Florence [music score],
- Sullivan and McPherson, Florence [libretto], 35–41; Sullivan and McPherson, Florence [music score], 286–289.
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).
