Nurses in Opera – 14 Mar 2026

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.

Motherly Nurses: Gertrude

Romeo and Juliet by Charles Gounod, Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré
Premiered in Paris, 1867

PART 2

When thirteen-year-old Juliet’s father insists that she marry Count Paris, the young girl turns not to her mother – omitted in Gounod’s cast for Roméo et Juliette – but rather to her nurse Gertrude for counsel and comfort. Juliet, a Capulet, has secretly wed Romeo of the rival Montagues, and to marry another man would be to commit bigamy. Gertrude is privy to and accompanies Juliet to her secret marriage ceremony before facilitating the newlyweds’ wedding night together after Romeo is banished from Verona for killing Juliet’s cousin Tybalt. Seeing no way out of the current dilemma, the nurse sides with Juliet’s father, who has threatened to cast out his daughter if she disobeys him. On the fateful day of the nuptials, Gertrude fills in as mother of the bride, overseeing the preparation of her nursling for what will be her burial, not her wedding, when the soporific Juliet takes to prevent the marriage has tragic results. 

In Shakespeare’s play with its twenty-four scenes, only four feature Romeo and Juliet together in speaking roles – at the Capulet’s feast, in the encounter in the Capulet garden afterward, at Friar Laurence’s cell before their wedding, and in Juliet’s bedchamber that night. In the last act of the drama, Romeo drinks the poison and dies in the tomb before Juliet awakens. Gounod’s opera with its five acts but only six total scenes, offers a simplified plot and tighter focus, “sustained almost entirely by the sentimental strain of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The encounters between Roméo and Juliette consume far more time in relation to the whole in the opera than they do in the play.” 19 As The Times reviewer observed, “Thus Romeo and Juliet – one or the other being on the stage in nearly every scene, and having three very long scenes entirely to themselves – are the characters in which, even more exclusively than in the play, the interest is concentrated.” 20

For James Harding, a Gounod biographer, the opera “becomes a series of four great love duets” – a number that Stephen Huebner considers perhaps “at least one too many” in terms of the opera’s “overall dramatic momentum and scope.” 21 The many duets have been cause for a witticism found in reviews of the opera but lacking attribution. An early instance of 1915 is found in The Victor Book of the Opera: “Romeo and Juliet overflows with charming music, Gounod having written for lovers some of the most emotional passages ever composed, and the opera has even been called ‘a love duet with occasional interruptions.’” 22

One scene deleted in Gounod’s opera is Shakespeare’s Act 1 scene 3 “Nurse’s story.”  With no Lady Capulet in the opera cast, Gounod skips over the pre-party scene in which the mother sounds out her daughter’s disposition toward marriage and the Nurse tells the backstory of her relationship to Juliet.

Following the Prologue, Gounod launches directly into the merrymaking at the Capulet’s feast. The nurse Gertrude makes her first appearance as chaperone for a timid Juliet at the feast, staying by her side as the adolescent young woman relishes the heady sensation of being the center of attention and the belle of the ball – that is, until she spies Romeo. When in Gounod’s opera Romeo first sees Juliet and asks his friend Mercutio who is “This celestial beauty Who seems like a sunbeam in the night!”, Mercutio, the joker of the group, focuses his attention not on Juliet, but on her nurse: “The imposing dame with her is of more modest beauty … ” then rushes Romeo away as Juliet and Gertrude approach. 23

The nurse is trying to keep Juliet from partying too hard, but the young woman clearly wants nothing to do with that advice. “What will you, Nursey?” Juliet asks of Gertrude. “Do be quick, they are waiting!” she sings in an impatient allegro tempo punctuated with few rests. 24 “Draw breath a moment,” the hovering Gertrude urges – or perhaps the nurse simply needs to catch her own breath – then teases Juliet, asking whether she is dodging her nurse or looking for Count Pâris, who would be “a pearl among husbands.” 25 Juliet, caught off guard, laughs at the thought. The short conversation between Gertrude and Juliet in recitative provides the gist of Lady Capulet’s discussion with her daughter about marriage that follows the Nurse’s story in Shakespeare’s drama and sets the context for Juliet’s arietta that follows.

Gertrude matches Juliet’s tempo and remarks, “Why, lady mine! When I was your age, I was married!” But the nurse has no opportunity to continue what might have been a longer story, for Juliet does not want to hear about it and cuts her off: “I will no more hear the song you would sing!” she insists. 26 And indeed, Gertrude gets no song, for Juliet launches into her waltz aria with flights of coloratura depicting a young woman unable to contain the excitement of her introduction into the gaiety of social life. Thoughts of a premature end to this intoxication of youth bring her briefly into A minor before her return to the happier days of F major.

The distinction between nurse and nursling in their brief musical exchange is more one of voice type – Juliet’s soprano contrasted with Gertrude’s mezzo-soprano – rather than musical style, with Gertrude’s phrases centering around middle C and Juliet’s, an octave above. In the 1994 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden performance conducted by Charles Mackerras, mezzo-soprano Sarah Walker as Gertrude, who has not forgotten what it was like to be young and in love at Juliet’s age, listens indulgently as the young woman sings her display piece. 27 But despite its prettiness, The Times (London) reviewer for the 1867 London premiere of the opera thought the arietta “Je veux, vivre dans ce réve” – “I want to live in the dream” – not “at all in the spirit of Juliet,” sung before she even had seen Romeo. 28 Romeo’s opportunity to meet Juliet and talk with her alone arises in Gounod’s opera when Gregorio, a Capulet servant, informs Gertrude that she is needed to help serve the supper. Impatient with the summons, Gertrude nevertheless leaves Juliet and departs for the kitchen.

Act 2 of the opera is devoted to Romeo’s visit to the Capulet garden where he seeks a glimpse of Juliet. Although “guarded” by her nurse, the young woman, bursting with romantic thoughts of Romeo, manages to slip out to her balcony, where she encounters the man of her dreams. The passion of their meeting is moderated by interruptions of Gertrude calling her nursling back inside and by the appearance of Gregorio and other Capulet servants looking for a possible Montague trespasser – Romeo’s page Stéphano – sneaking around the grounds.

In Huebner’s mind, when contemplating the adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the composer and his librettists must have seen “a natural entreé … for comedy in the figure of the nurse.” The exchange between Gertrude and the servants – not found in Shakespeare’s play – likely was included, Huebner continues, “to provide animated contrast to the elegiac tone that predominates in the balcony scene.” 29 In “De qui parlez-vous donc?” – “Who is he you berate?” – that Gertrude sings with Gregorio and his servants, the nurse, who probably has heard the men stumbling about in the garden, comes outside to ask what they are talking about. When they tell her they are looking for a Montague page, the nurse responds, “You’re jesting?” “No, by my head! One of the Montagues has allowed himself to come with his friends to our feast!” Gregorio explains.

With good-natured bantering, the servants tease her, asking, “Is it for the sake of your pretty face that the traitor has come?” to which Gertrude retorts, “Let him come back! And upon my life I’ll send him packing so smartly for you that he’ll have no desire to try it again!” They believe her and, laughing at the thought, break into close four-part harmony evocative of both a serenade and the spiritual blessing that they bestow upon her: “Goodnight, charming nurse, add forgiveness to your virtues! May Heaven bless you and confound the Montagues!” Gertrude has the last word when she adds, under her breath, “Blessed be the cudgel that sooner or later avenges me on these rascals!” The Mackerras performance shows Gertrude tapping a stick against her hand with the determination that she has no qualms about using it. She then turns her attention to Juliet, who has joined her outdoors to see what is going on. “Is it you, Gertrude?” Juliet asks. “Yes, my pretty angel! Why are you not abed at this hour?” Juliet replies, innocently, “I was waiting for you!” “Come on in!” her nurse instructs. “Don’t scold!” the young woman answers, as she follows her nurse inside.

Whether “those rascals” refers to the Montagues or to the Capulet men remains open to interpretation. Gertrude’s encounter with Gregorio and the servants may offer more than meets the eyes – or ears. As a servant herself of the Capulet household, the nurse likely knows these men, with whom she associates on a daily basis, so the good-natured ribbing is nothing new to her. But neither Shakespeare nor Gounod makes it clear whether Gertrude is aware of Romeo’s presence in the garden when she calls for Juliet. Is she “turning a blind eye” to his meeting with Juliet? If the nurse has seen or heard Romeo and condones the tryst, then she will engage the men to keep them from suspecting Romeo’s presence. She also will resent their interference, which could explain her final retort after the servants have left. Like a mamma bear protecting her cub, Gertrude might consider the servants, not Romeo and his page, as the scoundrels who threaten her nursling’s well-being.

The repeated notes in short phrases separated by rests in the men’s chorus on entering the Capulet garden, sung piano to an even quieter accompaniment in a moderate tempo, evoke stealth on tiptoe and whispering voices. But instead of the page, they encounter Gertrude. The musical exchange between nurse and men changes to triple time, with shorter note values. As the men explain their mission, their voices rise in unison by half step. When Gertrude questions their sincerity, the men revert to duple time and repeated notes in an emphatic response to stress the seriousness of the intrusion. Having made their point, they return to their banter. Gertrude’s replies to the men – mostly questions – are short and sung in recitative. When she sings of the reception “so ill” that the intruder will receive at her hands, Gertrude then repeats the words four times in a descending pattern, musically driving her point into the ground. In her interaction with the servants, Gertrude is a presence to be reckoned with, revealing a woman who in her musical repartees can hold her own against the men.

Shakespeare dispenses with the wedding itself in Friar Laurence’s three lines in Act 2 scene 6: “Come, come with me, and we will make short work, / For by your leaves, you shall not stay alone / Till Holy Church incorporate two in one.” 30 Gounod, however, expands on the ceremony, which Dean finds typical of the romantic period with its “unquenchable appetite for religious scenes in opera, especially weddings, prayers and funerals. Where Shakespeare supplies them, as in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, we are sure to find organ or harmonium (or both) and the fruitier aspects of sacred harmony. Where he does not, they can generally be worked in.” 31

Because Gounod “could not resist a substantial wedding service complete with responses,” his account of the marriage ceremony more closely resembles that of Brooke, who assigns to the Friar double the coverage of Shakespeare. 32 Like Brooke’s nurse, Gertrude accompanies Juliet to her secret wedding. The nurse is not present for the actual ceremony, however, for Romeo instructs her to wait outside at the door to Friar Laurence’s cell. Gertrude, who is offstage for the nuptials, supposedly is keeping watch for anyone who might try to prevent the wedding. She re-enters after Romeo and Juliet have been pronounced husband and wife to add her voice to the quartet that follows, rejoicing and praising God for uniting the two lovers in holy matrimony.

A greatly agitated Gertrude next appears on stage in Act 4 scene 1 as she enters Juliet’s bedchamber the morning after the wedding to tell Juliet that Lord Capulet is on his way to see her. As surrogate mother, Gertrude assumes the role given to Shakespeare’s Lady Capulet in Act 3 scene 5 when Lady Capulet brings Juliet the “joyful tidings” that her father has set a date for his daughter to marry Count Pâris. When Juliet says that father shall not make daughter a “joyful bride,” Lady Capulet washes her hands of the affair: “Here comes your father; tell him so yourself.” 33 In the opera, Gertrude simply announces Capulet’s imminent visit.

Gertrude recovers herself quickly when she sees no sign of Romeo. “Juliet! Ah, heaven be praised, your husband has gone! Here is your father!” Juliet reacts with alarm: “God! Can he know?” Her nurse’s response is a mixed blessing, doing little to reassure her: “Not a thing, not a thing, I hope! Friar Laurence is with him!” Juliet, now very anxious, offers up a quick prayer: “Lord, protect us!”

In “Que l’hymne nuptial succeed aux cris d’alarmes!” – “A wedding song shall soon o’erbear the wail of sorrow!” – that follows, sung with Juliet, the friar, and Gertrude as a quartet, Lord Capulet, who mistakes Juliet’s anxiety for mourning over her cousin Tybalt’s death, thinks the news he brings will cheer her up. She is to marry her cousin’s choice for her husband, the name revealed to Lord Capulet as his nephew lay dying. But Juliet’s reaction is not what her father expects – her “O God!” sung “aside” is a supplication for help, not a prayer of thanksgiving. Friar Laurence, who hears Juliet’s quiet cry, silences her, while Gertrude tries to calm her down with a quiet, ineffective “Calmez vous! Calmez vous!” One must wonder, however, what unspoken thoughts hide behind those two words.

Gounod has not included the next episode in Shakespeare’s play when, after Lord Capulet has left the room, Juliet seeks the advice of her nurse. The episode, found in Shakespeare Act 3 scene 5, but not in Brooke, reveals facets of the Nurse’s pragmatism and of Juliet’s entirely different disposition. Feeling trapped and desperate, Juliet cannot believe what she is hearing from her Nurse’s mouth. “Speak’st thou from thy heart?” she asks in Shakespeare’s play. The Nurse replies, “And from my soul, too, else beshrew them both.” Juliet’s “Amen” – so be it – is not the response the Nurse expected. “What?” the Nurse asks. Juliet’s response, spoken ironically (in her role as Nurse, Bruce interprets it as “Devil take you,” shows that she no longer is submissive to her Nurse’s will, no longer the nursling sucking from her wet-nurse’s teat, partaking of her wet-nurse’s nature: “Well, thou hast comforted me marvelous much. / Go in, and tell my lady I am gone, / Having displeased my father, to Lawrence’ cell, / To make confession and to be absolved.” Juliet’s irony is lost on her Nurse, who thinks her advice has been taken and leaves the room. 34

Watching her Nurse depart, Juliet curses under her breath: “Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!” What was worse, she asks herself, that the Nurse wants her to break her marriage vows to Romeo, or that the Nurse has criticized Romeo, whom she has praised so highly thousands of times in the past? “Go, counselor, / Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain,” she resolves, and puts her trust instead in Friar Laurence, realizing that “If all else fail, myself have the power to die.”

Shikoda interprets Juliet’s current disregard for her Nurse’s advice as the reenactment of Juliet’s weaning, which occurred eleven years prior. But this is a different, “spiritual” weaning that represents Juliet’s parting from the “realistic and practical nature” that she has imbibed through her Nurse’s milk. 35 She has “passed far beyond any understanding that the Nurse can offer,” Wells explains. “To this extent she is seen as a foil for Juliet, a rounded, developed but static character that serves as a measure of the speed and extent of Juliet’s spiritual and emotional development.” 36

Martin Stevens, who considers the Nurse central in conveying information or warning in Shakespeare’s drama, sees her role “declining as an agent of dramatic action; gradually she must, along with all others, give way to the ineluctable power of Fortune.” By the end of the play, Stevens concludes, “With the Nurse silent, and the Friar rendered ineffective, Juliet’s earlier words ring as prophecy for the chilling tragic end: ‘My dismal scene I needs must act alone.’” 37 The nurse’s declining role in Gounod’s opera is apparent in the superficially brilliant but ultimately dismal Act 2 scene 4 that opens with the proposed marriage between Juliet and Count Pâris. Gertrude has no words of joy for her nursling; the extent of her advice is to urge that Juliet remain calm. She does not intervene on her nursling’s behalf, and she leaves before the emotionally charged dialogue between Juliet and the friar.

Gertrude is seen last on stage when preparing Juliet for this second wedding ceremony. In the Mackerras performance, the nurse walks over to Juliet, who is kneeling at a prie-dieu, looks at her lovingly, and caresses her cheeks with her hands, perhaps speaking calming words, before stepping back to oversee six young maidens who are giving the final touches to Juliet’s wedding attire. Gertrude appears somewhat removed, not hovering about Juliet as she had only days before at the Capulet’s feast, but now wringing her hands and looking worried at what is about to happen. Perhaps Gertrude is all too aware of the rift that has developed between nurse and nursling. She nonetheless moves to Juliet’s side when the celebrant who will perform the wedding enters the room.

Once Juliet’s dressing is complete, her father entreats her, “Ma fille, cede aux, voeux du fiancé” – “My daughter, yield to the wishes of the bridegroom who loves you!” Juliet never has to make the effort, for the soporific she has consumed begins to take effect. “Ah, support me! I am falling!” she cries out as the wedding guests rush to her side to break the fall. The reality of the action sinks in: “Is this death? I am afraid! Father! Farewell!” Juliet cries as she slips into the death-like stupor that Friar Laurence predicted. Gertrude joins the bewildered Lord Capulet, Pâris, and wedding guests in final, despairing exclamations of shock and alarm: “Dead! … Gracious Heav’n!” 38 The nurse picks up the veil that has fallen from Juliet’s head and cautiously, almost reverently, approaches the unconscious Juliet and Lord Capulet, who is weeping over his daughter’s lifeless body. Thinking her nursling dead, and having no knowledge that Juliet’s deathly state, however realistic, is only temporary, Gertrude has no further role in the opera.

That Gounod and his librettists chose to cast Gertrude rather than Lady Capulet in the opera suggests that the nurse’s role as surrogate mother was the more important of the two. Gounod also may have chosen the nurse in part for the comic interlude that she as a stock character could provide; The Victor Book of the Opera states that Gertrude’s scene with the servants in the Capulet garden in Act 2 “serves merely to divide the long love duet” between Romeo and Juliet. 39

The nurse’s limited stage time precludes developing her character fully, but in her short appearances the audience can glimpse instances of a pragmatist who accommodates her behavior to the situation at hand. She is seen as companion, surrogate mother, messenger, chaperone, and intermediary, however briefly. She is Henderson’s older woman of Greek drama, Roberts’s trivialized crone, although more through lack of action than in what she says or sings, as well as Wells’s foil revealing how a young woman forced to mature quickly in the face of tragic circumstances has left her nurse behind, physically and emotionally.

As confidant(e)s, motherly nurses often are privy to secrets, often concerning affairs of love, shared by their mistresses. Juliet’s nurse is aware of Juliet’s secret marriage to Romeo and in fact has facilitated it by arranging the ceremony and, afterward, the ladder, for instance. Such scheming dates back to servants as tricksters not limited to comedy on the page and on the stage in ancient Greek literature and is a stock trait of the balia from whom the nurse descended in early Italian drama. Most of the scheming in which opera’s nurse characters engage is harmless and leads to a happy outcome for the beneficiaries of those endeavors. But in other cases, when sorcery is involved, scheming is reprehensible and may not bode well for either nurse or nursling in the end, as the next Blog illustrates.

Notes

19. Huebner, Operas of Charles Gounod, 156.
20. “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet,” 244.
21. James Harding, Gounod (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), 144; Huebner, Operas of Charles Gounod, 156.
22. Samuel H. Rous, The Victor Book of the Opera, 3^rd (Camden, NH: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1915), 449.
23. Charles Gounod, Roméo et Juliette, Choir and Orchestra of the Théatre National de L’Opéra, cond. Alain Lombard (1994 EMI Classics CD libretto). Unless otherwise indicated, lyrics are from this libretto.
24. Charles Gounod, Roméo et Juliette [vocal score] (New York: Schirmer, 1897, 1925), 47.
25. The parenthetical directions “avec malice” – maliciously – in the libretto precede Gertrude’s comment about dodging, but opera productions show a kind nurse whose words are not delivered accusingly.
26. Gounod, Roméo et Juliette [vocal score], 48.
27. Charles Gounod, Roméo et Juliette, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, cond. Charles Mackerras (Kultur DVD, 2002).
28. “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet,” 244.
29. Huebner, Operas of Charles Gounod, 155, 156.
30. Shakespeare, Tragedies (Romeo and Juliet), 317.
31. Dean, “Shakespeare and Opera,” 101–102. Before composing opera, Gounod had served as an organist and church musical director and had attended seminary to study for the priesthood. See Jeffrey Langford, Evenings at the Opera: An Exploration of the Basic Repertoire (Milwaukee, WI: Amadeus, 2011), 194.
32. Dean, ‘Shakespeare and Opera’, 150.
33. Shakespeare, Tragedies (Romeo and Juliet), 336.
34. Bruce, “Nurse in Romeo and Julie,”
35. Shikoda, “Juliet, the Nursling,” 36.
36. Wells, “Juliet’s Nurse,” 63.
37. Stevens, “Juliet’s Nurse,” 205, 206.
38. Gounod, Romeo and Juliet [vocal score], 242.
39. Rous, Victor Book of the Opera, 450.

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).