“A love for opera, particularly on record, is a nostalgic emotion, and gay people are imagined to be a uniquely and tragically nostalgic population--regressive, committed to dust and souvenirs. A record, a momento, a trace of an absence, suits the quintessentially gay soul, whose tastes are retro and whose sexuality demands a ceaseless work of recollection.”  
- Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat

Wayne Koestenbaum in his beautiful personal ethnography of opera and gay culture, The Queen’s Throat, connects the importance of opera-on-record for opera culture not to consumer culture, like Evans, but to the nostalgia of gay culture. But as much as gay culture is nostalgic, since, as “queers do not usually have queer parents, queers must invent precedent and origin for their taste,” (Koestenbaum, 47) it is also performative, and the record is not the only place where traces of absence can be found. Another is the stage: opera culture is archival, but so, in fact, is opera performance. In the sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting relationship between recorded sound and performance, an opera emerges that is archived and archival, with, often, the more successful, less commercial work of recollection happening not on youtube or on the turntable, but on the stage.

One example of this lies in the performance history of Lucia di Lammermoor, by Gaetano Donizetti. Lucia premiered on September 26, 1835, at the San Carlo, Naples, and while it is now one of the most performed works of the operatic canon (in the 2018-2019 season Lucia was the 20th most commonly performed opera worldwide, according to Operabase), its star was slow to rise in the first two years of its life. From the late 19th century to the present day, Lucia’s titular role has become a career-defining signature for several of opera’s most iconic divas, which is perhaps the reason why Lucia has also become a work with a particularly interesting and malleable relationship to its own historicity and canonicity. In particular, I wish to examine two cases in which the climactic mad scene of Lucia di Lammermoor has become a staging ground for a kind of performative archiving.

Donizetti’s opera, loosely based on a Sir Walter Scott novel, tells the story of a young Scottish noblewoman, Lucia, who is in love with Edgardo, the nemesis of her brother, Enrico. Forced by Enrico to marry another suitor, Arturo, Lucia’s fragility turns to insanity, and, on her wedding night, driven mad by grief for her lost love, she stabs her new husband to death. Emerging from her wedding chamber, her wedding dress drenched with blood, she performs before the horrified guests a set of virtuosic, coloratura-drenched mad scene arias before herself dying.