A feminist before the term existed, an intellectual and art connoisseur, a friend of René Descartes, a modern woman demanding freedom to live her life as she pleases, most likely a lesbian? The Montreal Opera - Canadian Opera Company co-production La Reine-garçon, libretto by Michel-Marc Bouchard based on his eponymous play, would suggest so. How historically accurate is it, though? I consulted Veronica Buckley’s Christina Queen of Sweden: The Life of a European Eccentric (2004) to start finding out.
Was the actual Queen Christina (1626-1689) an intellectual and an art expert? Not by any current standards. She received a solid education thanks to the mentors who’d run her late father’s government but it stopped at the age of majority, when she was happy to be channeled to ruling instead of schooling. She was fleetingly interested in many, many things, but few interests persisted.
As for art collecting, most of her treasures came through pillaging. As the Westphalian peace was being negotiated at the end of the Thirty Years War, Christina sent the Swedish army to Bohemia to complete one last battle. Reaching an impasse in Prague, the army climbed the Castle and, on Queen’s orders, looted what was left of the legendary Rudolf II of Habsburg’s collection of art, sculptures and objects. All of it was schlepped to Sweden, including a live lion cub. The Queen particularly enjoyed Italian Masters, and when she abdicated a few years later, she continued to creatively mistake the property of the state for her own property and packed her favourite items for the trip south.
Although she always had scholars around and toyed with the idea of creating a Swedish Academy to match the French model, nothing came of it.
Was she buddies with Descartes? No. The poor man. After a bout of correspondence with the philosopher who was lying low in a small town in the Netherlands trying to avoid getting in trouble with the Catholic Church, Christina decided she would like to bring Descartes to Sweden and have him for herself. Descartes really did not want to go, but the Swedish monarch sent a militia and he had no choice. They did have a handful of conversations on issues of ethics and natural philosophy, but Christina’s interests were ricocheting to many other thinkers and theologians and for the most part the Frenchman didn’t have much to do but curse the Swedish cold and dream of returning home.
The dissection of the corpse, which gets its own and quite beautiful scene in the opera and which shows the Queen and the philosopher looking for the pineal gland “where the soul and the body met,” most certainly did not happen. She did urge him to contribute to the entertainment of the court and he had no choice but to produce an opera libretto for her courtiers-artistes. Otherwise, the Queen was so busy with other things during the day that she scheduled the philosophical lessons with Descartes very early in the morning, “before breakfast.” On one of those dark wintry mornings, the Frenchman caught a cold, which turned to pneumonia, which then led to his death. The Queen bandied about the idea of a grand memorial, but never followed through.
Was she a feminist? Not even remotely: though she claimed freedom for herself, she had nothing but contempt for most other women, and for anything she perceived as “womanly.” She was aware of Elizabeth I of England and her successful reign which had concluded a couple of generations previously, but avoided mentioning the English queen and wrote that women are “weak in soul and body and mind” and that there have been no good women rulers “in our present century.” The odd capable woman was rather the exception that proved the rule. “Of all human defects, to be a woman was the worst.”
As the opera would have it, Christina’s mother was hysterical; urging Christina to marry. Her German mother indeed had mood control issues—she gets the most delightfully crazy number in the opera for a reason. But wouldn’t you crack if you had been plucked out of your German principality, shipped with your new royal spouse to the frozen and largely rural and empty Sweden, and found yourself living mostly alone and having one miscarriage after another? (The King was most often away on military business, and later coupling-out-of-wedlock business). Christina was her only surviving child and, lucky for the girl, she was brought up by a benevolent family of royal relatives - until her father the King was killed in battle. The Queen Mother, who had difficulty parting with her dead husband’s body (you don’t want to know the details) insisted the child Christina remain by her side, locked up in a castle darkened for prolonged bereavement. (This only lasted a couple of years before they were permanently separated.)
The Queen Mum did not however sashay into adult Christina’s court urging her to marry, or for any other reason. In fact, by the time Christina was grown up, the Queen Mother had been long exiled.
Was Christina a lesbian? No, is what I would bet my money on. Just about every meaningful relationship of her life was with a man, and Christina had a particular weakness for charming scoundrels whom she’d repeatedly trust too easily, reward lavishly, and find herself being duped by. Ebba Sparre, who gets her own role in the opera, was indeed her favourite for a period, and rumours swirled around another woman or two during her reign, but rumours always swirl around unconventional nobles, particulalarly those who are not necessarily eager to quash them.
Besides, were the women in the court, ladies-in-waiting, capable of giving any kind of genuine consent to a monarch, male or female? You could argue no. If you became a favourite, whatever that entailed and however long it lasted, you had no choice in the matter. The opera doesn’t touch on this back story – presenting Christina and Ebba’s relationship as genuinely loving – but Christina used Ebba as a pawn in her ongoing settling of scores with the powerful Chancellor Oxenstierna. Ebba had been engaged to the Chancellor’s son, but would this marriage take place on Christina’s watch? No siree: Ebba was to marry someone else entirely, whom Christina chose. In the opera, the “Jakob” that the resigned Ebba decides to marry so she could unwillingly extricate herself from the Queen, was in actual fact the very noble that Christina imposed on her.
Buckley argues that in spite of her bravado with potential lovers of both sexes, Christina “does not seem to have followed any of her passions to their natural conclusion.” Both the opera and the play accurately portray the Queen as adamantly refusing marriage and what inevitably follows from it as the night follows the day: childbirth. And no wonder: childbirth was the most likely cause of death for women in non-pandemic years.
Fact as a matter of taste? La Reine-garçon is fiction and we should enjoy it as such. The greatest drama of Christina’s life was probably her conversion to Catholicism as the sovereign of a staunchly Lutheran country and her abdication, the planning of the flight, the wrangling of the apanage, and the move to Rome. But that would have been a much different opera – a story more suitable for multi-part television.
I went to Montreal for the world premiere in February last year and for the most part enjoyed the opera from my far-away balcony seat; the score by Julien Bilodeau was late- romantic-meets-twentieth century and full of colour; and the audience, doubtless drawn in part by the opera’s premise, was diverse in age and gender identity, including many same-sex couples of all ethnicities.
Now, a year later, after checking in with the historical record, and knowing how far detached from the actual queen the operatic Christina is, I am having second thoughts.
No, we don’t go to opera for historical accuracy. Don Carlos, Nero and Poppaea, Titus, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Mehmet II, Xerxes are all imagined rather than documented in their respective operas. And yet … perhaps a 21st century audience is too well-informed to indulge purely fantastical takes on post-Gutenberg historical figures who left scores of writings behind. (You’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong!)
Opera Quick Picks
Opera schools ahead of the April rush: Back in the early days we announced that April was going to be, henceforth, WholeNote Opera Month. There was a lot of opera happening in April back then, and still is. But April is already too late for one critical constituency in the operatic ecosystem – universities and other post-secondary institutions with opera schools or departments. Their big shows of the year (usually with double casts) have to be done and dusted before April, which is when past-due papers and/or partying tend to start monopolizing campus life.
So for those of you who think of “The Opera” as being the fiefdom of one or two A-list companies, this is a chance to broaden your horizons without lowering your standards, at a fraction of the cost. All the students involved, whether musically or in all the other arts that have to align for the show to go on, are right on the edge of careers. Think about it. You’ll have bragging rights for years because you spotted some of them first.
Here, accordingly, are bare-bones details for four schools that have operatic March madness honed to a fine art. Interestingly, they are all presenting operas by Mozart this year (but that will have to be a pedagogical topic for another day).
First out of the gate, March 6, 7, 8 and 9, in London, is Opera at Western (University of Western Ontario) with Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).
Next is a dead-heat (they both open March 13 and have the same number of performances (four). Opera Laurier is presenting The Marriage of Figaro in Waterloo, and University of Toronto Opera School presenting Così fan tutte at Harbourfront Centre Theatre. Both shows run for four performances.
And finally (last but definitely not least) Mar 19 and 21, it’s back to Die Zauberflöte, presented by the RCM Glenn Gould School at Koerner Hall.
And since April is a long way away for those of us who need our operatic (or operettic) fix, here are a few more offerings, roughly grouped into categories. Details on all these are in the listings.
Gilbert & Sullivan
Feb 01 2:00: St. Anne’s Music and Drama Society. The Yeomen of the Guard. St. Anne’s Anglican Church (Toronto), 276 Gladstone Ave. www.stannesmads.com. $35; $30(sr/st). Also Jan 31(7:30pm), 2(2pm), 6(7:30pm), 7(7:30pm), 8(2pm), 9(2pm).
Feb 28 8:00: Toronto Operetta Theatre. The Gondoliers. By Gilbert and Sullivan. Artists to be announced. St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts - Jane Mallett Theatre, 27 Front St. E. 416-366-7723 or 1–800-708-6754 or www.tolive.com. From $75. Also Mar 1(8pm), 3(3pm).
Mar 8: Bach Elgar Choir. The Trial of Gilbert & Sullivan. Trial by Jury and scenes from other Gilbert & Sullivan works with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra.
And variously operatic!
Feb 13,14,15: Opera Revue. Risqué at the Rivoli: An Opera Revue Burlesque Show.
Feb 22: Toronto City Opera. Second Annual Giuseppe Macina Operatic Voices Competition.
Mar 27: Metropolitan United Church. Vocal Recital; mixed opera hits programme. Holly Chaplin, soprano; Amy Moodie.
Apr 6: Orchestra Toronto. Theatrical Operatic Fusion. Works by Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and others.
Lydia Perovic is a writer in Toronto. Find her in The Hub or her Substack newsletter, Long Play.
