|
|
Dec. 16, 2011
A most famous tragedienne
The chief rabbi of Paris officiated the funeral of Rachel in 1858.
EUGENE KAELLIS
All living things – from viruses, which change their protein coats to avoid being destroyed by antibodies, to humans, the summit of God’s creations – cling to life, often desperately, even in the most evidently hopeless circumstances, perhaps, as Hamlet says, only because suicide is a sin and, more so, a risk: life possibly being succeeded by some sustained consciousness, plagued by yet more suffering as a consequence of having violated God’s “canon,” as he refers to it.
Although the Fall from Grace (Chapter 3 of Genesis) depicts the most fundamental and unavoidable tragedy of the human psyche – not death, which, with a final rush of endorphins, mercifully takes only a few seconds once the process is irreversibly underway, but rather knowing death, the inevitability of our own demise and that of those we love, anticipating it, even when we and they are in good health, as a recurrent, haunting reminder of our mortality, even with whatever equanimity we have managed to acquire in our lifetimes. It can place us under a permanent penumbra of agonized anticipation, not only for our own death, but for that of our “nearests.” But just imagine how aimless and desultory our lives would be if we expected to be immortal.
The theme of the fall thus provides the substrate for tragedy, which, in the West, first took dramatic form in Greece. There was, of course, Greek comedy, by Aristophanes, for example, but its themes were topical, like ridiculing Socrates, and it lacked, therefore, the universality and timelessness of tragedy. Comedy is still more topical, more dependent on the contemporary, while tragedy is an inseparable, unavoidable and permanent feature of the human condition, a theme, therefore, fundamentally independent of circumstance.
Walter Kaufmann, in Tragedy and Philosophy, remarked that, during the 1960s, “We have been told that tragedy is dead, that it died of optimism, faith in reason, confidence in progress,” factors that may no longer obtain. Even then, he disagreed. “Tragedy is not dead,” he insisted, “but what estranges us from it is just the opposite: despair.” Despair cannot countenance tragedy, because despair stands alone; it has no other aspect, whereas tragedy is always, dialectically, within the context of hope; otherwise, it wouldn’t be tragic. Despair is different; it is “merely” an unhappy event that somehow managed to avoid shattering our joyous expectations simply because we have none.
After Auschwitz, Kaufmann asks, How can we be seriously concerned about the psychic pains of Oedipus or Hamlet? They seem so contrived, so trivial. Yet, we are. Partly because, unlike the Holocaust, personal tragedy is on a scale we can absorb; they match our experience in one form or another, at one level of consciousness or another.
Every Western culture has produced its writers of tragedy. In English, of course, William Shakespeare stands unchallenged. In the Classical Age, there were three, contemporaneous at the height of the Greek Classical Period (fifth century BCE): Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes. Their works are still studied by university students and are still performed and, more importantly, still inspire contemporary writers of tragedy. In France, Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, both of whom flourished under the reign of Louis XIV, are the French classicists of tragedy, sans pareille, much of it based on Greek and Roman myths.
Enter Rachel Félix, born 1821, the daughter of an itinerant French Jewish peddler couple. One could hardly have chosen an origin more disparate or inauspicious for someone who would become the queen of French tragedy. The family name, Félix, meaning happy in Latin, may have had some ancestral justification, but the Félixes were definitely not happy people, barely eking out a living as wandering peddlers until they settled in Paris.
There, Rachel started her career by busking with her sister, another point of similarity with the life of an eminent 20th-century French performer whom Rachel resembled markedly in appearance – a thin gamin, her face surmounted by a high forehead over large, dark, expressive eyes – and in the emotions each expressed with her voice. That would be, of course, Edith Piaf, the singer whose death in 1963, at not quite 48, also occasioned a mass outpouring of grief.
Rachel’s family moved to Paris in 1830, the same year in which Charles X, the last (mainline) Bourbon king, was overthrown in favor of Louis-Philippe, the Orléanist “Citizen King.” Rachel sang the Marseillaise with timely fervor in the streets, being rewarded with a shower of coppers. Guided by her ambitious parents, she made her way into Paris’ theatrical life, eventually in the Comédie Française, the company with which she remained until her early death from tuberculosis in 1858.
Indeed, Rachel became the foremost tragédienne of her day, playing, among other roles, those created by Racine and Corneille. She was a sensation on and off the stage, making lots of money, enough to live extravagantly and provide lavishly for her family, touring even as distantly as the United States. She went from being a poor waif to a position in Parisian society of unparalleled fame, having many of the eminent literati and intellectuals of her day as lovers. There was never any overt and marked antisemitism expressed towards her, but there was obviously prejudiced, insidious gossip and there were ongoing murmurings exposing the usual stereotype – about her purported avarice.
While Rachel was not an observant Jew, she never succumbed to the temptation, rife in those days, of converting or concealing her Jewish roots, which might have benefited her career and reputation. For bigots who saw her in light only of her Jewishness, their barbed criticism obviously bore signs of conventional antisemitism, meaning that they revolved around her considerable wealth and her alleged extravagance. But, even at the end, she was unapologetically a Jew. At her funeral, the chief rabbi of Paris officiated.
What was most remarkable for Rachel, as she was almost invariably known, without mentioning her last name, was her ability to project the depth of emotion and maintain the sheer vocal volume necessary to reach the upper balconies in the days before acoustic design became a science and before amplification – this, from a slight, waif-like woman.
The crowds and even Paris’ often-acerbic drama critics praised her profusely. What is of equal interest and also remarkable is that the next great Parisian and international stage performer was Sarah Bernhardt, the “Divine Sarah,” as she was known, also a French Jew, born about 12 years before Rachel’s death, also achieving fame initially at the Comédie Française, but experiencing a considerably longer life.
Tuberculosis, one of the major deadly diseases of her day, took Rachel when she was only 37. Her mausoleum is in Paris’ Père Lachaise Cemetery, the resting place of many of France’s most eminent. It bears a single word: Rachel.
For readers who want to learn more about Rachel, there is a marvelously written book, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (1993) by Rachel M. Brownstein. It has an amusing, provocative and unlikely photograph of an apparently serious Rachel (double-) thumbing her nose at someone or something not in the picture and unknown. Hardly the gesture of a tragédienne.
Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
^TOP
|
|
