Seven Operatic Arias of Sorrow to Help Enhance Your Melancholy

It's amazing how listening to emotion-wrenching mournful music when you're having a hard time in real life can actually feel very therapeutic. It's almost something of a Schadenfreunde... except that you aren't really delighting in someone else's misfortune. You just feel less alone at the thought that whatever ill you are experiencing, somebody else had known it, too... and perhaps to a greater degree. Here are some of opera's most haunting songs of distress that have all popped up in my head in my various times of trouble. I'm arranging them chronologically... just in case you are interested in listening to them in order and see how musical grieving is done in various succeeding eras (Click on the name of the arias for individual Youtube sample clips... or click here for a player that plays all of them in a row):

1. When I Am Laid To Earth (Dido's Lament) from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:
Not many early English operas survived through the Baroque period, but Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas has tunes like this soul shattering lamentation to end the work that helps ensure its periodic resurrection on various operatic stages around the world and remind us all that people from the 1700's had feelings just as we do today.

Those of us who are familiar with the myth of Troy and the founding of Italy would already know the story, of course. Aeneas and his band of Trojan survivors were sheltered by the Carthaginian Queen Dido... until the decidedly restless ghosts of his predecessors re-emerged to remind Aeneas of his duty to resurrect Troy by establishing a new realm in Rome. Dido is so devastated by Aeneas' desertion that she cursed him and his folks before killing herself... but not before turning more introspective in rendering this mournful farewell to her sister, Anna, before gracefully expiring her last breath.

2. Son nata, o a lagrimar (Cornelia - Sesto duet) from Händel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Cesare in Egypt):
Roman history nerds among us would be familiar with the story of Julius Caesar's conquest of Egypt and how Pompey literally lost his head, of course. This historical fiction opera by Georg Handel afford Pompey's surviving wife (Cornelia) and son (Sesto/Sextus) a bit more stage time than most history book would tell you. Being the son of Caesar's freshly deceased political rival makes Sesto a threat, so when the Roman emperor sends his soldiers to collect Sesto for a meeting with him, both Cornelia and Sesto assume the worst and sing this poignantly heart-wrenching parting duet that would make even Ptolemy cry if only he isn't such a sociopath. Sesto was originally written for a soprano castrato (male singer that was surgically altered to preserve his ability to sing in the soprano range), so nowadays he is usually portrayed by a cross-dressed female mezzo-soprano.... I thought I'd mention that in case you aren't that familiar with the gender-liberal world of opera and find the visual in the sample clip a bit odd. At any rate, it is a quirk of nature how potent an intertwining of two low female voices (over a subdue sonic bed of violins and violas) is creating a devastating acoustical scene... Listen to it and see if this thing makes you miss your mom, will ya?

3. Scherza, infida from Händel's Ariodante:
From one of Handel's fantasy operas based on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, this long scene of vengeful lamentation finds our sensitive hero, Ariodante, in distress after having seen his rival duck into a darkened room with someone clad in his fiancee's night dress (so he put two and two together and concluded that he is being romantically cheated on). What's a heroic operatic superhero to do but to take up 14 minutes of stage time loudly feeling sorry for himself before (mercifully) leaving us to (attempt to) commit suicide by jumping into the choppy sea off the coast of Scotland. Sung by someone less than spectacularly engaging this aria can really tempt you to scream for the opera's title role to forget drowning and just bayonet himself and get it over with halfway (or less) into the song. Sung by someone really up to Handel's dramatic demands, though, and you might even volunteer to go and jump into the ocean with him just to see if death is really worth such tuneful elegance and naked melancholy.

4. Porgi, amor from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro):
Talk about musical elegance and one must immediately think of Wolfgang Mozart. While Handel allows Ariodante room to throw a hissy fit unbecoming of his heroic status, Mozart's Countess Almaviva is afforded not even a spit in her tearless sob of an aria that opens scene 2 of the first act of Le nozze di Figaro. You know just how sad the Countess is when she spends an entire song singing long descending phrases that melts you without even leaving a messy puddle on the floor. It is his musical restraint on such sorrow that makes this piece so effective. The lass is so wretched that she isn't even allowed to let anyone else in on her sorrows. The whole aria is played out in her head...

5. Ach! Ich fühl's from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte
Pamina, not knowing that her beloved Tamino has been forbidden to speak to her as a test of his worthiness, takes offense at his silence and literally goes to piece in the space of the 2 or so minutes that it takes to sing this song. As much as I think of Mozart as the wise young guy who knew to smile through even the most painful wound, it is music like Pamina's melodious heartache that reminds me of his ability to contemplate suicide in a terrifyingly resolute manner. There really isn't any light left at the end of the tunnel by the time the lass is done.

6. Deh, tu bell'anima from Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues):
You definitely know this story of Romeo and Giulietta's forbidden love. With the help of Lorenzo, the family physician, Giulietta plays dead so convincingly that our hotblooded hero, Romeo, finds himself torn to piece from inside out visiting her tomb... What he does next everyone who had done his time reading Shakespeare and other authors who had added their touch on the story knows, but it takes someone like Bellini to capture the sheer psychological desolation that drives Romeo to such a measure in such few musical notes.

7. Addio del passato from Verdi's La Traviata:
It's a long way to fall for a courtesan who had risen to the top of her profession. The beautiful Violetta had seen a vision of love before it was forbidden in words by his father and in fact by her own illness (consumption). So here she is, fatally weakened by her disease and feeling rightfully deserted by the love of her life, opera's favorite courtesan is allowed one of the most fabulously tragic dying song to sing before the curtain. Tutto fini!

Well... I hope that didn't use up all your supply of Kleenex! To be honest, being something of a control-freak I'm more in tune with Mozart's mode of melancholy (you know, the never let 'em see you bleed school of thought).... though that also means that I look on with a sort of envy those who could let it all hang out like the Romantic composers that came after old Wolfie did. No justification and no rationalization attempted... just cry your heart out then drop dead from poison or consumption (or whatever else that operatic heroes/heroines like to die from). We in real life tend to survive to sob another day, of course, but it always help to have someone cry themselves to death as our proxy sometimes. Then when it is all over everyone (the singers included, I'm sure) would feel so much better.