The Aging Wife

[epoh]

In John Corigliano’s opera The Ghosts of Versailles, three women sing a trio together :

As autumn brings its windy chill
And water freezes on the hill,
Women love and hate their men,
Wishing they were young again.
O time, O time, O thieving time,
Give me back my stolen years.
As winter brings a longer night,
And women read by candlelight,
They come to know, like sun, like rain,
That nothing lasts, not love nor pain.
O time, O time, O thieving time,
Give me back my stolen years.

Thieving time .. They cannot have the past; they cannot change the past; they cannot even have, or change, the present; they must love and age and die.

[epoh]

The self-impersonation of a woman as she ages and loses her beauty is expressed by Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro

[epoh]

... and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier





There he goes, the bloated worthless rogue, and gets the pretty young thing and a tidy fortune, too, as if it had to be. And flatters himself that it is he who makes the sacrifice. But why do I upset myself? It is just the way of the world. I well remember a young woman who came fresh from the convent to be forced into holy matrimony. [She looks in the mirror.] Where is she now? Yes, seek the snows of yesteryear! It is easily said, but how can it really be, that I was once the little Resi and that I will one day become the old woman, the old woman, the old Marschallin. “Look, there she goes, the old princess Resi!” How can it happen? How does the dear Lord do it? While I always remain the same. And if He has to do it like this, why does He let me watch it happen with such clear senses? Why doesn’t He hide it from me? It is all a mystery, so deep a mystery, and one is here to endure it. And in the “how” there lies the whole difference.



“The way of the world” is what we have come to call gender asymmetry, an aspect of the double standard—a phrase to which these myths of doubling give new mean- ing: the Baron Ochs can get a woman decades younger than him, but the Marschal- lin (who is barely thirty!) is already over the hill.

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