ON OPERALa Reine-garçonA thoroughlymodern Christina?Or not.LYDIA PEROVICLa Reine-garcon, Opéra de Montréal & The CanadianOpera Company's first ever co production, is atThe Four Seasons Center through February 15.Pictured here, Joyce El-Khoury (Christine) andPascale Spinney (Countess Ebba Sparre) fromthe February 2024 premiere in Montreal.VIVIENNE GAUMANDVIVIENNE GAUMANDAfeminist before the term existed, an intellectual andart connoisseur, a friend of René Descartes, a modernwoman demanding freedom to live her life as shepleases, most likely a lesbian? The Montreal Opera - CanadianOpera Company co-production La Reine-garçon, libretto byMichel Marc Bouchard based on his eponymous play, wouldsuggest so. How historically accurate is it, though? I consultedVeronica Buckley’s Christina Queen of Sweden: The Life of aEuropean Eccentric (2004) to start finding out.Was the actual Queen Christina (1626-1689) an intellectual and anart expert? Not by any current standards. She received a solid educationthanks to the mentors who’d run her late father’s governmentbut it stopped at the age of majority, when she was happy to be channeledto ruling instead of schooling. She was fleetingly interested inmany, many things, but few interests persisted.Librettist Michel-Marc Bouchard (left) and Composer Julien BilodeauAs for art collecting, most of her treasures came through pillaging.As the Westphalian peace was being negotiated at the end ofthe Thirty Years War, Christina sent the Swedish army to Bohemia tocomplete one last battle. Reaching an impasse in Prague, the armyclimbed the Castle and, on Queen’s orders, looted what was left ofthe legendary Rudolf II of Habsburg’s collection of art, sculptures andobjects. All of it was schlepped to Sweden, including a live lion cub.The Queen particularly enjoyed Italian Masters, and when she abdicateda few years later, she continued to creatively mistake the propertyof the state for her own property and packed her favourite itemsfor the trip south.Although she always had scholars around and toyed with the ideaof creating a Swedish Academy to match the French model, nothingcame of it.Was she buddies with Descartes? No. The poor man. After a bout ofcorrespondence with the philosopher who was lying low in a small townin the Netherlands trying to avoid getting in trouble with the CatholicChurch, Christina decided she would like to bring Descartes to Swedenand have him for herself. Descartes really did not want to go, but theSwedish monarch sent a militia and he had no choice. They did have ahandful of conversations on issues of ethics and natural philosophy, butChristina’s interests were ricocheting to many other thinkers and theologiansand for the most part the Frenchman didn’t have much to do butcurse the Swedish cold and dream of returning home.The dissection of the corpse, which gets its own and quite beautifulscene in the opera and which shows the Queen and the philosopherlooking for the pineal gland “where the soul and the body met,” mostcertainly did not happen. She did urge him to contribute to the entertainmentof the court and he had no choice but to produce an opera librettofor her courtiers-artistes. Otherwise, the Queen was so busy with otherthings during the day that she scheduled the philosophical lessons withDescartes very early in the morning, “before breakfast.” On one of thosedark wintry mornings, the Frenchman caught a cold, which turned topneumonia, which then led to his death. The Queen bandied about theidea of a grand memorial, but never followed through .Was she a feminist? Not even remotely: though she claimed freedomfor herself, she had nothing but contempt for most other women, andfor anything she perceived as “womanly.” She was aware of Elizabeth Iof England and her successful reign which had concluded a couple of20 | February & March 2025 thewholenote.com
generations previously, but avoided mentioning the English queen andwrote that women are “weak in soul and body and mind” and that therehave been no good women rulers “in our present century.” The oddcapable woman was rather the exception that proved the rule. “Of allhuman defects, to be a woman was the worst.”As the opera would have it, Christina’s mother was hysterical; urgingChristina to marry. Her German mother indeed had mood controlissues—she gets the most delightfully crazy number in the opera fora reason. But wouldn’t you crack if you had been plucked out of yourGerman principality, shipped with your new royal spouse to the frozenand largely rural and empty Sweden, and found yourself living mostlyalone and having one miscarriage after another? (The King was mostoften away on military business, and later coupling-out-of-wedlockbusiness). Christina was her only surviving child and, lucky for the girl,she was brought up by a benevolent family of royal relatives - until herfather the King was killed in battle. The Queen Mother, who had difficultyparting with her dead husband’s body (you don’t want to knowthe details) insisted the child Christina remain by her side, locked up ina castle darkened for prolonged bereavement. (This only lasted a coupleof years before they were permanently separated.)The Queen Mum did not however sashay into adult Christina’scourt urging her to marry, or for any other reason. In fact, by the timeChristina was grown up, the Queen Mother had been long exiled.Was Christina a lesbian? No, is what I would bet my money on. Justabout every meaningful relationship of her life was with a man, andChristina had a particular weakness for charming scoundrels whom she’drepeatedly trust too easily, reward lavishly, and find herself being duped by.Ebba Sparre, who gets her own role in the opera, was indeed her favouritefor a period, and rumours swirled around another woman or two duringher 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, capableof giving any kind of genuine consent to a monarch, male or female?You could argue no. If you became a favourite, whatever that entailedand however long it lasted, you had no choice in the matter. Theopera doesn’t touch on this back story – presenting Christina andEbba’s relationship as genuinely loving – but Christina used Ebba as apawn in her ongoing settling of scores with the powerful ChancellorOxenstierna. Ebba had been engaged to the Chancellor’s son, butwould this marriage take place on Christina’s watch? No siree: Ebbawas to marry someone else entirely, whom Christina chose. In theopera, the “Jakob” that the resigned Ebba decides to marry so shecould unwillingly extricate herself from the Queen, was in actual factthe very noble that Christina imposed on her.Buckley argues that in spite of her bravado with potential loversof both sexes, Christina “does not seem to have followed any of herpassions to their natural conclusion.” Both the opera and the playaccurately portray the Queen as adamantly refusing marriage andwhat inevitably follows from it as the night follows the day: childbirth.And no wonder: childbirth was the most likely cause of deathfor women in non-pandemic years.Fact as a matter of taste? La Reine-garçon is fiction and we shouldenjoy it as such. The greatest drama of Christina’s life was probablyher conversion to Catholicism as the sovereign of a staunchly Lutherancountry and her abdication, the planning of the flight, the wranglingof the apanage, and the move to Rome. But that would have been amuch different opera – a story more suitable for multi-part television.I went to Montreal for the world premiere in February last yearand for the most part enjoyed the opera from my far-away balconyseat; the score by Julien Bilodeau was late- romantic-meets-twentiethcentury and full of colour; and the audience, doubtless drawnin 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 operaticChristina is, I am having second thoughts.No, we don’t go to opera for historical accuracy. Don Carlos, Neroand Poppaea, Titus, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Mehmet II, Xerxes areall imagined rather than documented in their respective operas. Andyet … perhaps a 21st century audience is too well-informed to indulgeDescartes discusses philosophy with Queen Christina of Sweden in anillustration for La Ciencia Y Sus Hombres by Luis Figuier (D Jaime Seix, 1876).The image is a chromolithograph by Josep (or Jose) Planella (Spain 1804–90)purely fantastical takes on post-Gutenberg historical figures who leftscores of writings behind. (You’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong!)Lydia Perovic is a writer in Toronto. Find her in The Hub orher Substack newsletter, Long Play.la RondineBY GIACOMO PUCCINIITALIAN OPERA WITH ENGLISH SURTITLESTHURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2025 | 8 PMFRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2025 | 8 PMJEANNE LAMON HALL,TRINITY-ST. PAUL’S CENTRENARMINAAFANDIYEVAMUSIC DIRECTORCASSANDRAAMORIMBELLECAORYANHOFMANNEW VENUEJeanne Lamon HallTrinity-St. Paul’s Centre427 Bloor St W,ROBERT COOPER, CM& the Opera inConcert ChorusBOX OFFICE INFO:RCM TICKETS416-408-0208 OROPERAINCONCERT.COM/TICKETSALAMYthewholenote.com February & March 2025 | 21
UPCOMINGErika Nielsen (Cellist and
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