Illicit Issue, Part 2

Barber's 1958 Vanessa [also discussed in White Stuff], being a more modern work, is more explicit about the pregnancy of Vanessa's niece though not quite so progressive as to overtly convey whether the child was miscarried by Erika's frantic dash through the snow, or deliberately aborted. Stagings tend to suggest the latter, Erika staggering out the door of her home in genuine physical as well as emotional pain. Why would she abort her child? Why has she in fact refused to marry its father, Anatol, who proposes to her without even knowing she is pregnant with the result of their one-night stand? His flirtatious sycophancy toward her middle-aged aunt has alarmed her; and she sees with what a blind love Vanessa regards him. When questioned by her grandmother, the old Baroness, who suspects him of being a fortune-hunter, Erika admits, "I do not want his honor so that mine be saved...I feel he is incapable of love." In Act IV, as soon as Erika expresses to her hitherto supportive grandmother, (who refuses to speak directly to Vanessa) her relief that Anatol's child won't be born, the Baroness stomps from the room now refusing to address Erika as well. Erika is not as forthright with her aunt. When interrogated separately by Vanessa, she reverts to a mixture of lies and half-truths about the identity of baby's father, so as not to spoil her aunt's happiness...for Vanessa has herself become engaged to Anatol, the son of her own eponymous lover of some twenty years before. Is Erika really Vanessa's child of that earlier affair, and not her niece? Though it is tempting to assume so, and one may even say we are teased into suspecting it, surely the Baroness could not have expected Erika to marry her genetic half-brother, so this is doubtful. However, there is some reason why the old woman has refused to address her own daughter for the entire length of the opera. Could the death of Erika's child be history repeating itself? If so, the Baroness sure ain't telling.

It takes an eleventh-hour confession by La Marquise de Berkenfield for us to learn the true identity of Marie, of Donizetti's 1840 The Fille du Régiment. As she explains to Sergeant Sulpice, she had waited so long for a husband befitting her father's high station in life, that she was very willing to marry Le Capitaine Robert -- Marie’s father --despite

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