Spank the Soprano

The 2009 Opera North production of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), so the London Financial Times tells us, featured ‘bottom-spanking, Batman outfits and electronic effects’. There is talk of an unspecified production of Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri (1813) in which the entire chorus of harem girls were spanked, and of the 1985 Metropolitan Opera staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (1786) in which Barbarina, played by Dawn Upshaw, reportedly got a good spanking.

Dawn Upshaw

And a reviewer of Martin Otava’s 2009 Olomouc production of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie (1817) was uncommonly and helpfully specific in describing how Otava introduced a character not in the original opera, the magpie herself, played by Katerina Pešková, seen on the right here:

Throughout the production, she hopped around the other characters onstage until finally she was identified as the thief who took the missing silver spoon, and the show ended with her being taken across a servant’s knee and spanked.

It seems there’s a lot of spanking in opera, even though there are not a lot of operas that include spanking scenes – an exception being an operetta from, perhaps inevitably, Czechoslovakia, Karel Fort’s Slecinka z Bileho Zamecku (The Lady from the White Castle; 1925), as seen here in an American amateur production from 1934, with brother and sister Frank and Emily Serpan in the operative roles of Karasek and Olinka:

But for the most part, operas tend not to have actual scenes written in, even though they often have the potential for a director to put in spanking business. For instance, the very first opera to be written and performed in the Americas, La Purpura de la Rosa (1701), by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco Sánchez with a libretto by Calderon, dramatizes the classical legend of Venus and Adonis, but also includes a low-comedy sub-plot in which the peasant wife Celfa deceives the jealous god Mars; he takes reprisals by having a soldier chastise her while he husband cheers from the sidelines. As with Le Médecin Malgré Lui (which itself has an operatic version by Gounod, 1858), it’s a matter of how the particular production chooses to play it, but Andrew Lawrence-King’s 2003 staging for the Hispanic and Music Departments of the University of Sheffield made it a spanking, causing one online reviewer to offer the usual depressing observation that this ‘intruded needlessly out on a politically incorrect limb’.

But that’s exactly what opera directors often do. We have previously encountered spankings introduced into productions of Handel’s Alcina (1735), Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1843) and Flotow’s Martha (1847), the last of which (in a 2015 German production) was magnificent enough to be worth a rerun now:

There are well established stage traditions of Rosina being spanked in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (1816), the Maid in Adès’ Powder Her Face (1995) and various characters, not always Barbarina, in The Marriage of Figaro and also in Lortzing’s Der Wildschütz (1842). In Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Zerlina even asks for a spanking from her husband, and sometimes gets it; and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (1918) has a scripted incident that can be staged as a fullscale spanking and sometimes may even be of interest.

Another opera scene that quite often has a spanking introduced is the louche party that opens Verdi’s La Traviata (1853). Here’s one of the goings-on in the 2010 production at Fremont Opera, with Adam Meza as the Marquis d’Obigny:

But, as I’ve been repeatedly hinting, we have to beware, in several different ways. Some reviews suffer from a regrettable failure of specificity about the age and gender of the participants, the latter being the more pertinent pitfall of La Traviata. (Both can be an issue with Gianni Schicchi.) For instance, we know that somebody got a public spanking in the party scene in the San Francisco Opera production of summer 2014, but not who, and in some productions the loucheness is expressed as F/M – a perfectly valid artistic choice, reflecting an orientation that exists in life, but not a piece of business that holds any interest for me, at least.

Reviewers are also not always as precise as we might like in their use of terminology, so that sometimes a mere smacked bottom is described as a ‘spanking’. For example, the 1992 Cheltenham production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea (1643) featured Sarah Jane Wright as Love (in effect, Cupid), in a performance that enchanted the Guardian reviewer:

‘On stage the whole time, orchestrating the action, she turns gleeful cartwheels, bares virtually all in an amorous conquest, is spanked by rival goddesses, and always sings with pert personality.’

But was she spanked or just smacked? We simply have no way of knowing!

So it helps to have incontrovertible photographic evidence like this shot from the 2014 Zurich production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), with Michael Laurenz as Monostatos forcing his amorous attentions on Mari Eriksmoen’s Pamina in an unconventional way:

In the 2011 Caen production of Cavalli’s La Didone (1641), Cassandra (Katherine Watson) was spanked by Iarbas (Xavier Sabata):

Then there’s the 2013 opera Marilyn (Beautiful Child), by Ondřej Brousek with a libretto by Radek Balaš, which dramatized the unhappy life of Marilyn Monroe, including her marriage to baseball star Joe DiMaggio. He certainly spanked her at least once (as detailed here), and apparently did something not too dissimilar in the opera too, if we are to believe this shot from the 2017 production at Pilsen with Zuzana Kajnarov:

But some photos can be ambiguous or misleading. Here’s a moment in the 2016 Dusseldorf production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel:

It shows King Dodon (Boris Statsenko) in the office with his housekeeper Amelfa (Renée Morloc), but the trailer, long since vanished from YouTube, helpfully revealed what had just happened: she crawled across the desk to answer the phone for him…

On the other hand, I’ve no idea what’s going on in this Russian production of Strauss’ The Gypsy Baron (1885), though it’s such an arresting image that allows us to hope for the best:

A photo may also be unreliable when it’s associated with a production’s publicity, where it could serve as a striking metaphorical image rather than a literal representation of a scene you would get to see if you were to buy a ticket. Here’s the press ad for the 2006 Dallas Opera production of Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851):

That’s Marcus Haddock, who played the Duke of Mantua, doing the spanking; it’s possible that the bottom belongs to Maureen O’Flynn, who was his lover Gilda,

Maureen O’Flynn

but it’s impossible to say whether she actually got spanked in the production itself.

As I said before, there seems to be a lot of spanking in the world of opera… but there’s also a lot of opera in the world, far too much to wade through in search of spanking scenes unless you’re a true enthusiast of both. So if you should be lucky enough to encounter such a scene in an opera that you might happen to see, it will be appreciated if you report it accurately and precisely, so that others may have the chance to enjoy it too!

The Ways of Love

In the early 1940s, two University of California students met while performing in revues at Berkeley. As well as their shared acting skills, Elizabeth Berryhill (1921-2002) had a talent as a sketch writer and director, while Gordon Connell (1923-2016) was a budding composer. After an enforced hiatus caused by Japanese activities involving Pearl Harbor, they got together, not romantically but to found the Straw Hat Theater company, based in Lafayette and drawing its personnel from U. Cal. students and graduates. From 1947, they staged an annual revue, and sometimes more than one, with scripts mainly written by Berryhill and scores by Connell, until Miss Berryhill decided the company had achieved everything it possibly could, and closed it down in 1956.

In 1955, a journalist declared that ‘the greatest single thing Straw Hat has ever done’ was The Ways of Love, or Pretty Mitzi. It was a spoof operetta that comprised the entire second half of the first 1949 revue, For Love and Money, performed for six weeks from June 10 until July 23. Straw Hat then substituted an all-new revue, One Thing After Another, and then merged the two into a ‘best of’ compilation under the latter title, and with The Ways of Love once again forming the second half; this was performed on tour from October 1949 through March 1950.

The operetta was so fondly remembered that it was revived in the 1955 revue, Haven’t We Met?, revived again in 1959 as part of Strings and Things by the Mummers’ Theatre, Oklahoma, and yet again in 1963 by the San Anselmo Festival Theatre, which Berryhill had founded in 1957, as part of To Soothe the Savage, a compilation of her greatest hits. In short, The Ways of Love was a piece of American humor with a decade-and-a-half’s staying power, even though it is now almost wholly forgotten, not least because Elizabeth Berryhill never published her sketches and so never gave them the access to posterity that she accorded her later serious play, The Cup of Trembling (1958), about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The 1949 revue had a cast of eleven actors, including Berryhill and Connell themselves. Let’s meet three of them:

At the bottom, Gordon Connell. On top, Charles Hulse. And in between, Marilyn Stock, who was wrongly reported as being a newcomer to Straw Hat for the 1949 summer revues. (Actually it was only her surname that was new: she had five years’ experience in the Bay Area theater, and had appeared with Straw Hat the previous season, under the name Marilyn MacCamy, but had got married in April 1949.) Charles and Marilyn are the ones we’ll be wanting to pay most attention to.

The difficulty of writing about The Ways of Love is, of course, that as an unpublished play it has already largely disappeared into history, and all that we can do to rescue it from oblivion is to piece together whatever details may be gleaned from press reports of the various productions over the years.

As a spoof, the particular object of its satire was the middle-European brand of operetta epitomized by The Student Prince (1924); the Oakland Tribune described it as ‘a pocket-size edition of everything Rudolph Friml dreamed of in his worst nightmares’. (Friml is best remembered for his 1925 operetta The Vagabond King, which was later filmed in 1956 with the happy addition of a spanking scene.) It was celebrated for the accuracy and acuity of its observation, reproducing every cliché, narrative and musical, to the extent that one rather dim Californian audience failed to see the joke, and the cast were obliged, for one night only, to play it straight.

The story takes place in the Ruritanian kingdom of Humbuggia, and deals with the familiar complications that arise from supposedly unsuitable romantic liaisons between royals and commoners: the barmaid Mitzi is in love with Crown Prince Erik, while Princess Eleanore wants to marry Erik’s friend Rudolph, who is a mere naval cadet. Ultimately the whole thing is resolved when a gypsy fortune-teller reveals that the royals are less royal than they think, because the rightful Queen of Humbuggia is none other than the innkeeper, Kristin. Obstacles to matrimony thus removed, all ends happily.

However, there’s a romantic but not entirely happy interlude for the character originally played by Marilyn Stock, courtesy of Charles Hulse:

And that’s where the evidence gives out on us. Who are these two characters and what are the circumstances?

The reviews allow us to pin down only seven characters in the show, the four women and two men already mentioned, plus the evil privy councillor Ludwig; one review also helpfully tells us that the very start of the operetta has four young women onstage. We know that Jane Cowell played Mitzi, Carol Brumm played Princess Eleanore and Nan Tillson was the Fortune-Teller. The fourth major female role was Kristin, the innkeeper. So was she played by Marilyn Stock – an incognito queen who gets spanked?

Probably not. Reviews of the 1963 revival describe Kristin as ‘matronly’, which is a very accurate adjective for Elizabeth Fuller, who played her in that production, and not a very accurate one for the Marilyn Stock character seen in the photograph. And anyway, since The Ways of Love formed an entire half of a show, it seems likely that all eleven available actors had roles in it: five women and six men (including, as well as Hulse and Connell, Robert Cowell, Louis Bonnett, John Tomaschke and David Fulmer, who played Erik) – in which case Kristin would be a better fit for the fifth unassigned female cast member, Elizabeth Berryhill herself.

It follows that we just don’t know what character was played by Marilyn Stock, nor indeed by Charles Hulse, and we can’t even guess at the context for the picture. All we can do is give thanks that, among the scanty surviving traces of The Ways of Love, there has come down to us such a fine spanking photograph!

Wedding Night in Paradise

The 1942 German operetta Hochzeitsnacht im Paradies, with its book by Heinz Hentschke (1895-1970), music by Friedrich Schröder (1910-72) and lyrics by Günther Schwenn (1903-91), tells the story of how the tempestuous Spanish dancer Doña Dolores, known as Dodo, spitefully tries to prevent the marriage of an old flame, with unwelcome consequences for her.

But we’d better get one thing out in the open straight away.

The operetta’s recent fortunes have not been helped by the historical period in which it came into existence. You might like to imagine that this is a reflection of modern prejudice: that any mainstream, apolitical work from the Hitler era is now treated with suspicion, if not actively considered tainted, and that the show’s earlier decades of success reflect the more nuanced judgement of audiences who actually had to live through the Nazi tyranny and who knew what was and wasn’t fascist. The trouble is, that argument starts to fall apart when you look a little closer at the show’s history.

The leading role, bridegroom Ulrich Hansen, was closely associated with the popular and exceedingly durable Dutch singer Johannes Heesters (1903-2011), who played the character in the original production and continued to do so intermittently for more than thirty years, including revivals in Munich (1943, 1953), Hamburg (1949), Frankfurt (1950), Ulm (1951), Dusseldorf (1952), Salzburg (1955) and Vienna (1957, 1971); he was also in the 1950 film version and in television productions of 1966 and 1974. And in the first half of the 1940s, he did morale-boosting gigs for the guards at concentration camps and donated money to the German arms industry, effectively helping to fund Hitler’s war machine. Speaking of whom, the premiere, at Berlin’s Metropol Theater on September 24, 1942, was attended by no less a person than the Führer himself.

So there is some very uncomfortable baggage associated with Hochzeitsnacht im Paradies; but now we know about it, let’s put it on one side and introduce ourselves to a succession of Dodos through time, from the beginning through to the operetta’s relatively modest post-Heesters stage history. In both the original 1942 production and the 1950 film, Gretl Schörg:

In the 1962 film version, Marika Rökk:

On television in 1966, Ida Boros:

In the 1974 television production, Marlène Charell:

And onstage at Leipzig in 2006, Sabine Thies:

For reasons that will become clear, we’ll now go directly to the 1950 film version,

in which the characters have been amended: tennis star Hansen has become nightclub singer Pieter van Goos, but is still played by Johannes Heesters. He is first seen as the innocent party in a quarrel with a comely but temperamental Spanish dancer who is still Gretl Schörg, but is now named Rosita Pareira. She is often seen in diaphanous costumes which are just see-through enough to reveal her panties underneath. An example is the negligee she’s wearing when she catches Pieter on the phone to another woman, Clarisse Röders (Claude Farell), and takes retaliatory measures:

(Interestingly enough, the garment has a completely opaque white back cutting off the rear view.)

So the film starts with physical aggression by Rosita against Pieter, after which she apparently calms down. She makes a show of gracious acceptance when Pieter publicly announces his forthcoming marrriage to Clarisse, whilst secretly scheming to prevent it and keep him for herself. This includes drugging his wine on the eve of the wedding and arranging for Clarisse to find him unconscious in a compromising position with her.

Thanks to the forbearance of Clarisse and the help of Pieter’s friends, the wedding is not off, and the happy couple fly to Venice for their honeymoon at the Hotel Paradiso, which gives the show its title. Rosita goes too, and the upshot is that, through a drunken misunderstanding, he finds himself in bed with the wrong woman on his wedding night. But she does not simply accept her good fortune: she provokes him into chasing her round the room in her pajamas, which are again translucent and panty-revealing, but this time also from behind.

As she runs, she makes enough noise to ensure to wake the entire hotel, including Clarisse, who arrives when she is apparently taking refuge from his lustful advances on top of the wardrobe.

Pieter gets her down and out of sight before letting his wife into the room, but Rosita doesn’t stay obligingly hidden – meaning that he ends up spending the night alone while Clarisse makes her arrangements to leave.

The next morning, he has another meeting with Rosita in his room, but not, as she thinks, in order to continue the romantic entanglement. Is he going to give her a kiss? No… ‘A spanking!’ he declares, seizing her.

Next door, Clarisse is packing when she hears what is happening. She comes in to watch as Pieter is in the process of administering six firm smacks.

‘One more,’ she asks, smiling. And Pieter obliges,

Rosita duly ends up with a sore bottom.

It’s an all-round victory for Clarisse.

And after a markedly unsuccessful attempt to sit down, Rosita makes her final exit from the film, rubbing all the way.

This is obviously a very important scene, the climax which turns the story around and facilitates the happy ending, and it is therefore done across two distinct camera set-ups, not including cutaway shots of Clarisse.

One notable thing about the second set-up is what Heesters is doing with his right hand, when he’s not using it to spank.

Gretl is giving a very energetic performance,

and Heesters is being a gentleman and keeping her skirt under control.

Since the spanking is a structural ‘rhyme’ for Rosita’s violence towards Pieter at the start of the film, and since Rosita was given to a certain immodesty of dress earlier on, you might think that the rhyme might be enhanced if, far from holding her skirt down, he were to raise it (and that wasn’t altogether inconceivable in a German film of this time). But this is a spanking that must not be misunderstood as a romantic gesture: its function in the story is to be Pieter’s definitive rejection of Rosita, establishing once and for all that Clarisse really is the girl for him. It follows that there cannot be any hint of sexuality about it. No doubt that’s why Heesters was so careful to guard against a wardrobe malfunction at the crucial moment, though I really don’t think it managed to be even remotely unsexy – and thank goodness for that!

If you want to see the scene (and if you don’t, what are you doing reading this?), go here (and put in the password Hochzeitsnacht).

The film was remade in color in 1962, with some of the character names reverting to their stage originals: Peter Alexander plays Ulrich Hansen (who is still a singer rather than a sportsman), and Waltraut Haas is his bride Regine. But Marika Rökk’s character has gone east and become Ilonka Davarosch.

In other respects it is a close analogue of the earlier version, based on the same screenplay by Ernst Marischka, and every 1950 incident illustrated earlier also happens in the new film, including…

The big difference concerns Ilonka, which may be delicately alluded to with reference to the respective dates of birth of Gretl Schörg (January 17, 1914) and Marika Rökk (November 3, 1913). So in 1962 there is much less emphasis on the physical allure of Ilonka than there was for Rosita in 1950; this time around, it’s Regine showing her panties through her flimsy clothes.

This may also partly account for a bit of extra glamor in a drunken dance sequence before the bedroom encounter with Ilonka, in which Hansen cavorts around the hotel lobby in a way designed to capitalize on Peter Alexander’s physical comedy skills, but also gives us a couple of pretty girls in pink, Milli and Tilli, played by the twins Ellen and Alice Kessler:

They end up being dragged off by their angry, jealous boyfriends, who seem assertive enough for it not to be entirely gratuitous if we indulge in a little imaginative speculation about what’s going to happen to them back in their hotel rooms!

What happens to Ilonka is not a matter for speculation, of course, because we get to see it onscreen.

It’s well staged and, once you make allowances for the fact that you’re watching an actress in her late 40s instead of her mid-30s, it holds up well in comparison with the 1950 version.

Both spankings have exactly the same amount of screen time, though in this case without any cutaways: Regine simply walks into the shot to make her contribution.

There’s one obvious difference, as seen on the right: as well as Regine, the spanking is also witnessed by the impresario Felix Bröckelmann (Gunther Philipp), and he too has a contribution to make.

That doesn’t completely account for the fact that it’s a slightly longer spanking, nine slaps instead of the seven in 1950. And they are clearly felt,

though unlike Rosita, Ilonka does succeed in sitting down afterwards, albeit very gingerly.

The big difference is that the spanking is done in just one camera set-up, instead of the two in 1950 – remembering that every additional set-up effectively means an extra spanking for the actress.

This relates to something that was very much on Peter Alexander’s mind as he prepared for the scene. He had not done a spanking scene before, but he was going into a period when he did several: his very next film appearance was another Johannes Heesters part in another operetta, Die Lustige Witwe, which contains a much more incidental sequence with a spanking for Geneviève Cluny,

and a few years later he spanked Olga Schoberová in Graf Bobby, der Schrecken des Wilden Westens (1966). This may seem slightly out of character for his usual screen persona, as does this, with his co-star Cornelia Froboess in a 1964 ‘I married a kleptomaniac’ comedy:

The title is telling: Hilfe, Meine Braut Klaut (Help, My Bride Steals). The typical Peter Alexander part is not someone who assertively takes charge of things, but an amiably comical ‘beta male’ whose first instinct is to call for help, until he is provoked into ‘alpha’ behavior.

So on the set of Hochzeitsnacht im Paradies in 1962, before he had developed this kind of performance, he was feeling very uncomfortable and unhappy about what he was being asked to do. Then Marika Rökk came over to talk to him and said:

‘Darling, please do me one favor: forget that I am Fraulein Rökk. Forget that I am a lady, and simply hit hard. Don’t be careful, please, otherwise I cannot react. I must feel it, it must hurt. Thank you.’

He never forgot shooting the scene, and many years later described what happened:

‘I put Marika across my knee and I spanked her so soundly that my hands were trembling afterwards; they were swollen from the smacking too.’

‘And I had realized she wasn’t wearing much under her dress, so she must have felt pain. She was hobbling off and everyone applauded; even the lighting staff from the gantry clapped their hands.’

The way Alexander told it, it sounds as if they got it in one take. Afterwards she came back and told him:

‘Darling, what hands you have! If only I’d known that beforehand! I’ll be black and blue. My husband will ask me tonight how I got red down there. Well, hopefully he’ll ask.’

‘Hopefully’, I guess, because the husband in question was the veteran director Georg Jacoby, 30 years her senior, with less than two years left to live and possibly by now too old to notice…

In any event, Peter Alexander was always grateful for the consideration she showed him, and so a mid-Sixties cinema spanker was launched!

But let’s stay focused on Hochzeitsnacht im Paradies. Now that we have seen two very good scenes from the film versions, we have reached the point where it is necessary to admit that I’m not 100% certain that the spanking features in the original 1942 version. To pique your imagination, or else feed your disappointment, here’s the stage incarnation of Gretl Schörg’s Dodo:

But here’s the problem: the libretto is not readily available, only a full summary that doesn’t mention the spanking. That could be because there’s no such scene, but could just as well be the banal embarrassment with which some modern historians shuffle their intellectual feet when they encounter the subject of spanking. (But at least that’s better than a shrill, phobic, uncomprehending cry of ‘Misogyny!’) Neither have I been able to trace the scene in the rare and fragmentary video clips from revivals to be found on YouTube (though for a little bit of bottom-smacking from a 1989 production, go here). But again, that absence could be the result of suppression rather than not having been there in the first place.

And on the other hand, as we have seen, there are those two film scenes, which would admittedly be more decisive if they didn’t have the same screenplay in common. For the strongest evidence, we are lucky to have this photograph of Sabine Thies being spanked in the Leipzig stage production of 2006:

Adaptation or original? Publicity spanking or actual scene? Only that elusive 1942 libretto will tell us for sure!

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Maitrefesseur for giving all kinds of help with this article.

Another Try with the ‘Spank Me’ Song

Sometimes a girl just can’t get herself spanked!

Here’s our golden couple, newlyweds Masetto and Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni:

We have already seen how Zerlina, seduced by Don Giovanni on her very wedding day, attempts to make it up with her husband by singing an aria that invites him to spank her: Batti, Batti, O Bel Masetto (Spank Me, Spank Me, O Dear Masetto). Sometimes this comes with an overt offer of her bottom to be spanked, like this from Sarah Blanch in 2016:

Masetto’s part in the proceedings is to reject her, at least at first:

So some Zerlinas put themselves in a position where the offer is completely unambiguous and ought to be unignorable. You’ll see what I mean, if you can’t guess already, in this example from 2015:

Likewise, here’s Theresa Krügl performing the aria in 2016:

And Elyse Anne Kakacek at the Bronx Opera in 2020:

(Video here.)

As you can see there, Masetto starts to thaw out as she sings on, and sometimes this leads him at least into temptation, as anticipated by Kasia Suska’s Czech Zerlina in 2020.

And who wouldn’t be tempted by Diana Alexe’s extremely seductive Zerlina in her pretty bloomers?

In the Vienna production of 2021, she gives a DIY demonstration, which gets her a lusty two-hander from her Masetto, Peter Dolinsek:

And in Tanja Heesen-Nauroth’s production at Bergisch Gladbach in 2018, it looks as if Raphael Simon Blume’s Masetto may have gone even further with Maike Neunast:

Let’s hope so!

Update (February 2024): With great thanks to Sganarelle (whose comment appears below), here’s another Zerlina (Leah Brzyski) in the May 2023 production by Minnesota Opera:

Masetto was Charles M. Eaton. It sounds like quite a ponderous production that offered what the director seems to have thought was the earth-shattering new angle that Don Giovanni is actually not very nice to women. The reviews suggest that Zerlina was portrayed as a bit of an airhead, perhaps because of her interest in being treated as seen above.

Jewels of the Baroque

Jewels of the Baroque, the work of New York company Opera Feroce, was an immersive show that had just two afternoon performances in Brooklyn over the weekend of November 28 and 29, 2015. Patrons were encouraged to come in costume for a musical salon concert at home with a 17th-century British family, the Minims, who are wealthy and have pretensions to grandeur but are not quite out of the top drawer of society. We’ll want to pay especial attention to Miss Acquamarinia Minim, played by the pretty, talented semiprofessional soprano Allegra Durante.

The show is partly a recital of baroque musical masterpieces, partly a comedy about what happens when a group of eccentric musicians with wittily ludicrous names are engaged to entertain the Minims and their guests. At her mother’s insistence, Acquamarinia gets involved and joins the foppish, womanizing German countertenor Herr Smaragd Solitaroff von Schmückstuck (Alan Dornak) in a Handel duet (Son nato a lagrimar, from Giulio Cesare).

She puts his nose out of joint by outshining him, but he’s not the one she has to watch out for. Afterwards she excitedly effuses in German, whereupon her father intervenes: ‘That’s the final straw! No daughter of mine’s going to use language like that in my house!’ And with that, he seizes her, bends her over, rucks up her dress and proceeds to give her a spanking in front of the scandalized audience.

Her embarrassed mother steps in front and attempts a little inept singing to distract from the vulgar domestic spectacle, without much success. Who wouldn’t rather watch a pretty girl getting spanked?

Here’s the video:

Applause for them all!

Gianni Schicchi

Rather like with The Nerd, if you’re going to see Giacomo Puccini’s one-act opera Gianni Schicchi, it’s worth establishing three things beforehand: is the character of Gherardino in the production and, if so, what is the age and gender of the performer?  And as is regrettably often the case nowadays in these anxious, censorious times, there’s also a fourth thing which is harder to discover without actually seeing the show.

First performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in December 1918, and set in Dante’s Florence of the late 13th century, Gianni Schicchi concerns efforts by the legacy-hunting relatives of the wealthy and recently deceased Buoso Donati to circumvent an inconvenient last will and testament. Before the document is discovered, they all expect handsome inheritances, and on the strength of this Rinuccio’s snobbish mother gives her consent for him to marry his beloved Lauretta, daughter of the lowly, self-made Gianni Schicchi. Rinuccio sends young Gherardino to fetch Signor and Signorina Schicchi, and only then does it emerge that old Donati’s will is in nobody’s favor: he left all his money to a monastery, meaning no love-match for Rinuccio after all. Cue general despondency among the disappointed non-legatees, followed in due course by a scheme to have the rascally Schicchi impersonate Donati, pretending that he is still alive for just long enough to draw up a new will. Schicchi duly cooperates, but makes himself the principal beneficiary – which isn’t completely dastardly of him, because it means he can afford to give Lauretta a good dowry so that she can marry Rinuccio after all.

The moment that might interest us, depending on circumstances, comes just as the truth about the will has emerged. Rinuccio’s mother tells him she doesn’t want to hear any more about Scicchi and his daughter, ever, and with impeccable comic timing Gherardino returns to say that, as requested, Schicchi and his daughter are on their way. The outcome of this is that Gherardino gets spanked for running the errand in the first place: ‘You should only take orders from your father.’ And then he’s sent out of the room.

That pronoun in the last sentence ushers in the moment when we must face some inconvenient facts. Gherardino is the 7-year-old son of Gherardo, Donati’s nephew. Some productions manage to leave him out altogether, while others have him played by a child. But it’s not altogether uncommon for the part to go to a smallish adult performer, a soprano rather than a treble, and when that happens it’s most often a young woman.

Even then, there is the little matter of what actually gets done in the scene. Given that a spanking, in the strict sense of the word, is complicated and time-consuming to stage, some productions opt for a simpler smacked bottom to propel the kid out. And given that a spanking is no longer as commonplace an expression of parental disapproval as it was in 1918, other productions opt to replace it with a slap on the head or even remove the business altogether. But there is still a minority in which Gherardino does get something that amounts to a spanking.

So a lot of variables need to line up exactly to produce a version of the opera that we’ll enjoy for our own niche reasons (which is not to say that there aren’t many other reasons to enjoy a production that’s completely devoid of spanking). One more that might not be quite so fundamental, depending on taste, is whether Gherardino, even if played by a soprano of our preferred age and gender, is also played as a boy. Sometimes the character is simply made into a girl, but sometimes a real effort is made to disguise the performer’s true gender, as in the 2019 Brooklyn College production, in which (depending on the performance) either Sylvia Maisonet or Christina Schwedler found herself bent over a chair and spanked by either Lena Haleem or Cora Stolper:

(The video is here.)

Perhaps it’s more straightforward when the production is set in a more remote historical period, such as the 2017 version by the Crane Opera Ensemble, in which Allie Brault was spanked by Tristan Lesso:

Gianni Schicchi is always going to be a marginal entry in the annals of stage spanking, for the simple reason that nobody (or at least, nobody we’d want to be associated with) likes to see a little kid get spanked. So here’s to unconvincing age and gender impersonation in opera!

There Isn’t a Spanking Scene in… The Gypsy Baron

The 1885 operetta Der Zigeunerbaron, by the younger Johann Strauss, deals with the amorous and financial affairs of Sandor Barinkay, who returns to Hungary to reclaim his ancestral estate and is elected the leader of the gypsies who have occupied his ruined castle. He finds himself entangled with two women: the dark, personable gypsy girl Saffi and Arsena, the haughty blonde daughter of the grasping pig-farmer Zsupan. The choice ought to be a no-brainer, but Sandor takes his time deciding on Saffi (who turns out, to the surprise of everyone except her mother, to be a Turkish princess).

The operetta is still often produced (and even if you don’t know it, you’re sure to have heard some of the tunes), but neither of the two girls in it gets spanked. For that, we must turn to its subsequent career in the German cinema, which began in 1927 with, strange as it may seem, a silent version. A sound film starring Anton Walbrook followed in 1935, made twice over, with different supporting casts, for the German- and French-speaking markets. The screenplay for this version added a lot of material not in the Strauss original, making Sandor an outlaw exiled for political reasons who has returned incognito and illegally, while Zsupan is the rascal who has misappropriated his estate in his absence. It also gives Sandor a comic servant named Ernö, who will eventually become an important player in our story – but not just yet.

In the decades after the Second World War, when German cinema was dominated by safe, nostalgic subject matter, there was a little burst of big-screen Zigeunerbarons, with two very different versions released in 1954 and 1962. The earlier starred Gerhardt Riedmann as Sandor, with Margit Saad as Saffi, not seen here in character but displaying a little gypsy gumption nonetheless.

And here showing the romantic side of Saffi:

She gets a playful smack on the bottom from Sandor in an early scene.

But of course it’s the proud, overweening ones who are most likely to have the kind of experience we enjoy watching. Arsena is played by Maria Sebaldt.

She’s a lot blonder in the film.

In this version, as in Strauss, she’s a little sweet on her father’s secretary Ottokar (Peer Schmidt), but her head is turned when Zsupan introduces Sandor to her as a prospective fiancé. Initially this transforms the lovelorn Ottokar into a stalker: he follows them on a date and spies on them from a tree, and later he gets into her bedroom after she has undressed for the night, resulting in a comic sequence where she has to hide him under the bedclothes when her father comes to talk to her. Later on, however, he grows masterful. When Arsena is all dressed up for her betrothal to Sandor, he declares his love with a spanking:

In a neat reversal of the earlier scene, this time Sandor and Saffi are the ones watching from a tree. And the betrothal collapses when Sandor makes up his mind in the gypsy’s favor, so Ottokar gets Arsena on the rebound.

The 1962 version, with Carlos Thomson as Sandor, used an adaptation of the 1935 screenplay, which meant another screen outing for the non-Strauss character of Ernö. This time he’s played by none other than Peer Schmidt, who also got to revisit certain interesting aspects of his 1954 Ottokar performance in material that wasn’t there in 1935, and for which we must thank the adapter, Heinz Oskar Wuttig.

This time Arsena was played by Heidi Brühl.

Here she is in character, proudly showing off one of the less featured elements of her costume:

About halfway through the film, Sandor finds treasure hidden in the castle ruins, which enables him to purchase his confiscated estate from the government, without revealing his true identity. He appoints Ernö as his bailiff and sends him to give Zsupan notice to quit, along with a ruinous bill for 25 years’ back rent. There follows the first key sequence that wasn’t in the 1935 version, in which Ernö inspects the house and comes across Arsena in the bath.

It’s not clear whether she is more distressed by the presence of a man at her ablutions or the news that she is to lose her home, but distressed she certainly is.

Through Saffi’s indiscretion, Arsena discovers who Sandor really is, and she and her father scheme to make him choose between marrying her or being executed as an illegally returned outlaw. On the wedding day, however, the bridegroom who turns up is an empty suit of clothes brought by Ernö; that is all that Arsena really loves about Sandor, he explains. And now Wuttig gets to work again. In 1935, Zsupan immediately rides off to pursue a reckoning with Sandor (but of course it all turns out happily in the end), leaving the humiliated Arsena with no real resolution to her story. But in 1962, there has already been a little romantic groundwork laid in the earlier bath scene, which now pays off for all concerned, even Arsena (though she might not think so at first).

She furiously chases Ernö upstairs, leaving her father and the wedding guests to have a food fight with the wedding banquet before setting out on the punitive expedition. Meanwhile Ernö has some punishment of his own to dish out. Still in her wedding dress, Arsena has a stand-up fight with him in her bedroom, which results in a brief spanking when they get onto the bed.

She escapes after two smacks, but he quickly catches up with her and resumes work.

And this leads to a happy ending: there is a rough kiss, a slapped face and finally a gentler, reciprocated kiss that shows who Arsena is really going to marry.

The trailer uses a different take of the spanking and the available print is a lot cleaner.

And the lobby card used a b/w still photograph colorized without any reference to the film itself:

You can see the 1954 film here and the 1962 trailer here.