Crazy For Love, Lucia di Lammermoor

This weekend marks the Chinese Valentine’s Day — the Qixi Festival — a day devoted to the celebration of love.

On this day, may all lovers find union, and may all who love be cherished in return.

The Qixi Festival commemorates the yearly meeting of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl — a love so steadfast that even magpies form a bridge across the heavens for their reunion. Their story reminds us that when two souls truly love, distance and hardship cannot keep them apart.

But what of those whose stories do not end in such joy? For lovers who ache yet cannot be together — what becomes of them?

The composer Donizetti offers one such tale in his beautiful, tragic opera Lucia di Lammermoor.

Set in 16th-century Scotland amid the bitter feud between the Ashtons and the Ravenswoods, the story unfolds with Enrico Ashton’s unyielding determination to destroy his sister Lucia’s forbidden love. Lucia — delicate, sensitive, and earnest — has given her heart to Edgardo, the last heir of the Ravenswoods, their sworn enemies. Despite the danger, the two lovers continue to meet secretly beneath the cloak of night.

One evening, accompanied by her closest friend Alisa, Lucia ventures onto a desolate heath to await Edgardo. In the darkness, she sees a pale apparition drifting across the moor — the ghost of a woman wronged. Alisa warns that this may be an omen, urging Lucia to abandon her hopeless love.

But Lucia refuses. When Edgardo arrives, they exchange rings as vows of eternal fidelity before he departs for France.

Soon after, her family pressures her into a political marriage. Under Enrico’s relentless manipulation, Lucia is forced to wed Arturo.

On the day of the wedding — weakened by grief and months of despair — Lucia reaches her breaking point. Just after she signs the marriage contract, Edgardo bursts into the hall with his men. Believing Lucia has betrayed him, he condemns her, demands back his ring, crushes hers underfoot, and storms out after killing one of Enrico’s guards.

Amid the continuing celebrations, Lucia’s mind shatters. She murders Arturo in the bridal chamber, then returns to the hall — bloodstained and hollow-eyed — to deliver the opera’s famous mad scene, “Spargi d’amaro pianto.”

Her family has traded her happiness as political currency. She has witnessed a man killed at her feet. Her beloved Edgardo has shattered her faith and desecrated her token of love. In her brokenness, she slays the man forced upon her, then collapses into visions of impossible joy with Edgardo. She rips her wedding gown, imagines children in her arms, dreams of a life forever denied. Her love — and her sanity — lie in ruins.

Lucia would rather die and watch Edgardo from heaven than exist in a world stripped of tenderness.

Her mad scene — a dazzling storm of coloratura — becomes both an unrestrained outcry of longing and a defiant scream against a merciless world. In that moment, she chooses to become a wandering ghost rather than remain a silent mortal.

The chorus laments her fate. With one final, heart-piercing cry, Lucia’s life — and her love — end.

Her last scream is the loss of her reason, yet it awakens ours. Seeing Lucia destroyed by devotion, ruined by love — how many of us could truly bear such a fate? How much courage does it take to offer decades of our lives to love?

It is not merely a story of wrong person, wrong time. Even Edgardo — noble, steadfast — is powerless before the weight of ancestral hatred and the cruelty of fate. Love, it seems, torments its believers to the very end.

“Spargi d’amaro pianto,” with its impossible difficulty and dramatic power, has long been the hallmark of great coloratura sopranos. Natalie Dessay’s performance at the Met is now considered a modern masterpiece.

They say love makes us blind — that in loving, we cannot see another’s flaws. But if you hear Lucia’s cry of anguish in “Spargi d’amaro pianto,” driven mad by love, and still find yourself drawn helplessly toward love itself, then perhaps love makes us deaf as well.

Valentine’s Day is usually a wish that all lovers may be united. But after Lucia’s tale, I wish for something more — that all lovers may be cherished by the ones they love.

And if love does not arrive, it is no tragedy. Keep your reason, watch a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, and treasure the peace of a life untouched by love’s cruelties.