Leadership in opera: Romance,betrayal,strife and sacrifice

Abstract

What, if anything, does opera tell us about leadership, leaders and followers, that social research or indeed other art forms do not tell us? This is the question I address here. I argue that opera is a highly political genre, able to depict political events involving leaders and followers in sharply illuminating ways. In particular, through the device of the chorus it is able to represent the political actions and sentiments of large multitudes of people in their complexity and ambiguity. It is also capable of portraying many of the contradictions of leadership in a critical light. In particular, I argue that opera offers powerful insights into the psychology of leaders confronted by crisis and strife. It highlights the sacrifices they make, the distance and isolation that frequently afflicts them, the different ways in which they wield power and handle conflicts and the tensions between their private and public lives. In showing them meting out favours and punishments, opera warns of rulers’ perennial temptation to abuse their power and highlights some of the dark sides of leadership.

What, if anything, does opera tell us about leadership, leaders and followers, that social research or indeed other art forms do not tell us? This article, addressed to a readership who need not be opera connoisseurs or enthusiasts, seeks to answer this relatively simple question. Works of art, including fictional literature, music, film and drama, are now widely recognized as legitimate fields for organizational research, not merely reflecting organizational realities but frequently helping to construct and make sense of them (e.g. Beech and Gilmore, 2015; Hassard and Holliday, 1998; Parker et al., 1999; Phillips, 1995). Opera, we shall argue, engenders some distinctive qualities that allow special insights in our chosen subjects. Two of them will be singled out for special attention – its ability to give collective voice to multitudes of people by means of the chorus and its adeptness at deploying music to enhance, qualify, question or stigmatize what is expressed in the words. In this way, the emotional and political impact of a text can be greatly augmented or elaborated by the music to which it is set, something that opens up valuable opportunities of illuminating the political psychology of leaders and followers.

Opera is a stage genre, combining words and music, a sung drama. It exists in many forms, including tragic and comic, serious and popular (Williams, 2006). Today, it arguably includes other genres like musicals and operettas. The earliest operas date from Italy in the early 17th century, although the genre spread to most European countries, spawning many works in French, German, Russian and other languages. The bulk of the so called “repertoire” can be roughly dated from the middle of 18th century to the early 20th century, but new operas continue to be composed today with varying degrees of success.

Of the thousands of operas, about twenty or thirty works are today regularly performed in some 400 theatres throughout the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_opera_houses) and a further thirty to fifty get occasional airings. In addition to being performed in opera houses, opera spawns numerous video and audio recordings; performances from the world’s great opera houses are now regularly broadcast live in cinemas and theatres throughout the globe; YouTube is packed with operatic recordings.

In the last forty years or so, the introduction of surtitles or subtitles with translations of the lyrics has enabled audiences to follow more closely the action on stage. It has also enabled opera producers to engage in ever more daring stagings, with the drama being transposed to different settings and times from those envisaged by their original creators. It is not unusual today to see an opera originally set in 18th century Seville transposed to a 20th century concentration camp or a 21st century brothel in New York, a trend that has sometimes got out of control, leading to rancorous media debates and controversies.

Opera today is widely seen as an ‘elitist’ art form. It was not always like this. Starting with the first private theatre built in Venice in 1637, opera was aimed at different social classes. Mozart’s Magic Flute was composed for a public that resembled more the audience of a contemporary pop concert than a group of snobbish cognoscenti. During the golden era of Italian melodrama it was not uncommon to hear a recently premiered opera’s best tunes played by street organ grinders. Even more so, there was a time when opera was capable of launching revolutions. In 1830, following a performance of Auber’s grand opera La Muette de Portici in the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, a crowd stormed the local courthouse setting off the revolution that led to Belgian political independence. The opera that so stirred the passions of Belgian patriots was about a failed revolution in Naples in 1647. In it, the rebel leader Masaniello becomes horrified by the brutality of the mob, is denounced as a traitor, and is finally murdered by his own followers.

Revolution is not an uncommon theme for opera, nor indeed are wars with victories and defeats, enslavement and liberation, peace treaties, state marriages, exiles and public executions, conspiracies, political assassinations, state visits, succession struggles, dictatorship, democracy and many other political phenomena. Over its history of nearly four hundred years, from Claudio Monteverdi’s Incoronazione di Poppea (1643) to John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987), opera has regularly sought to depict, criticize and comment on power and subjugation in every conceivable context. Opera has shown a considerable versatility in engaging with the great public issues of different eras – from the rise of the bourgeoisie in Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro (1786) to Mark-Anthony Turnage’s treatment of media fed celebrity culture in Anna Nicole (2011), a dramatization of the life of the American model and television personality. State politics, family feuds, class politics, racial politics, religious politics and, of course, gender politics have never been out of its sites.

The subjects chosen by opera composers reflect the political realities and anxieties of their time. Written before the failure of the 1848 revolutionary efforts in Italy, Verdi’s early operas with their rousing choruses and great exaltations of patriotism expressed the ideals of Italian unification and independence; the slogan “Viva Verdi” came to stand for “Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia” (Long Live Victor Emmanuel, King of (unified) Italy). Verdi himself, ‘the voice of the Risorgimento’ served in Italy’s first national parliament and his funeral cortege in 1901 was followed by a crowd of some 300,000. His great German rival Richard Wagner actively supported the unsuccessful Dresden Revolution in 1849 and was forced to live for eleven years in exile. Long after his death, his music dramas with their powerful evocation of a heroic Nordic past provided a vibrant ingredient of Nazi ideology. The connection between Wagner’s music and Nazi politics still arouses great passions. Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite and racist and his operas are not performed in Israel to this day.

The political power of opera was recognized early by various censors who sought to control and tame it. Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, probably the three greatest operatic composers, repeatedly fell foul of censors as did virtually every major composer of the 19th century. Many famous operas exist in different versions as a result of their composers’ attempts to meet, to evade or even to resist the demands of censorship. Dmitri Shostakovitch’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District prompted a denunciation by the Communist Party newspaper Pravda in 1936, possibly written by Stalin himself, as “an ugly flood of confusing sound … a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and crashes” warning that “it might end very badly” for the composer. The work was banished for some thirty years and left Shostakovich living in fear of arrest and execution for the rest of his life.

Opera is a political phenomenon, not merely in its content but in the passions that it arouses and the political processes it sets in motion. This is true even today when it is no longer capable of launching revolutions but can be the topic of acrimonious debates. Individual opera productions are constantly sparking bitter disputes over whether they insult public mores or artistic tastes. Even more significantly, the question of whether the state should be subsidizing an ‘elitist’ art form in which the huge majority of the population has no interest is never far from the public agenda.

The staging of an opera is itself a political process involving many competing interests, including those of the composer, the producer, the conductor, the theatre director to say nothing of various temperamental singers and the multitudes of support workers – chorus members, orchestral players, technicians and stage-hands. Indeed there have been several operas, including by Mozart and Strauss, about the staging of an opera and associated conflicts and complications. For all the accusations of operatic elitism or maybe because of them, the BBC series The House documenting Jeremy Isaacs’ leadership of London’s Royal Opera House in 1995 attracted more than four million viewers. They were drawn to it largely by what seemed like the political shenanigans and intrigues of overstretched leadership, financial mismanagement, constant technical and human problems, embittered staff and capricious prima donnas.

Leadership and relations between leaders and their followers are central ingredients in many operas, as indeed they are in many types of drama and art. Operatic rulers range far and wide – heroic, tyrannical, benevolent, flippant, wise, guilt-ridden, magnanimous, punitive, loving, deranged, enlightened, ambitious, depressed, narcissistic, paranoid, illegitimate and so forth. They can be terrifying or merely ridiculous – Mustafa in Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri being a good example of the latter spiced with ill-hidden racist prejudices and xenophobia. They can be male or female: and in fact among the most villainous characters in all time operas one finds queens or princesses, like the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute, the lead female characters in Verdi’s Nabucco and Macbeth and the title roles in Rossini’s Semiramide, Strauss’s Salome and Puccini’s Turandot. They can be triumphant or punished by their karma: and usually, in opera, cruel and unjust leaders pay with their life with some remarkable exceptions such as Nero and Poppea in Monteverdi’s Incoronazione. Moreover, as with all drama, the same leader, say Verdi’s Otello, can be portrayed in many different ways by different interpreters in different productions – as noble warrior, jealous husband, deracinated alien, innocent child and so forth.

The chorus and the psychology of collective followership

Due to its ability to give collective voice to numerous individuals, opera can offer psychologically rich and complex portraits of human multitudes. Operatic choruses can show groups of people acting as rebellious mobs, disciplined fighting units, confused and needy subjects, patriotic crowds thirsting for freedom, merrymaking gatherings, debating assemblies, religious congregations and many others besides. Indeed, there are several major operas in which the chorus is a major character in the storyline or even the protagonist. “It is an opera not of heroes and heroines, but of crowds and armies” Bernard Shaw wrote astutely about Rossini’s William Tell (Arblaster, 1992: 76), something that can be said about several other works as well.

Operatic composers were not, of course, the first ones to use a chorus in giving voice to shared feelings and attitudes. The chorus in Greek tragedy was usually a group of men or women witnessing events and actions on the stage and offering a critical commentary on the characters, the situations they faced and their actions. Singing choirs are a central part of Western ecclesiastical tradition where polyphonic music with its dissonances and chromaticisms was reluctantly accepted by the Church as a means of praising God, reaching its own apotheosis in the great oratorios of Bach and Handel. The chorus also plays a major part in some large symphonic works, starting with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It is in opera, however, where it demonstrates its full dramatic potential by actually driving the drama forward and inviting the audience to share its own predicament and judge its actions.

Consider for example the famous chorus Va, Pensiero from Verdi’s Nabucco, the music spontaneously sung by the crowd that followed his funeral cortege more than half a century later. Exiled from their home to Babylon, oppressed and exploited, the Hebrew slaves are lamenting their fate in verses like “Oh, my fatherland, so beautiful and lost! Oh, remembrance, so dear and so ill-fated”. What gives these mundane words their great power and makes them utterly unforgettable is, of course, the music. They are sung in hushed unison by the chorus to one of Verdi’s sweeping melodies that carries everything along. The music’s almost unbearable nostalgia and yearning transcend individual differences to become part of a shared experience and a shared ideal, one that immediately reaches out to the audience. Between the world of Biblical Jews and the Italians’ messy political struggles for independence the gap is huge – and yet, “the choral texture becomes a musical metaphor of the democratic ideal” (Kimbell, 1981: 456).

Va Pensiero was the first of many patriotic choruses that established Verdi as a significant political figure of his age (another example from a year later is the chorus “O Signore dal tetto natio” from I Lombardi alla prima Crociata). It is worth noting that in turning Macbeth into an opera, Verdi sought to compensate for the omission of several dramatic episodes in Shakespeare’s drama, by composing substantial choral parts, including the chorus “Patria Oppressa” sung by Scottish exiles, echoing the sentiments of the Hebrew slaves and if anything bleaker and more desolate. This chorus was substantially enhanced in the revisions that Verdi carried out for the Paris production of the opera in 1865, where he also concluded the drama with a victory chorus celebrating the death of the tyrant and the end of oppression. It is the presence of the chorus throughout the opera that highlights the political character of the Macbeths’ crimes (Arblaster, 1992: 103–104) and its final celebration conveys the political message that tyrants do not last forever. The last word belongs neither to the dying tyrant nor to the new leaders; it belongs to the people.

It is notable that in several of Verdi’s early operas, the chorus acts as a leaderless mass, even if a leader (like the priest Zaccaria in Nabucco and Macduff and Malcolm in Macbeth) at some stage steps in to lead them. In contrast to the tyrants they oppose, these figures are dwarfed by crowds of followers that they lead – it is not the leaders but rather the followers who eventually ensure that good will prevail against evil and that the mass of humanity will hold tyrants to account. In his early works which were as much an expression of political aspiration as of purely musical values, Verdi offered an idealized view of the crowd driving historical events that may be seen as one-dimensional or simplistic. It is worth remembering, however, that in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when many intellectuals, such as Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine, had come to view revolutionary crowds as “band[s] of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with … blood” (cited in Rude, 1959: 2) or at least as rabble (a view which can be found in some operas, including in La Muette de Portici that launched the Belgian Revolution and even more in Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes), Verdi’s idealization stands as an important corrective.

A different depiction of the masses is presented in Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. The work is a sprawling political panorama of events in Russia during the doomed reign of Boris Godunov from 1598 to 1605, the tsar who assumed power following the death (possibly by assassination) of the legitimate heir, the ten-year-old Dmitry, who had been placed under his protection. The opera exists in several versions involving a number of scenes, some public and grand, some private and intimate, and a huge cast of characters including the Tsar and his children, monks, chroniclers, a pretender to the throne, a variety of boyars and noblemen, a Jesuit priest and a Polish princess, various policemen and frontier guards, a simpleton or Holy Fool and, above all, the people. The chorus is a vital part of this drama. As it frequently does for Verdi, here too the chorus represents above all the suffering people, in this instance the people of Russia during the period referred to as the “time of troubles”. Unlike Verdi’s choruses, however, the chorus, in this work assumes many different and highly differentiated forms, now as a rent-a-mob pleading with Boris to become their king, now as hungry and desperate crowd, now as a gang of unruly and callous street children, now as a riotous throng quarrelling among themselves, now as a mob thirsting for blood, now as an enduring and noble mass of humanity praying for a better future.

A particularly brilliant portrait of the people emerges in the opera’s final scene in the revised version, widely known as the Revolution scene. It starts in the pandemonium of a revolution, depicting an anarchic mob, including men, women and children, who have captured a local nobleman. They are baiting him, beating him and are about to torture and kill him. They are interrupted by the arrival of two itinerant vagabonds/monks who announce the coming of a new Tsar, the False Dmitry, and denounce the crimes of Boris Godunov. They, in turn, are followed by two Jesuits; they are captured by the mob who are preparing to hang them. At the crucial moment, the Pretender and his predominantly foreign retinue arrive on the stage. Urged by the vagabond monks, the mob immediately acknowledge him as their new Tsar. He, in turn, frees the captive nobleman and asks the crowd to follow him onto Moscow to seize power. They all exit the stage, leaving the Holy Fool alone to lament the sufferings of the people – they have now embarked on another ill-fated adventure under a different doomed leader.

In the course of the barely 20 minutes that this scene lasts, we see the crowd first as an anarchic but differentiated mob lusting for revenge – all energy and no direction or plan. It then comes under the influence of two opportunists who egg them on, only to embrace their new ruler, even though his first action is to deprive them of their prey. Their cries of ‘Glory, Glory’ are almost identical to those with which they had greeted his predecessor bringing the plot full circle to the earlier scene when the same people were celebrating Boris’s coronation.

Opera and leaders

Along with many other operas, Boris Godunov does not celebrate or support the view of rulers as transforming or charismatic leaders. Rulers in opera, even idealistic ones, suffer and, usually, fail in their missions. To be sure, most operatic rulers are kings and potentates, tyrants and occasionally democratically elected politicians rather than princes or conventional heroes, roles which are generally assigned to even more doomed characters. In few occasions when opera places an ostensibly charismatic leader like Joan of Arc, Moses or Alexander the Great centre-stage, the result scarcely highlights the character’s charisma, in the way, for example, that Bach does so successfully in his portrayal of Christ in his two settings of the passion. Instead, charismatic leaders, when they feature in opera, tend to emerge either as conflicted and tormented beings or as rather monochromatic characters on auto-pilot with destiny.

At its best, what opera, with its ability to invest words with conscious and unconscious significance afforded by music, can do is to open windows into the psychology of leaders. It can explore and expose in detail their ambivalence, confusion, doubts, regrets, disappointments, hopes, despair and many other emotions. It can reveal inconsistencies between desires and actions and discontinuities between intentions and outcomes. More specifically, opera can reveal sharply the leader’s inner conflicts and torments that are rarely discussed in public, and also the distance between a leader’s inner state of mind and his or her public pronouncements and displays. In this section, we will discuss three such operatic portraits of leaders, all dating from the latter part of the 19th century and all dealing with real historical personages from several centuries earlier. All three leaders in question lived in times of strife, war and rebellion and their operatic portraits display considerable psychological but also political complexity and depth.

Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra

In Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, the eponymous character, a former pirate, aided by two corrupt conspirators is elected Doge of Genoa in a successful attempt by the plebeians to seize power from the aristocracy. The opera’s tortuous plot is rife with conspiracies, conflicts, alliances and betrayals, at the political, family and personal levels. But behind the various machinations, deaths, curses, reunions and reconciliations, we have a magisterial portrait of a leader, whose legitimacy at the start of the drama is questionable but who, in the course of it, rises to considerable stature and authority as he strives to maintain the unity and harmony of the state in the face of rebellion and strife. The political motivations of the Doge are closely intertwined with his most private feelings: in the course of the opera we see him regularly deflected from his political goals because of his love for his daughter.

At the heart of the opera is a uniquely powerful scene, added by Verdi some 24 years after the work’s premiere, in which Boccanegra stands up to a rebellious crowd invading the Council Chamber. Plebeians and patricians throw a variety of accusations and recriminations at each other and intermittent fighting erupts which Boccanegra effectively quells with a message of peace inspired by Petrarch. Throughout the opera Boccanegra is portrayed as someone who seeks to heal class divisions in the light of conspiracies and betrayals (which also afflicted the historical Boccanegra throughout the two periods of his dogeship). At the opera’s desolate end, Boccanegra, reconciled with his patrician foe, dies, poisoned by the man who had orchestrated his ascent to the throne. Before he dies, and as the crowd is already mourning his demise, he anoints a young patrician (one who had earlier sought to kill him) as his successor. The omens for his successor are clearly bleak.

Anger and intimidation are in this leader’s repertoire as he is portrayed in the opera. His anger is indeed terrifying and it has to be terrifying if it is to control the forces of chaos and anarchy that he faces, in the manner of a true Machiavellian ruler (Machiavelli, 1513/1961) for whom maintaining the cohesion of his state is a supreme responsibility. But this is also a leader capable of displaying great generosity, magnanimity and love, aware that neither peace nor harmony can be built through tortures and executions. This ecumenical empathy is vastly amplified by Verdi’s magnificent music: it is surely not a coincidence that Simone’s most memorable musical utterance (the famous “Plebe, patrizi, popolo!” (Plebeians, patricians, people!) during the abovementioned Council Chamber scene) leads to a majestic ensemble in which the Doge’s passionate appeal for brotherhood enables the other characters, patricians and plebeians, allies and enemies, to, at least publicly, join him in expressing similar feelings, even if not sincerely held.

Verdi’s Don Carlos

Maintaining the cohesion of the state in the face of religious war and rebellion is also essential to understanding another major leader as portrayed in opera, Philip II of Spain. He is a central character in Verdi’s Don Carlos which was inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s eponymous drama. Philip is a less sympathetic character than Boccanegra, willing to send rebels and heretics to their death in defence of his realm, to abandon his only friend and ally to the Inquisition, to cheat, spy and bully his wife and her retinue and eventually to sacrifice his rebellious son in the interest of the state. In the hands of a lesser composer or a less politically shrewd composer, Philip would emerge as a mere brute of a man or just a melodramatic villain, as indeed such characters feature in many other operas. What makes Verdi’s portrait of Philip so compelling and instructive is, firstly, the dramatic situations in which the composer places him (and these owe a lot to Schiller) but more importantly the music that Verdi composed for Philip’s deep and authoritative bass voice.

Unlike Boccanegra, Philip has no direct problems with his legitimacy. He is the rightful monarch, the son of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, and in addition to the Iberian peninsula he rules many parts of Italy, central Europe and, of course, Flanders where he faces a bitter religious war and rebellion. He does not appear until a good hour into the opera and thereafter assumes centre stage. We first encounter him brutally dismissing the Queen’s lady-in-attendance for disobeying his orders. We then see him in a heated political argument with the idealistic Marquis de Posa on the value of freedom and peace in which Philip defends the use of naked force in defence of the realm. At this point, the orchestra bursts in a cacophonous explosion of sound, indicating both the ferocity of the force and the composer’s questioning its legitimacy. Yet, the argument closes mysteriously with the king taking his opponent into his confidence with the words:

Your proud gaze has penetrated deep into the heart of my throne;

Learn then the anguish and grief inside a head

Weighed down by the crown;

Look now at the royal palace

And the anxiety that pervades it.

Unhappy father, husband unhappier still.

In the next act, we see Philip dismissing the pleas for mercy of Flemish deputies, confronting Carlos, his son, who draws a sword against him, and “celebrating” the public burning of heretics. We then meet Philip in his royal study, after a sleepless night, lamenting a loveless marriage, a palace full of traitors and conspirators with eyes on the throne and a life that will only find rest in the black vault of the Escorial. This soliloquy, which in many performances ends with the monarch weeping privately, is rendered to the greatest music that Verdi composed for the bass voice (and possibly for any voice) and is followed by another political encounter. This time Philip meets the indomitable figure of the Grand Inquisitor who demands the death of Posa, the only man that Philip can trust or for whom he has any affection. The encounter between state and Church, vocally depicted through the struggle between two bass voices, can only be described as terrifying. The king’s final words, musically diving from the highest note of his voice to the lowest, leave no doubt as to the outcome of the struggle:

Thus, the throne will always

Bow in front of the altar!

In the rest of the opera, united, the throne and the altar bring about the death of the idealist Posa, quell another crowd rebellion led by Carlos and, in the final scene, preside over the demise of Carlos himself (although Verdi and his librettist departed from Schiller here allowing for some ambiguity concerning the hero’s actual end).

As potent piece of political music drama, Don Carlos offers a portrait of a leader who is lonely, suspicious to the point of paranoia, brutal and autocratic. He is strongly reminiscent of Plato’s (1993: 324ff) depiction of tyrants whose need to dominate stops them tasting “true freedom or friendship.” Philip’s isolation, a feature that generally goes unnoticed by leadership theorists, is near total, but so too is his courage in the face of opposition and adversity. Although never a sympathetic character, Philip emerges as a believable, three dimensional person with a single mission – to maintain the unity of his empire at all costs. To this end, he is willing to sacrifice his son, his only friend and, of course, any claim to personal happiness. Sacrifice is a key aspect of leadership, one which features in countless operas, from Mozart’s Idomeneo to Wagner’s Walküren and in innumerable religious texts, not least the Christian New Testament, yet it is rarely discussed by leadership scholars (for exceptions, see Choi and Mai-Dalton, 1999; De Cremer, 2006; Ruth, 2014). Grint (2010) who has provided by far the most convincing account regarding sacrifice as the sine qua non of leadership, views sacrifice as underpinning the leader’s isolation by creating a gulf between the leader who can make sacrifices and the followers who regard them as legitimate. Sacrifice is also the hallmark of the leader’s power, a power whose failure makes the leader him/herself a sacrificial victim.

Leaders … have a Faustian pact with their followers, in which the leaders accumulate privileges of power or wealth or whatever is deemed appropriate at the expense of the followers – some of whom may be sacrificed for the collective good. In return the leaders legitimate and secure the goals of followers, but if and when the leaders fail then they must become the sacrificial victims themselves. (99)

If leaders making sacrifices or being sacrificed themselves are not rare in opera, the image of a supreme leader weeping away from the public eye is a rare and very powerful one. It is certainly an image that haunts Thomas Mann’s (1968) young Tonio Kröger and when a public figure of considerable authority (including a politician, a judge or even a teacher or a lecturer) is seen crying, the effect can be overwhelming and unpredictable, as demonstrated by Margaret Thatcher when leaving office or George W Bush when awarding a posthumous medal to a dead serviceman. To see a person in authority cry and if the tears are seen to be genuine rather than manufactured for effect destroys the leadership mystique and lays bare the unconscious fantasy of the leader as someone above others, one who is not affected by the same afflictions as ordinary mortals.

Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov

Unlike Philip II, in most modern productions we do not see Boris Godunov crying. We do, however, see him psychologically collapse twice in the course of Mussorgsky’s great opera. The first time, he is undone by his courtier Vasiliy Shuisky’s description of the death of the legitimate heir to the throne. Later, and as the drama approaches its denouement, he meets the elderly chronicler Pimen who describes a dream of the murdered child and a subsequent pilgrimage to his grave, something that precipitates Boris’s final collapse and death. What we witness in these two scenes is a ruler in the grip of utter terror leading to his physical, spiritual and psychological unhinging. Witnessing such terror has a mesmeric effect on the audience and destabilizes another aspect of the leadership mystique, the fantasy of the leader as all-powerful and fearless in the face of extreme adversity. The effect is augmented by the breakdown of the musical line and the performer lapsing into something more akin to talk, as if the musical language has reached its limit in the face of abject horror, overpowering guilt and blind panic, emotions that we rarely witness in a ruler and are even hard to imagine.

In another memorable scene we see Boris meeting the Holy Idiot or Simpleton (yuródivïy) outside the Saint Basil’s Cathedral. The last to remain in front of the Tsar when a desolate crowd has melted away, the idiot accuses him of having blood on his hands, a charge that goes unanswered. This scene brings the supreme leader face to face with the lowest of his subjects and destabilizes another facet of the leader mystique by reversing the archetypal scene of meeting God on the day of Judgement (Gabriel, 1997) – here it is the lowly subject who passes judgement on the figure of authority, drawing the leader outside the rehearsed routines of protocol and ceremony and inviting us to judge him in a more authentic light. Whereas elsewhere in the drama, the people when confronted with overbearing power stay silent, here it is the monarch who stays silent in the face of the most extreme accusation that precipitates yet another crisis to his claim to legitimacy. Like Boccanegra and Philip II, Boris finds himself in total isolation; but unlike them, the outer crisis that he faces unleashes an inner crisis from which he will not recover.

All three leadership portraits discussed here present rulers who are isolated, who face challenges to their legitimacy, who are constantly preoccupied with conspirators and traitors undermining their rule and are governing countries torn by social strife, war and divisions. They all are greatly preoccupied with maintaining the unity of their state and, to different extents, they care for the welfare of their subjects. They are all prepared to make sacrifices and are willing to sacrifice their peace of mind in the interest of the state. They wield considerable power and, yet, they discover that this power is regularly foiled by religious and other institutions and is certainly insufficient in attaining their objectives. They all find that between their actions and the outcomes of these actions there is an insurmountable gulf. All three carry heavy burdens and suffer.

What makes these portraits particularly compelling is that, in addition to their public roles, we meet all three of them in intimate family situations. Boccanegra is reunited with a long lost daughter after many years of separation, Philip is engaged in a long-standing battle with his idealistic son and heir, while Boris is a loving father of two young children whose happiness or even survival he cannot secure. These intimate aspects of leadership, in all their complexity and ambivalence, are ones that we rarely glimpse in scholarly literature. In opera, on the other hand, they provide a powerful counter-weight to the leader’s public duties. Family life, far from being an irrelevant distraction turns out to be every bit as political as the public arenas. It is a conjugal dispute with his wife (whom he believes unfaithful) that leads Philip to a paroxysm of anger, prompting Posa to tell him:

Sire, half of the world is in your power

In such a vast empire,

Are you the only person you cannot rule over?

A notable difference between Philip’s behaviour as King and the leadership style displayed by Boccanegra concerns the extent to which each of these leaders allow their private feelings to dictate their political decisions. While Boccanegra’s public choices are affected by his paternal love for his daughter, he stops short of allowing this love to jeopardize the safety of his kingdom; even in moments of acute anger, he holds back from behaving impulsively or recklessly. Philip II, on the other hand, allows personal feelings prompted by jealousy for his wife and antagonism for his son to dictate his actions; his anger leads to all kinds of irrational acts as he seeks to bolster his authority (that unlike Boccanegra’s in not being questioned) by arbitrary and excessive displays of power, lapsing into the familiar pattern of tortured authoritarianism. The one political act that would resolve all of his conflicts, handing his rebellious son to the Grand Inquisitor, is precisely the one that he constantly evades, not due to love for his son, but due to his consistent tendency to displace his anger onto innocent scapegoats.

Operatic leaders: Ambition, legitimacy and abuse of power

Like other art forms, opera can offer different portraits of leadership, some more insightful than others. At its worst, it offers caricatures of power wielders, flattering or grotesque depending on the occasion. At its best, like other art forms, opera can provide unique insights into the process of leadership, the minds of the leaders and the needs of the followers. We can now return to our opening question, What, if anything, does opera tell us about leadership, leaders and followers, that social research or indeed other art forms do not tell us?

Our earlier discussion would suggest that, when addressing the complexities of leadership, opera in the first instance highlights the importance of leaders themselves as human agents with needs of their own, strengths and vulnerabilities. Current debates on leadership have tended to shift the emphasis away from the leaders towards the processes and functions of leadership that may be diffused throughout an organization, an institution or a state. Heroic leadership which once dominated leadership scholarship is currently being (rightly) contested by conceptualisations of leadership as process and relation. Opera, at its best, acknowledges that leadership may be a terrain of strife and contestation. Yet, it is a terrain that is claimed ultimately by women and men of ambition and power. The political requirements of a state, a community or an organization as well as the psychological needs of followers dictate that leadership cannot simply be diffused among many different actors: it must be exercised by particular individuals, men and women, who may perform better or less well and are judged by their record. Leadership cannot, in operatic terms, be distributed (Fitzsimons et al., 2011; Gronn, 2002; Rayner and Gunter, 2005) or dispersed (Raelin, 2003) in a bureaucratic hierarchy (although opera is not unable to portray bureaucracy) – it has to be identified with specific individuals who occupy leadership positions not only in relation to the events on stage but also in the minds of those on stage and, maybe more importantly, in the minds of the audience.

The legitimacy of the leaders is problematic, as we saw in all the earlier examples. In maintaining their legitimacy, leaders must in the first place uphold the unity of their realm and, secondarily, ensure the welfare of their followers and communities, as Machiavelli clearly recognized. In doing so, leaders must endure hardships, political and personal, and must make numerous sacrifices affecting themselves and their families. They must be prepared and willing to sacrifice others and suffer the consequences when such sacrifices are challenged or resisted. They may crave popular approval but must often endure disapprobation and vilification – hence leadership calls for courage and doggedness but, also, paradoxically, for flexibility and versatility.

Opera thrives in presenting leaders in situations of crisis, strife and conflict. The notion that leaders may enjoy a quiet and peaceful time is instantly dispelled by a casual look at any operatic text, even before one listens to the music to which it is set. Leaders are called to face conflict. Sometimes this may not be of their own creation but it often is – their actions knowingly or unknowingly unleash conflicts without which there is no drama. One aspect of conflict starkly revealed by opera is how easily interpersonal and family conflicts turn into political conflicts and vice-versa. Consequently, the fiction that long dominated management theorizing, that of the unitary concept of an organization in which all interests are aligned together and from which all conflict can be banished has no place whatever in operatic settings. Conflict is of the essence in leadership and, even when passionately and sincerely pursuing peace like Boccanegra, a leader is someone willing to fight and struggle for his or her beliefs and interests – a leader constantly lives with conflict and its unpredictable consequences. Opera, then, amply confirms Burns’ statement that “leaders, whatever their professions of harmony, do not shun conflict; they confront it, exploit it, ultimately embody it” (Burns, 1978: 39) Thus, if in making and enduring sacrifices, a leader comes close to a sacral figure (Grint, 2010; Hatch et al., 2005), in taking on opponents, winning and losing battles, a leader is never far from the figure of a warrior or a general (Alvesson and Spicer, 2011).

Two elements of leadership that are greatly highlighted by opera are the leader’s propensity to punish disobedience (Cunha et al., 2013) and to reward loyalty – both of these are liable to abuse. Punishments meted out by leaders can be unduly harsh (as in the case of Philip II) while rewards for loyalty easily turn into recipes for nepotism and flattery. Thus, while emphatically focusing the stage lights on the faces of leaders, opera does not necessarily seek to idealize them. On the contrary, with the exception of celebratory or sycophantic works, opera is suspicious of the idea of charismatic leaders who, through force of personality or gift of grace, can sweep all obstacles aside and lead their followers to a promised land. Works about monolithic and tetragonal leaders rapidly become boring and implausible with limited aesthetic and expressive potential.

Opera is also quite short of examples of transforming leadership, where leaders and followers relate in such a way as to advance to a higher level of morality and motivation, reaching new heights of achievement and common purpose (Burns, 1978). Even in the reduced sense proposed by Bass (1990, 1999), transformational leadership is more likely to be lapse into cultism and authoritarianism (Tourish and Pinnington, 2002). Transforming leaders in opera are liable to be depicted as opportunists, like the Pretender Dmitry, rousing the populace for personal aggrandizement in the Revolution Scene of Boris Godunov than as interacting with their followers for “mutual stimulation and elevation” (Burns, 1978: 4). Even when a leader in opera experiences a moment of personal transformation, realizes the responsibilities and burdens of leadership and determines to dedicate his/her life to the common good, the result can be surprisingly disappointing, as if such an occurrence is so contrived that no amount of effort from the librettist and composer makes it plausible. This is demonstrated by Don Carlo in Verdi’s Ernani who, craving to be elected Emperor (as Charles V), needs only a few seconds (and a few bars of music) to transform him from unscrupulous and quite villainous womanizer into idealistic statesman concerned with leaving a benign legacy to posterity.

Operatic leadership is ineffably linked to ambition, even when a leader assumes power reluctantly (as in the cases of Boccanegra and Boris). Ambition can make leaders attractive to followers, yet, it quickly becomes a double edged sword – it can help leaders assume great power and make them hugely popular with followers; it can also enable them to endure unpopularity and adversity. In the majority of cases, it also leads to their downfall, something that can be observed daily in our times with leaders of business organizations, international bodies, public sector organizations and, of course, political parties, as demonstrated by the tribulations that afflicted several of the UK’s recent Prime Ministers. Opera, therefore, consistently highlights the dark side of leadership (Tourish, 2013). It poignantly and pointedly demonstrates that the same qualities that raise leaders to great heights, their ambition, self-confidence, eloquence, decisiveness and so forth also account for their shortcomings. This, maybe, is the most important lesson from opera, as it is from tragic drama – the same qualities that account for a leader’s triumphs also account for his or her downfall.

This then may be the most important lesson that opera affords us on the topic of leadership. Great figures make for powerful drama, especially if we can observe them and compare their actions on the large political stage as well as in intimate contact with their close associates and their families. Opera can highlight the needs of the people as followers through powerful choruses and large multitudes acting and singing in concert on stage, emphasizing their propensity to come turn to a ‘strong man’ especially in times of stress and uncertainty. In most such cases, leaders, successful at first, are more liable to disappoint than meet the exaggerated expectations and hopes of their followers. Early miracles and triumphs are generally preambles to calamities and misfortunes.

Fortunately, most organizations, like hospitals, businesses and government departments, universities and international organizations, in spite of their rhetoric neither seek miracles nor demand them of their leaders. Leaders do not have to be superhuman and, as opera warns, seeking to appear as such usually proves fatal. Delivering a sound service to their constituents, respecting their communities and the environment, conducting their business in an ethical manner and supporting their own staff are much more important goals than chimeric ambitions of being Number 1 in this or World Leader in that (Thanem, 2013). In most organizational contexts, realistic, down to earth, accountable and pluralistic leadership is far more likely to produce enduring and socially meaningful results than leadership that, lapsing to hype and hubris (Claxton et al., 2015), casts itself as transformational or charismatic.

In conclusion

Opera thrives in depicting the motives, actions and emotions of large multitudes of people and their rulers, especially in moments of strife, uncertainty and crisis. At its best, opera can provoke, annoy, challenge and inspire us, offering insights into the predicaments and emotions of followers and their leaders. It is particularly effective at portraying the followers’ potent and conflicting needs for protection, certainty and freedom and also the leaders’ ambition, uncertainty and isolation. Opera highlights the anxieties of leaders facing challenges to their legitimacy, often surrounded by conspirators and sycophants and often resorting to inappropriate punishments, sacrifices and favours in seeking to quell these anxieties. It illustrates powerfully how some of the leaders’ qualities turn into vices when circumstances change, unleashing abuses of power and legitimizing other ethical transgressions. Finally, opera reminds us that maintaining the cohesion of a state, an empire or even an organization is not a simple matter and cannot be taken for granted. This is a lesson that leaders ignore at their own peril as many of Europe’s political leaders are discovering to their cost as this article is going to press.