Operas are grand in every way: sets, costumes, music, divas, and ticket prices. Their plots celebrate the agony and the ecstasy of gods and goddesses as well as kings and queens, knights and courtesans, shepherds and servants. So it’s surprising that some of this art form’s great dramatic moments revolve around a workaday functionary, the notary.

Webster’s dictionary defines notary as a public officer who attests or certifies documents such as deeds and wills to make them authentic. I used the services of a notary when I created my living trust.

A notary also takes affidavits and depositions and witnesses documents in order for them to comply with the legal code. The office is bare bones—a desk, a chair, and a telephone; perhaps the notary does not have an office, but travels to other offices or venues where required. And all that is required is to certify someone else’s signature, affix one’s own signature and seal, and record the date.

Pretty prosaic. Yet, the notary is one of opera’s most fraught characters. Many a scene of emotional tension centers on the final-act entrance of the notary or even just the expectation of the arrival of this official. L’elisir d’amore, Cosi fan tutte, Don Pasquale, Der Rosenkavalier, and Lucia di Lammermoor count among the popular works that include a notary in the cast, though not necessarily giving him words to sing.

              

when few people could write, notaries were more important than they are now. No

 

betrothal, marriage contract, will, agreement, or record had legal validity unless it

 

bore the seal of a licensed notary. In France the king commissioned notaries, and

 

every city, town, and village had so many according to the number of inhabitants.

 

These officials charged a small fee but made good money because they were

 

much in demand. Theirs was an honorable profession.

              

               Opera audiences were familiar with these officials who were omnipresent

 

in real life. French, Italian, and Spanish literature abounds in them. Jokes about

 

notaries were as prevalent as jibes at lawyers are today.

 

On the opera stage, notaries are often comic figures. The notary enters invariably costumed in a disheveled, over-sized black robe and sports a wig, askew, and a hat of preposterous proportions and shape. He carries a big black ledger, a pot of ink and a quill pen, and many large sheets of paper covered with miniscule writing. He is sometimes nearly blind.

Despite his drollery, the notary usually sets in motion the great dramatic scene of the evening. In his presence a legal document will be created that will unalterably affect the fate of any number of other characters. To sign or not to sign, that is the question usually roiling in the mind and the music of the soprano, for it is the marriage contract that lies on the table. The signing of this contract takes place before the church ceremony—it is the point of no return. The unhappy girl will now be bound for life to a wealthy old codger, and all the while the handsome young fellow she loves anguishes on the other side of the stage. A trio, quartet, or septet expresses the varying emotions of all involved: despair, triumph, fear, disgust, hatred, passion. The notary appears unaware that all this is going on. He is searching for his blotting paper.

False notaries turn up now and again. Sometimes a friend or servant masquerades as a notary to further the plot along. In Don Pasquale, the tenor involves other cast members in a scheme to dupe the Don into a fake marriage so he will consent to the real marriage of his nephew, the conniving tenor. In Cosi fan tutte, the two sisters fall in love with Albanians while their erstwhile lovers are out of town and Don Alfonso and Despina concoct . . . but, wait, this is an opera. I’m not supposed to be able to summarize its plot inside a paragraph. Let’s just say that the servant, Despina, dresses as a dithery notary in order to entrap the women in a demonstration of their unfaithfulness.

She drones, in an annoying nasal voice, “the stipulated contract with the normal provisions in judicial form. By this contract drawn up by me, the following are joined in matrimony,” stating the names of the ladies of Ferrara and the gentlemen, Albanian nobles, and begins to itemize the terms of the dowry and settlement. Just as ink is about to be applied to paper, when the tension is almost unbearable, the ladies’ lovers, who were disguised as the Albanians (and not recognized by their girlfriends!), return to accuse, forgive, and embrace in the last fifteen minutes of the three-hour performance. The shenanigans would never end were it not for the notary, whose presence demands a showdown.

So, we cannot eliminate the notary from the plot. This works well until the production staff decides to set the opera in a different time and place than the composer did. Last year I attended a staging of L’elisir d’amore, written in Italy in 1832, now taking place in a diner on Route 66 in the 1950s. A few months later San Francisco mounted the same opera in the Napa vineyards circa 1914. These are amusing productions, with vintage cars, blinking neon signs, and Elvis impressions, and it all seems plausible until the notary enters, now in a modern suit but definitely a creature out of time and out of place. No one in the opera house objects. After all, it’s an opera—it doesn’t have to make sense.

It just makes for a memorable evening, and the music takes care of that, transforming dull, ordinary facets of life. Music legitimizes the inconsistencies, anachronisms, and irrationalities. Add elegant costumes, atmospheric lighting, and a larger-than-life backdrop for improbable action, and the magic of opera transforms even a notary.