"A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th- and 20th-century operatic texts. . . . This is an extraordinary examination of how opera uses the singing body—gendered and sexual—to give voice to the suffering person. Highly recommended."—Library Journal "The authors’ argument is rich and complex; it draws on source, text and music; it is also medically sound. Opera is quintessentially an art of love and desire, of loss and suffering, of disease and death. Hutcheon and Hutcheon enrich our understanding of both content and context."—Opera News "Linda and Michael Hutcheon have done a fine job of pulling together medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera. . . . For opera lovers and for anyone interested in seeing good, synthetic reasoning at work, this is a fine study."—Publishers Weekly Linda Hutcheon is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of, most recently, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. Michael Hutcheon, M.D., is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. His many articles have appeared in American Review of Respiratory Disease and other journals.
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Amazon.com Review
Opera has never been short on pain and suffering. The diseases that actually appear onstage, however, depend greatly on cultural context. In this provocative academic study, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon ponder the significance behind the ailments that beset operatic characters. The authors' division of specialties--she is a literary critic, he is an MD--gives them a built-in perspective on their subject. The Hutcheons do not claim to be musical experts; they quote from scholars to bolster their arguments, which focus on librettos and source material.
Operatic diseases are largely those with overtones of moral, not just physical, infection. Tuberculosis was a 19th-century favorite, associated with feverish passion and the self-consuming flame of artistic creativity. The authors contrast tubercular heroines before and after the discovery of the illness's cause, which altered the perception of TB from a disease of temperament (La Traviata) to one of poverty and overcrowding (La Bohème). They also consider syphilis (The Rake's Progress, Lulu, and even Parsifal), cholera (Death in Venice), and another "pathology," smoking (Carmen). As the last example hints, the book's true theme is not disease, exactly. These conditions and habits--all linked in some way to emphatic sexuality--indicated a morally dubious life and marked a character for doom.
The authors' thesis encourages the reader to look behind the assumptions in these works. That is valuable, sometimes more than the arguments themselves, which can drift into repetitiveness and jargon (lots of references to "gendered coding" and "transgressiveness"). In an epilogue, the Hutcheons discuss plays--there are not yet any operas--dealing with AIDS. These works suggest a 21st-century model: affirmative, sometimes angry, refusing to exoticize or condemn their diseased heroes. --David Olivenbaum
From Publishers Weekly
To paraphrase the old saying: "It isn't over until the consumptive lady dies." A professor of comparative literature and English and a doctor, respectively, Linda and Michael Hutcheon have done a fine job of pulling together medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera. In their study of tuberculosis, they point to Robert Koch's 1882 lecture announcing the discovery of the infectious nature of tuberculosis as one key to understanding the difference between Alfredo's treatment of Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata (1853) and Rodolfo's rather more reluctant approach to the declining Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme (1897). Perhaps because there has been so much written about AIDS and the arts, that final chapter isn't particularly fresh; and the chapter on smoking in Carmen and Il segreto di Susanna, among others, is more tangential to the thesis, though it does reiterate certain points about transgressive women. But without a doubt the most important chapter is that on Amfortas's wound in Parsifal. It may have been a bit of prudery that caused Wagner to move Amfortas's never-healing injury from the groin, where it originally appeared in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, to the side. But the authors make a very convincing argument that this was not (or at least, not only) about Christian symbolism. The circumstances of the wounding and the symptoms make it very likely that Wagner meant, and a contemporary audience would have understood, the wound to be a sign of syphilis. For opera lovers and for anyone interested in seeing good, synthetic reasoning at work, this is a fine study. Illustrations.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wealth of dark detail on opera's unique social situations,
By Rachel Abbinanti (tusai1@aol.com) (Chicago) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Texts and Contexts) (Paperback)
Opera has become yet another popular sport today,and thank someone that a growing number of essayists and scholars have switched away from the cloistered rigours of musical academia, an academia that simply analyzes how the notes and tones move and come toward organization. This is valuable but explains nothing of the especially fascinating aspects of opera,its historical,social and political dimensions This book indeed has a focus drawing the darker sides of opera's implications. Desire for instance hits us right in the face as in Bizet's "Carmen". There a town in Seville was the site of a tobacco factory employed by only scantily clad women. It was hot in Seville and men(this is a true story) travelled from all over Europe just for a glimpse of the flesh of women rolling these penis-shaped objects. The Hutcheon's bring fascinating detail to their subjects. Michael Hutcheon is a doctor and analyzes the prevalence of consumption and tuberculosis in 19th Century Europe the backdrop of Verdi's "La Traviata". There is story of a consumptive kept woman devoted to the love and desire in all night parties in Paris.But there is a very human side to her as well not simply an avaricious opportunist. Disease was a bourgeois curse at that time that threatened to disrupt the middle-class family values as well as a disruption of profit-making. It was these classes who were in attendance at the opera,so these themes indeed stuck a social resonance. Someone like Violetta Valery, Verdi's anti-heroine, was the focus of this disruption(Violetta after "violare" in Italian to violate). We learn also of the presence of syphillis as an extension of these disruptive disease. The prostitutes in Lille infected the master race during the Second World War, as a means of guerilla warfare, which worked quite well. Speaking about opera in this way drawing all these details from opera's story-lines,plots and aesthetic strategies makes fascinating reading as well as enriching opera's scholarship beyond the four-corners of the music.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deepened my understanding,
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This review is from: Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Texts and Contexts) (Paperback)
Before reading "Opera: Desire, Disease, Death" I never realized how widespread and how grim tuberculosis and syphilis once were, and therefore how much these diseases worried people in Verdi's, Puccini's, and Wagner's time. This book has deepened my understanding of "La Traviata" and "La Boheme," which of course feature heroines suffering from tuberculosis, and "Parsifal," which, the authors have persuaded me, features a character (Amfortas) suffering from syphilis.
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