Book Review

Opera: Desire, disease, death

N Engl J Med 1996; 335:1163-1164October 10, 1996

Article

Opera: Desire, disease, death
(Texts and Contexts. Vol. 17.) By Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon. 294 pp. Lincoln, Nebr., University of Nebraska Press, 1996. $40. ISBN-0-8032-2367-6.

It was a rainy Good Friday in 1954. A fellow intern at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital agreed to cover for me. I took the subway to the Metropolitan Opera House to see Parsifal, an opera I have seen every year since. One of Parsifal's overwhelming moments takes place in act 2. Kundry, a symbol of the “eternal-womanly,” entices Parsifal in a luxuriant garden, where she embraces him with a long kiss. Parsifal reacts with horror and bursts out: “Amfortas! — Die Wunde! — Die Wunde!”

According to Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, the wound in question was not inflicted by a spear, but was a consequence of sexual surrender. Amfortas's wound was a syphilitic gumma! In this book, a wonderfully original analysis of operatic representations of disease, Michael Hutcheon, an associate professor of medicine, and Linda Hutcheon, a professor of English and comparative literature, both at the University of Toronto, explain how opera employs sexuality and desire to transcend illnesses. Aaron Copland's definition of opera, “la forme fatale,” is appropriate for the subject of this book. The authors say that opera is, and has always been, obsessed with death. There are stabbings, shootings, drownings, and suicides, many involving women, as well as tuberculosis, syphilis, and cholera.

The book begins with famous “last breaths” of tubercular heroines, who include Antonia in The Tales of Hoffmann, Violetta in La Traviata, and Mimi in La Bohème. Antonia's cheeks flush when she is possessed by the “demon of music.” For Mimi and Violetta, living, loving, and dying are inseparable from their disease and their sexuality. Mimi's tuberculosis is associated with poverty and contagion, whereas Violetta's has to do with money and high society.

“Syphilis, Suffering, and the Social Order” follows the chapter on tuberculosis and mainly involves Parsifal. In Wagner's libretto, Amfortas's wound is inflicted as he sinks into the arms of Kundry. Her master, Klingsor, seizes Amfortas's Spear of Longinus and wounds him. But Hutcheon and Hutcheon see Amfortas's wound as a gumma ulcerating through the skin and involving a rib. In Wagner's day, syphilis was a sign of the scourge of God — a punishment for sexual irresponsibility.

We also meet Lulu, in Alban Berg's opera. A prostitute in London, she had infected her husband, Alwa, with the “pale spirochete.” (“The prostitute pollutes but does not suffer.”) When Igor Stravinsky saw the Hogarth paintings of degeneracy (also executed as engravings) at the Art Institute of Chicago, he asked W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman to set “The Rake's Progress” to music. Tom Rakewell inherits a fortune, but becomes a rake who impregnates young women, wears the latest London fashions, gambles, goes through a loveless marriage with a rich old hag, and dies in Bedlam of “chagrin and tertiary syphilis.” The villain, Nick Shadow, offers Tom money, happiness, and success in exchange for his life and soul. Anne Trulove saves Tom, but Nick curses Tom into madness (really tertiary syphilis).

Leonard Bernstein had a different view of syphilis in 1956 when he, with others, set Voltaire's Candide to music. In the opera we find Pangloss in the bushes giving “intensive private tuition” to young Paquette. Pangloss, now a syphilitic beggar, was Candide's tutor. He is disfigured by multiple syphilitic gummas, but neither the authors nor the audience connect syphilis with suffering and pain. Perhaps thanks to penicillin, syphilis as a social disease — a consequence of moral failure — could be the subject of theatrical humor.

In the chapter “ `Acoustic Contagion': Sexuality, Surveillance, and Epidemics,” the authors take up cholera, which arrived in Western Europe as an epidemic in 1831. Like tuberculosis and syphilis, cholera was related to personal (and sexual) habits. We see this theme intertwined with the folkloric image of a miasma related to decay, putrefaction, and stench that arose from stagnant water and marshes in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. Translated by Kenneth Burke). Mann's book was the subject of Benjamin Britten's last opera. The same-sex affection portrayed in Lulu appears here in the story of Gustav von Aschenbach's love for a Polish boy, Tadzio, who is vacationing with his family at the same hotel as Aschenbach.

Mann's and Britten's descriptions of cholera are complex, medically correct, and metaphorical. They connect cholera with miasma through the stagnant lagoons of Venice and its hot summer atmosphere. Both Mann and Britten accurately describe how Aschenbach died, of cholera sicca. As portrayed by Mann, Apollo and Dionysus confront Aschenbach for his devotion to Tadzio. Cholera was associated with homoerotic affection, which wins out over “beauty, reason, and form” (Apollo). Overcome by rapture, passion, and violent commotion (Dionysus), Aschenbach says “Let the Gods do what they will with me.” He loses all resistance and believes he has undergone total moral and spiritual disintegration. He succumbs to “dry cholera” and dies on the beach.

From the sirocco that oppresses Venice, Hutcheon and Hutcheon move to an atmosphere of cigarette smoke. And, of course, to Carmen. When 19th-century women smoked, it was considered a signal of rebellion or sexual availability. In Carmen, the opening scenes focus attention on the association of cigarettes and tobacco with sexuality, race, and violence. Although Carmen is actually just a working-class cigar maker, others saw her as “somewhat whore, somewhat Jewess, somewhat Arab, entirely illegal, always on the margins of life,” in the words of Catherine Clément. The associations of smoking, violence, and sexuality in Carmen are still prominent in today's films and advertisements.

The epilogue of the book is entitled “ `Life-and-Death Passions': AIDS and the Stage.” AIDS has been compared to the plague and also to cholera, tuberculosis, and syphilis, with which it has common denominators, in both the medical and social realms. A mainstream opera on AIDS has not been fully staged, but John Corigliano dedicated his first symphony to friends and colleagues afflicted with AIDS.

I recommend this book to everyone with an interest in music, opera, literature, and world history. My only quibble is with the lack of a discography of the operas under discussion. Otherwise, this is a scholarly and provocative book.

Aaron J. Marcus, M.D.
New York Veterans Affairs–Cornell Medical Centers, New York, NY 10010-5050