Opera: Desire, Disease, Death

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. (May)