Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Texts and Contexts)

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