Opera: Desire, Disease, DeathWorking from the conviction that we can learn much about past and present societies by studying how they conceptualize and present diseases, this study looks at well-known operas in which love, sexual desire, illness, and death are inextricably linked. It does so in order to investigate not only the operas themselves but also the fears and anxieties of the societies in which they were produced and received. It focuses on operatic representations of diseases (and those who suffer from them) and the ways in which opera associates illness with sexuality, gender, and desire. The familiar operatic alliance of tuberculosis with female sexuality (the consumptive heroine) is countered with the more usually silenced relationships such as those between venereal disease and moral transgression or between cholera and homosexual desire. The conclusion turns speculative: studying the cultural and scientific representations of AIDS, it aims to predict the ideology and the form of the first AIDS opera. Table of ContentsPrologue: "All Concord's Born of Contraries" Chapter One:
Melodies and Maladies: An Introduction Chapter Two:
Famous Last Breaths: The Tubercular Heroine Chapter Three: Syphilis, Suffering, and the Social Order: Richard Wagner's Parsifal
Chapter Four:
The Pox Revisited: The "Pale Spirochete" in Twentieth-Century Opera Chapter Five: "Acoustic Contagion": Sexuality, Surveillance, and Epidemics Chapter Six:
Where There's Smoke, There's . . . Epilogue: |