![]() We then meet the sisters, Fiordilighi and Dorabella, in their home. They agree to his terms of complete cooperation and rejoice at the pleasure they will have spending their winnings. (Their city of birth is a reference to Da Ponte’s mistress, Adriana Ferrarese, who was to sing the opera’s the first Fiordiligi.) The officers are ready to draw swords with the older man on this issue of contention, but he refuses, likening the fidelity of women to the “Arabian Phoenix” “every one says it exists but where it is, no-one knows.” When Don Alfonso proposes a wager, the officers eagerly accept and propose a sum of one hundred guineas, even offering a thousand if he likes. Ferrando and Guglielmo, two army officers, are passionately arguing with the elderly philosopher Don Alfonso for the constancy of their respective fiancées, two sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella from the town of Ferrera who are living in Naples. To set the scene: The opera opens in a café in Naples. It is necessary to reacquaint ourselves with the story of the opera and the scene in particular so as to explore the questions raised by the text. ![]() In the finale to the first act of Così fan tutte, “that third and neglected step child” of the collaboration between Lorenzo Da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a scene occurs that caught my attention, as an example of this convergence of music and medicine. Opera and lieder (song) with their specific text and dramatic possibilities present us with a greater range of material: tuberculosis in Verdi’s La Traviata, in Puccini’s La Boheme and in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman mental illness in Donizetti’s Lucia da Lammermoor, and cholera, which had repeatedly ravished 19th century Europe, in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice and in Alban Berg’s Lulu. There are those who also read into a repeated and syncopated solitary “A,” played by the cello section in the opening measures of his ninth and last completed symphony, the irregular rhythm of his own diseased heart. This led to his demise from subacute bacterial endocarditis in 1911. Gustav Mahler, in his Sixth Symphony (The Tragic), depicted the three hammer-blows that fate had dealt him in life which included the diagnosis of valvular heart disease. Bedrich Smetana, in the finale of his first string quartet in E minor, subtitled “From My Life,” inserts a high sustained high “E” in the first violin part depicting the whistling in his ears that presaged his eventual deafness. We speculate that his handicap, which forced him to give up concertizing, enhanced his achievements as a composer.įew works of instrumental music can inform us about disease, but there are examples. We marvel at the achievement of Beethoven knowing that during the last decade and a half of his life he could not hear his own playing on a pianoforte. The study of the biographies of great composers and their medical illnesses is of general interest, yet we may question if the information leads to a greater understanding of their music. Music, because of its largely abstract quality, confronts us with a different set of concerns. Examples cited in the medical literature have included rheumatologic and endocrine abnormalities noted by modern clinical observers in Renaissance works of art and orthopedic deformities or prosthetic appliances found in the populous canvases of Bruegel. In the visual arts, the depiction of an illness or some aspect of medicine or medical practice can be the topic of the work of art or figure in some detail of a painting that might not have even been the focus of the artist. If the author is a physician himself, for example Anton Chekhov, his observations take on greater credence and authenticity. In literature the specifics of a disease or an epidemic can be presented in an objective fashion that allows us to see their human and societal features. Two examples, the musical friendship of Theodore Billroth and Johannes Brahms and the consultation that Gustav Mahler sought with Sigmund Freud in 1910, have been the topics of papers I have presented to the Chicago Literary Club. As an amateur musician I have been particularly interested in the intersection of music and medicine. ![]() In the visual arts we might think of Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson” in the Mauritshuis or Thomas Eakin’s “The Gross Clinic” of 1885 depicting the distinguished surgeon Samuel D. Examples quickly come to mind: the world of the tuberculosis sanatorium in “The Magic Mountain” of Thomas Mann or an epidemic in “The Plague” of Alfred Camus. Paper given at the Chicago Literary Club on February 16, 2004Īs a physician, I have long been interested in representations of medical topics in literature, art and music. Mozart, Mesmer and medicine January 30, 2017
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