Our modern narratives of science and technology can only go so
far in teaching us about the death that we must all finally face.
Can an act of the imagination, in the form of opera, take us the
rest of the way? Might opera, an art form steeped in death, teach
us how to die, as this provocative work suggests? In "Opera: The
Art of Dying" a physician and a literary theorist bring together
scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons on living and
dying that this extravagant and seemingly artificial art
imparts.
Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera to that in
tragedy, the Hutcheons find a more apt analogy in the medieval
custom of "contemplatio mortis"--a dramatized exercise in imagining
one's own death that prepared one for the inevitable end and helped
one enjoy the life that remained. From the perspective of a
contemporary audience, they explore concepts of mortality embodied
in both the common and the more obscure operatic repertoire: the
terror of death (in Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites"); the
longing for death (in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"); preparation
for the good death (in Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung"); and
suicide (in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly"). In works by Janacek,
Ullmann, Berg, and Britten, among others, the Hutcheons examine how
death is made to feel logical and even right morally,
psychologically, and artistically--how, in the art of opera, we
rehearse death in order to give life meaning.
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