1 - Disordered not Mad

Summary

Opera provides us with invaluable insights into human character and behaviour. Indeed, through its fusion of words, music and performance, it can reveal our understanding of mankind in all its variety and deviance, and illuminate the human mind in a way not possible in either literature or straight theatre. In this study I shine the spotlight on twelve operatic men, and assess them from a psychiatrist's viewpoint as if they were presenting themselves as actual patients. Most of them suffer, and nearly all cause those around them to suffer, as a consequence of their personality and behaviour. Their personalities differ from our own only in degree and quality, and fall outside what is generally considered to be the normal spectrum, without their being mad in the sense of mental illness. My aim is not simply to ‘diagnose’ them, although they all do appear to conform to particular types of personality disorder, but rather to explore the somewhat contentious concept of abnormal personality through opera. Of course, Art has its own means and ends. But the observation of Life is central to dramatic art, and audiences constantly relate what they see in the theatre to what they meet, or might meet, outside it. This study is thus a contribution to the process of relating. The opinions presented here by a now retired psychiatrist are, inevitably, my own. I am not, perhaps, abreast with the very latest thinking, and my views do not necessarily reflect the views of my psychiatric colleagues and those of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

(a) Personality Disorder

The twelve ‘dysfunctional heroes’ are grouped in six matching pairs. They are: Otello, from Giuseppe Verdi's adaptation of Shakespeare, and Boris Godunov, from Modest Musorgsky's adaptation of Pushkin; Iago, from Verdi's Otello, and John Claggart, from Benjamin Britten's adaptation of Melville's Billy Budd; Wozzeck, from Alban Berg's adaptation of Büchner's Woyzeck, and Peter Grimes, from Britten's adaptation of Crabbe's The Borough; Werther, from Jules Massenet's adaptation of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Hermann from Tchaikovsky's adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades; Don Giovanni, from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte's derivation from various sources including Molière, and Eugene Onegin, from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's adaptation of Pushkin; and Faust, from Charles Gounod's adaptation of Goethe's Faust, and Gustav von Aschenbach, from Britten's adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.