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A personal view

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Mark Jones
Mark Jones*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Medicine, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London EC3
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That art is an expression of man's attempts to understand himself and his environment is as important as the purely aesthetic qualities of the piece, whatever it may be. Opera, together with the other performing arts, literature and painting, cannot simply be seen as pure entertainment. It is also a reflection of the society in which the composer and librettist lived, and the issues and values contemporary to those people. Opera with its fusion of words, music and theatre is able to delineate those issues involved and present them with an emotional intensity possibly unequalled elsewhere in art. Musical imagery is used to portray and develop the characters in opera by inflecting the librettist's words and embedding them in a sound world. This is how we can gain access to those characters' thoughts and emotions. As psycho-dramas the works of the late 19th and the 20th centuries reach the greatest level of complexity.

Type
The psychiatry of opera
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 14 , Issue 5 , May 1990 , pp. 306 - 307
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1989

References

Feggetter, G. (1980) Suicide in opera. British Journal of Psychiatry, 136, 552–557.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacDonald, M. (1977) The inner side of wisdom: suicide in early modern England. Psychological Medicine, 7, 565–582.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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