An evening at the opera is a treat and a pleasure. Music provides a relationship between psyche and soma, inner emotions and outer sensations, and opera adds other dimensions. Experience comes to the audience from many directions – narrative, drama, intense emotion, costumes, colour, music, words, staging, sets and behavioural disturbance. Narratives in opera are of the human, the godly, and the archetype, as well as the lovelorn, the power-hungry and the jealous. They feature extremes of cowardice and heroism, and of poverty and riches. In short, opera is a glorious reflection of society.
This well-written book involves all the above and adds psychiatry. It is wide ranging and extremely well researched. Cordingly considers all aspects of each opera, drawing on the original story, the libretto and the music, as well as biographies of the author, librettist and composer. He covers social and psychiatric history, conceptualisations of suicide and homosexuality, and ideas from psychoanalysis. Of the operas he covers, original authors include William Shakespeare (Otello), Georg Büchner (Wozzeck), George Crabbe (Peter Grimes), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust, Werther), Alexander Pushkin (Onegin, Queen of Spades) and Thomas Mann (Death in Venice). There seems to be great value in having the right librettist as a collaborator, for example Boito with Verdi for Otello, E. M. Forster with Britten for Billy Budd and Da Ponte with Mozart for Don Giovanni.
Cordingly takes twelve male characters who are ‘disordered’ and pairs them in six chapters by similarities of their personalities, which are operatic representations of personality disorders. Psychiatrists use broad categories of personality and the pairings in the book are clusters A, B or C. All but one of the twelve characters die, and six of those are by suicide. Realism and logic may be sacrificed for entertainment but we do recognise these types as we recognise similar traits in ourselves. The device of pairing protagonists is variably successful; the glamorous Don Giovanni seems unlike the tedious Onegin, there seem to be few similarities between Otello and Boris Godunov, and Verdi and Musorgsky's characters are also very different. However, any reservation about the pairings did not detract from the book. Cordingly's affinity is with characters from Tchaikovsky and Britten, who are quintessentially Russian and English, but those preferring other composers would not be disappointed as this book is filled with information. For example, I did not know that Berg, as well as attempting suicide, was treated for asthma by Freud.
Performances from the great opera houses are now being relayed to cinemas, and more people have the opportunity to share the excitement. Disordered Heroes in Opera is a readable reference to use before seeing a production. Cordingly may be disappointed by the number of copy-editing mistakes; he has clearly put a lot of work and a lot of himself into this publication. Nevertheless, the effort was worthwhile.
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