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Lucia and the Auscultation of Disease in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2020
Abstract
As many scholars have shown, regardless of its popularity today, the ‘mad scene’ of Lucia di Lammermoor was not popular in the several years that followed the premiere in 1835. In fact, audiences, critics and publishers of opera selections for the salon preferred the love duet of act 1 or the final scene of the opera when Edgardo kills himself upon hearing the news that Lucia is dead. In this article, I explore early nineteenth-century notions of hysteria, a disease that manifested with both physical and emotional symptoms. If undiagnosed, the individual suffering from the disease would experience muscle contractions, pupil dilations, delusions, cardiac arrest and eventual death. One of the seminal studies of hysteria in the first half of the nineteenth century was written by the French physician and medical historian Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (1799–1873), who published in 1833 Histoire philosophique de l'hypochondrie et de l'hystérie, a 500-plus page investigation into the cause and cure of hysterics and hypochondriacs. Through an investigation of the diagnosis of hysteria in d'Amiens's work and the sound and look of hysteria in Donizetti's opera, now made more acute through familiarity with the newly invented stethoscope (1816, René Laennec) and its ability to deliver the internal sounds of the body, we can see how close the opera comes to mirroring the look and sound of the disease, which may explain the lack of enthusiasm and in some cases outright hostility to Lucia's fall into madness in the early reception of the work in France.
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Footnotes
I am grateful to Mary Ann Smart, who read this article in draft form and presented me with helpful insights.
References
1 Lucia di Lammermoor was ‘performed annually [at the Théâtre-Italien] until 1855 (excepting 1852), with four performances during December 1837, seventeen in 1838, ten in 1839, six in 1840, six in 1841, twelve in 1842, eleven in 1843, four in 1844, seven in 1845, three in 1846, and nine in 1847’ (Rebecca Harris-Warrick, ‘Lucia Goes to Paris: A Tale of Three Theaters’, in Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004): 212).
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8 In the Walter Scott original text, Lucy Ashton's desire to marry the man she loves is continually thwarted by her mother, Lady Ashton, who suppresses every independent desire of her daughter. Such abuse, coupled with Lucy's sense of guilt of marrying a man she does not love, renders her at the end of the novel insane and mute. For a comparison between the novel and the opera in the treatment of Lucy/Lucia, see Newark, Opera in the Novel, 85–98; and Mary Ann Smart, ‘The Silencing of Lucia’, 123–5.
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15 Mary Ann Smart, ‘The Silencing of Lucia’, 128.
16 As per the libretto, right before Lucia's entrance in act 3, the priest describes Arturo's dead body covered in blood and prays that Lucia's blood-soaked hand (‘destra di sangue impure’) will not invite the wrath of God. Although Lucia's ‘blood-filled’ appearance in act 3 is a common element described in reviews of opera productions today, I have found no Paris reviews of the 1830s or 1840s that make mention of the blood in Lucia's appearance on stage. Indeed, the stage directions do not mention blood on the white dress of Lucia. However, in the Scott original, which serves as the model for this scene, Lucy Ashton is covered in blood from her victim's wound as she sits in the shadows of a large chimney.
17 Cammarano, Lucia di Lammermoor, act 3, scene 5, 32.
18 Cammarano, Lucia di Lammermoor, act 3, scene 5, 32.
19 According to William Ashbrook, even though Donizetti wrote out a cadenza for the end of this section of the aria, it was still expected for the singer to improvise this characteristic vocal set piece at each performance. Ashbrook, William, Donizetti and his Operas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 376CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more information on the cadenza and its connection to madness, see Pugliese, ‘The Origins of ‘Lucia di Lammermoor's Cadenza’, 23–42; and Smart, ‘The Silencing of Lucia’, 127–30.
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32 For the full section in the treatise where Laennec discusses these sounds, see Laennec, Traité de l'auscultation médiate, vol. 2, 421–48.
33 The ‘swan song’ as defined by Laennec was often popularized by early nineteenth-century writers, most especially in the work of Honoré de Balzac. For example, in the 1833 novel Le Médecin de campagne (Paris: L. Mame-Delaunay, 1833), the main character, a Doctor Benassis, interprets the distant sounds heard while traveling on a county road as that of a tubercular youth in the last stages of life. For commentary on Balzac's novel in relation to the practice of medicine in France, see Hildreth, Martha L., ‘Balzac's Le Médecin de campagne in Medical Discourse: Imagining the Doctor's Role in the Third Republic’, Journal of the Western Society for French History 32 (2004), 256–76Google Scholar.
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36 Le Temps (23 Dec. 1837); cited in Harris-Warrick ‘Lucia goes to Paris’, 220.
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38 In the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for scientists to rent theatrical spaces and to invite the public in order to demonstrate their latest scientific findings. Science thus became a public drama, which highlighted the forces of nature that define our reality. Indeed, according to Tresch, John, Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012): 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘Science was no longer mere observation: it was instead the production of effects’; see also Olson, Richard G., Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008): 164–206Google Scholar.
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41 Harris-Warrick, ‘Lucia goes to Paris’, 214, 227. According to letters dating from 1829, Donizetti was already complaining of the symptoms that would eventually claim his life; see Peschel and Peschel, ‘Donizetti and the Music of Mental Derangement’, 190.
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49 Vieth, Hysteria, 151–4. Curiously, for men, when suffering from similar symptoms of female hysteria (that is to say, a hypochondriac), such lesions are found in the gastro-intestinal tract; see Dubois d'Amiens, Histoire philosophique, 289.
50 Dubois d'Amiens, Histoire philosophique, 238–288.
51 See note 16.
52 Dubois d'Amiens, Histoire philosophique, 96–7. It is interesting to note that in recent productions of the opera, the appearance of blood is more pronounced in this penultimate scene, where some productions, such as the Katie Mitchell 2016 production at The Royal Opera House in London, even go so far as to have Lucia dripping in blood.
53 Dubois d'Amiens, Histoire philosophique, 290–92.
54 Cammarano, Lucia di Lammermoor, act 1, scene 4, 9–10.
55 In modern productions, it is customary to have the ghost appear as a character on stage to remind the audience of exactly what Lucia is thinking. I have found no evidence in the Paris productions of the first half of the nineteenth century that the ghost appears on stage.
56 Cammarano, Lucia di Lammermoor, act 2, scene 2, 16.
57 Cammarano, Lucia di Lammermoor, act 2, scene 2, 17.
58 Cammarano, Lucia di Lammermoor, act 2, scene 5, 22.
59 Cammarano, Lucia di Lammermoor, act 2, scene 6, 26.
60 Dubois d'Amiens, Histoire philosophique, 176.
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70 See note 7. The favourable reception of Lucia's ‘mad scene’ in the second half of the nineteenth century is often made in reference to the work of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893); see for example Clément, Catherine, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999): 87–90Google Scholar, and Pugliese, ‘The Origins of Lucia di Lammermoor's Cadenza’, 30–42. The founder of modern neurology, Charcot would turn the diagnosis and cure of hysteria into pure theatre. In Paris he would perform autopsies in front of huge audiences and exhibit hysteria patients in order to demonstrate that excessive sensitivity of the ovaries was one of the direct causes of the illness and also the cure. Charcot even would later publish photographs of hysteria patients in a way to highlight their physiognomy, which demonstrated an excessive vocality in the sufferer of the disease; see Charcot, Jean-Martin, Charcot, the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons, trans. Goetz, Christopher G. (New York: Raven Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Hustvedt, Asti, Medical Musses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Norton, 2011)Google Scholar.
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72 The cadenza was such a point of concern for Melba that according to an article in L'Art musicale (15 Dec. 1889), she and the directors devoted 10 weeks of rehearsals to the mad aria alone; see Pugliese, ‘The Origins of Lucia di Lammermoor's Cadenza’, 30–35.
73 Fauser, Annegret, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005): 348CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
74 As Pugliese argues, such a change in the ‘mad aria’ reflects the late nineteenth-century preference for female tragic figures who subvert their status of victimhood to become powerful women independent of men (a femme fatale); see Pugliese, ‘The Origins of Lucia di Lammermoor's Cadenza’, 37–42.