Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes are two extraordinary operatic heroes. As essentially twentieth-century figures they are worlds away from their counterparts in the two preceding centuries. Wozzeck is a downtrodden private soldier and Grimes a misunderstood fisherman, and both are at odds with the world around them, which they think of as alien and hostile. Each is tormented, provoked and hounded to his tragic demise. Wozzeck becomes increasingly deranged, murders his unfaithful mistress and kills himself; Grimes, who may have abused his young apprentices, retreats into an increasingly alarming fantasy world and drowns himself. Are they mad, bad, or merely non-conforming victims of intolerable circumstances? Their strange ideas and unreasonable behaviour certainly place them on the borderline between madness and normality – indeed, they compel us to reflect on madness and who in the opera is actually mad. Yet their words and music portray them as credible, sympathetic individuals caught up in situations beyond their control, figures in whom we can recognise something of our own experience. It is perhaps no coincidence that their respective operas appeared in the wake of the extreme horrors of the First and Second World Wars, Wozzeck in 1925 (composed in 1914-22) and Peter Grimes in 1945.

Their psychiatric diagnosis thus presents a challenge. The two operas draw on stories inspired by real early eighteenth-century individuals. Berg's opera is based upon Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck of 1837 (Berg changed the name only because he had misread the original); this in turn was based on a celebrated legal case in which Woyzeck's sanity was in dispute. In the opera, the protagonist's sanity remains ambiguous. Britten's opera is loosely based on George Crabbe's poem The Borough of 1810, which also questions its hero's sanity. Taken together, Wozzeck and Grimes have a significant number of traits consistent with the Cluster A personality disorder: this consists of paranoid, schizoid and schizotypal types, and is a condition not necessarily amenable to specific treatment. But theirs is not a mental illness such as schizophrenia: this would imply that they should not be held responsible for their behaviour and that they probably need antipsychotic medication.