Opera: Desire, Disease, Death

"A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th- and 20th-century operatic texts. . . . This is an extraordinary examination of how opera uses the singing body—gendered and sexual—to give voice to the suffering person. Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"The authors’ argument is rich and complex; it draws on source, text and music; it is also medically sound. Opera is quintessentially an art of love and desire, of loss and suffering, of disease and death. Hutcheon and Hutcheon enrich our understanding of both content and context."—Opera News

"Linda and Michael Hutcheon have done a fine job of pulling together medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera. . . . For opera lovers and for anyone interested in seeing good, synthetic reasoning at work, this is a fine study."—Publishers Weekly

Linda Hutcheon is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of, most recently, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. Michael Hutcheon, M.D., is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. His many articles have appeared in American Review of Respiratory Disease and other journals.