Tragic Manhood and Democracy: Verdi's Voice and the Powers of Musical Art

This work argues that tragedy is at once art and science—an absorbing art and precisely observed empirical inquiry into human psychology, whose subject matter is the dilemma of manhood under democracy. The author expands discussion of the idea of the tragic to include music drama in general and the operas of Verdi in particular, and explores the indispensable contribution of tragedy to an understanding of personal and political psychology through discussion of: the political theory of structural injustice resting on the suppression of voice, a developmental psychology of gender, and an interpretation of tragic art.