Opera: The Art of Dying.(Book Review)

Opera: The Art of Dying by Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon Harvard University Press, 240 pp. $27.95

After exploring erotic-pathological themes in Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996), Linda and Michael Hutcheon turn their attention here to operas in which death assumes a more positive guise and characters struggle to come to terms with this most universal yet most frightening fate. The coauthors, "a practicing physician and a literary theorist," attempt to link opera deaths to the spiritual tradition called the contemplation of death (contemplatio moris), aimed at teaching the "art of dying" (ars moris).

Sister Blanche, in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites, provides a useful point of departure, given the character's difficult journey from fear of death and life to voluntary assumption of martyrdom--after first witnessing the terrifying, craven agony of the Prioress. The cult of death in Tristan und Isolde, which prompts the authors to look at Wagner's language, harmonic innovations and philosophical sources, will be a useful guide for relative newcomers, even if the two lovers' exalted excesses stretch the ars mortis concept far beyond its sober religious roots.

As for the discussion of Wagner's Ring, I remain unconvinced that it revolves around Wotan's "personal death." The ...