Cholera rages in Webern’s Lulu and Britten’s Death in Venice. Violetta and Mimi are preeminent tuberculosis patients in Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s La Bohème, respectively. It is a given that operas involving serious illnesses recur regularly throughout music history. The famed examples mentioned illustrate that opera history has primarily featured diseases that were once epidemic, yet now, reasonably under control. Compositions presenting more recent diseases (Aids, Ebola, Covid-19…) are rare in comparison, if existent at all. We can situate operas that are inspired by diabetes mellitus somewhere in between; literature on the creative reception of this metabolic disorder is largely non- existent.
My paper as proposed addresses three recent operas dealing with diabetes. Augmenting Alfred, Alfred by Franco Donatoni (1995), Diagnosis: Diabetes by Canadian composer Michael Park (2015), and La straordinaria vita di Sugar Blood by the Spanish composer Alberto Garcia Demestres (2017) will be discussed. Cast in music and text, these operas share a patient’s personal perception of suffering from metabolic disorder, yet the individual experiences vary in terms of their emotional impact, physical ordeal, social implications, as well as in their intellectual perception of the treatment process. In all three cases, the composer positions himself as an expert witness who channels his involvement creatively through music, either by presenting himself as a vulnerable patient (Donatoni), by approaching the topic through medical facts (Park), or sublimated via the vicissitudes of an adolescent girl (Demestres).
The diabetic observations are cast in telling musical parameters, styles, sounds, and (adaptive) structures through which, for example, hypo and hyperglycemia conditions are mediated. I argue that the Medical Humanities (scholars from both disciplines, doctors, as well as patients) can learn a great deal from these musical, first-person portrayals of diabetes mellitus.

Musique et maladie : jour 2

Entre histoire de la musique, histoire de la médecine et philosophie des sciences dans le monde occidental, ce colloque international se propose d’interroger les conditions et les méthodes de leur dialogue à l’âge moderne, du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours : études de cas, pathographies d’artistes, maladies et représentations du malade à l’opéra, spécialités médicales, psychiatriques, cardiologiques ou pneumologiques, à l’aune de l’œuvre… Comment comprendre la place accordée à la musique et au musicien dans les écrits médicaux, qu’ils relèvent de l’anatomie, de la physiologie ou de la thérapie ? Que retenir de l’intérêt des artistes eux-mêmes pour les sciences médicales ? Prises au sérieux et non réduites au rang de curiosités, ces questions ouvrent un vaste champ d’études, celui du corps du musicien, créateur aussi de symptômes. Comité scientifique : - Vincent Barras (Institut des humanités en médecine, Lausanne) - Laurent Feneyrou (CNRS – STMS, Paris), Céline Frigau Manning (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 – IHRIM) - Philippe Lalitte (Sorbonne Université – Iremus – Collegium Musicae, Paris) - Emmanuel Reibel (Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris – École normale supérieure de Lyon).