Towards a History of Operatic Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the trope of psychoanalytic therapy in musical dramas, from Richard Wagner to Kurt Weill, concluding that psychoanalysis and the musical drama are, in some ways, companions and take cues from each other, beginning in the mid-19th century. In Wagner's music dramas, psychoanalytic themes and situations – specifically concerning the meaning and analysis of dreams – are presaged. In early modernist music dramas by Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg (contemporaries of Freud), tacit representations of the drama of hysteria, its aetiology and ‘treatment’ comprise key elements of the plot and resonate with dissonant musical soundscapes. By the middle of the 20th century, Kurt Weill places the relationship between analyst and patient in the foreground of his musical Lady in the Dark, thereby making manifest what is latent in a century-spanning chain of musical works whose meaning centres, in part, around representations of psychoanalysis.