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A Convenience of Marriage: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity

2001; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1632/pmla.2001.116.5.1364

1938-1530

Linda Hutcheon, Michael Hutcheon,

Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration

At the risk of sounding like a parody of a conversation about opera and illness in the 1987 movie Moonstruck , we would like to relate a postperformance dialogue about Richard Wagner's last opera. Parsifal (not Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème , as in the film). While descending the same staircase at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Loretta and Ronny, the film characters played by Cher and Nicholas Cage, a man turned to his wife and said, not “You know, I didn't think she was going to die! I knew she was sick,” but “Do you think audiences today understand that Amfortas had syphilis?” Since this man is a physician, his wife was used to his medical observations, though this time he took her by surprise: “Syphilis? He was wounded by a spear when caught in the arms of the seductress Kundry!” “Yes,” he replied, “but that might just be Wagner's indirect or allegorical way of invoking nineteenth-century obsessive worries about venereal disease. Did you notice that this is a wound (one inflicted in a moment of amatory indiscretion) that won't heal, whose pain is worse at night and is eased only slightly by baths and balsams? To any nineteenth-century audience these symptoms and signals would have meant only one thing: syphilis.” “If that's the case.” his wife suggested, “then people must have written about this and we can find out.” “Not necessarily. People didn't talk openly about this kind of disease; it was secret and shameful, remember. And today, thanks to the discovery of penicillin, we luckily don't have to know about such things anymore,” said he.