Some Scenes of Intersection Between Psychoanalysis and Opera

Abstract

The article theorizes the intellectual intersections of psychoanalysis and opera. First, it analyses Sigmund Freud’s ambivalent relationship to music in general and to opera in particular. The principal reason for Freud’s conscious rejection of music’s influence becomes the impossibility of conceptualizing pleasure. One of the first to bring together musicological and psychoanalytic discourses was Max Graf, who was not only a friend of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg but also a member of the very first psychoanalytic circle of friends that gathered at Freud’s home. Max Graf’s article, in which he offered a detailed analysis of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, was the first psychoanalytic publication devoted to the art of opera. Max Graf’s son Herbert Graf is known in the history of psychoanalysis as Little Hans. Herbert’s Graf dissertation was devoted to the works of Richard Wagner and he subsequently became a prominent opera director. In his dissertation, Herbert Graf used Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas to build his theory of opera staging where the concepts that unite the unconscious and operatic scenes, namely fantasy, desire, and identification, come to the fore. These subjects allow us to contextualize and map the space of the encounter between opera and psychoanalysis, fantasy and its embodiment.