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.

Drawing on the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek, founders of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, turn in their work to opera, with Mladen Dolar focusing on Mozart and Slavoj Žižek on Wagner. The title of their work refers to the two deaths, symbolic and real, of which Lacan speaks in connection with ethics and aesthetics in his Seminar VII. Death, along with love, forms the center of both the operatic and the psychoanalytic narrative. Recently, the psychoanalytic approach to opera has become notorious. Typically, its product is a deconstructionist reading of the libretto or, even worse, a rather primitive Freudian debunking of its (patriarchal, anti-Semitic, and/or anti-feminist) prejudices. However, the authors argue that opera deserves better. The historical relationship between opera and psychoanalysis is suggestive. The moment of the birth of psychoanalysis (early twentieth century) is also often perceived as the moment of the death of opera—as if after psychoanalysis, opera, at least in its traditional form, was no longer possible. Not surprisingly, echoes of Freudianism are present in most contenders for the title of the last opera.

In this fragment of Theodor Adorno’s Versuch Uber Wagner (1952), the author analyzes Richard Wagner’s aesthetic conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or a “total work of art.” Drawing on both Wagner’s theoretical works and his operas, Adorno reveals the contradictions of this concept, emphasizing its fundamental difference from Hegel’s definition of art. Examining the relationship between the evolution of opera, the autonomy of the artist, and the development of cultural industries, he shows that despite Wagner’s rejection of the division of labor and his desire for perfect unity, the Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk not only fails to eliminate this division of labor but further reinforces it. According to Adorno, Wagner’s music drama is deeply contradictory: the music is locked within the action, leading to an intensification of subjective expression and an excess of plot over music. Wagner himself was aware of these contradictions both at the level of conception and at the level of the practical realization of the work.

The Versailles Park is a synthesis of the utopian fantasies of Tommaso Campanella and the urban baroque transformations of Rome, expressed through landscape architecture. Imbued with Campanella’s “mystical imperialism,” Louis XIV relegates the care of the palace to the background, building first and foremost a man-made landscape as a metaphor for the representation of absolute power. If the Baroque transformations of Rome are projections of private manorial spatial structures onto the layout of the city, the Park of Versailles is the opposite phase of this process initiated by the Roman pontiffs, that is, the projection of Roman Baroque urban structures onto the only truly private property in France at the time. The layouts of Versailles are an essence of Baroque, which could not be obtained either in Rome itself or in Paris with their dense buildings. Louis XIV contrasts Versailles with the capital of the Catholic world and the restless capital of his own kingdom. The park is saturated with didactic symbolism, expressing his concern for the education of worthy successors. The king himself draws up guidebooks and orders the publication of plans of Versailles in which the south is at the top, so that no one dares to look at his residence from the side of the sun he has appropriated. The appearance and semantics of the bosquets and fountains allegorically represent the spheres of interest without which power can be neither enlightened nor universal. However, the grandiose planning structures are only the skeleton; the flesh of the Versailles Park is the walls of trembling foliage, the marble and gilding of statues and decorations, the sparkling and hissing of fountain jets, bursts of sunlight in shadow, the contrasts of cosmic and obscure spaces that are playfully comfortable. The Park of Versailles is a center of sensual pleasures, reaching the peak of ingenuity in the extravagant day-and-night revelries. Through a sophisticated and unconventional stage direction, earth, air, fire and water — all four elements — stir the imagination, memory and thought in the Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk, which glorifies the Sun King.

The Baroque, as an era and style in architecture, music, and literature, shares analogies with the history of early political economy. The main purpose of this article is to show that the use of the notion of the Baroque in the intellectual history of economic thinking provides a better understanding of both the corpus of works and the motivations of the authors. It is common to refer to the era preceding classical political economy as mercantilism or cameralism, as its German version. A close acquaintance with the most prominent figures of cameralism — such as Johann Joachim Becher and Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi — raises questions. How can we understand such amazing productivity and desire to work simultaneously in such different fields, not limited to agriculture, finance, security, police, ethics, but touching upon law, natural philosophy, and natural sciences, humor, and such questions as making paints or turning sand into gold? Why are they so versatile and multifaceted? Why such immense mobility and desire to impress, charm and at the same time to create verbose intrigue, to intentionally obscure their meaning, to bring about a certain level of confusion? Why this manner of writing and the famous projectionism — those which are courageous and comic at the same time? In some cases, it is the juxtaposition of the two labels that will give a better understanding of the corpus of texts — Baroque and Cameralism. In addition, states had new demands for maintaining a permanent army, for building roads and buildings, for displaying grandeur and glory. The festive splendor of Versailles needed a Baroque man. Many obscure manifestations of economic thought become clearer through the prism of Baroque terms. The corpus of works exhibits vitality, excess, a desire for a new pathos, and optimism.