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