For the Love of Opera

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.