Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience’s expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world’s greatest composers. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi’s Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner’s influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a “life review” of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments. With its deft treatment of these composers’ final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.

This celebration of opera as a living art that visualizes music explores the 'operatic body'--the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members, as well as the represented body on stage in operas such as Death in Venice and Electra. (view table of contents)

"Opera is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th and 20th century operatic texts...This is an extraordinary examination of how opera uses the singing body-gendered and sexual-to give voice to the suffering person. Highly recommended." - "Library Journal." "The authors' argument is rich and complex; it draws on source, text and music; it is also medically sound. Opera is quintessentially an art of love and desire, of loss and suffering, of disease and death. Hutcheon and Hutcheon enrich our understanding of both content and context." - Opera News. "Linda and Michael Hutcheon have done a fine job of pulling together medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera...For opera lovers and for anyone interested in seeing good, synthetic reasoning at work, this is a fine study." - Publishers Weekly. Linda Hutcheon is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of, most recently, "Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony". Michael Hutcheon, M.D., is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. His many articles have appeared in "American Review of Respiratory Disease" and other journals." (view table of contents)