TB is centre stage in La Traviata

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This article was published 21/03/2018 (2787 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We’ve all seen this scene in a movie: a character, usually pale and wan, coughs delicately into a handkerchief and then quickly folds it up to hide the resulting spots of blood.

This cough — a common symptom of the infectious disease tuberculosis — is also artistic shorthand for “this person is not long for this world.”

In La Traviata (The Fallen Woman), Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera — which is being presented by Manitoba Opera next month — tuberculosis is centre stage, as the beautiful courtesan Violetta Valéry is being consumed by the disease. She eventually expires, but only after reconciling with her true love on her deathbed.

Tuberculosis (also known as TB or consumption) was often portrayed in such romantic fashion in works of art and literature of the late 1700s and early to mid-1800s. The look of the consumptive patient — thin and pale, with large eyes and red cheeks and lips — was emulated by fashionable women of the day, ignoring that the weight loss was due to lack of appetite, and the rosy complexion and glassy eyes the result of low-grade fever. After the debut of Verdi’s opera, the Italian phrase “tipo Traviata” came to refer to that kind of tubercular beauty.

Dr. Pamela Orr sees the decidedly unromantic effects of tuberculosis every day. She is a professor of internal medicine, infectious disease, community health science and medical microbiology at the University of Manitoba. She’s also a member of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, which is working to eliminate the disease.

“It’s always a shock for people to hear that it’s not only around, but in some places actually increasing,” she says of the false notion that TB is a disease of the past; in fact, it kills more than one million people a year worldwide. “In Canada, the number of TB cases hasn’t changed very much in the last few years. We haven’t made very much headway at all in controlling this disease, and we haven’t done very well when we compare ourselves to other countries.”

World Tuberculosis Day is Saturday; it commemorates the discovery of the bacillus that causes the disease by Robert Koch on that day in 1882.

Before his discovery, Orr explains, tuberculosis was either attributed to those with a surfeit of sensuality, either sexually or in other areas of indulgence, or innocent youths not given time to embrace life (see Edvard Munch’s paintings of his sister Johanne Sophie, who died of TB in 1877).

That romantic blush was wiped away with the revelation that consumption was a disease caused by bacteria. In the 1900s, it came to be associated with the grubby working poor and ghetto life, no longer an affliction of the sensualist or hedonist.

“That’s a common theme: when the causes of illness are known, the rosy picture of a disease disappears,” says Orr, whose interest in tuberculosis goes beyond modern medicine. “Before the discovery, there was an interesting conflagration of the idea of beauty with the opposite of beauty, which is decay. The idea of love and positive feelings with the opposite, which is fear and horror.

“(This) was a particular gestalt of the romantic era. I think it was a reaction to classicism — the classic period, classic esthetics. The admiration in that period was for order and the superiority of the rational, whereas in the romantic period, as a reaction, people became very attracted to emotion over rationality, and terror and horror and fear.

“We see this not only in opera, such as La Traviata, but also the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Keats, Shelley and Chopin, Thomas Mann, the list goes on.”

In tonight’s lecture, The Consumption of Violetta: Tuberculosis as Metaphor, part of Manitoba Opera’s Opera Plus series, Orr will discuss the way we attach symbolic meanings to diseases we don’t understand.

“TB was seen to be the consequence of either unrestrained sensuality or blocked young life,” she says. “If I can draw a parallel, cancer follows this kind of thread of metaphor; it’s regarded as a disease caused by rage or anger and it turns the body to stone, it becomes hard. As TB liquefied the body and turned it into air, cancer is seen as a consequence of us not expressing ourselves in a fully human way.

“People talk about a battle with cancer, which is not really used with other diseases. You succumb to TB or heart disease; it’s a tragic event.”

Even in its glamorous heyday, however, Orr points out that consumption was attached to self-indulgence, depravity or sin.

“Punishment is a subtext. There isn’t usually mention of a God or creator doing the punishing; it’s more seen as the natural consequence of living a dissipated life, the punishment of a kind of karmic will.”

Manitoba Opera presents Verdi’s La Traviata on Saturday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m.; Tuesday, April 17, at 7 p.m.; and Friday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m. at the Centennial Concert Hall. Tickets range from $29 to $154. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to manitobaopera.mb.ca or call 204-944-8824.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @dedaumier