¹ Dent, Edward J., The Rise of Romantic Opera, ed. Dean, Winton (Cambridge, 1976), 111. Earlier versions of this article were presented in Autumn 1995 in two workshops at the University of Chicago: at the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, and in the Eighteenth-Century Workshop of the Division of Humanities. I wish to thank the participants in both workshops for their stimulating comments.Google Scholar

² Nina o sia La pazza per amore. Commedia di un atto in prosa, ed in verso per musica [ … ] (Naples: Flauto, 1789).Google Scholar Paisiello's Nina preserves one important feature of its sources: it employs spoken dialogue instead of recitative. For an early revival in Naples (Teatro dei Fiorentini, 1790), Lorenzi and Paisiello added a few new pieces in order to make two acts from the original one (this two-act version still employs spoken dialogue). The two versions are collated in Paisiello, Giovanni, Nina o sia La pazza per amore, ed. Broussard, Fausto (Milan, 1981).Google Scholar

³ By the 1790s Paisiello's Nina had reached many Italian and European centres. It was produced in Barcelona (1789), Vienna (1790, with a text revised by Lorenzo Da Ponte), Paris (1791, with musical additions by Cherubini) and London (1797). The opera also received many translations.Google Scholar

⁴ In the 1770s and 1780s Neapolitan audiences had welcomed with growing enthusiasm spoken dramas of the bourgeois and sentimental genre, mostly of French origin. See Croce, Benedetto, I teatri di Napoli dal Rinascimento alla fine del secolo decimottavo, ed. Galasso, Giuseppe (Milan, 1992), 258–61.Google Scholar

⁵ Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par [Friedrich Melchior] Grimm, Diderot [ … ], ed. Tourneux, Maurice, XIV (Paris, 1880), 401–3.Google Scholar

⁶ Nina, ou La folle par amour, Comédie en un acte, en prose, mêlée d'ariettes. Par M[onsieur] M[arsollier] d[es] V[ivetières] Musique de M[onsieur] Dal[ayrac] [ … ] (Paris: Brunet, 1786), scene 12. All translations are mine, unless otherwise specified.Google Scholar

⁷ Correspondance littéraire, 401.Google Scholar

⁸ Dent, 110.Google Scholar

⁹ d'Arnaud, F. T. M. Baculard, Délassements de l'homme sensible, ou Anecdotes diverses, 6 vols. (Paris: chez l'Auteur et la Veuve Ballard, 1783–1785).Google ScholarArnaud published a second set of anecdotes in 1786–1787; the two collections add up to over five thousand printed pages. ‘La Nouvelle Clémentine’ is found in vol. I (1783) of the first set, pp. 50–8: its title and text make explicit reference to the character of Clementina in Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754).Google Scholar

¹⁰ In Roy Porter's words, ‘the moral therapy … was in practically all respects a commonplace of certain strands of eighteenth-century psychiatric thought’. Porter, Roy, ‘Was There a Moral Therapy in Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry?’ Lychnos: Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society (1981–1982), 12–26, here 20.Google Scholar On Pinel see Goldstein, Jan, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), in particular ‘Scientizing “the treatment” ’, 89–105.Google Scholar Philippe Pinel's fundamental work is the Traitémédico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale, ou la manie (Paris: Caille et Ravier, An VIII [1799–1800]).Google Scholar This first edition is mentioned in Weiner, Dora B., The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (Baltimore and London, 1993).Google ScholarI read the book in an early reprint (Paris: Richard, Ravier, Caille et, An IX [1800–1801]), to which all following quotations refer.Google Scholar

¹¹ ‘[N]e peut résister au combat affreux qu'elle éprouve’: Marsollier, Nina, scene 1.Google Scholar

¹² Cheyne, George, The English Malady (London, 1733), 199–200.Google Scholar

¹³ Pinel, , Traité, 143–5.Google Scholar

¹⁴ ‘[L]e Berger … n'attend qu'un signal pour jouer des airs, qui tirent toujours Nina de sa sombre tristesse’: Marsollier, Nina, scene 9.Google Scholar

¹⁵ ‘The lunatic is not consigned to total “otherness” but is located on a continuum with the sane person’: Goldstein, Console, 109. ‘Pinel breaks through the clear division between pathology and normality.Google Scholar The insane are seen as driven by motives that linger in everyone's heart. The difference is only one of degree’: Vandermeersch, Patrick, ‘ “Les mythes d'origine” in the History of Psychiatry’, in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, ed. Micale, Mark S. and Porter, Roy (New York and Oxford, 1994), 219–31, here 223.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Pinel, , Traité, 233–7.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid., 54–7.

¹⁸ Postel, Jacques, Genèse de la psychiatrie: Les premiers écrits psychiatriques de Philippe Pinel (Paris, 1981), 161.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See Goldstein, , Console, 68.Google Scholar

²⁰ Indeed, Sébastien Merciet – an influential playwright and theoretician of the new bourgeois drama – had planned as early as 1773 to bring Bicêtre (the Parisian hospital for ‘incurable’ madmen) on stage. Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, Du Théâtre, ou Nouvel Essai sur l'art dramatique (Amsterdam: Harrevelt, 1773), 136.Google ScholarOn Marsollier's early interest in psychiatry, see below.Google Scholar

²¹ Pinel, Philippe, ‘Observations sur la manie pour servir l'Histoire naturelle de l'Homme’ (1794), in Postel, Genèse, 233–48, here 234.Google Scholar Engl. transl. in Weiner, Dora B., ‘Philippe Pinel's “Memoir on Madness” of 11 December 1794: A Fundamental Text of Modern Psychiatry’, The American Journal of Psychiatry, 149/6 (06 1992), 725–32.Google ScholarPubMedHere, as in many eighteenth-century texts, ‘interest’ is to be understood in a broad sense, including an element of emotional involvement and empathy: an investment beyond the simply intellectual.Google Scholar

²² Goldstein, , Console, 84–5.Google Scholar

²³ Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, 1980; rpt. Chicago, 1988, to which my page numbers refer).Google Scholar

²⁴ Fried, , Absorption, 57–9.Google Scholar

²⁵ ‘Soit done que vous composiez, soit que vous jouiez, ne pensez non plus au spectateur que s'il n'existait pas.’ Diderot, Denis, ‘De la Poésie dramatique’ (1758), in Diderot: le drame bourgeois: Fiction II, Chouillet, J., Chouillet, A.-M., eds., vol. X of Diderot, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1980), 373.Google Scholar

²⁶ See Heartz, Daniel, ‘From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theatre and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 94 (1967–1968), 111–27;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Johnson, James H., listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995).Google Scholar

²⁷ Jean-François Marmontel, Zémire et Azor, Act III scenes 5–7. See Collection complète des ceuvres de Grétry. Publiée par le Gouvernement belge, XIII (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, n. d.), xx–xxi.Google Scholar

²⁸ Marsollier, , Nina, scenes 5–6.Google Scholar

²⁹ Diderot, Denis, ‘Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel’ (1757), in Diderot: Le drame bourgeois, 83–162, here 93. Mercier, Du Théâtre, 371.Google Scholar

³⁰ Fried, Absorption, 57.Google Scholar

³¹ See die passage by Lichtenberg, G. C., quoted in E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge, 1995), 38–9.Google Scholar

³² Goldoni, Carlo, Memoirs (Paris, 1787), Troisième Partie, chapter 39.Google Scholar The English translation is by Black, John in Memoirs of Goldoni (London: Colburn, 1814), II, 333–4.Google Scholar

³³ Arnaud, ‘La Nouvelle Clémentine’, 50n.Google Scholar

³⁴ Diderot, ‘Entretiensè, 83–4.Google Scholar

³⁵ Florimo, Francesco, La scuola musicale di Napoli, II (Naples, 1882), 268.Google Scholar Florimo mentions the singer Celeste Coltellini and the Teatro di San Carlo. The report in question most probably refers to the 1790 revival at another Neapolitan theatre, the Teatro dei Fiorentini (where Coltellini sang); Nina was not produced at the San Carlo until 1820. See Il Teatro di San Carlo. La Cronologia 1737–1987, ed. Roscioni, Carlo Marinelli (Naples, 1987).Google Scholar Coltellini was praised for her gifts, more exceptional in acting than in singing: ‘nella Nina, poi, mi fudetto ch'era sublime, che faceva piangere e che toglieva quasi il respiro a chi l'ascoltava e la vedeva’: Ferrari, G. G., quoted in ‘Coltellini, Celeste’, Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, III (Rome, 1956).Google ScholarOn such ‘literal’ interpretations of the stage, see also Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 40–1.Google Scholar

³⁶ Le Vaporeux, comédie en deux actes et en prose, par M. M[arsollier] D[es Vivetières], Représentée pour la première fois par les Comédiens Italiens ordinaires du Roi, le 3 Mai 1782 (Toulouse: Broulhiet, 1784).Google Scholar

³⁷ Marsollier, Le Vaporeux, Act I scene 2.Google Scholar

³⁸ Ibid., Act II scene 6.

³⁹ Ibid., Act II scene 9.

⁴⁰ Pinel, Traité, 100 (italics mine).Google Scholar

⁴¹ ‘No physician had yet written case histories as sympathetic and eloquent’, Werner, ‘Philippe Pinel's “Memoir” ’, 727.Google Scholar

⁴² It is perhaps not without meaning that such an archetype exerted some influence for almost a century. The acknowledged master of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in Italian, Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908), wrote a short story about a woman who goes insane when her beloved marries someone else-and is cured through a final ‘psychodrama’ in which her traumatic past is re-enacted with a positive turn; see Amicis, Edmondo De, ‘Carmela’, in La vita militare (1868).Google Scholar

⁴³ On the ‘ungrammatical’ breaches in David Garrick's delivery, and their relationship to gestural expressiveness, see Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, vol. III, chapter 12,Google Scholarand its discussion in Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988), 174–5.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Scene 8.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Bars 120–45 are absent in the first volume of Alessandro Parisotti's Arie antiche (Milan, 1885 and ever after), where the aria is refashioned as a conservatory or salon piece. This may be the main reason the passage has been so often expunged in recent performances (and in all four recordings I know), even when the aria is sung as part of the entire opera. Similar cuts can be documented in earlier editions of the piece, starting in the late eighteenth century.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ See Broussard, , ‘Prefazione’, in Paisiello, , Nina, v–vi.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ ‘Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.’ Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G. B., rev. Powell, L. F. (Oxford, 1934–1964), II, 175.Google Scholar