A mad scene (French: Scène de folie; German: Wahnsinnsszene; Italian: Scena della pazzia) is an enactment of insanity in an opera, play, or the like. It may be well contained in a number, appear during or recur throughout a more through-composed work, be deployed in a finale, form the underlying basis of the work, or constitute the entire work. They are often very dramatic, representing virtuoso pieces for singers. Some were written for specific singer, usually of a soprano Fach.

History

The mad scene first appeared in seventeenth-century Venetian operas, especially those of Francesco Cavalli, most notably in L'Egisto (for a male inamorata). More notable examples were composed for opere serie or semiserie, as in those of Georg Frideric Handel (e.g., Orlando, farcically in Imeneo). They were a popular convention of French and especially Italian opera in the early nineteenth century, becoming a bel canto staple. Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is the most famous example; it was likely modeled on Vincenzo Bellini's earlier example in I puritani. Gilbert and Sullivan satirized this convention via Mad Meg in Ruddigore. As composers sought more realism (verismo), they adapted the scene, better integrating it into the opera. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky often deployed these scenes as finales. With the rise of psychology (and advances in psychiatry), modernist composers revived and transformed the mad scene in expressionist operas and similar genres (e.g., melodramas, monodramas). Richard Strauss (Salome and Elektra), Arnold Schoenberg (Erwartung), and Alban Berg (Wozzeck and Lulu) depicted madness in new and dissonant idioms in the early 1900s. Berg, Igor Stravinsky (The Rake's Progress), Benjamin Britten (Peter Grimes) wrote these scenes for male roles. The latter wrote a mad scene parody in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The modern musical theatre was also influenced by the operatic mad scene, as in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard or Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Some ballets contain similar scenes, most notably Adolphe Adam's Giselle.

Selected examples

Baroque

Francesco Cavalli Alessandro Stradella Jean-Baptiste Lully George Frideric Handel Johann Adolph Hasse

Classical

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Ferdinando Paer

Romantic

Gioachino Rossini Gaetano Donizetti Vincenzo Bellini Giuseppe Verdi Richard Wagner Giacomo Meyerbeer Ferenc Erkel Ambroise Thomas Modest Mussorgsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Since 1900

Richard Strauss Arnold Schoenberg Max von Schillings Alban Berg Sergei Prokofiev Benjamin Britten Igor Stravinsky Francis Poulenc Hans Werner Henze Peter Maxwell Davies Leonard Bernstein Dominick Argento John Corigliano André Previn

Since 2000

Daniel Catán

Comparable examples

Francesco Sacrati Henry Purcell Jean-Philippe Rameau Giuseppe Verdi Arnold Schoenberg Giacomo Puccini Milton Babbitt Luciano Berio Olga Neuwirth Michael Finnissy

Parodies

Jacques Offenbach Gilbert and Sullivan Benjamin Britten Leonard Bernstein