A Musical Post-Mortem

Professor Steven Scber dissects a performance in the operating theater.

SINCE ANCIENT TIMES music has been allied with the art of healing. The Greeks and Romans worshipped Apollo as the god of music and medicine. The Apollonian concept of harmony between body and soul gave rise to four major theories of music and medical science: the harmony of the spheres (water, fire, air, and earth), the theory of bodily humors (phlegm, yellow bile, blood, and black bile), the theory of temperaments (phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholic), and the theory that music is composed of four modes or scales (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Myxolydian). During the Renaissance these theories were neatly correlated. The Dorian mode corresponded to water, phlegm, and the phlegmatic temperament; the Phrygian to fire, yellow bile, and the choleric; the Lydian to air, blood, and the sanguine; and the Myxolydian to earth, black bile, and the melancholic.

Yet composers have only rarely represented physical and mental illnesses and treatments in music. An oddity in the history of music as well as medicine—of urology, to be precise is the 1725 composition "Le tableau de l'operation de la taille" ("Description of a Lithotomy") for viola da gamba, harpsichord, and figured bass, by Marin Marais, who was Louis XIV's celebrated court composer (and the subject of the sumptuous French film Tons Les Matins du Monde).

Marais attempted to convey musically the horrors of lithotomy, an operation for the removal of a stone in the bladder without the benefit of anesthesia. The composer allegedly experienced the horrors himself. It was standard for two attendants to grasp the legs of the patient, while a third sat on his chest to hold him down. The surgeon introduced a metallic catheter through the urinary duct into the bladder, made a rapid incision, then extracted the stone with a forceps. Speed was of the essence: the ordeal took no more than a couple of minutes from start to finish. So, too, Marais's ingenious musical representation takes less than three minutes.

The music includes a running commentary on the operation. In performance, the lines are recited over the music by a narrator who marks the subsequent stages of the surgical or deal. The detached, matter-of-fact tone of the narrator's comments effectively underscores the aura of gloom and melancholy that besets the entire work. The mortality rate of the procedure at the time was about 60 percent. No wonder then that Marais expressed his relief at surviving the ordeal by following up the musical procedure with three sprightly and exuberant dance pieces he called "Les Relevailles"—"convalescence.

Hear the music on the CD Marais: Pikes de Viole du Cinquieme Livre (Auvidis Astree E 7708). But be warned. It's painfully beautiful.

Operation forthe removal ofa stone fromthe bladder,eighteenthcentury.

German and comparative literature professor STEVEN SCHER, an expert on the links between musicand literature, lectured on music and medicine during Dartmouth Medical School's bicentennial celebratons.