“Every day, pounding, pounding: oh what a hard and miserable life!” So begins the opening aria, sung by the eponymous “hero's” assistant, of Haydn's opera, Lo speziale (The apothecary) of 1768, a setting of a libretto by Carlo Goldoni. As an operatic theme, apothecaries and their work have not reached quite the popularity of love and death. None the less, there have been far more appearances of apothecaries in opera than one might imagine, and far more mises en scène of medication, especially if we include administering love potions, poisons, and sleeping draughts. Doris Zaugg, herself a professional apothecary, has had the excellent idea of collecting as many operatic representations of apothecaries and materia medica as she can find. She has trawled reference works in German and French (but not the New Grove dictionary of opera, which might have been helpful even though it has no subject entries for topics such as medicine). The result is a corpus of some 125 operas relevant to her theme. These range in period from Monteverdi to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, by way of obvious luminaries such as Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner, and such less celebrated figures as M M Fournier (L'homéopathie, 1836), Giuseppe Maluscardi (L'ammalata ed il consulto, 1837), and Ignatz Umlauf (Die Apotheke, 1778). Presumably because of the Franco-German leaning of the sources consulted, the only British composer included is Benjamin Britten. Comparably “medical” operas by, for example, Peter Maxwell Davies (The doctor of Myddfai) are omitted.
The book falls into two roughly equal parts. The first considers apothecaries in libretti and proceeds chronologically. The author took the odd decision to make that chronological order reflect the periods in which the libretti are set or the dates when they were written. Thus, for example, all operas based on Molière or Goldoni appear under the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, whenever they were composed. Even Penderecki's The devils of Loudun (1969), derived from the Aldous Huxley novel, becomes a seventeenth-century work. Such an arrangement militates against the cultural history of apothecaries to which the author wants to contribute. So too does the entirely thematic deployment of material in the second half of the book. Abandoning chronology altogether, this half is organized according to the type of drug depicted. A passage on Peter Grimes is for instance followed by one on Haydn's Il mondo della luna, because both feature laudanum or opium.
Overall, more space is given to recapitulating libretti than to establishing period context. The general history of operatic pharmacy that emerges is therefore unsurprising: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the apothecary is principally a comic figure; the nineteenth-century industrializing of pharmaceutics is scarcely reflected in opera, and so on. The achievement of the book is to provide raw materials for a neglected kind of pharmaceutical history, not that history itself. It should also, of course, stimulate the submission of some cunning questions to the Texaco Metropolitan Opera interval quiz.
