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When
the Romantic imagination collided with the harsh
reality of TB, it transformed the disease into
a metaphor.
Death from consumption -
at least among the educated classes - became an
aesthetic experience, the long-drawn-out separation
of body and spirit allowing hope and despair to
take their turn upstage.
Two of the best-loved operas
in the canon, La Traviata and La Bohème,
take full advantage of this God-given plotline.
TB also seemed to pick the
finest among poets, novelists and aesthetes. Those
who fell victim included the Brontë sisters,
Chekhov, Chopin, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Heine, Kant,
Keats, Rousseau, Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson
and - when the disease was on its knees - George
Orwell.
The "index case"
of literary TB has to be a young girl from Normandy,
Marie Duplessis, sold by her father at the age
of 15 to a male protector. Two years later, she
had become the most famous courtesan in Paris.
She died at 23 and would have been forgotten but
for one of her lovers of the heart, Alexandre
Dumas, fils.
He
wrote her life story as a tear-jerking novel,
La Dame aux Camélias, transformed by Verdi
into La Traviata, an opera of such beauty, balance
and sheer tunefulness that it has never been out
of the repertoire.
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