Hysteria in Music and on the Stage

Abstract

  At the turn of the 19th century, the theater expressed and often anticipated the tensions that animated contemporary neuropsychiatric research, and at the start of the 20th century the concepts of neurosis, hypnosis and hysteria burst onto theatrical stages in dramaturgic and musical creations. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra of 1903 (later set to music by Richard Strauss), whose heroine is stigmatized from the very start as “a case of hysteria” is an emblematic example.