‘All in the mind’: Eighteenth-century opera and the idea of psychological depth

What do we value in an opera?  Our aesthetic as well as scholarly response is usually to seek psychologically compelling narratives or characters.  But while this approach might make sense for Verdi or Puccini, its application to operas of the eighteenth century is rather more questionable.  After all, this is a period in which ideas of the ‘self’ and the limits and meaning of consciousness – following from John Locke’s pioneering Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) – were only just emerging as topics of philosophical analysis and (heated) debate, and what we would describe as ‘psychology’ was barely in its infancy.  When we examine these ideas alongside eighteenth-century opera, with its emphasis on the singer, the da capo aria, and the primacy of convention, the genre seems a poor fit for such concerns.  Late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories of science and philosophy, I will suggest, offer us the opportunity to reappraise our historiographical blindness to the historical contingency of notions of ‘psychology’ – and our blanket application of the theme as an operatic badge of honour.  At the same time, they also allow us to look again at eighteenth-century opera, and discern some of the ways in which librettists, composers and performers alike did begin to wrestle with the representation of the interior lives of characters on stage, in response to the philosophical debates occurring around them.