Feature: Music to Stop Tuberculosis

Highlight La Traviata

Since 2007 the Stop TB Partnership has sought to galvanize a movement drawing on longstanding links between tuberculosis and music, especially the classical music of 19th century Europe. The objective of this initiative, called Music to Stop TB, is to raise awareness among music lovers.

The vast majority of people who appreciate classical music and opera are at low risk of becoming ill with tuberculosis and tend to think of it as a disease of the dim past. But in the 19th century tuberculosis represented an enormous threat across all social classes. At a time when antibiotics had not yet been discovered and tuberculosis was incurable, the disease took the lives of up to one in four people.

In Europe's influential artistic milieu tuberculosis inspired an attitude that may strike people in the modern era as incomprehensible, even bizarre: tuberculosis was fashionable. Perhaps it was because the disease, generally known as consumption, caused people to waste away, giving them a much-admired ethereal quality.

"It was a badge of refinement, it was very nearly a polite accomplishment. And if you contracted it, it led your friends not to mourn your early death so much as to venerate you as one marked out for a fate of special distinction," writes Mark Caldwell in his book The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption 1862-1954.

This image of tuberculosis inspired the creation of enduring ethereal heroines in painting, theatre and especially opera. Two of the world's most beloved opera characters -- Mimi in Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème and Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata -- represented ideals drawn from women who died young of tuberculosis.

Contributing to this development was the toll of the disease on the era's poets, writers and composers. The list of luminaries who lost their lives to tuberculosis between 1800 and 1900 reads like a Who's Who of the romantic and post-romantic era -- Honoré de Balzac, John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were taken. So were composers Frédéric Chopin, Carl Maria von Weber and Niccolo Paganini.

Nearly two million people are still dying every year from tuberculosis. The Stop TB Partnership is hoping more and more musical organizations and musicians will take up the cause and get out the word -- through song.

Music to Stop Tuberculosis: Recent highlights

• In March 2007 at the Black Diamond Theatre in Copenhagen, Soprano Elsebeth Dreisig and tenor Niels Jørgen Riis sang arias from La Traviata, and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes played Frédéric Chopin. Proceeds from the concert were donated towards the repair and reopening of the children's tuberculosis hospital in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
  
  
• In December 2007 Opera Lyra, a non-profit organization responsible for opera productions in Canada's National Capital Region, joined the Stop TB Partnership. The company concluded its 2008 season with performances of Verdi's La Traviata, drawing its audience's attention to the toll of tuberculosis across the world today.
  
  
• In April 2009 the New Orleans Opera teamed up with RESULTS Tulane University -- an advocacy organization dedicated to ending poverty -- to raise awareness about tuberculosis during three performances of La Traviata The Stop TB programme inserts they prepared reached some 4 000 opera goers. RESULTS is currently seeking to work with other opera companies around the US.