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| Image of Fader Moviz playing the viol with text bubble, "Movitz, your Consumption, it pulls you into the grave..." |
While those of you in New York City might be lucky enough to attend the book-launch for John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis (Mar 18, 2025), the rest of us are hanging around with “old TB” – its readings, its meanings, and its character.
Musically speaking, there’s a lot of literature on tubercular heroines (Violetta in La Traviata; Mimi in La Boheme; Antonia in Tales of Hoffmann)
Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. “Famous last breaths: The tubercular heroine in Opera.” Parallax, 2:1 (1996): 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/13534649609362002
Kasunic, David. “Tubercular Singing,” Postmodern Culture 24:3 (May 2014).
Morens, David M. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:11 (Nov. 2002):1353-8.
If we follow artistic assertions, to be consumptive is evidently to be a soprano, since so many of the roles are in the Leading Lady idiom. And, of course, these narratives blend into those of the cautionary tale, where the fallen woman and the consumptive prove to be one and the same. That latter theme remains common, with an added whiff of poverty – just think of Fantine from Les Mis, or Satine from Moulin Rouge, not to mention Violetta herself.
The prevalence of the disease made the it and its social consequences quite topical, of course. Though weirdly, not for men, at least not as artistic representation. There are hosts of deaths of artistic men from consumption – Boccherini, Chopin, Keats, George Orwell… But women feature in much of the music, both before and after the baccilus’s discovery in 1882.
Take, for example, this abbreviated list of tubercular characters. Lots of women, and our passionate consumptive Chopin.
Fader Movitz (Freman’s Epistles by Carl Michael Bellman, 1790)
Chopin dies of consumption, 1849
Violetta Valery (La Traviata, Giuseppe Verdi, 1853)
1865 Jean-Antoine Villemin: proved TB was contagious (not heritable)
Antonia (Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach, 1881)
1882: Robert Koch announces discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Mimi (La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini,1896)
Lady Madeline (La Chute de la Maison Usher, Claude Debussy, [incomplete] 1918)
Sister Benedict (Bells of St Mary's, 1945)
Fantine (Les Misérables, 1980)
Satine (Moulin Rouge, 2001)
“In the 18th century in Western Europe, TB had become epidemic with a mortality rate as high as 900 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, more elevated among young people. For this reason, TB was also called ‘the robber of youth.’” -- Barberis et al (2017)
On the list, the odd man out – the odd MAN – is that 18th century character, Fader Movitz. He, and his illness, features in Epistle no. 30: “Till fader Movitz, under dess sjukdom, lungsoten. Elegi” [To Father Movitz, during his illness, consumption. An elegy]. Fader Movitz might not be young, but he is definitely characterized as one of the 900 consumptives per year; we learn various of his symptoms, and know from early on inn stanza 1 that he is terminally ill, though in TB’s typical slow motion fashion. Unlike the ethereal soprano heroines of later operatic tradition, however, Fader Movitz is neither young nor transfiguring; instead, his illness is woven into a bawdy, bittersweet world of drinking songs and resignation.
The composer of the work, Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), was a Swedish composer, musician, and lyricist. His song collection, Fredman’s Epistles, contains 82 songs. “To Father Movitz” is relatively typical of the song types; they mix themes of drinking with character sketches and scenes ranging from the pastoral to the poignant to the saucy. Movitz appears in 28 of the settings, so this isn’t his only appearance! He is a composer with a famous Concerto, we learn from the book’s character list.
Coming in the middle of the pack, “To Father Movitz” is clearly a song about his consumption (“Lungsot”). Death is coming, but there may be some time (line 4) – after all, TB is a slow-moving disease. Nevertheless, it is an active disease, one that “pulls you into the grave” (line 5). In fact, it’s so effective at drawing you toward death that the first part of the next line belongs not to the singer but solely to the instrumentalists. There’s a bit of a musical pun on the striking of the octave, and then we move upwards (finally) to sing about the fond memories one had.
Sharpen his sword, and stand at your doorstep.
Do not be alarmed, he only glares at the grave door,
Beats it again, maybe even in a year.
Movitz, your Consumption*, it pulls you into the grave.
- - - Strike now the Octave;
Tune your strings, sing about the Spring of life. : |||
(stanza 3): Heavens! you die, your cough scares me;
Emptiness and sound, the entrails make a sound;
The tongue is white, the saving heart hatches;
Soft as a fungus are late marrow and skin.
Breathe. - Fie a thousand times! what fumes are your ashes.
- - - Lend me your bottle.
Movitz, Gutår! Bowl! Sing about the God of wine. : |||
The song is strophic, but sets its mood effectively; all those descending lines, the minor mood, the simple harmonic language, the largely syllabic setting – we aren’t singing of triumph but instead of the inevitable outcome in the local cemetery. And the active agency of consumption is signaled musically by the shift from the predominantly step-wise treatment to the more dramatic leaping, as the illness personified pulls poor Movitz toward the grave.
The third strophe gets into even more graphic details: the cough, the disruption to the guts, the gradual falling apart of health into pallid skin and grotesque forms of mucus-coated tongue. Ick. But, think back on happier times, and toast the God of wine. The inevitable is, well, inevitable.
“About 10 million people around the world do fall ill with the disease. And even though it is preventable and curable, about 1.5 million people die. So it is known as the world's top infectious killer according to the WHO.” -- AMA report, 2/5/25
In this current moment, TB has taken on special poignancy. We know that TB is still “the world’s top infectious killer” under normal circumstances. It doesn’t need to be; there are treatment courses that take 4 to 12 months, depending on drug and dosage. If it isn’t one of those (scary) resistant strains, it’s treatable. And yet people continue to die.
And some of them are dying today in America.
Today, we are experiencing the country's highest-ever TB case numbers over a one-year period. -- AMA report, Feb 2025 and Kansas Civic Alert, Feb 2025
With the Kansas City
outbreak doing its best to set records, we should remember that an
illness like TB is both PREVENTABLE and TREATABLE.
Don’t be “that” character in song or story; redemptive endings and transfigured souls are all very well in fiction. But in real life, we’d rather spend our time like Fader Movitz, focused on wine and happy memories.
