ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Marsollier's and Dalayrac's Nina, the source for Paisiello's opera. It reconstructs a web of relationships between the practices of psychiatry emerging in the late eighteenth century and the theatrical and aesthetic cultures of the time. The chapter aspects of Paisiello's setting are read as a composer's effort to create an operatic language responsive to the culture of 'sensibility' shared by eighteenth-century humanists and physicians. Predictably, the text of Nina is filled with physical symptoms of sensitivity and with stylistic markers of the sentimental mode. Pinel's Histoires show a literary nature and a degree of human sympathy apparently unique in contemporary medicine. In particular, it is tempting to suggest that Pinel may have derived his idea of 'psychodrama' from the stage – and most notably from Nina, an opera that was triumphing in the same city and year in which he started experimenting with the moral therapy.
