A mad scene (French: Scène de folie; German: Wahnsinnsszene; Italian: Scena della pazzia) is an enactment of insanity in an opera, play,[1] or the like.
With the rise of psychology (and advances in psychiatry), modernist composers revived and transformed the mad scene in expressionist operas and similar genres (e.g., melodramas, monodramas).
Richard Strauss (Salome and Elektra), Arnold Schoenberg (Erwartung), and Alban Berg (Wozzeck and Lulu) depicted madness in new and dissonant idioms in the early 1900s.
The modern musical theatre was also influenced by the operatic mad scene, as in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard or Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.
[1] Francesco Cavalli Alessandro Stradella Jean-Baptiste Lully George Frideric Handel Johann Adolph Hasse Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Ferdinando Paer Gioachino Rossini Gaetano Donizetti Vincenzo Bellini Giuseppe Verdi Richard Wagner Giacomo Meyerbeer Ferenc Erkel Ambroise Thomas Modest Mussorgsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov Richard Strauss Arnold Schoenberg Max von Schillings Alban Berg Sergei Prokofiev Benjamin Britten Igor Stravinsky Francis Poulenc Hans Werner Henze Peter Maxwell Davies Leonard Bernstein Dominick Argento John Corigliano André Previn Daniel Catán Francesco Sacrati Henry Purcell Jean-Philippe Rameau Giuseppe Verdi Arnold Schoenberg Giacomo Puccini Milton Babbitt Luciano Berio Olga Neuwirth Michael Finnissy Jacques Offenbach Gilbert and Sullivan Benjamin Britten Leonard Bernstein