Invited Paper: Music and blood pressure - risk, therapeutic or simply pleasure?

Is music a cardiovascular risk factor? Yes, if one believes the events unfolding in the second act of Jacques Offenbach’s opera fantastique “The tales of Hoffmann” which is based on the short stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, a German writer who lived at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. In this opera Antonia, the young daughter of a respected city councilor in Munich, is suffering from a mysterious condition where she has to refrain from singing, which has had deleterious effects on her health. Unfortunately, after being tricked to break into song (after all it is an opera) by a malicious house guest she tragically dies from an apparent heart attack in front of the eyes of her father and her unfortunate lover, Hoffmann (Figure 1).