Solitary confinement is torture

It has no more place in a civilized society than the rack

A prisoner.
(Image credit: Illustrated | AP Images, iStock)

"God! what darkness here!" cries Florestan in Beethoven's Fidelio, speaking alone to the audience from the underground cell in which he has been imprisoned. Beethoven's youthful Jacobinism has not aged well, but many of the causes that animated his politics are as worthy now as they were in his own era. This is true not least of his evident horror of solitary confinement, which he shared with Dumas, Dickens, and many other 19th-century worthies. It is the moral seriousness of the uncompromising revolutionary that makes the famous "Prisoners' Chorus" among the most stirring moments in the history of Western art music:

Oh what joy, in the open airFreely to breathe again!Up here alone is life!The dungeon is a grave. [Fidelio]

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.