Oliver Sacks, "the Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a chamber opera based on Oliver Sacks's book of the same name. A true story, it takes the form of a neurological case-study; Dr P, a professional singer, suffers from visual agnosia—an inability to recognize or make sense of what he sees—and the opera describes in simple, unpretentious dialogue two consultation sessions during which the other two characters, the neurologist (Dr S) and the patient's wife (Mrs P), by way of a sequence of tests and conversations, gradually penetrate the mystery of the symptoms.