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''YOU know the old saying,'' a German diva once remarked. ''The theater is a madhouse, and the opera is the ward for the incurable.'' She ascribed the remark to Mahler, who should have known. His symphonies are rife with turmoil, he did time running the snake pit known as the Vienna Court Opera, and he consulted Freud -- just once -- in a moment of existential anguish.
Plenty of opera singers think they must cultivate their neuroses for the sake of their art, and so does much of the public. The Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón, 32, who began classical psychoanalysis nine years ago and made his leap to the stage three years later, has occasionally shared that superstition. ''What if analysis makes me a normal person,'' he has wondered, ''and I can't be an artist anymore?''
It hasn't happened. In the sixth season of his career, audiences in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Paris and Vienna are cheering the ebullient young singer as a star of the first magnitude. On Saturday, he opens at the Los Angeles Opera opposite the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko in Gounod's ''Roméo et Juliette.''
With the slender frame and reflexes of a polo player, he looks the hotheaded young lover's part, even though people keep telling him that offstage he looks like Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. (If his limited engagements so far in New York -- a televised ''Bohème'' at the New York City Opera, a Metropolitan Opera debut opposite Renée Fleming in a post-premiere ''Traviata'' and an inspired recital debut at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- have gone comparatively unsung in the press, his audience-approval ratings on each occasion were off the charts.)
It was his wife, Lucia, a psychologist, who made the gentle suggestion that Mr. Villazón might benefit from psychoanalysis. He was teaching history and studying voice at the time, facing no obvious crisis.
''I was completely shocked,'' Mr. Villazón said by telephone recently between rehearsals in Los Angeles. ''Everyone has problems. I thought that any demons I had were the same as for half the children in our society. My parents were divorced. But Lucia said nothing about any specific problems. She just said, 'I see that you have lots of potential and that for whatever reason you're constantly sabotaging yourself.'''He hesitated a month, then plunged in. Today Mr. Villazón's sessions with Alejandro Radchik, a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, continue by telephone. Mr. Villazón regards them as crucial, from both the personal and the professional points of view.
Classical psychoanalysis on the couch, multiple sessions a week, no end in sight: this is not a regimen much associated with tenors. According to a stereotype that will not die, they lack the brain. And besides, the cardboard lovers and warriors tenors mostly portray in opera scarcely repay profound introspection.
Add to that Freud's gloomy view that the goal of psychoanalysis is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness, and the inducements to embark on the analytic journey look faint. Dr. Radchik does not see it that way.
''What conflicted artists express through art is simply their inner conflict,'' he said recently from Mexico City, where he has also treated painters and sculptors. ''By resolving conflict, psychoanalysis can enhance an artist's powers, to allow an artist to work with greater intensity.''
Acting introduces its own layers of complexity. ''An actor is someone who mirrors the emotions of others,'' Dr. Radchik said. ''But speaking psychoanalytically, there are actors who have a weak personality and others who have a strong one. The weaker ones express the inner life of other people and hide their own. The stronger ones express themselves freely, without fear that their personalities will be overwhelmed.''
Still, a tenor's career begins and ends in the larynx. Some of Mr. Villazón's fans have taken to calling him ''Piccolo Domingo,'' after Plácido, his acknowledged idol. On two CD's of arias on the Virgin label, you can see why. (The first, in Italian, came out last year; the second, in French, will be released this week.)
The voice, at this early stage, weighs in on the light side but is tinged like Mr. Domingo's with the dark shading of a baritone. Mr. Villazón shapes phrases expressively, with natural refinement. The high notes ping; no problem there.
What sets Mr. Villazón apart most of all may be his imaginative engagement. Superficially, Federico's lament from Cilea's ''Arlesiana'' (introduced by Enrico Caruso in the opera that launched his career) may not differ much from Cavaradossi's bittersweet reminiscence in the last act of Puccini's ''Tosca.'' Deep down, they differ significantly, and Mr. Villazón shows us how: Federico is a youngster who has given in to his fate; Cavaradossi, though resigned to what will be, is still in rebellion.
In the opera house, Mr. Villazón has been gravitating lately to what a mental-health professional might call suitable cases for treatment, played to the hilt. Last June, at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, he made his debut as the hero of Verdi's ''Don Carlo,'' that hapless princeling who loses his fiancée to his father, Philip II of Spain. Set entirely in the royal crypt at the Escorial, the production was by the German director Willy Decker, who brought the curtain up early to reveal Mr. Villazón in the throes of the sort of meltdown usually reserved for the prima donna at 11 o'clock.
Anticipating his written entrance by many minutes, the monarch joined his son onstage, forced him to his knees before a gargantuan crucifix and left him sniveling in the dust, there to commence an even crueler martyrdom than Verdi intended. At the end, rather than save himself in the arms of a monk who steps from the shadows to offer him asylum, this Don Carlo impaled himself on his father's sword.
In December, at the Berlin State Opera, Mr. Villazón followed up with his debut as the soldier Don José, killer of Bizet's Gypsy in ''Carmen.'' In a hard-edged, jolting new production by the Austrian director Martin Kusej, Don José pays the price upfront. A firing squad guns him down to the final chords of the overture, but not before he has ripped off his blindfold in a final flourish of defiance.
Carmen, it turns out this time, is his last victim of many. In dialogue often cut, we learn that José ran off to the army after killing a man in a scuffle back home. In addition, Mr. Kusej has him finish off two characters who ordinarily make it out of the opera alive: José's rival and superior officer, Zuniga, and the virginal Micaela, José's dying mother's choice for his wife.
Raising the stakes, Micaela's costumes, makeup and behavior in Mr. Kusej's show identify her less as the emissary of José's mother than as her creepy double. The chaste kiss Mom sends from home was mouth to mouth this time, sadistically taken rather than tenderly received. For Oedipal shock value, it ranked right up there with the closet scene from ''Hamlet.''
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