For someone feeling depressed, the prescription might be an uplifting poem about spring, set to music by the 19th-century composer Gabriel Fauré. For insomniacs, it’s Sleep, an operatic song by the early 20th-century poet Ivor Gurney. And for anyone feeling anxious, it’s An Evening Hymn, Henry Purcell’s musical version of an obscure 17th-century religious poem.

In an experiment that attempts to use the transformative power of poetry and music to improve mental health and wellbeing, people in the Lake District town of Ambleside will be offered these unusual remedies at a special “song surgery” being tried courtesy of the opera singer Bibi Heal.

She will tailor the songs she prescribes and performs – typically very old poems set to classical music, known as “art songs” – according to the needs of the person who is seeking her help.

“We all know that music, whether you’re performing it or listening to it, has a transformative quality. It can help you to feel better and to reframe how you see your situation,” Heal says. “Art songs are a particularly rich vein to tap. Whether it was Mozart, Brahms or Mahler, the composers and the poets whose works they set to music were flesh and blood, who felt the things we go through now.”

These songs are undervalued today, she says. “A wealth of human emotions might be condensed in one song.” They also tend to require more technical training than modern songs because of the vocal range the singer must cover.

“There’s a pure visceral quality of hearing a voice doing things that you may never have heard before, particularly close to you,” Heal explains.

This creates an “element of wonder”, and when such a song is then targeted according to the listener’s emotional needs, she believes it can have a dramatic impact.

“If the song can provide an emotional reflection of your life, then you can relate to it and you can see your own truths there in that unfamiliar art form.”

The song surgery is the latest example of “social prescribing”, the trend to prescribe arts treatment to people with psychological and cognitive problems. Last week, the world’s largest study to date of the impact of arts intervention on physical and mental health was launched to help assess whether arts prescriptions can and should be rolled out across the NHS.

Heal became interested in the idea of prescribing songs after performing an opera taster tour of care homes and witnessing the impact her music had on patients with dementia. “You can see very clearly with a dementia sufferer when they get it and when they don’t, and at what point they are awakened and suddenly find joy.”

She has been able to reach people with music who are otherwise unreachable, she says. “One particular elderly lady couldn’t form responses when we tried to have a conversation. She couldn’t remember anything about her husband, about her work – she didn’t really have a grasp of language, even. We tried to find a way in, we had visual aids, nothing worked. But when I sang La Vie en Rose, she sang along in French.”

She knew every word, Heal says. “She didn’t have any memory at all from any period of her life but she sang that whole song, with me, in French.”

In Ambleside, passersby will be invited by performing arts students at Bradford College to have a personal five-minute “therapy” session with Heal, who will listen to their individual problems before deciding which song to prescribe and offering them a chance to hear her perform it. They will also be given the words of the song, translated into English if necessary, to read and reflect on.

She plans to use the hundreds of songs she has learnt to sing over her 20-year career like “musical paracetamol” to treat particular emotional maladies: “There is an opportunity to come along and say, ‘I’m really down’. And we will prescribe what we think you need, as a pick-me-up.”

Heal hopes that the unfamiliarity of the songs will add to their emotional power. “I’m interested in seeing if we can get a deeper understanding and a deeper therapeutic response from providing songs that are so multi-layered and not readily available.”

The one-day trial is being co-funded by the charity Help Musicians UK and a local arts project, Great Place: Lakes and Dales.

Jane Rice-Bowen, Heal’s creative producer, says she is hoping to secure more funding to develop an app, similar to the popular meditation app Headspace, that will allow Heal to compile a programme of prescriptions for anyone to access, and also to track their progress.

“Those of us who work within the arts have known for ever that it has a transformative power. But we’ve not always been very good at collecting the case studies and the data, and being able to demonstrate the impact we are having.”