Chapter 20
Emotions
There are two paradigms for understanding musical emotion in the nineteenth century. Exhibit A is Sir Simon Rattle’s face transfixed with ecstasy at the dominant 13th harmonic climax at bar 731 of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony (figure 20.1).
Figure 20.1 Sir Simon Rattle, face transfixed with ecstasy at the dominant 13th harmonic climax at m. 731 of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. (From a performance by Sir Simon Rattle, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Youth Chorus; Hillevi Martinpelto, soprano, and Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano; recorded in 1998 at Symphony Hall, Birmingham.)
Rattle’s expression is a fitting icon for how the audience might feel at this point, overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of sound emanating from massed choirs and orchestra in a vast public space. The example speaks to the popular conception of the nineteenth century as tearing down convention to unleash musical emotion as a material force. This materialism is epitomized by what Leonard Meyer called musical sound’s “secondary parameters”: dynamics, timbre, and tempo (Meyer 1989, 14). Exhibit B is the final movement of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, “Der Dichter spricht.” The piano solo in its naked delicacy seems to speak from the inner core of the composer’s subjectivity; it presents a model of emotion as spiritual, rather than material. So, is musical emotion a matter of physical nature (Mahler) or of human nature (Schumann)? Of course, it is both. The antinomy of Romantic emotion (to borrow a term from Kant; see Kant [1781] 1996, lvii) sharpens the Baroque dualism of passion versus action (James 1999): the subject passively suffering the assault of emotion as a material force (passion) versus the view of emotion as an emanation from the active will (action). And, at many removes, the dualism survives today in the debate between affective and cognitive approaches to musical emotion. The present chapter examines the nineteenth century’s particular take on this antinomy.
Everyone knows that the nineteenth century associated art with emotion. Wordsworth’s definition of poetry in 1802 as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” ([1802] 2013, 98) can stand for any number of similar pronouncements on musical emotion by Baudelaire, Heine, Mazzini, or Wagner. If the identification of Romantic music and emotion seems obvious to us, as well as to nineteenth-century artists and audiences—see Exhibits A and B—then it is puzzling why so few contemporary thinkers agreed or approved. Hanslick’s formalist rejection of the received view that music was capable of expressing the specific emotions of everyday life (as opposed to music’s very general emotionalism) is familiar, and need not be rehearsed here. Long before Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Hanslick [1854] 1986), Kant had set the negative keynote of the age by reviving the Stoic objection to emotion as a hindrance to human freedom. His three critiques deliberately give emotion short thrift, and he doubles down on it directly in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ([1798] 2006). Hegel attacks emotion for being static and inward in the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1976). And while Schopenhauer is often represented as the philosopher who embraced desire, it should be stressed that he assimilates emotions at the expense of abstracting them from everyday life (Budd 1992, 76–104). Hence, if emotions were literally unthinkable—because none of the great philosophers could theorize them—then they were also politically suspect. After the sentimentalist experiment of 1789–1815, when France put feeling center stage in political life, emotion was discredited and went underground, to erupt sporadically in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 (Reddy 2001).
All this should remind us that, while the emotionalism of nineteenth-century culture may well seem uncontroversial to us, it originally bore a radical edge. Its novelty and strangeness is revealed by the resurgent discipline of the history of emotions. Thomas Dixon (2004) has shown that the modern category of “emotions” was invented in the nineteenth century. By around 1850, “emotion” had become the most popular standard theoretical term for phenomena that had hitherto been labeled “affections,” “passions,” and “sentiments” (Dixon 2004, 98). The difficulty is that these words continued to be used both in Britain and on the continent, side by side with national idioms such as sensibilité and Gemüthsbewegung (literally, “movement of the temper” or of “the soul”). A further complication is that the concept of emotion changed during the century, gradually losing its moral and metaphysical dimensions as it acquired its modern scientific status. However, this is not to say that the subjective, “spiritual,” pole of the antinomy seamlessly handed over to its materialist pole, despite the historical distance between the Schumann and Mahler examples. These two extremes were in play from the outset of the nineteenth century, associated with an opposition between concepts of “surface” and “depth.” The story of emotion in nineteenth-century music is how this surface–depth model twists and turns in endlessly fascinating configurations. One can easily get lost in the vicissitudes of this rich history. What guides my path through the labyrinth are two “red threads.” The first thread is the idea that emotion in the nineteenth century is essentially transitional, playing into the emergent paradigm of music as dynamic. There is a vigorous counter-thrust of seeing emotion as a stream of discontinuous impulses, just as light can be modeled both as waves and as particles. Nevertheless, I believe that the basis of Romantic emotion in music is processual, and that discontinuity is heard as a figure against that ground. My second guiding thread is to construe emotion from the bottom up, from the viewpoint of compositional practice and the analysis of style. As often as not, the perspective from musical material is reinforced by contemporary theory and criticism, and by the history of ideas. Where tones and words disagree, however, I have sided with tones.
Idealism and Materialism
When we turn from the copious emotion literature of the Scottish Enlightenment to the situation in Germany circa 1800, we are first struck by an appearance of collapse. There is nothing in Idealist philosophy to compare with the detailed taxonomies of the sentiments and passions in the treatises of David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume’s and Smith’s plural approach follows in the great Western tradition of the emotion taxonomies of Descartes, Spinoza, Thomas Aquinas, and the Stoic philosophers. Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer show little or no interest in exploring the nature of happiness, sadness, anger, or fear. This is oddly out of line with the emotional realism of so much Romantic music: it is easy to recall songs or piano miniatures which are happy or sad (compare “Die Forelle” with the end of Frauenliebe und -Leben), angry or yearning (Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude; Liszt’s Liebestraum). Nevertheless, an impression of loss would be misleading. Rather than classifying its external expressions, Kant and his contemporaries are much more interested in the topography of depth, mapping the interiority of the subject. The subtlety of the German vocabulary of feeling is revealed by Ute Frevert’s exhaustive study of emotion words in nineteenth-century dictionaries and encyclopedias (Frevert 2014). The most important emotion word was Gefühl, reflected in the increasing length of dictionary entries on Gefühlsreligion, Gefühlsmenschen, Gefühlsphilosophie, Gefühlspädagogik, Gefühlspolitik, and other terms. The notion of Gefühl, developed by Kant in his Anthropology, is momentous because it supplies a crucial mediating third term within the dualism which had governed emotion theory since Descartes—the opposition of cognition and appetite or desire (see James 1999). Internalizing the older view of “feeling” as the tactile perception of external objects, Gefühl is an imaginative activity whereby the human mind grasps itself through self-reflection. In other words, Gefühl means what we nowadays call “subjectivity.” By distancing subjective feeling from physiological perception, or idealism from materialism, Kant safeguards the autonomy of human reason.
Gefühl gives Kant a vantage point on the surface and depth of emotions, associated, respectively, with the classical categories of affect and passion. In his view, affects are shallow and fleeting; passions are deeper and more stable. Kant articulates a highly influential hydraulic model of emotion—akin to a fiery liquid erupting from the depths—which would resonate with musical concepts of expressive breakthrough (Durchbruch) best known from Adorno’s Mahler monograph (Adorno 1992). Here is the Brockhaus dictionary’s definition of 1851: “The affects are different from the passions as the latter are constant, firmly rooted in the inside, dispositions towards affects, like a volcanic substrate from which often only the lightest touch can cause the flames of affect-laden feeling and action to break out” (cited in Scheer 2014, 53). While the crux of Kant’s theory of emotion is that surface and depth are related dialectically, it doesn’t follow that the interchange is always violent. The subtlety of in/out relations can be seen in the two most familiar cognates of Gefühl, the emotions of Gemütlichkeit and Innigkeit.
Gemütlichkeit is epitomized in Schubert’s late song, “Der Einsame” (D. 800), although critics have found this emotion in countless points of his music, including seeing his oeuvre against the philistinism of Biedermeier Vienna. A hermit (Einsame) sits by his fire listening to the chirps of a cricket on the hearth. The song is relaxed and light-hearted, tinged with longing. But “cozy”—the common translation of Gemütlich—doesn’t cover its full meaning. The concept blends isolation with aspects of social sympathy and compassion, suggesting that a person is seldom truly alone. Stirring in the additional connotation of Gemüt as character or soul, the 1827 Brockhaus captures the mutuality of the word beautifully: a person was gemütlich if “solely by the expression of his own Gemüth, the Gemüth of another person is put into a pleasant and comfortable state” (Scheer 2014, 48). The hermit and his cricket constitute a tiny society: “In my narrow and small hermitage,” he sings, “I tolerate you gladly: you do not disturb me when your song breaks the silence, for then I am no longer so entirely alone.” Like Gefühl itself, the song mediates the opposition between hermetic solipsism and sociability.
While “Der Einsame” instantiates the enormously significant Romantic trope of home as an emotional center—a spatial analogue of interiority—it also captures the urban distinctiveness of Viennese homeliness. The city of Vienna was much more rural than Edinburgh or London, metropolises whose civic society underpinned Hume’s and Smith’s emotion of sociability. On top of their authoritarian politics, this is another reason why the German-speaking lands were comparatively untouched by Scottish moral philosophy. In this respect, Gemüt affords a more idealist yet personalized variety of emotional sympathy, rooted in affective contagion between individuals (even across species), rather than in artificial customs joining people and society. This was even more the case for Schumann’s provincial Leipzig.
Innig, denoting intimacy and affection, described the emotions most associated with middle-class practices of interiority, such as love, friendship, prayer, and contemplation. According to Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie (1818), Innigkeit was: “a state of significant excitement of the soul [Gemüt] or emotive faculty (heart), in which the sensations or feelings emerge from the most secret (most ardent [innig], i.e., most interior, thus most hidden) depths of our soul” (quoted in Scheer 2014, 58). The second of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze is marked “Innig,” expressive of its interiority. However, by labeling the dance “E” for Eusebius, the composer’s introverted avatar, Schumann personifies the emotion. For the Romantics, emotion is character. Whereas, in the wake of Locke’s critique of consciousness as an association of fleeting impressions, the modern notion that a fictional agent owns a stable personality was simply foreign to early eighteenth-century psychology (Fox 1982), the Romantics saw emotion (or passion) as both an emanation of character and a means of stabilizing character. Our contemporary term “subjectivity” amalgamates character and emotion into a single efficacious force, as explored by philosophers of emotion under the rubric of “persona theory” (Robinson 2005). Sulzer and Körner’s theories, in the late eighteenth century, that emotional character inhered in the “ethos” of musical material (Le Hurray and Day 1988), blossomed in Schumann’s critical writings on the programmatic character piece (Lippman 1999, 169), paradoxically by rendering character vaguely suggestive (in the Romantic spirit) rather than distinct.
Personifying an inner emotion also meant rendering character visible within the surface physiognomy of the music. When Innigkeit intensifies to “fervor” (Inbrunst), it has crossed the line from feeling to affect, “which then therefore shows itself externally in the body” (Lippman 1999, 58). Externalization, implicit the first time we hear Schumann’s Innig, erupts when the movement famously returns midway through the penultimate dance, no. 17, and morphs gradually into Schumann’s extrovert persona, Florestan. Marked to be played “Nach und nach schneller,” the dance climaxes with virtuoso physical gestures, tokens of surface affect. At one level, the passage epitomizes the fluidly dynamic quality of Romantic emotion that Wagner would call an “art of transition” (see later). At a deeper level, it signals that the meaning of transition extends deeper than just a step between two points of a line. Transition also has a vertical dimension: a shift from inner to outer, combined with a qualitative transformation as these inner feelings (passions) are objectified in surface materials (affects). Hegel called this process Entäusserung, a hugely influential concept explaining how artists externalized inner emotion by objectifying it in the artwork (Scruton 1997). The Idealist theory of Entäusserung was further developed by Croce and Collingwood, and is the central plank of Jenefer Robinson’s (2005) expression theory of aesthetic emotion.
Idealism never took root in early nineteenth-century France, and it is significant that neither of its foremost philosophers, Victor Cousin and Auguste Comte, developed a distinctive theory of emotion. Moreover, despite the tide of empirical psychology arising from British shores, Comte fenced it off from his positivist system, framed by the dualism of sociology and physiology. Hence the Kantian mediating term of subjective feeling literally had no place in French thought. The first edition of Larousse (1860) captures this dualism perfectly: a dualism which reconstituted the Cartesian materialist theory of emotion, suggesting that late eighteenth-century French sentimentalism was a historical hiatus. “In short,” the entry states, “emotion has two characteristics: a physical one, which is a commotion [ébranlement] of the nerves, felt chiefly by the organ of the heart; and the other moral, consisting of a very lively affection of the soul, of which the physical affection is the external sign.” The physical/moral dualism is reinforced in the 1878 edition of Larousse, which is overwhelmingly indebted to the Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain (1818–1903). It is a paradox that France needed to import its theories of emotion, because its poets and artists virtually invented its practice. The preface to Victor Hugo’s Cromwell (1827) is a manifesto for European Romanticism, and Hugo’s grotesque realism is imprinted on every bar of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830).
A touchstone for musical Romanticism, Berlioz’s symphony also ticks every emotional box. According to the “Postscript” to Berlioz’s Memoires, “The prevailing characteristics of my music are passionate expression, inward intensity, rhythmic impetus, and a quality of unexpectedness [imprévu]” (Berlioz 1960, 488). From a dualist perspective, imprévu, the jostling of contrasting impressions, might be understood to engage the external side of emotion as physical perturbation of the nerves, pointing to the aesthetics of shock developed by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 2006). Conversely, what Berlioz terms “inward intensity” could be heard in the cumulative waves of passion unfolding both within the Idee fixe and across its increasingly intense variations in the first movement. The theme’s “passionate expression” is encapsulated in the semitone appoggiaturas which form its melodic crux, the archetypal Romantic figure of yearning. Yet Romantic yearning is double-fronted: one face points to an indefinite future, never to be resolved; the other face bids us to enjoy struggle as an emotional end in itself. This is why Berlioz’s process of emotional intensification is based on repetition, sequence and variation as distinct from its German analogue, the Goethian concept of Steigerung which is characterized in music by sentential motivic compression and harmonic acceleration (Spitzer 2004). At its climax in the recapitulation, the Idee fixe is clothed in tutti orchestration, heterophonic textural doublings, and loud dynamics, but it is essentially the same melody. This is why we cannot speak of the subject’s course from tentative beginning to climax as a process of externalization, or Entäusserung. Unlike the shadowy ideas adumbrated, say, at the start of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony which break through in the finale, Berlioz’s theme is fully formed at the outset. Adorno’s judgment on Richard Strauss seems equally applicable to Berlioz, that “it thumbs its nose at inwardness [and abandons itself to] unmitigated exteriority” (Adorno 1964, 16).
Berlioz’s fixation on the particularity of musical material, evidenced by his astonishing orchestral neologisms, plays into the painterly aesthetics of his contemporary Delacroix, who wrote in his journal: “The kind of emotion proper to painting is in some way tangible” (quoted in Scott 1993, 135). Baudelaire urged poets to “glorify the cult of images” (129); and the Goncourt brothers spoke of the “spiritual physiognomy of matter” (quoted in Rajan 1997, 190), suggesting that the spirit/matter distinction was moot. In the wake of Hugo’s celebration of the category of the grotesque, Berlioz is a pioneer in the modernist emotion of aestheticized disgust (Menninghaus 2003). Outlawed from art by pre-Romantic aesthetics, disgust now plays a dialectical, multifarious role on at least three levels. First, Berlioz broadens our palate for unusual, hitherto disgusting sonorities. Second, his music is literally disgusting to contemporaries of a Kantian bent such as Mendelssohn. In his letter to Moscheles dated April 1834, Mendelssohn wrote: “For his orchestration is such a frightful muddle, such an incongruous mess, that one ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores” (quoted in Bloom 2008, 105). And third, the unceasing procession of sensations both records and elicits the most refined flavor of disgust, the ennui associated with the fin de siècle, but already established in early Romanticism. We can scrutinize the avowed meaning of the symphony’s ineffably emotional introduction, looking past Berlioz’s decoy that the music expresses “the overpowering sadness of a young heart first tortured by a hopeless love” (16). Whereas “sadness” suggests a clearly defined emotional category, Berlioz’s effect is in reality more in the tradition of the “vague des passions” theorized in Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme (1802). Closely related to the ancient category of acedia, a cocktail of boredom, disgust, and melancholy, “vague des passions” denotes the paradoxical emotion of not having any distinct emotion: “a state of the soul which precedes the development of passions, when our faculties, young, active, whole, but withdrawn [renfermées], are only exercised upon themselves, but without any goal or object” (159). It appears that Berlioz originates something extraordinary in the history of musical emotion. As a portrait of an emotion struggling to articulate itself, the introduction is not a transition from one emotion to another; nor a gradual clarification of emotion, as in the Entäusserung model. The music, rather, makes the very vagueness of emotion emotionally apparent. It puts interiority on display. Chateaubriand’s and Berlioz’s tactic fits into the politics of post-1815 emotion outlined by William Reddy, a time when French artists and intellectuals, disgusted with the weakness of the subject, hankered after a restoration of rational conservative government. Key figures in Reddy’s narrative are the philosopher Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and the weak men in George Sand’s fiction, one of whom could have been Chopin himself (see Reddy 2001, 249–256).
To identify the subject of Chopin’s Nocturne in C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1, as emotionally “weak” is not to denigrate the music. It is a factual comment on the music’s dependency on an ultra-rational, 24-bar framework in the ternary form’s outer sections, which supports the nocturne like a mollusk’s shell. The da capo keeps strictly to this shell, so that its emotional intensification is solely a function of harmonic variation: its intoxicating coloristic layering displays Delacroix’s emotional tangibility of painting. The ribs of the shell are transparent voice-leading descents from G to C, far more tangible than in the majority of Schenker’s graphs, where structural notes are abstract projections of a depth model. In Chopin’s surface model of emotion, even the passion is superficial: the double octaves which overtake the chorale melody in the middle section, “Poco più lento,” do not erupt from within, like a Germanic Durchbruch, but simply expand to fill up the available surface area between melodic steps. The triumphant melody at the close of the section is the same chorale melody as at the start, yet instilled with the octaves’ passionate force. The emotion is magnified, through Meyer’s “secondary parameters” of texture, speed, and dynamics, but not actually transformed.
Maine de Biran is a double-insider in Reddy’s political narrative. Not only is he witness, through his diaries, of self-disgust at the vacillations of his own will, seemingly the passive object of external sensations. Maine is also an important Voluntarist philosopher, parallel yet distinct to Schopenhauer, who paves the way for the characteristically French embodied phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. According to Maine, our sense of self flows from muscular effort and the feeling of resistance (Scheerer 1987, 177). It is through this feeling of resisted physical effort that we understand the externality of the outside world. Such a view deconstructs the duality of inner and outer emotion. The pianist’s muscles overcoming Chopin’s technical challenges resonate with listeners’ ecological experience of force and resistance in their everyday lives. While Maine and his contemporaries grappled with these concepts, we nowadays have fully developed theories of embodied cognition to understand how listeners imbibe Chopin’s emotions by empathizing with the performer’s fingers (Leman 2008).
Individual and Social Emotions
In the nineteenth century, musical emotion was individuated in human subjects and bodies. Earlier, people had tended to talk of being in the grip of external passions or social sentiments, diffused around the person like an ether (Fisher 2002). The concept of Gefühl stipulated that emotion was owned and defined by character. A symptom of that is the mutation of emotion scripts, as in the anger stereotype. Under the Aristotelian model of anger as an offense to dignity calling for revenge, the emotion was split between the judgment of offense and the will to vengeance. Little or no account was taken of how the social sleight affected personal feeling as long as outward decorum was upheld (Lehmann 2015, Spitzer 2017). This is why so many Baroque and Classical rage arias—from Handel’s “Why Do the Nations” to Figaro’s “Aprite un po’ quegli occhi”—are joyful: they are fixated abstractly on the idea of future retribution, rather than on what the subject is feeling in the present moment. This is the empty space in the emotion schema that Gefühl fills, so that Wotan’s very personal rage in Walküre, Act II, or Chopin’s in his “Revolutionary” Etude, can hold nothing back. The latter is also a good example of how Romantic rage can be instant, rather than consequent on a process of provocation and gradual build-up.
If an emotion could be discharged in a flash in a character piece—a musical analogue of Romantic irony’s favored genre, the fragment—then changes in musical style meant that, for the first time in history, an emotional script could also be unfolded across a large-scale work. Individuating emotion is to treat it as the motion of a persona in a temporal narrative; in music, this meant a compositional “subject” moving across the virtual tonal landscape of the work. Emotional travelogues such as Berlioz’s Harold in Italy or Liszt’s Les Preludes, each tracking the subject’s shifting affects, are only conceivable in the nineteenth century. But this is also the time when the specific emotion of fear or anxiety comes of age. No longer restricted to local trembling or Ombra effects, fear can now unfold as a fully fledged process, a “threat imminence trajectory” akin to an approaching storm (Spitzer 2011). The eighth symphonies of Schubert and Bruckner both map fear trajectories onto first-movement sonata forms. In Schubert’s “Unfinished,” the “storm”—rumbling in the ominous double-bass introduction—breaks in the development section; in the Bruckner, it thunders in the apocalyptic Totenuhr (“clock of death”) climax of the coda.
The paradox is that individual emotion was defined partly in anxiety toward the rise of social emotion in crowds and cities. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s words: “It is the town life. Their nerves are quickened by the haste and bustle and speed of everything around them” (1977, 279). Music’s social emotion was particularly blatant in opera. Opera not only put emotions on display; emotions travel faster among theatre audiences than in isolated acts of reading a novel—the paradigm of emotional inwardness. In terms of face-to-face reciprocity, the nineteenth century celebrated particular social emotions which have since fallen out of fashion, such as intense yet nonsexual male friendship (as between Verdi’s Don Carlos and Rodrigo), or the equally peculiar love-death of Tristan und Isolde. On a level of group emotion, the mob dynamics analyzed in Gustave Le Bon’s influential The Crowd ([1895] 2012) are played out in the massed choruses of French and Italian grand opera. A huge throng of people on a stage can inspire both sublime awe and a feeling of solidarity—an urge to join the crowd. It can also afford a foil for acts of titanic individual will, as when the Doge quells the mob in the Council Chamber scene of Verdi’s revised Simon Boccanegra: “His heartfelt words have the power to calm our anger.” Given the links between sensationalism, urban fragmentation, and popular culture (see Gabriele 2017), an operatic chorus could also be a physical correlative of the crowd of musical impressions impinging on the audience, as could the operatic orchestra. In the following report by Berlioz on Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, one sonic inventor doffs his cap admiringly at another: “Every two measures, in the silences that separate each part of the phrase, the orchestra swells to a fortissimo and, by means of irregular strokes of the timpani doubled by a drum, produces a strange, extraordinary growling that arouses dismay even in the listener most incapable of feeling musical emotions” (quoted in in Lacombe 2001, 256).
But there are also quintessentially social emotions suffered by individuals in themselves, such as shame and embarrassment, as with the enervated sopranos blushing under the audience’s collective gaze in Bellini or Donizetti. And individual grief can become socially contagious. According to Glinka: “In the second act [of La Sonnambula] the singers themselves wept and carried the audience along with them” (quoted in Kimbell 1991, 398). Moreover, the strong honor code operating in Ottocento Italy is one reason why so many librettos are focused on sexual jealousy, from La Sonnambula to I Pagliacci. At the deepest level, one might argue that musical emotion was social through and through, since to externalize feeling (Entäusserung) entails mediating it through intersubjective convention, like language. The dialectical interdependency of inner and outer emotion is suggestive for what increasingly happened at mid-century, when political exigencies literally drew music out.
In Vormärz Austro-Germany, as in pre-1848 Paris and Italy before the Risorgimento, emotional “inwardness” was tainted by the suspicion of political irresponsibility. Attitudes toward tearful sentimentality had always been ambivalent. However, the critique of sensitivity in the 1798 Krünitz dictionary entry on “Leidenschaft” makes the auspicious connection between emotion and nation building: it complains of the lack of “active useful virtue” which “harmed the public” and “brought the fatherland into disrepute” (quoted in Frevert 2014, 28), and points to early nineteenth-century endeavors to strengthen the active power of Gemüt. In this light, Wagner’s compliment that “Bellini was all heart” (quoted in Budden 1987, 300) sounds back-handed. And Karol Berger’s (1994) observation that Chopin’s narratives, as in his Ballade in G Minor, tended to collapse into disastrous proto-revolutionary apotheoses throws the spotlight on the pressure-cooker aspects of the Parisian salon. Napoleon had grumbled about Mme. de Staël’s machinations in the salon of 1802 (Reddy 2001); with a “political pianist” such as Chopin, the salon of the 1830s was far from being a sentimentalist emotional refuge. But the links between music, emotion, and politics were most direct in Italy.
In April 1859, when he hears that he has succeeded in goading the occupying Austrian troops into war with France, Prime Minister Cavour throws open the windows of his room and bursts into the opening lines of “Di quella pira,” the cabaletta which concludes Act II of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (Billington 1999, 157). Verdi’s climax is phenomenally stimulating on a physiological level, utilizing every trick in the book: peaking after a Rossini-style dramatic crescendo; dramatically displacing a hesitant earlier emotion through the tempo di mezzo; hammered home through percussive note repetitions; burnished with martial fanfares; and topped with the tenor’s high C (not in the score, but an unshakeable part of performance tradition all the same). The crucial point, however, is that Verdi crosses the threshold from nervous excitation to political provocation: even today, the musical emotion makes the audience feel like leaping out of their seats to take up arms. How does Verdi do this?
One struggles to find a nineteenth-century Italian theory of emotion, just as contemporaries wondered whether Romanticism was a uniquely North European phenomenon. Verdi drew deeply from Hugo, setting several of his plays and adopting his Shakespearian tragi-comic ethos, where the beautiful and the grotesque rubbed shoulders. But he also combined many home-grown tendencies, chiefly from Leopardi, Mazzini, and Manzoni. Leopardi, Italy greatest Romantic poet, is also becoming increasingly recognized for his critical writings, including a systematic treatise on the passions (Alcorn 1996). Bleakly pessimistic and even proto-Darwinian, Leopardi viewed the political fragmentation of early nineteenth-century Italy as a Hobbesian war of all against all, animated by universal hatred. His poetica dell’indefinito e del vago may echo Chateaubriand’s vague des passions, but in a brutally dramatic “sentimento del contrario,” working toward the deliberate destruction of illusion. The politician Mazzini, chief guru of the Risorgimento, wrote a precocious Philosophy of Music in 1836. Mazzini’s treatise finds analogues for Leopardi’s Hobbesian chaos in the state of contemporary opera, a “vulgar tumult of blind sensation and material instinct” (Mazzini [1836] 2004, 58). Mazzini’s main grievance is not opera’s mosaic-like “jumble” (36), but that “the emotion excited is ephemeral” (35): “It bounds from object to object, from affection to affection, from thought to thought; from the most ecstatic joy to the most hopeless grief; from laughter to tears, from love to rage, from heaven to hell; ever powerful, emotional, and concentrated” (42). Verdi’s Risorgimento choruses directly answer to Mazzini’s call for operatic emotion to be both extended in temporal scale and deepened into a social mission. Third, after Leopardi and Mazzini, what Verdi takes from Manzoni—author of Italy’s 1827 national novel, I promessi sposi—is the example of how to concentrate political sentiment within a family romance. Thrilling noises can only go so far: an audience is most deeply provoked when it cares about individual characters.
Leopardian “sentimento del contrario” is encapsulated in the shock tactics of Rigoletto’s “curse” motive, a chain of monotone repetitions leaping to a tonal surprise (which can be any interval, from a semitone to a diminished 7th). Strictly speaking a gesture rather than a motive—because its core is rhythmic rather than melodic—the curse epitomizes Peter Brooks’s idea that melodrama abrogates transition (1995). It makes a virtue out of Mazzini’s complaint of one affect leaping into another. In its simplicity, the curse is pliable enough to condense every aspect of the drama: the spoken rhythms of Italian with the anacrusic patterns of Verdi’s melodies; the formal principle of tempo di mezzo—the mid-scene intervention where one affect is ambushed by another (see Monterone’s shock entrance in Act I: importantly, Verdi prunes away the long poetic speech Hugo had originally given this character); the Manichean clash of “grotesque” and “beautiful” music, as in the leap from the C minor prelude to the Ab major banda; even Leopardian destruction of illusion, when the final curtain reverses the values of the grotesque and the beautiful, so that we find the hunchback’s anguish sympathetic, and the Duke’s La donna è mobile disgusting. The opera affords audiences a sentimental education in Brechtian Verfremdung, an alienation technique which redeems melodrama’s flirtation with emotional stereotype—that is, sentimentality. To pick two moments out of many, see the start of the Rigoletto–Gilda duet embedded within the Act IV quartet, where Rigoletto’s curse motive shunts the key to B double-flat major (A major), and is placated by Gilda’s redemptive cantabile. And then the point of Gilda’s murder in the D major refrain of the subsequent trio, whose melody finally makes sense of the approaching storm’s intermittent chromatic rumbles. The intermittency of these rumbles is nothing less than the curse motive writ big, projecting the idea of repetition at an architectonic level. At the heart of Verdi’s genius, here and in many other operas, is the ruthless focus on father–daughter relationships, a distillation of the Manzonian family romance, or the ideal of “home.” At the end of Rigoletto, the inwardness of home is detonated, and it is as if its shards fly off centrifugally into a utopian future into which the shell-shocked audience is bidden to follow.
Just as much as Verdi, Wagner relied on emotion in his project of building universal sentiment by extending sympathy from individuals to society as a whole. Yet he reached his goal by drawing opposite conclusions from French sensationalism. Where Verdi’s instinct was to exacerbate emotional contrast into shock, Wagner famously sought to mediate Meyerbeer’s “effects without causes” in processes of transition. Wagner was actually very admiring of French grand opera’s emotional energies. Here is his comment on Auber’s La Muette de Portici: “In the midst of this frenzied chaos, suddenly [come] the most emphatic calls for calm, or repeated appeals; then more furious wildness and bloody affrays, interrupted by a moving, anguished entreaty or by the murmuring of an entire people in prayer” (quoted in Lacombe 2001, 255). He was equally impressed with Scribe’s control of architectonic pacing, as in his libretto for Les Huguenots. The principle of acceleration and collapse, familiar in Chopin’s ballades, is applied by Scribe to the length of the five acts, so that Acts 4 and 5 get progressively shorter, while audience tensions are screwed up further by the overlong celebration scene just before the massacre (see Gerhard 2000, 188). The challenge was to mediate local sensation with architectural design, something Wagner’s “art of transition” achieved in all his mature music dramas (in Berger 2017, 60). In his letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 1859, Wagner claimed that his “greatest masterpiece in the art of the most delicate and gradual transition is without doubt the great scene in the second act of Tristan und Isolde.” Wagner sought, and surely succeeded, in “mediating and providing an intimate bond between all the different moments of transition that separate the extremes of mood” (quoted in Berger 2017, 60).
Transition foregrounds emotion as a wave, not as a particle or a spark. Wagner writes extensively about emotion (including thirty-eight references to it in Opera and Drama [1851]), and in varying senses, so that the term is essentially a placeholder. However, one can tease out four main ways that emotion can be “transitional.” The first is as a modulation between “extremes of mood,” as in the Wesendock letter. The second is in the Hegelian tradition of a fluctuation in levels of conceptual clarity, with concepts alternately rising up and sinking back into the “watery” depths of musical emotion. In this light, the music waxes emotional at critical points of the drama, affording relief for long stretches of “dry” textual recitation, and marking those moments for consciousness and memory. While Wagner’s practice chimes both with the German aesthetics of the “moment” (Hoeckner 2002) and with the tendency of Aeschylus’s tragedies to drive toward climactic points (Ewans 1983), it also fits modern psychology’s findings that listeners tend to perceive musical emotion at boundaries between structural units (Sloboda and Lehmann 2001). Wagner’s third usage of emotional transition follows Feuerbach’s philosophy of the socially redemptive power of love. The music dramas increasingly highlight the oppositions of selfish, erotic love, and the compassionate love which arises through fellow feeling within a community (Berger 2017, Scruton 2017). Wagner’s fourth use of transition ultimately engages a move between these two extremes of love themselves. This is actually a double movement: from individual to society, and between two kinds of emotion—erotic desire and quasi-religious compassion, or pity (Mitleid).
Parsifal marks the triumph of pity in Wagner’s thought, although the tension between “eros” and “anti-eros,” as Berger puts it (2017, 340) had always been there, as recorded in Baudelaire’s reception of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin (1861). Confronted by the sexual savagery of the Tannhäuser prelude—whose orgiastic tumult shows how mob dynamics can migrate from chorus to orchestra—Baudelaire finds himself raped by the music, “ravished and flooded” with its emotion. By contrast, the Lohengrin prelude expresses an “ardor of mysticism,” “the yearnings of the spirit towards God” (Baudelaire 1981, 342). By calling attention to the music’s “blinding climax of colour,” Baudelaire puts his finger on the intellectually arresting quality of wonder, Wagner’s “Wunder.” Descartes’s premier emotion, wonder was denigrated by Spinoza because it froze attention and impeded thought. Lohengrin’s Wunder epitomizes that anti-intellectual, religious emotion which Nietzsche and Adorno diagnosed at the heart of Wagner’s phantasmagoria, the masking of technique by ideology (Adorno 1996). Yet the technical fusion of stasis and drama is extraordinary. Lohengrin’s sonic magic is viscerally transfixing, and Baudelaire’s reaction to Tannhäuser are equally pertinent here: “From the very first bars, our nerves vibrate in unison with the melody” (342). Wagner’s trick is revealed when we compare the opening with its likely source, the Benedictus of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, where flutes and solo violin also represent the dovelike descent of the Holy Spirit. Psycho-acoustically, very high solo violin pitches are heard to “hover” because they are in search of harmonic grounding. By beginning the Prelude with eight high violins in full harmony, Wagner has his cake and eats it, too: the music can shimmer suspended in midair indefinitely because it has no harmonic need to descend to a bass. Yet descend it does, in a seamlessly fluid, subdominant-orientated, progression toward the Grail motive, announced in brass-heavy orchestral tutti which sound like a physical approach in musical space. Overall, the Prelude unfolds the aural illusion of gradual descent and approach followed with rapid ascent and withdrawal. It is a sonic metaphor for the approach–withdrawal shape of the opera as a whole: the arrival and exit of the Swan-knight, accompanied by the dove. The final bars of the opera show Wagner’s uncanny ability to compress drama into sound. As Lohengrin and his dove vanish into the distance, the close of the Prelude is recapitulated, but with the timbre vacillating between full and rarified orchestration. For one bar, it seems as if the opera will end as softly as the Prelude, the final F sharp—A major plagal cadence scored with gentle upper wind and horns. But then the closing tonic is overtaken by full orchestra, swelling via a hairpin crescendo into a fortissimo which seals the opera’s fate with devastating feet of clay. In an echo of Cartesian dualism, Wagner’s wondrous transition is in equal part timbral (material) and harmonic (rational): an orchestral sonic gesture underpinned by an upward shift in the Riemannian Tonnetz from F sharp to A.
It is arguable that, while Elsa’s death is no more absurd than Gilda’s, the audience cares less about her. That is the price of a communal, religious, model of emotion, which both undercuts our investment in the individual and threatens to return to a pre-Enlightenment, de-individuated model of affect. The idea that this was a price worth paying is increasingly the tenor of Wagner’s late music dramas, following Schopenhauer’s philosophy of renunciation. Behind Wagner lies the broader paradox that Romantic emotion is a flight from emotion, as in Kierkegaard’s theory of the stages of existence, the necessary progression from the aesthetic through the ethical to the religious stage (Gouwens 1996, 83–88). The aesthetic plane, in which the subject swings feverishly from one emotion to another, is strongly rejected by Kierkegaard. Wagner’s later music dramas—Tristan und Isolde, Gotterdämmerung, and Parsifal—sacralize love from a variety of angles.
The civilized emotions enshrined in national anthems take emotional progression in another direction entirely. The course from spontaneous and short-lived individual emotions, through the increasing stability of character and chorus, climaxes with the habitualized and carefully cultivated emotions of a people (Volk) or a nation. What remains dubious in Wagner’s case is the projection of the artist into the crowd so that the nation is imagined as the individual writ large, arguably in reflection of late nineteenth-century Prussian militarism under a hero such as Bismarck. This kind of egocentric projection is absent in the French emotion of civilité, founded on “an eagerness to show respect and regard for others, by an inner feeling consistent with reason” (Saada 2015, 63). This French self-image held even when commuted to an imperial, colonial, scale, as expressed in works such as Massenet’s Indian opera, Le Roi de Lahare and Delibes’s Lakmé. Outside the main European powers, the ostensibly less “civilized” nations invoke landscape to naturalize their emotions. For instance, in contrast to those of Britain, France, and Austria, the national anthems of the Nordic countries propose that their emotions are as pure and uncultivated as their forests, rivers, and hills (Jordheim 2015, 25). The anthems of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland unfold similar plots in which the landscape holds firm and triumphs over foreign invaders. The Danish anthem (words by Adam Oehlenschläger, 1819; music by Hans Ernst Krøyer, 1835) begins: “There is a lovely country, it stands with broad beech-trees near the salty eastern shore.” The land sees off its foe, whose bones rest “behind the mounds’ monoliths.” Krøyer’s pure D-major Folkelighed—a Danish version of the nature-sounding Volkstümlichkeit of innumerable Schubert songs—adds the further dimension of childhood innocence. It sounds the circularity wired into national songs between nation-building and the education of children. This explains the further paradoxes that the Danish national emotion of Hygge, as in much of Carl Nielsen’s choral music, is simultaneously educational and patriotic; and at the same time, the emotion of domestic coziness par excellence (Reynolds 2010). By contrast, German Gemütlichkeit is kept firmly at home.
Aesthetes and Other Animals
He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,
He crammed his feet into bright tight boots
And to start in life on a brand new plan,
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man!
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man!
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through
For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey crav’d,
Was a radiant Being,
With a brain farseeing
While Darwinian Man, though well-behav’d,
At best is only a monkey shav’d! —Gilbert & Sullivan, Princess Ida
Parsifal’s consciousness awakens after he kills a swan, and Nietzsche collapses into madness embracing a dying horse. One of the many cultural repercussions of Darwinism is the rise of animal rights at the close of the century, predicated upon emotional sympathy across the species divide. The finale of this tale is as packed and colorful as that of any Gilbert and Sullivan opera, taking in Darwin, Edmund Gurney, Schubert’s cricket, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, the Munich phenomenologists, and G&S themselves. But the drama begins with Darwin.
Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals ([1872] 2009), published simultaneously in England and Germany (and two years later in France), was the most sophisticated and influential theory of emotion in the nineteenth century. In terms of the history of emotion, Darwin is important because he leapfrogs over the Kantian interregnum to revive the mainstream idea of emotions as part of surface behavior, rather than of shadowy inwardness. That is, he picks up where the Scottish Enlightenment left off, conceiving of the expressive properties of distinct emotional categories such as happiness, sadness, fear, and anger—an approach which has become mainstream again today. Darwin’s specific theory of music is that it originates in the emotion associated with animal mating cries; that is, musical emotion was a sonic corollary of sexual competition, and musical pleasure evolved from sexual pleasure. Darwin’s theory was taken up by Edmund Gurney in his massive treatise, The Power of Sound ([1880] 2011). Gurney is a fascinating character, as much a double-insider as the composer-chemist, Borodin. While musicology recognizes Gurney as the progenitor of a mode of Anglo-American criticism from Tovey through Kerman and Rosen (Spitzer 2005), he is known in emotion studies as a psychologist, and friend and colleague of James Sully and William James (see Dixon 2004).
Gurney cites “Mr Darwin[’s] remarks on the power of music to excite emotions of tenderness, love, triumph, and ardour for war,” and that “nearly the same emotions, but much weaker and less complex, are probably felt by birds, when the male pours forth his full volume of song, in rivalry with other males, for the sake of the female” ([1880] 2011, 119). He also broadly (despite quibbles) approves of Herbert Spencer’s idea that musical emotion, like “impassioned oratory,” is a “mental reversion” to these primal emotions. How, then, does Gurney deal with the fact that musical emotion at the “cultivated stage of the art” (172) doesn’t sound much like animal cries—indeed, with the very difficulty of labeling or categorizing its ineffable and fluid nature? Ingeniously, Gurney argues that it is this very quality of “fused and indescribable emotion which seems explicable on Mr. Darwin’s view” on account of the evolutionary principle of “differentiation” (120). It is completely understandable that, over eons of time, musical emotion has evolved out of recognition.
Whether or not one is convinced by Gurney’s maneuver, the subtlety of his theory of emotion is best revealed in the chapter “Music as Impressive and Music as Expressive.” Gurney’s argument circles the topic in three dialectical steps. First, he makes a clearer connection than any other nineteenth-century critic between a range of emotions and the structural features of music, including: the “accent of trouble” in Schumann’s Bittendes Kind (322); “passion and vehemence” in Beethoven’s Les Adieux piano sonata (325); “confidence” in Schubert’s B♭ Piano Trio (327); “triumph” in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang (327); “caprice” in Bizet’s Carmen (234); and “yearning and imploring” in Schumann’s Des Abends (330). And yet, despite pages of sensitive music analysis, Gurney invokes these examples only to dismiss them as being beside the point for a variety of reasons. Musical emotions are too fleeting to be easily captured; and even when they are, “our interest seems to lie in something quite remote from such description” (336). More generally, Gurney can think of innumerable “expressive” pieces which are nonetheless not “beautiful,” and vice versa, so that emotion has as little to do with aesthetic quality (the “impressive”) as fleeting expressions do with the underlying beauty of a human face. Completing the circle, however, Gurney then concludes that key emotions such as yearning and triumph do operate at a foundational level in our perception of musical expectancy. Gurney’s analysis of Des Abends is extraordinarily prescient of Leonard Meyer’s psychological model of musical emotion as a cycle of anticipation, confirmation, or subversion:
The yearning character can, I think, only be due to the fact that … we are yearning, not for inexpressible things, but for the next note, or all events for some foreseen point beyond. Take the place of junction of the second and third bars; in leaving the A, we seem to be stretching out for, straining towards, the F sharp, with a desire which results in an almost imperceptible dwelling on it when we have once arrived. Then in the ascent to the upper F, we have a gradually growing excitement in the approach and the same final strain towards the longed-for point.
(Gurney [1880] 2011, 331)
Gurney’s phenomenological atomism, his notion that, compared to the eye surveying a spatial object in its entirety, the ear is really only cognizant of one note at a time, a “succession of impressions” (Gurney [1880] 2011, 215) of “note-after-note melodic motion” (315), influenced William James’s far better-known concepts of the “stream of consciousness” and the “specious present.” It was also taken up much later by Jerrold Levinson’s theory of musical “concatenationism” (Levinson 1997). It is a case of evolutionary theory applied to psychology, commuting the model of blind, nonteleological struggle from the organism in the field to the datum in the listener’s consciousness. It has expressly nothing to do with any lack of coherence in the musical “organism” itself, a point which needs to be underlined, in view of the deceptive analogy with proto-modernist fragmentation. On the contrary, Gurney has a fairly conservative view of musical style, emphasizing that music inheres not in individual notes but in “coherent groups” (15). As we shall see in due course, the materialist perspective on music as an “agreeable stimulation of the nerves” (14)—fully accepted by Gurney—would become associated in Austro-German music with the perception of decadent incoherence.
Gurney is more in tune, rather, with the aestheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, particularly with the Paterish notion of the refined critic as arbiter of the aesthetic impressions bombarding his sensorium. Gilbert and Sullivan modeled their character of Bunthorne in Patience on Wilde, and Darwinism was lampooned in Princess Ida (see earlier). Beyond these overt references, the operas are aestheticist in their seemingly inconsequential patter. Ko-Ko’s song, “Tit Willow” from The Mikado is the Darwinian composition par excellence on a number of levels. First, Ko-Ko’s absurd tale of the tit who drowns himself out of unrequited love instantiates Darwinian sexual selection; indeed, one of the “Darwin plots” that Gillian Beer (1983) discovers in so much late-Victorian fiction. Second, the song enacts the Darwinian evolution of music from a bird’s mating call, not to mention cross-species musical communication from bird to man. And third, there is the nihilistic absurdity of the operatic setting—in particular, the evolutionary gulf between the emotional sincerity of the song and its comic framing. For “Tit Willow” is unsettling precisely because of its surprising emotional authenticity, its Italianate conventionality notwithstanding. Nor can one gainsay the exquisite delicacy of Sullivan’s orchestration, as in the affecting progression from bassoon and cello to flute in the middle section.
The question of whether the song is emotionally authentic or sentimental recalls another lesson of Gurney’s The Power of Sound: the separability of beauty and emotion. Gurney observes that music can convey emotion without needing to be coherent or sophisticated. The traditional word for such emotion is sentimentality. In his defense of sentimentality, the philosopher Richard Solomon (1991) contends that sentimental art can be valuable in offering emotion as an object of contemplation in itself, over and above the artwork’s aesthetic qualities. Solomon’s view helps exonerate the commodified character of much nineteenth-century British music, such as the tradition of domestic piano ballads (Scott 2012). Thus the abiding attraction of Henry Bishop’s 1823 setting of “Home Sweet Home” is its moral didacticism, whatever one might think of its cloying melody. The ethical spirit exuded by a huge range of nineteenth-century music, including Mendelssohn’s comparable Songs without Words, represents the reverse side of sentimentality’s morally questionable character—the Stoic tradition’s suspicion of emotional wallowing. Modern psychologists are careful to discriminate the emotions music expresses from those they induce. In the case of sentimentality, morally sanctimonious music can well induce a reaction in the listener of disgust. Reciprocally, music which is expressive of disgust, such as the Symphonie fantastique, can elicit emotions of sublime joy.
Disgust is perhaps the most interesting emotion at the century’s decadent sunset. As an emotion reacting against the ingestion of a toxic substance, disgust reflects the culinary aspect of sentimental music as a kind of delicious poison: Kitsch or Schmalz (literally, lard). The question is, what sets Schubert’s homely and deceptively sentimental (Gemütlich) Der Einsame apart from songs such as “Home Sweet Home”? It is not Schubert’s infinitely superior formal sophistication in itself—that goes without saying. The marvel, rather, is how his song builds in the self-reflection intrinsic to Gefühl as a dialogue between the hermit and the cricket’s piano chirps. The music’s haltingly unpredictable stop-start flow, punctuated by pauses and silences, evokes the hermit’s listening and enacts the audience’s own listening. By contrast, Carl Goldmark’s 1896 Das Heimchen am Herd (an operatic version of Dickens’s Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth) is sentimental because its emotions are fundamentally static and uncritical. Mahler, who conducted Das Heimchen am Herd on many occasions, wrote that “it first opened my eyes to the banality of his music, its weakness and sentimentality” (quoted in Hollington 2014, 18). Conversely, it is curious why Strauss’s Salome, ostensibly the apotheosis of fin de siècle sentimentality, triumphs over an extraordinary barrage of criticism. This key work in the history of musical emotion helps pull together various strands of the narrative.
Salome, a raptor-like femme fatale, is a Tit Willow of biblical proportions, just as the executioner’s axe hovers over the heads of the Mikado’s colorfully plumed characters (the two operas are unlikely satyr plays of each other, with Wilde as the common denominator). The links between the bestial, the gustatory, and the sentimental come literally to a head when she figuratively eats the lips of the decapitated Jochanaan like a ripe fruit, and Strauss serves up the delicious sonority on a silver platter for the delectation of the audience. Reviewing Salome’s Viennese premier in 1907, Robert Hirschfeld wrote that this “music of monstrosity” is a kind of “unorganic [sic] form [which] harms our emotions” (quoted in Gilliam 1992, 333). He also puts his finger on the paradox that this music which “has ascended the highest heights of aesthetic culture” (335) also bears “deep traces of decay” (334). This paradox looks less problematic from a Darwinian perspective, with its dialectics between evolution and descent. Our ability to sympathize emotionally with animals grows with cultural sophistication, just as savoring decadent art predicates the exquisite connoisseurship of Pater, Wilde, and Huysmans. By this light, Salome’s discourse of disgust is quite complex, operating on at least three levels. The first level is its flow of apparently atomized sensations, akin to the Baudelairian ennui of Berlioz’s symphony. The second level is those moments of Goldmark-like sentimental Kitsch which afford the flux deceptive respite and resolution. The third level is the decay of Kitsch back into avant-garde dissonance: the semitones which spike Salome’s triads ventriloquize the audience’s rejection of these sonorities—a disgust summarily enacted by Herod’s being on stage at the very end (she is not killed so much as spat out). The circulation of these levels of disgust (flux to Kitsch, decay back to flux) constitutes a kind of gustatory self-reflection, as if our stomachs became conscious. This is similar to the haptic reflexivity we experience when our hands touch each other, according to Merleau-Ponty’s materialist theory of perception.
A materialist apology for Salome’s emotion aligns it with the new scientific discourse of music led by Gustav Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Carl Stumpf (see Bujic 1988, Hui 2013). Fragmented into acoustic stimuli, and its inwardness de-sacralized into surface effect, Strauss’s music also converged with physiological paradigms of emotion. The scientific body cancels the surface–depth model because, unlike the soul, its interior organs are open to observation and measurement. Nevertheless, what most troubled Strauss’s formalist critics, from Hirschfeld to Adorno, is that his music blurred the line between life and art, or physiology and aesthetics. In short, it was the hoary debate about “program music,” and this is the point to bring Hanslick back into the conversation. Chapter 6 of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (The Relation of Music to Nature; 1854) laser-beams its critique of musical emotion on the fallacy of a one-to-one causal connection between physical and aesthetic arousal. Given the alluring myth of listeners vibrating to music in an immediate and unreflective way (see Baudelaire’s Tannhäuser review earlier: “our nerves vibrate in unison with the melody”), this fallacy presented an open goal for Hanslick. Nevertheless, Hanslick oversimplifies, and the clue lies with his reference in Chapter 6 ([1854] 1986, 77) to the physiologist Hermann Lotze, whose work Hanslick actually admired.
Lotze, together with Theodor Lipps and Edmund Husserl, belonged to the “Munich Phenomenologists,” the founders of that discipline (Frechette 2013). It is an imponderable historical coincidence that Munich was simultaneously the birthplace of phenomenology and Straussian program music. Strauss was bored by Stumpf’s lectures at Munich University, so one should speak less of influence than of convergence: Lotze’s ideas reflect musical atomism through the looking glass. Lotze believed that the primitive elements of experience and self-consciousness were feelings (657). Thus the self was the unity of these feelings:
Every feeling of pleasure or dislike, every kind of self-enjoyment (Selbstgenuss), does in our view contain the primary basis of personality, that immediate for-me-ness (Fürsichsein) which all later developments of self-consciousness may indeed make plainer to thought by contrasts and comparisons, thus also intensifying its value, but which is not in the first place produced by them. (Frechette 2013, 659)
Crucially, although bodily feelings may be triggered by physiological sensations, they are emphatically not reducible to them; nor are aesthetic feelings. By grounding subjectivity in feelings at a transcendental level distinct from empirical sensation of space and time, Lotze carved out a distinct space for a “phenomenology” of experience. This space of phenomenological emotion isn’t captured by Hanslick’s gross binary between aesthetic and materialist sensation. Lotze’s idea will become extraordinarily significant for future emotion theory, as would Lipps’s equally vital notion of projective empathy, Einfühlung. Lipps argued that the striving self projected its emotions onto stimulus configurations so that, for example, a beholder of a gesture of sorrow or pride in animate or inanimate object (streams, creatures, or persons, or indeed music) can identify with those emotions. Susanne Langer’s theory of musical emotion is the best known early exponent of this approach. Moreover, by abrogating the distinction between subjects and objects, Lipps’s unity of consciousness resonates with the Darwinian continuity between human and animal emotions.
Strauss and the Munich Phenomenologists both set the seal on the story of emotion in nineteenth-century music, and lay the battle lines for another century of argument. The emotivism of Lotze and Lipps was easily picked off by Husserl’s and Heidegger’s stringently ideational approach, whereby art was “bracketed” off from empirical data. There followed nearly a hundred years of critical consensus that aesthetic (including musical) emotion was distinct from emotion in everyday life. With the renewed interest in musical emotion over the last decade, this consensus is only now becoming challenged.