Mozart Cryptology: Gothic Horror and Musical Meaning in the Late Enlightenment
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Southampton
Department Name: Faculty of Humanities
Abstract
In some of his late minor-key instrumental works, I will argue, Mozart joined his literary contemporaries in cultivating the terrors of the supernatural. I will explore how the notion of music as spectral, eerie and uncanny, which is met in Gothic novels and Graveyard poetry of the period, are embedded in Mozart's own works.
Recent literature in literary and cultural studies has explored the Enlightenment's cultivation of terror as an aesthetic effect. Such 'terrorism' is epitomised by Collin's 'Ode to Fear' (1746), the flesh-creeping impression of Garrick's fear-struck Hamlet in Drury Lane in the 1740s, hair-raising Gothic romances (beginning with Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764), wet-nurses supernatural folktales, everyday superstitions, and the staged phantasmagoria across Europe at the end of the century. Terror as an aesthetic effect and social good was influentially theorised by Burke in his treatise on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Rendered pleasurable by a safe distance, terror gives commercial society a short sharp shock. However, as Clery notes, the terrible was itself a commercialised experience.
A major focus for aesthetic terror was the supernatural: the 'Age of Reason' returned again and again to the horrors of the spectral, the ghostly, the demonic, and the disembodied intrusion into consciousness of 'the other side'. Castle, The Female Thermometer (OUP, 1995) explores the conflicts between supernaturalism and rationality, arguing that precisely because the Enlightenment explained the supernatural as a product of the mind, the mind was inadvertently supernaturalized / as if hosting its own phantasmagoria. Thus tensions between belief and disbelief, the real and the imaginary, the past and present, the animate and inanimate, the worldly and the otherworldly were endemic to consciousness itself / tensions that were addressed directly, and externalised, in what Clery calls the 'terror industry'.
The role of sound and music in these contexts is barely acknowledged in the literature. But the graveyard poets, and later the Gothic novelists, evoked the presence of the supernatural in the mundane, and mental, realms through, and as, sound. In literary representation, instrumental music was spectralized. Like an emanation from the other side, it seemed at once part of, and not part of this world, at once real and imaginary, human and disembodied, like a language but without semantic referentiality, hence suggesting presence and absence simultaneously. In Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) music / emanating from an invisible, possibly imaginary source beneath Emily's window / is the language of ghosts to which Emily listened with 'superstitious awe' until 'the strains ... sunk to a great distance ... became fainter and fainter, till they softened into silence'.
The supernatural topic in instrumental music, I suggest, involves not just conventions of harmony and style, but techniques of through which the music is made to sound strange and unfamiliar, disorienting, confusing, and suggestive of the visual world of ghosts, spectres, skeletons and the un-dead. With regard to expression, I will argue that Mozart exploits the chilling effect of apparently emotionless writing to create a 'cold', 'inhuman' and hence menacing impression. This phase of the study will culminate in a discussion of Mozart's musical cryptology, a set of musical signs equivalent to the literary and pictorial discourse of descent into the crypt, haunted dungeon or underground passageway.
With reference to Mozart's Fantasias in C minor (K. 475) and D minor (K. 397), I will explore how the fantasia provided an ideal context for the terror's of the supernatural, not simply because of the genre's relative 'freedoms' of modulation, thematic working and meter, but because the elusiveness and ambiguities of the genre resonated with the discourse of the supernatural itself.
Recent literature in literary and cultural studies has explored the Enlightenment's cultivation of terror as an aesthetic effect. Such 'terrorism' is epitomised by Collin's 'Ode to Fear' (1746), the flesh-creeping impression of Garrick's fear-struck Hamlet in Drury Lane in the 1740s, hair-raising Gothic romances (beginning with Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764), wet-nurses supernatural folktales, everyday superstitions, and the staged phantasmagoria across Europe at the end of the century. Terror as an aesthetic effect and social good was influentially theorised by Burke in his treatise on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Rendered pleasurable by a safe distance, terror gives commercial society a short sharp shock. However, as Clery notes, the terrible was itself a commercialised experience.
A major focus for aesthetic terror was the supernatural: the 'Age of Reason' returned again and again to the horrors of the spectral, the ghostly, the demonic, and the disembodied intrusion into consciousness of 'the other side'. Castle, The Female Thermometer (OUP, 1995) explores the conflicts between supernaturalism and rationality, arguing that precisely because the Enlightenment explained the supernatural as a product of the mind, the mind was inadvertently supernaturalized / as if hosting its own phantasmagoria. Thus tensions between belief and disbelief, the real and the imaginary, the past and present, the animate and inanimate, the worldly and the otherworldly were endemic to consciousness itself / tensions that were addressed directly, and externalised, in what Clery calls the 'terror industry'.
The role of sound and music in these contexts is barely acknowledged in the literature. But the graveyard poets, and later the Gothic novelists, evoked the presence of the supernatural in the mundane, and mental, realms through, and as, sound. In literary representation, instrumental music was spectralized. Like an emanation from the other side, it seemed at once part of, and not part of this world, at once real and imaginary, human and disembodied, like a language but without semantic referentiality, hence suggesting presence and absence simultaneously. In Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) music / emanating from an invisible, possibly imaginary source beneath Emily's window / is the language of ghosts to which Emily listened with 'superstitious awe' until 'the strains ... sunk to a great distance ... became fainter and fainter, till they softened into silence'.
The supernatural topic in instrumental music, I suggest, involves not just conventions of harmony and style, but techniques of through which the music is made to sound strange and unfamiliar, disorienting, confusing, and suggestive of the visual world of ghosts, spectres, skeletons and the un-dead. With regard to expression, I will argue that Mozart exploits the chilling effect of apparently emotionless writing to create a 'cold', 'inhuman' and hence menacing impression. This phase of the study will culminate in a discussion of Mozart's musical cryptology, a set of musical signs equivalent to the literary and pictorial discourse of descent into the crypt, haunted dungeon or underground passageway.
With reference to Mozart's Fantasias in C minor (K. 475) and D minor (K. 397), I will explore how the fantasia provided an ideal context for the terror's of the supernatural, not simply because of the genre's relative 'freedoms' of modulation, thematic working and meter, but because the elusiveness and ambiguities of the genre resonated with the discourse of the supernatural itself.
Organisations
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ORCID iD |
| Matthew Head (Principal Investigator) |