Int. J. Psycho-Anal.

(1996) 77, 1127

THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR: FREUD'S PROBLEM

WITH MUSIC

NEIL M. CHESHIRE, BANGOR

Freud's difficulty in appreciating music, even though he seems to have been one of
Charcot's 'auditifs' and had given auditory imagery a central place in his psychology,
is re-examined in the light of his dealings with various distinguished musicians, and
with special reference to the musical career of 'Little Hans'. The author argues that
Freud's exaggeration of his difficulty, combined with his ability to enjoy certain operas
and his use of musical metaphors in the context of theory and therapy, confirms his
own intuition of a conflict rather than a simple deficiency. This conflict is examined
with reference to the theories of Eissler and of Vitz, and in the light of his own
interest in classical Greek culture and in the nature of Art. Since opera was perhaps
the only form of music that Freud could readily enjoy, the relation between words
and melody in that genre is addressed. The significance for Freud of the specific works
and passages that he mentions throughout his writings is examined in the light of
some of his own theoretical concepts: (a) with special reference to 'oedipal' features,
to the dynamics of 'eros' and 'thanatos', and to the balance between the 'primary'
and 'secondary' processes in artistic creativity; and (b J as exemplified in his favourite
operas 'The Marriage of Figaro', 'Don Giovanni', 'Carmen' and 'The Mastersingers'.
The parts played, in his problem with music, by his envy of the artist's intuitive talent
for seduction and by his own 'acoustic atrophy' are also considered. He is defended
against the recent charge that, in order to avoid having to cede primacy to others on
points of psychology, he deliberately misrepresented how much he knew about music.

Then Music, the mosaic of the air,
Did of all these a solemn noise prepare:
With which she gained the empire of the ear ...
(Marvell, c. 1650, lines 17-19)
Since Freud himself established the psycho-
logical 'empire of the ear' rather compre-
hensively, both by developing an uncompro-
misingly oral and auditory psychotherapy
and by sketching a model of the psychic
apparatus which gives pride of place in per-
ception and memory (whether conscious or
unconscious) to auditory images, his self-
confessed difficulty with music, contrasting
as it does with his evident sensibility to other
art-media, has given many of his commen-
tators pause. To some extent it puzzled
Freud himself, at least enough to evoke from
him his well-known thumbnail analysis of it
(l9l4a, p. 211).
But, from the outset it has seemed to
some that Freud's claims to unmusicality
smacked of 'protesting too much', and were
therefore symptomatic of at least an uneasy
ambivalence if not a more active conflict of
some kind (cf. Strachey, 1966, p. 5). Some
of the contributions to two recent volumes
devoted to 'psychoanalytic explorations in
music' (Feder et aI., 1990, 1993) can be seen
as reinforcing such a view, and have there-
fore encouraged this further exploration of
it.
1128 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
1) A COMPLETELY UNMUSICAL PERSON
1.1) Freud as an 'auditif
In investing the ego with the responsibility
for keeping in touch with the outside world
and for operating the 'reality-principle', Freud
made people's perceptual powers a central
component of their ego-functioning. So that,
in the notorious diagram of psychic structure
in The Ego and the Id, 'perceptual-conscious-
ness' is drawn as part of the ego. Alongside
it but quite separately, however, Freud de-
picts the locus of auditory perception labelled
(in the Standard Edition) as 'acoustic' con-
sciousness. It is drawn, no doubt somewhat
jocularly, like a peakless kepi perched on
top of the psychic cranium, and Freud ex-
plains that 'the ego wears a "cap of hearing"':
the German word Horkappe apparently be-
ing medical slang for the auditory lobe. In
this way he illustrates what he has been
saying in the text about the centrality of
specifically auditory memories to the contents
of the unconscious: namely, that its main
effective components are 'mnemic residues',
and that dominant among these are 'verbal
residues' which are 'derived primarily from
auditory perceptions. As a consequence, 'the
system Pes. ["preconscious"] has ... a special
sensory source' (1923, p. 25), which is es-
sentially an auditory one. He pursues the
point in greater detail, and with repeated
reference specifically to the 'mnemic residues
of speech' (my italics), in the late Outline ...
(Freud 1940, esp. Chs. 4, 8), by which time
Isakower (1939) had also addressed the issue.
In the light of all this, it cannot be without
significance that Freud's early resolve to
become a natural scientist rather than a
lawyer, which he announced to Fluss at the
age of 17, was already expressed in somewhat
unexpected auditory, rather than visual, im-
agery. He writes there, of his decision to
explore the natural world, that he is going
to 'eavesdrop on' or 'listen-in to' (belauschen)
what he calls, in Ilse Schrier's translation,
the 'eternal processes of nature' (Freud, ed.,
1969, p. 424). Thus he seems to have had,
in addition to that powerful auditory memory
which is well documented, also a more per-
vasively auditory 'cognitive style' such as
Charcot had identified as a distinct person-
ality characteristic marking off the tempera-
mental auditifs from the contrasted visuelsand
'motorics' (Charcot, 1889, esp. p. 162), though
the validity of the disjunction was soon to
be challenged experimentally, but without
reference to Charcot, by the American psy-
chologist George Betts (1909) and much later
by Sheehan (1967, esp. p. 387). Nevertheless,
it is a distinction which Freud himself en-
dorsed in an early discussion of memory-im-
agery, having referred to it in his personal
tribute to the Professor of the Salpetriere
(1893, p. 12; Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 280),
and one for which Nass (1975, 1993, pp.
26-9) claims to find evidence in the early
lives of future musicians.
This penchant for an auditory mode of
expression and account-rendering, which made
him prized by his children as a colourful
raconteur in everyday life (M. Freud, 1957),
also influences the form of his written ex-
positions; and some would go further to say
that it affects the form of his theoretical
arguments and his use of clinical evidence.
Strachey has commented on the way in which,
even in those 'lectures' which were not in-
tended for viva voce delivery, Freud engages
his imaginary audience in a dialogue, puts
anticipated objections into their mouths,
makes conversational asides and so forth
(Strachey, 1963, p. 6). In doing so, he may
encourage us to sense that he had not entirely
put aside the rhetorical dialectic of the court-
room lawyer or political activist, whose roles
he had explicitly renounced as early as 1873
(Schorske, 1973, pp. 193-8).
Nor should we forget that a man whose
classical education had included the verse of
Sophocles and Virgil in the original texts
would also have absorbed the theatrical prose
of the politico-legal orators Demosthenes
and Cicero. Does not Freud's expository style
put us in mind precisely of the forensic case-
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
pleader's characteristic combination of evi-
dence, reasoning and rhetorical persuasion (cp.
Dalbiez, 1941; Mahony, 1987)? Although most
of that may be, for present purposes, another
story, yet we cannot help stumbling into the
paradox that this pre-eminently 'auditory'
man, whose sensitivity to the tone and rhythm
of words allowed him to develop even in his
schooldays a recognisably 'individual' (idiotisch)
style of writing, and who was fascinated by
many forms of art, was conspicuous in Vi-
enna for his self-confessed resistance to the
most purely auditory of the arts: music.
1.2) Protesting too much?
Given that Freud was wont to flaunt this
resistance almost to the point of ostentation
(cp. Strachey, 1966, p. xvi, n.1; Gay, 1988,
p. 168), and that his adopted home-city of
Vienna was celebrated throughout the west-
ern world for its music, we may legitimately
wonder whether his professed attitude rep-
resented to some extent a retaliatory rejec-
tion and devaluation of the cultural identity
of the city, in response to its perceived re-
jection and devaluation of his own Jewish
identity and unpalatable theories. As if to
say 'You scorn my Jewishness and my ideas:
I scorn your famous music!' Indeed, the
suspicion that this avowed aversion from
music was itself to some degree contrived or
synthetic is supported by his response when
Strachey challenged him on the point: to
Strachey's puzzlement at Freud's expressed
enthusiasm for going to see Don Giovanni
one evening in Vienna in spite of supposedly
not liking music, Freud relied, 'Oh, Mozart!
That's different' (Steiner, 1991, p. 375). On
the other hand, his pupil and friend, Hanns
Sachs, was able to confirm quite inde-
pendently the way in which the city carried
its estimation of music to indiscriminate
lengths. After mentioning Mozart, Schubert
and Hugo Wolf, he goes on:
These were the men who gave to Vienna what she
prized and appreciated more than anything else-
1129
music. The scholars, the scientists and the thinkers
could hope for nothing better than general apathy
(Sachs, 1945, p. 33).
Certainly, in his letters to Fliess alone,
Freud several times expresses a dislike of
Vienna which is so vehement as to amount
to active hostility (Masson, 1985, pp. 314,
326, 336, 337, 403, 409). But the hostility of
the Viennese to Vienna was and is, up to a
point, conventional (and certainly the hostility
of the Viennese musical press to their own
State opera company has been legendary for
some time). So it may be that Freud's sen-
timents were partly a matter of convention,
and partly the too-much-protested pole of a
complex ambivalence that did not allow him
to take up any of the opportunities to move
elsewhere that came his way before he was
forced out in 1938. His eldest son, Martin,
was not convinced that his father's oft-
professed dislike of the city was 'either deep-
seated or real', and he thought that those
expressions of 'hatred' represented
the truth of a day, of an hour or of a moment: not
necessarily a fixed attitude. And my own feeling is
that sometimes my father hated Vienna, and that
sometimes he loved the old city, and that, in a general
sense, he was devoted (M. Freud, 1957, p. 48).
It was also Martin Freud's view that his
father had opportunities to leave Vienna
sooner than he did. For further observations
on Freud's attitude to the city, see Eisslin
(1972, pp. 42-5).
Looking back from the perspective of his
middle forties, Freud's former child-ana-
lysand 'Little Hans' expressed his own mixed
view of the psychology of the city in which
he had grown up and studied at the Academy
of Music, before leaving to seek his fortune
elsewhere in Europe and eventually in the
New World
... Vienna was an old city, aware of its past, witty
and skeptical, of refined taste and tired nerves. It
was not just coincidence that Schoenberg's theo-
1130 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
ries of the dissolution of classic music harmony
stemmed from Vienna, or that there we met Sig-
mund Freud, who discovered the secrets of the
subconscious. This was a great place for learning,
but it was too conservative to offer practical op-
portunities to beginners (H. Graf, 1951, p. 5).
Freud's own ambivalence may have been
both more complex and less articulate than
that of his erstwhile patient, as we shall see
below (end of §2.1); but even if this is so,
other factors are evidently involved to render
his negative attitude to music standardly
'overdetermined'. For it is not just a matter
of verbal protestations: the additional 'be-
havioural evidence' has been reviewed often
enough, most recently by Diaz de Chu-
maceiro (1993, p. 262). There is the familiar
story that, as a schoolboy, he was allowed
to prevent his younger sister Anna from
practising the piano at home, by simply
asking his parents to remove the instrument;
thus making the Freud household one of
'the very few middle-class Central European
families without a piano' (Gay, 1988, p. 14).
Gay's source for his assessment of the con-
sequences of this much-quoted act of selfish-
ness on Freud's part is no doubt the son
Martin again; for he had written that his father
showed no selfishnessexcept on one strange point:
his demand that no piano should play in the flat
was inflexible. He had his way then ... and he
had his way later when he had a home of his own.
His attitude towards musical instruments of any
kind never changed throughout his lifetime.There
was never a piano in the Bergasse (sic) and not
one of his children learnt to play an instrument.
This was unusual in Vienna then, and would prob-
ably be thought unusual today: because to be able
to play the piano is considered to be an essential
part of middle-classeducation (1957, pp. 19-20).
Whatever effect this piano-deprivation may
have had on Anna, it did not break the
musical spirit of Freud's only brother Alex-
ander, who was some ten years his junior
and is a first-hand source for the story of
Anna's piano (Bernays, 1940, p. 142). In the
course of his account, the younger man
specifically says that their mother was 'very
musical'; and Martin Freud reports that his
uncle managed to develop a lively interest
and competence in the art, with which he
used to entertain his nephews and nieces (M.
Freud, 1957, p. 17).
Brother Alexander does confirm (p. 17),
however, that Freud the parent and pater-
familias imposed (as we have just seen) the
same sort of musical deprivation upon his
own children as he had upon his oldest sister,
though not quite with the vehemence that
he recommended to the parents of the young
violinist prodigy Fritz Kreisler. Ernest Jones
(1953, pp. 19-20, 206) tells us that Freud
was of the opinion (perhaps not to be taken
literally) that they should have throttled the
boy rather than indulge him with expensive
and disruptive musical tuition abroad. When
it came to the education of his own daughter
Anna, she was inevitably poorly prepared to
tackle the elementary musical requirements
of her teacher-training programme in 1915.
But fortunately she was able to secure suc-
cessful tutoring from one of the singers at
the Opera, Hedwig Hitschmann, whose hus-
band Eduard had been introduced to Freud's
'Wednesday meeting' by Paul Federn some
ten years previously (Diaz de Chumaceiro,
1993, pp. 261-2). It was this same Eduard
Hitschmann who was later (1927) to oppose
Freud so vigorously on the subject of lay
analysis (Gay, 1988, p. 495).
With reference to the verbal protestations
of unmusicality, a few of the most conspicu-
ous may be called to witness. In the last
decade of his life, he could write about
mysticism to Romain Rolland, the romantic
litterateur and musicologist, that that subject
was to him 'just as closed a book as music'
(Freud, 1929); and he had confided many
years before to his American follower J. J.
Putnam, 'I have no ear for music' (19l0c).
Even in the last few years of his life, he
found it necessary to remind his long-time
friend Marie Bonaparte, in a letter which,
as we shall see, paradoxically contains its
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
own contradiction of the assertion that he
is a 'completely unmusical person' (ganz un-
musikalischer Mensch) (Freud 1936, p. 430).
His own brief interpretation of this defi-
ciency follows an almost confidential 'aside'
in the famous essay on a visual art-work,
namely the Moses of Michelangelo. Having
claimed that, by contrast with literature and
the visual arts, he is 'almost incapable of
deriving any pleasure' from music, he goes
on to speculate:
Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind
in me rebels against being moved by a thing with-
out knowing why I am thus affected and what it
is that affects me (l914a, p. 211).
This interpretation has been glossed by
Roazen, with an echo of discussions of 'the
musical erotic' by both Kierkegaard (1843)
and Schopenhauer (1818, ii, pp. 455-6), who
opines that 'of all the arts, music is perhaps
closest to the id '; and he paraphrases Freud's
own account of the matter by saying 'without
a guide from the more rational part of his
mind, Freud felt uneasy' (1975, p. 57).
While some sort of psychodynamic story
is obviously critical to understanding the
various inconsistencies, not to say frank con-
tradictions, which we shall encounter in trac-
ing his responses to music, we should not
lose sight of the fact that many years earlier
Freud had introduced another element into
the complex of determinants by referring to
a more general difficulty with sound-percep-
tion (that is, one not confined to musical
sounds), and by seeming to hint at a quasi-
neurological categorisation of it. In an entirely
non-musical context, he reports irritation that
he has had to give up trying to follow a
chapter on auditory perception in a psycho-
logy textbook (Lipps, 1883), because its con-
tent was alien to him by reason of 'the
atrophy of my acoustic sensibilities' which
had prevented him from acquiring even 'the
most elementary knowledge' in that area
(Freud, 1898b, p. 325; cp. Cheshire & Thomae,
1991, p. 430b).
1131
There seems to have been a consensus
among those who knew him that a behav-
ioural manifestation of this 'atrophy' was a
form of so-called 'tone deafness' which pre-
vented him from humming or whistling in
tune. However, Diaz de Chumaceiro (1990a)
has objected that it is wrong to use the term
'tone deaf of Freud, because he evidently
could perceive tunes as tunes, store them as
such in his memory and identify them when
recalled. Her point is that, if he evinced only
a 'productive' (as opposed to a 'receptive')
dysphonia, it should not be called a form
of 'deafness'. But we may doubt whether the
term is really as technical as this argument
implies: it may still be informally appropriate
for the sort of limitation in question. We
return to the technicalities of pitch-percep-
tion later on (pp. 1136, 1141).
At all events, Gay recounts (1988, p. 168)
that Freud 'virtually boasted' about this dis-
ability, and that 'those compelled to hear
him droning arias from Mozart' confirmed
it. Freud refers to this ruefully when he
reports catching himself humming a tune
from The Marriage of Figaro; and when he
tells Marie Bonaparte, in one of the 'Chow'
letters just mentioned, that he often finds
himself humming to his dog an aria from
Don Giovanni, he still has to insist that his
recognition of it is in spite of his being
totally unmusical. In this way Freud exem-
plified a touching observation, made early
in the sixth century AD by the Roman consul
and polymath Boethius:
he who cannot sing agreeably still hums some-
thing to himself, not because what he sings gives
him pleasure, but because one takes delight in giv-
ing outward expression to an inner pleasure, no
matter what the manner (quoted by Strunck, 1965,
p.83).
But that way of expressing camaraderie with
one's canine friend, by humming the tune
of 'A bond of friendship binds us two' (as
Freud's German version of Da Ponte's libr-
etto puts it), is scarcely the action of a
1132 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
'completely unmusical person'. So the be-
havioural evidence itselfis already becoming
confused and beginning to reveal inconsis-
tencies. Nevertheless, these deprivations, pro
testations and contradictions may well be
thought sufficient in themselves to render
Freud a strange therapist for Gustav Mahler,
that most famous of contemporary Jewish
musicians whose consultation of Freud in
1910, the same year as the Putnam letter
just quoted, has been the subject of much
discussion (Still, 1960; Kuehn, 1965/66; Grun-
feId, 1979, pp. 36-51; Collins, 1982; cp, Pollock,
1974; Feder, 1981).
1.3) 'Dramatis personae'
Nor do the protestations about musical
marginalisation stop at assertions of personal
unresponsiveness to musical compositions:
for they encompass also the claim that he
did not even know any really musical people.
Coming from a man whose own brother
could whistle whole operas, who was close
enough to the eminent music writer Max
Graf to analyse his young son by proxy,
and who counselled none other than Gustav
Mahler himself, this disclaimer has the ring
of operatic make-believe since the facts are
stacked against it. All the same, at the end
of a discussion of the phenomenon of tunes
'coming into one's head', we find Freud
saying in the sixth Introductory Lecture that,
although he can understand that, in the case
of 'really musical people', there may be no
need for such tunes to be triggered by as-
sociated words (as they usually seem to be),
he cannot give an informed opinion on the
point because 'as it happens, I have had no
experience' of such people (1916, p. 108).
The roster of Freud's musical acquain-
tances in fact sampled a broad spectrum. At
one end, as it might be, the early analytic
patient whose 'hysterical' problem he could
interpret to her, because she was a semi-
professional singer, by quoting Cherubino's
famous love-sick song from The Marriage of
Figaro (Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 156; Freud,
71895); across the middle band, the severally
musically sophisticated colleagues and aca-
demic musicians who attended his 'Wednes-
day meetings'; at the far end, Mahler. And
somewhere along the line (who knows where?)
the ebullient French diseuse Yvette Guilbert,
who came to his last birthday party and
whose signed photograph cheered up his
Hampstead sideboard. There was wide vari-
ation also in the depth of these acquain-
tanceships: from the 'one-off' therapeutic
session with Mahler to the almost weekly
'academic' contacts over several years with
the Wednesday colleagues; not to mention
the clinical and personal involvement with
Max Graf over the indirect analysis of his
phobic son 'Little Hans', who turned out
(as we have already seen) to be a very
considerable musician himself.
For the phobic 4-year-old, Herbert Graf,
grew up to write a doctoral thesis on Wag-
ner, and to become an internationally-re-
spected operatic stage-designer who worked
at the New York Metropolitan for over
twenty years. All the time that the little boy
was being treated 'at arm's length' by Freud,
he was being watched over by his godfather,
Gustav Mahler himself, who was a Jewish
convert to Roman Catholicism. If he had
not died when the boy was only 7 years of
age, Mahler would have had good reason
to be proud of his godson's future musical
achievements. For, not only did he work
with many of the most distinguished orches-
tral conductors of his day (to whom, as it
were, Mahler had passed on the baton) and
write books about his successful activities at
the New York Met. and elsewhere (H. Graf
1951, 1961); but he also returned to his
native Austria to design opera-productions
-first in Vienna shortly before the second
World War, and then again for the Salzburg
Festival in the early 1950s.
It happens that one of the operas which
he 'staged' at Salzburg, at the invitation of
the legendary Wilhelm Furtwangler, was none
other than Freud's own favourite-Mozart's
Don Giovanni (of which, much more below).
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
Moreover, interested readers of today can
still witness that production, and so become
acquainted with the work of 'Little Hans'
himself, in a recently reformatted audio-
visual recording (Mozart, 1787/1995).
Freud also treated another orchestral con-
ductor for several sessions, some seven or
eight years before Mahler, who was appar-
ently suffering from a psychogenic paralysis
of his baton-arm. Born a Schlesinger, the
young musician had changed his name as a
conscious identification with Walther von
Stolzing, the hero of Wagner's Mastersingers,
whom we meet again below. He achieved
the greatest international distinction, not only
in his own right as an orchestral-operatic
conductor and piano-accompanist, but also
as a generous and far-sighted champion of
the music of his sometime mentor Gustav
Mahler. This championship culminated in
his giving, in Vienna (1912), the world pre-
mieres of both the Ninth Symphony and the
symphonic Song of the Earth, and in his
writing a biographical appreciation of the
man and his music. The patient was Bruno
Walter. It was Mahler who had invited him
to Vienna in 1901 as his assistant at the
then Court Opera, and he stayed on briefly
after Mahler's death in 1911; he returned to
Vienna over twenty years later, in 1936, to
succeed to Mahler's former rostrum at what
was now called the State Opera (Walter,
1946, pp. 156-88, 1958). A celebrated per-
formance of the Ninth Symphony, played
by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by
Walter and recorded during Freud's lifetime
is now widely available on compact disc
(Mahler, 1938, posth.).
We may wonder whether Freud remained
sufficiently in touch with the activities of
either Walter or Graf junior to be able to
relish the coincidence that these two former
patients did in fact work together, in his
very last years, on a production of one of
his Mozartean favourites: The Marriage of
Figaro. The Canadian tenor Edward Johnson,
who had recently been appointed General ,
Manager of the New York Met., saw this
1133
Walter-Graf Figaro in Florence in 1937 and,
according to Jackson, wrote back to a New
York colleague:
Nozze di Figaro was a great success ~r Bruno
Walter, and gave Dr Graf a splendid opportunity
to prove his worth .,. all the grace and charm of
this Mozartean chef d'oeuvre was presented to a well
disposed and enthusiastic public (1992, p. 213).
The senior partner by more than a quarter
of a century, Walter evidently enjoyed his
collaboration with the former Little Hans;
for he wrote appreciatively:
At my request, Labroca had engaged as stage di-
rector Dr. Herbert Graf, with whom I got along
splendidly ... I produced the Entfiihrung at the
Salzburg Festival Plays in the summer of the same
year. Dr. Graf was then also the stage director of
Don Giovanni ... My congenial artistic relations
with Graf proved lasting. He was in charge of the
scenic arrangements for Fidelio, when I produced
it ... at the Paris Opera in 1936. My collaboration
with Graf became still more intensified when I
met him again later at the Metropolitan Opera in
New York (1946, pp. 315-16).
For his part, the older musician had cer-
tainly been 'in touch', in a sense, with Freud
during the previous year, when he had signed
the commemorative Address that Freud's
friends and eminent admirers presented to
him on his eightieth birthday. Nor was
he the only distinguished opera-conductor
among those signatories: another was Fritz
Busch, who had already left Germany, after
a celebrated eleven-year tenure at the Dres-
den State Opera, to become the first Music
Director of England's Glyndebourne Opera
(where, incidentally, he master-minded a
famous recording of that other Freudian
favourite, Don Giovanni, which was publish-
ed in the same year that he signed for Freud
(Busch, 1936».
Returning to our musical 'spectrum', let
us focus briefly on that middle band, where
Graf senior was evidently a central figure.
1134 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
As a founder-member of that group of early
disciples, Max Graf himself records that he
had continued to attend 'for several years'
(seemingly between 1906 and 1912), and that
eventually 'a personal contact developed be-
tween Freud and my family which made
Freud's human warmth particularly valu-
able'. He tells us that, although the group
consisted mainly of physicians, 'there were
a few writers, I who was a music critic, and
Leher, the musical aesthete from the Vienna
State Academy of Music' (M. Graf, 1942,
pp. 473, 470). According to Abrams (1993,
p. 282), Graf writes elsewhere that Freud
often visited the Grafs' home, and on many
occasions met the composer Eduard Schlitt
for whom he developed considerable affec-
tion. Both Abrams and Clark (1980, p. 214)
add that another music critic, David Bach,
also often attended on Wednesdays. So it
looks as though at least four of Freud's close
associates, at the time of these intense pio-
neering discussions of the new psychology,
were professional musicians.
Graf says that Freud 'welcomed conversa-
tions with a musician' (p. 473) and that he
encouraged Graf's own literary-musical applic-
ations of psychoanalysis. This encouragement
took the form of actually holding on to one
of his orally presented papers for subsequent
publication (M. Graf, 1911). Thus he recalls:
One day I brought Freud an attempted analysis
of Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman; in this
the poetic imagery of Wagner was connected with
his childhood impressions. Freud told me that he
would not return this work to me (the first of its
kind); he published it in his Writings on Applied
Psychology (Vienna, by Deuticke) (1942, p. 471).
If this paper was the first of its kind from
Graf's hand, it was by no means the last.
The publication dates of his extensive and
highly original writings about music, many
of them 'psychological' and not a few ex-
plicitly 'psychoanalytic', span more than half
a century and have been attentively reviewed
just recently by Abrams (1993).
One of the earlier books covered such
topics as the mental processes involved at
different stages of musical composition, with
reference to the typical work-habits of indi-
vidual composers; this was revised more than
thirty years on for an English edition (M.
Graf, 1947), and includes an exploration of
the idea that so-called 'classical' composers
(Nietzsche's 'Apollonians') are dominated by
Freud's 'secondary process', while the 'rom-
antics' (or 'Dionysians') tend to access the
'primary'. Grafs history of Vienna's rise to
prominence as a centre of music might have
clashed with Freud's professed dislike of the
city, noted above; and his almost religiose
ideas about the aesthetic function of music
would surely have challenged the Master's
positivistic hostility to all things remotely
'mystical' (an attitude on which M. Graf
(1942) himself commented; cp. Cheshire &
Thomae, 1991, esp. p. 434).
Flickering through all this are the shadows
of Gustav Mahler and 'Little Hans'; but
these observations about Herbert Graf's fa-
ther serve both to provide a necessary back-
ground to understanding what follows about
Freud's problem with music, and, for the
moment, to lead us back briefly to that coy
disclaimer in the sixth Introductory Lecture.
We had found Freud saying there that he
could not tell whether really musical people
had tunes coming into their heads as the
result of purely musical, as opposed to ver-
bal, associations, because he did not know
any such people, and therefore (by implica-
tion) had been unable to test the hypothesis
with them. We have just seen that, on the
contrary, he in fact knew several highly
musical people really quite well: but worse
is to come. According to Otto Rank's records
of the Wednesday meetings, one of the topics
which Graf senior had raised in February
1909, the very year in which Freud published
'Little Hans ... ' and some six years before
the remark in the Introductory Lectures, was
precisely 'his self-analysis of so-called "spon-
taneously emerging melodies", which he
regularly found to be associatively linked
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
with the text'. To this Freud had replied
directly, with the suggestion that 'one should
perhaps make a distinction between asso-
ciations that are connected with the word-
ing of the text, with the content, or with
the situation' (Nunberg & Federn, 1967,
p. 151).
Flagrant dissonances such as this, within
Freud's own presentation of his problem-
atical relationship with matters musical, serve
only to motivate us to investigate more deeply
into the nature of his problem and the rea-
sons for it. For it must have taken some
pressing dynamics indeed to drive him be-
yond mere self-deception and so close to the
brink of palpable dishonesty. Whatever they
may have been, they contrived also to render
this defensive pose or 'role-take' plausible
enough to deceive even some of his closest
associates: for example, Hanns Sachs was
misled, as we have seen above, into repeating
the fiction that Freud was 'out of touch with
music' throughout his life. The next stage is
to seek further clues from what Freud has
to say when he drops the pretence, 'steps
out of character' as it were, and allows
himself to talk openly about his enjoyment
of music and even to lapse into vivid but
unexpected musical metaphor.
2) THE PLOT THICKENS
In the light of the above considerations,
this is plainly not a straightforward case of
a wise and cultured man having feet of clay
in the form of a tin ear. We have already
seen that he sometimes demonstrated a re-
tentive and discriminating ear for a relevant
tune and for the dramatic content of the
music; and we shall discuss below other
occasions when he positively enthuses about
individual pieces of music, whether whole
works or particular passages. To begin with,
however, let us note some further evidence
to the effect that, in spite of the 'acoustic
atrophy' of which he complains, he must
have had in some respects a good ear, and
1135
even that he was to some degree himself a
'musical' performer.
2.1) Evidence to the contrary
One of his patients, who had undoubted
aesthetic sensibility and talent, namely the
'imagist' poet Hilda Doolittle, has reported
that Freud spoke English 'without a percep-
tible trace of accent', and that 'the beautiful
tone' of his therapeutic voice had a 'singing
quality that ... permeated the texture of the
spoken word'. Whether or not these features
were a legacy from his former role as a
clinical hypnotist, they could not have been
achieved and maintained by someone with
a pervasively defective 'ear' (Doolittle, 1956,
p. 75). This impression, that Freud's contri-
butions to the analytic session bore the stamp
of an artistic, if not specifically musical,
performance, is confirmed independently by
another witness, the Englishman James Stra-
chey who is now so well known to us through
the Standard Edition. From his experience of
being analysed by Freud in 1920, he reported
that as a therapist he was 'a brilliant artistic
performer' (Meisel & Kendrick, 1986, p. 30).
Indeed, Freud seems to have intuited this
himself. For he has left us, in a letter to
Fliess, a remarkable metaphor (remarkable,
that is, for a completely unmusical person)
which represents him, in the role of therapist,
as a skilful musician who plays upon the
psyche of the patient in such a way as to
create a harmonious composition from the
latent resources of his instrument. Thus he
writes of the progress of a case, which in
fact turned out to be short-lived: 'everything
is going smoothly, and the instrument re-
sponds willingly to the instrumentalist's con-
fident touch' (1901b, p. 340). Even if the
instrumentalist may have been a trifle over-
confident on this occasion, as it transpired,
the figure of speech betraying the repressed
Apollo (whose lute-playing had, after all,
charmed the very stones into building them-
selves up as the walls of Troy) is not without
parallel elsewhere in Freud's oeuvre.
1136 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
More than a decade later, he again chose
musical imagery to depict, not the practice
of therapy this time, but the much more
unlikely topic of the theoretical dispute with
Jung! Thus, in the History ... he complains
that Jung has created 'a new religio-ethical
system' which has rejected the centrality of
sexuality; and he summarises the apostasy
of the rival group in an audacious concert-
hall metaphor:
these people have picked out a few cultural over-
tones from the symphony oflife (aus der Sympho-
nie des Weltgeschehens) and have once more failed
to hear the mighty and primordialmelodyof the in-
stincts (die urgewaltige Triebmelodie) (1914,p. 62).
Now, 'overtones' are, of course, those addi-
tional vibration-frequencies activated 'over
and above' the fundamental pitch-frequency
of the note being played (sung, whistled etc.);
and as such they determine its perceived
tone-quality and certain subtleties of into-
nation, but are not themselves heard, in a
regular musical context, as separate notes.
This being so, the original word iObertone),
which Strachey has no option but to render
as he does, must have been intended to mean
something more like 'descants', 'embellish-
ments' or 'counter-subjects'; or even some-
thing as non-specific as 'resonances' or 'rever-
berations'. But even if the terminology is adrift,
the spirit could scarcely be more musical.
Nor did the tempting analogy between
analyst and musician, whether as performer
or composer, escape Freud's colleagues. One
of his star 'pupils' and most devoted follow-
ers, the 'lay' analyst Theodor Reik, who
took an interest in musical education, argued
in some detail that training analysts was (or
should be) like training composers (Reik,
1953, Ch. 4). He justified the comparison
by saying:
both the analyst and the composer must listen to
the murmuring out of the obscurest recesses and
profoundest depths of the psyche .., When their
hearing is poor, they will never go beyond super-
ficial understanding and shallow formulations
(p. 59).
He then went on to say that this was the
mistake that the Jungians had made, quoting
Freud's passage about the 'symphony of life'
in support. Earlier (p. 12) he has recom-
mended training up the would-be analyst's
'ear' in a quite specifically musical way fa-
miliar to generations of instrumental students
during their basic training. This recommen-
dation obviously overlaps with (although it
is musically more technical than) that sens-
itivity to nuance and implication, now fam-
iliar to us as 'listening with the third ear',
which he had advocated in an earlier book
(Reik, 1948, esp. Ch. 15), where he acknow-
ledges having borrowed the phrase from
Nietzsche.
Now, we may well think that, if what the
analyst is listening to are the 'melodies' of
the instincts, with their associated variations,
counterpoints and dissonances, then the task
of 'interpretation' is a matter of finding the
words to fit the music. Although this sounds
like just the opposite of finding the music
to fit the words or 'setting words to music',
it is uncannily similar to what Walther von
Stoltzing finds himself doing in Wagner's
Mastersingers, in a scene which Freud singles
out, from all the opera that he knows, as
one that is uniquely satisfying for him. But
we anticipate.
Freud's vivid musical metaphor, of the
analyst as instrumentalist 'playing upon' the
patient's psyche, has been turned on its head
in recent times by the exponents of 'Aeolian
Mode' psychotherapy, who themselves give
a central place in therapy to the potentially
'mutative' effect of metaphor in general (Cox
& Theilgaard, 1987). The idea is derived, as
Pines explains, from the fact that in ancient
Greek times,
The Aeolian Harp was hung from the branch of
a tree, its music created by the stirring of the wind
playing through its strings. This was the music of
nature (1987, pp. xxiv-xxv).
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR 1137

On this view, the Greeks had indeed discov- Emil Fluss (p. 1128a above) he was going
ered, in the auditory metaphor that the young to do; and who but an auditif would then
Freud coined in a letter to Emil Fluss, how describe what he has found in terms of the
to 'listen-in to the eternal processes of Nature'. most abstract auditory art?
Our modem Aeolians have adopted the image If these are still somewhat veiled or im-
in order to focus on plicit manifestations of Freud's musical sens-
ibility, it is time to turn to some even more
how the therapist's mind can be stirred by the cogent and explicit refutations of his reiter-
communication of the patient, and how, unself- ated claim to unmusicality: namely a number
consciously, the therapist finds himself respond- of occasions when the mask slips completely
ing at depth to the patient's hidden meanings and he is discovered openly enthusing about
(p. xxv). pieces that he enjoys, or referring to them
so readily and aptly that a positive cathexis
However, in referring to 'the therapist's ca- is revealed for all to see. We have already
pacity to pick up the "music in the wind"', caught him out, as it were, humming to his
Cox & Theilgaard (1987, p. xxvi) seem to dog the tune of a Mozart aria about friend-
underplay their own metaphor: for really ship; and we have 'listened-in' to him re-
there is no music in the wind itself, but only minding a young wife of Cherubino's heart-
various tonally indeterminate frequencies and felt canzona about the bitter-sweet torments
intensities of aerial turbulence. of being in love. A further much-quoted
Music as such is generated only after these instance of the same kind of thing is recorded
have acted upon the passive but pre-tuned in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, p.
structures of the instrument; but the 'instru- 208). Freud is at a railway station waiting
ment' itself is now not the patient, as in to board a train, when he is incensed to
Freud's picture, but the therapist-and he catch sight of a minor government minister,
or she is seen as creating the music (Walther- Count Thun, strutting to the front of the
like) out of the relatively inarticulate and queue and barging into a first-class compart-
incoherent 'ventilations' of the patient. This ment without a ticket; he then finds running
metaphoric transposition would, of course, through his head the tune of the subversive,
have appealed to Reik, who could have seen anti-authoritarian cavatina which Mozart's
it as validating his proposal for parallels Figaro addresses to his Count-employer early
between the respective trainings of analysts in The Marriage of Figaro, 'If you want to
and of composers. dance ... you can dance to my tune!' (Se
With regard to Freud's images of the vuol hal/are '" ).
therapist as 'instrumentalist' and of the Two further 'off-the-cuff allusions to op-
'melodies' of the instincts, it simply is not eratic incidents, which have been brought to
the work of a completely unmusical person mind by his own activity of the moment,
to have drawn on musical experience and must suffice to dispel any lurking doubt that
fantasy to provide the 'vehicles' (in I. A. our auditif was equipped with an apt and re-
Richards's parlance) for two striking meta- tentive musical ear. When writing to his wife
phors expressing central features of his the- about the balmy evening air which he has
ory and practice: in the one case an aspect been enjoying on holiday in Sicily (Freud,
of essential therapeutic rapport, and in the 191Ob, p. 291), he reminds her of the lines
other a fundamental tenet of his controver- on the same subject which his favourite
sial psychology. It is, however, very much musical letter-writers, Susanna and the Count-
the work of a thorough-going auditif to 'listen ess, conspire to compose later on (Act 3;-x)
in' to 'the eternal processes' of human na- in Mozart's Marriage ... long after the 'danc-
ture, as he said in that youthful letter to ing-lesson' just encountered: 'How softly the
1138 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
breeze ... ' (Che soave zeffiretto ... ). Many
years earlier (1897a), in a letter to Fliess, he
refers to the fact that he has just had a
catalogue of his own 'works-to-date' printed
privately by Deuticke; and this puts him in
mind of the famous 'catalogue aria' from
Don Giovanni, in which Leporello enumerates
the Don's amatory conquests-to-date (Act
1, v). We return below to the possible sig-
nificance of Freud's implied comparison be-
tween the two disparate sets of achievements.
A handful of other obiter dicta, we may note,
reveal some acquaintance with such diverse
works as Weber's Der Freischiitz (1901a, p.
432), Wagner's Tristan '" (1911, p. 69), The
Mikado of Gilbert and Sullivan (1898b, p.
325) and the purely instrumental Devil's Trill
violin sonata of Tartini (1900, p. 613).
Turning now from mere allusions to pieces
of music to passages where Freud talks ex-
plicitly about his enjoyment of particular
works or episodes, we find that they mostly
concern the by-now-familiar Mozart operas,
with important remarks also about Bizet's
Carmen and Wagner's Mastersingers. This
gives the lie to Ernest Jones's mistaken as-
sertion (1953, p. 362) that the only non-
Mozart opera to which Freud would go was
Carmen, and it is unfortunate that Abrams
has recently (1993, p. 281) rehearsed Jones's
mistake without correcting it. Diaz de Chu-
maceiro, however, in her adjacent and over-
lapping chapter (1993, p. 251) in the same
somewhat loosely edited volume, does make
the correction, and also adds to the tally of
Freud's operatic references. Elsewhere (1990b,
pp. 285-8) she has discussed Freud's likely
operatic attendances in a specific decade.
Not only does Freud, in a letter to Fliess
(1897d, p. 286), single out from the Mas-
tersingers an especially enjoyable tune but
also, in saying why he found the whole work
unusually satisfying, he gives a substantial
clue as to why he was indeed able to derive
pleasure from opera as a genre but not from
so-called 'absolute' instrumental and orches-
tral music; for it does seem that he never
went to concerts, nor listened to music on
radio or gramophone when they became
available (cp. Gay, 1988, pp. 168-9). He
writes to Fliess (slightly adapted from Mas-
son's translation):
Recently, the Mastersingers afforded me a strange
pleasure ... I was sympathetically moved by the
'morning dream interpretation melody' .,. More-
over, as in no other opera, real ideas are set to
music, with the tones of feeling attached to it lin-
gering on as one reflects upon them.
We shall have more to say below (§3.2 &
§4.1) both about the significance for Freud
of this particular melody, which we have
already touched upon (p. 1136b), and about
the aesthetic impact of the work as a whole.
The fact that his enjoyment of opera de-
pended critically, as he indicates here, upon
the coherent integration of the words and
ideas with the music, is underlined by his
unfavourable reaction to Mozart's Magic
Flute. In spite of some tunes which he liked,
what annoyed and disappointed him in that
piece, by contrast with his expressed admir-
ation for other Mozart (especially Don Gio-
vanni), was precisely its 'crazy' (wahnsinnig)
libretto, dealing as it does with the magico-
religious mystery-mongering of Zoroastrian-
ism and Freemasonry (Jones, 1953, p. 214).
This annoyance and disappointment has been
shared, of course, by many another Mozart-
lover, whether Freemason or not, both be-
fore and since. One of his first experiences
of this opera must have been the occasion
which he mentions to Emil Fluss in a letter
of March 1874 (Freud, ed. 1969, pp. 426-7).
Faced with the choice between Schiller's Die
Rauber at the Theater an der Wien (with the
famous actor Ernesto Rossi) and The Magic
Flute, the lad of 17 writes that he thinks he
will go to the Mozart, even though his other
friend Eduard Silberstein, whom we meet
below (§2.2), was going to attend the Schiller.
So, however averse he was, at this age, to
domestic piano-playing, the aversion clearly
did not generalise to all forms of music.
'Heard melodies are sweet', he may have
 THE EMPIRE
thought: and added, with the poet, 'but those
unheard are sweeter'.
All the same, the importance which Freud
undoubtedly attached to the verbal structur-
ing of the music in opera can be overstressed,
and has led Marcuse to the simply false
assertion (1958, p. 396) that Freud never
speaks of the melodies themselves but only
of the words which they carry. Although
this may be broadly true of the tunes that
'came into his head', that is by no means
the whole story. We have just seen that his
dislike of the verbal content in The Magic
Flute overrode his evident delight in the
beauty of some of the tunes themselves: 'in-
dividual arias are most beautiful', he writes
(einzelne Arien sind wunderschiini.
Again, in his astute and lengthy review
of an Italian performance of Carmen (Freud,
1907), where, for the best part of 1500 words,
he uncharacteristically assumes the role of
music critic for the entertainment of the
family back home to whom he is writing, he
comments on 'the magnificent melodies' (die
herrlichen Melodien); and he further describes
the orchestral passage which accompanies
the card-playing in Act 3, as containing
'music which I love so much' (in dem Ich
die Musik ... so liebe). This surely reflects,
incidentally, more than the 'moderate' en-
joyment of the work which Vitz (1988, p.
118) attributes to him. Similarly, in that
provocative sixth Introductory Lecture (1916,
p. 108), at the point where he discusses the
patient who is being 'persecuted' by Paris's
song from Offenbach's La Belle Helene, he
interpolates into his argument the personal
comment that the tune itself is 'a charming
one'.
Furthermore, when he writes to his fiancee
from Paris about a production of Beaumar-
chais' stage-play The Marriage of Figaro
which he has just attended (1886, p. 204),
he complains that, although the French play
has more substantial and intricate dramatic
content than does Da Ponte's derivative li-
bretto for Mozart's piece, he found himself
missing the 'magnificent tunes' (die herrlichen
OF THE EAR 1139
Melodien again) that failed to accompany
familiar episodes in the action. It is curious
that what he picks out for mention are not
the obvious 'big tunes', but two atmospheric
instrumental paragraphs which set the mood
for an ensuing vocal line. Both these episodes
directly exemplify that same revolutionary,
or 'parricidal', motif which Freud sub-
sequently identified (in his discussion in The
Interpretation of Dreams, Ch. 5B), as having
prompted him to associate Figaro's cavatina
about the 'dancing-lesson' with his own con-
temporary encounter with Count Thun at
the railway station. For, in the one, the maid
Susanna is sitting down to write a message
luring the operatic Count to a supposed
assignation with herself, at which he is in
fact to be made a fool of; and, in the other,
the Count himself is pleasurably anticipating
that same subversive rendezvous which is to
be his downfall.
So it turns out that three of Freud's few
musical associations and references are vari-
ations on the theme of anti-authoritarian
subversion and symbolic parricide; and this
is a topic on which Schorske has elaborated
(1973) and which Krull has addressed inde-
pendently (1979, esp. Ch. 4; cpo Newton
1995, Chs. 3 & 8). We shall see below ( 4.1)
that it also permeates another favourite op-
era which we have already met, namely Wag-
ner's Mastersingers.
2.2) The nature of Freud's 'disturbance'
Someone who finds himself humming a
relevant Mozart tune while stroking his pet
dog or while mentally barracking a self-
important aristocrat, and who spontaneously
enthuses about the glorious melodies in such
disparate works as the classical Marriage of
Figaro, the deeply romantic Mastersingers
and the strangely 'modern' Carmen (as it
then was), just is not the completely unmus-
ical person that Freud repeatedly claimed to
be. The dissonance between this claim and
his de facto responsiveness to such music as
he chose to hear has, of course, been thought
1140 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
to disclose not so much a deficiency in the
field of music-perception, but rather a conflict.
Thus, in his contribution to a symposium
on Freud's 'language-world' and attitudes to
music, Eissler (1974) has concluded that, in
spite of all the protestations to the contrary,
Freud's personality was 'full of the spirit of
music' (p. 94) and that he was 'a deeply
musical man' (p. 97). He has independently
canvassed the view that Freud's musical sen-
sibility, so far from simply being defective
or 'atrophied', was actually rather acute but
in some ways blocked or 'disturbed': he there-
fore speaks (p. 93), in reference to Freud's
problem, of 'a disturbance of his musical
awareness' (eine Storung seines musikalischen
Erlebnissesi.
While it is true that Freud's own self-dia-
gnosis (p. 113la above) had identified a
conflict clearly enough, it had still grossly
underestimated his positive responsiveness
and capacity for enjoyment; that is to say,
it minimised the extent to which he allowed
himself to risk being 'moved by a thing
without knowing why'. It is one thing, how-
ever, to diagnose the existence of a conflict
or disturbance, but quite another to be able
to specify its constituent dynamics; and yet
another to understand how it arose. Freud's
own account gives the impression that, for
him, to be emotionally 'moved' by some-
thing, without knowing what was moving
him or why, is an intrinsically anxious ex-
perience. An obvious possible source for this
anxiety would be, as implied above, the fear
of being moved towards some unpleasant or
dangerous state, and of being unable to steer
or stop that movement. Hence the signific-
ance of 'verbal control'. But, in the case of
music, there is no reason why a state of
aesthetic gratification should be disturbing
unless that form of pleasure has become
anxiety-laden; and this could have occurred,
of course, as the result either of technically
'neurotic' processes (such as superego guilt
or phantasy about the destructiveness of
some disinhibited impulse), or of 'reality'
processes to do with objective conditioning
(such as traumatic experience).
Without assuming that Freud was a
stranger to vestiges of 'puritanical' inhibition
as implied by the former alternative, we
cannot ignore the colourful thesis which Vitz
(1988) has proposed along the lines of the
latter. His theory appeals to the coincidence
of two well-attested facts about Freud's in-
fancy: one concerns an emotional trauma of
separation and loss, the other has to do with
exposure to music.
The nanny who had charge of the young
boy for about the first two-and-a-half years
of his childhood, while the family still lived
in Freiberg, was a Roman Catholic Christian
who used to take him to church services.
These services evidently impressed the toddler
Freud considerably, for he was in the habit
of entertaining the family, on his return home,
by acting the part of the officiating priest.
As his mother recalled later, he 'preached and
told us all about God Almighty' (Freud,
l897c, p. 271). Vitz assumes, no doubt rightly,
that such services would have included not
only preaching but also various forms of
music: organ voluntaries, choral settings of
the traditional texts of the Mass, congrega-
tional singing with organ accompaniment
and so on. They would have been associated,
further, with the sound (whether or not
musical) of church bells; and Freiberg was
famous, apparently, for its bells, as Gay
independently attests (p. 1141b below).
However, about the time when Freud's
mother was briefly 'absent' during her con-
finement giving birth to sister Anna (a dif-
ficult enough time in any case for the boy),
the well-liked nanny also disappeared, with-
out warning and permanently, having been
convicted of theft. The abandoned child was
inconsolable for some days, and seems to
have harboured a residual grief for a matter
of years thereafter; at least a general grief
for the life at Freiberg, from which the family
moved only months later, if not a specific
one for the lost nanny. In his early forties
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
he could write: 'I now think that I have
never got over the longing for the beautiful
woods of my home .. .' (1899, p. 312; cp.
I Krull, 1979, Ch. 3)
Vitz supposes, therefore, that the child-
hood experience of church-music at Freiberg
became so bitterly associated with 'separa-
tion and loss' that musical experience per se
was irrevocably contaminated with anxiety
and thus became prima facie aversive. He
summarises accordingly:
... I believe that this rejection of music came from
Freud's early experience of church music. To hear
organ, instrumental, and choral music, and also
bells, would have activated painful unconscious
I memories in Freud-memories of his lost nanny
and her world (1988, p. 117).
If there were some truth in this adventurous
thesis, it could be used to throw some light
on two discrepancies which we have already
encountered: namely, the minor point about
'overtones', and the more substantial one
about Freud's much-discussed ambivalence
toward living in Vienna.
We have noticed above that, in his sur-
prising metaphor about the 'symphony of
life', he accuses the Jungians and others of
paying too much attention to subsidiary mo-
tifs, which are somehow no more than cul-
turally determined spin-offs from the main
theme, and mistakenly calls them Obertiine
or 'overtones'. Now, where would a musi-
cally untrained, non-concert-going, non-re-
ligious opera-fancier have had the specific
experience of hearing notes or tunes (Tone)
going 'over and above' (i.e. ober) the basic
melody? Well, during childhood exposure to
hymn-singing at a Christian church service!
For there it would have been common prac-
tice, once the tune of the hymn had been
established, for the congregation and lower
voices of the choir to sustain the melody in
unison while the boys' and/or women's voices
of the trained choir wove a decorative counter-
melody 'over and above' it.
1141
The term for this is, of course, 'descant'
(der Diskant); but it would be very under-
standable for a musical naif, such as Freud
certainly was with regard to technical aspects
of the art (cp. the Carmen violinist, p. 1160a
below), to suppose that these higher and
subsidiary notes were what was meant by
the technical term Obertiine, if and when he
heard one of his several musically expert
friends using it. It is curious, however, to
find Freud mentioning 'overtones' at all: for,
although he must have studied the basic
physics of sound at some point (and we
know that he admired the work of Gustav
Fechner in the new field of psychophysics),
yet we have seen above that, when it came
to the psychology of sound-perception, he
had given up on the chapter in Lipps's book
because it baffled him.
As for the other point, about his professed
antipathy to Vienna, especially in the context
of his admitted nostalgia for the Freiberg
of his early childhood, we may now be
tempted to read some additional and poign-
ant significance into a particular feature of it.
Something to which Freud often referred, as
symbolising for him the oppressive (Roman
Catholic and hence anti-Jewish) menace of
the city, was the dominating spire of St.
Stephen's cathedral: 'that abominable stee-
ple', as he was wont to call it. How did this
compare with the skyline of his lamented
Freiberg? Gay tells us, that the town
was dominated by the tall, slim steeple of its
Catholic church, with its famous chimes, rising
above some substantial houses and many more
modest dwellings (1988, p. 7).
Probably the very building in which Freud had
heard his first music, in the company of the
nanny by whom he was so soon 'abandoned'.
In the light of all this, we may suppose
that some other lines which Goethe put into
the mouth of his Faust, early in Part I of
the drama from which Freud used to quote
so readily (Goethe, 1808, p. 26), would have
1142 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
acquired a personal, if unconscious, reson-
ance for Freud. For, just after heavenly
choirs and church bells have appeared on
the scene, Faust also looks back wistfully,
with childlike emotions (mit kindlichem Ge-
fuhl), at a previous period of his life which
had been permeated by the sounds of religion
and by the trees and meadows of this home
ground, and reminisces (lines 771-782):
' ... There was a time
Of quiet, solemn Sabbaths, when heaven's kiss
would fill
Me with its love's descent, when a bell's chime
Was deep mysterious music, ...
." . I could not understand
The sweet desire that drove me far away
Out through the woods, over the meadowland:
There I would weep a thousand tears and feel
A whole world come to birth, .,. .
Those hymns would herald youthful games we played
To celebrate the Spring. As I recall
That childhood, I am moved, .... '
Moved though Freud evidently was by his
childhood memories of Moravia's woods and
fields, the part played by their association
with church music can only be a matter of
speculation; but music's unnerving capacity
to 'move' him as an adult is something which
he overtly acknowledged, as we have seen.
The 'classical' education which informed
both his thought and his writing, as Bette1-
heim (1983) has reminded those of us who
tend to read Freud in English (cp. Cheshire,
1989; Cheshire & Thomae 1991, pp. 430-2),
will itself have alerted him to the emotional
threat posed by music, as well as to the
possibility of defending against it. From his
reading in Homer, he would have known of
the destructive power of the Sirens' song,
and of the literal restraint and inhibition
that Odysseus had to impose upon himself
in order to survive it. From his study of
Greek Tragedy, Freud would have learned
that the aesthetic impact of the noble verse
declaimed by the principal actors was inten-
sified by being delivered in a kind of 'sing-
song' pitch-inflection, which must have been
half way to the quasi-operatic Sprechgesang
or 'speech-song' pioneered by Humperdinck
and later required by Schonberg in Vienna
for some of his own compositions just a few
years before the Introductory Lectures. He
would have learned too that the portentQ,us
interventions of the Chorus were enlivened
not only by musical accompaniments but
also by dance-movements.
2.3) Primacy and suppression
That Freud was keen to subject the great
Greek dramas to psychoanalytic scrutiny is
confirmed by Max Graf (1942, p. 466). But,
whatever discussions about it may have taken
place on those Wednesday evenings, Freud
has not left us any extended treatment of
the subject. However, although it must be
admitted that he touches upon the topic more
than once without mentioning Nietzsche's
classic study linking tragedy and music (The
Birth of Tragedy ... , published 1872 in
Freud's middle teens), we may well suppose
that his conflicted admiration for that writer,
combined with his deep-rooted interest in
Greek drama and in aesthetics, would have
led him to read it eventually if not at quite
an early stage (cp. Freud, 1906, pp. 303-6,
1913, pp. 155-6; 1925, p. 60).
There he would have found Nietzsche ar-
guing that the music and rhythms of the choric
episodes in Greek Tragedy enshrine the pri-
meval instincts, intuitions, apprehensions and
ecstasies of human experience; that in later
drama, Dionysiac dithyrambs became stifled
and constricted by a too cerebral didacticism;
and that the ideal Sophoclean synthesis of
ordered sensibility with archetypal emotion
(Apollo leading Dionysus) is being recreated
in his own day in the music-dramas of Wag-
ner (Stem, 1978, Ch. 3; cp, Nietzsche, 1872,
pp. 19, 31-32; May 1990 passim,esp. Ch.
1). He would have found also that, already
on the second page of his treatise, Nietzsche
refers to that very 'dream-melody-interpret-
ation' scene in the Mastersingers which Freud
singled out as having unusually moved him.
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
In this same sceptical vein, a vigorous
attempt to convict Freud of near-dishonesty
on the point has recently been made by Diaz
de Chumaceiro (1993). She assumes, along
with others, that Freud tended to underes-
timate, both in conversation and on paper,
the extent of his acquaintance with the work
of Nietzsche; and that this underestimation
has to do with disappointment at finding
himself anticipated, and with a wish to imply
greater independence of thought than he
could fairly claim. Thus she bluntly opines
(p. 268), concerning Freud's disavowals at
the famous 'Wednesday evening meetings'
and later in the Autobiographical Study, that
'clearly Freud protests too much'. She adds
the further suggestion (pp. 250-1) that, for
the same sort of reason, he also suppressed
his knowledge of Wagner and specifically of
the Mastersingers; but we return to this point
below (§3.2).
One reason for scepticism which the critic
advances is that Freud had belonged, over
some three or four years, to a students' Read-
ing Society (Leseverein) at Vienna University
whose members were devoted to the study
of the cultural triumvirate (if not quite the
unholy Trinity) of Wagner, Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. In that company, the hypo-
thesis goes, he could not have failed to
absorb, from hearing and discussing the vari-
ous presentations, the substance of much of
Nietzsche's work to date, even if it was true
(as he used to claim) that he did fail in a
number of attempts to read the actual texts.
With regard to his reading of Schopenhauer,
we have Hanns Sachs's testimony that that
also came relatively late on: Sachs can be
confident about this because it was his 'handy
pocket edition' which Freud borrowed for
the purpose (Sachs, 1945, p. 46).
In her eagerness to convict Freud of having
dishonestly underestimated his acquaintance
with Nietzsche's thought, Diaz de Chu-
maceiro also appeals to the youthful corre-
spondence between Freud and his close
friend Eduard Silberstein, recently published
in English (Boehlich, 1990), and she quotes
1143
Gedo & Wolf as saying that it shows that
'in 1873 the 17-year-old Freud was quite
familiar with what Nietzsche had written up
to that point' (1976, p. 13). Well, how does
it show this? The fact is that, in the nearly
ninety letters spanning some ten years (1871-
1881), during which the young men discussed
'life, the universe and everything', there is
precisely one passing reference to Nietzsche.
This occurs in March 1873, and concerns a
comment by Nietzsche, in the first volume
of his Thoughts Out of Season (1873), about
a view expressed by his much older contem-
porary D. F. Strauss, a philosopher in whom
Freud certainly was interested at the time
(Boehlich, 1990, pp. xxvi, 102, 105).
Much more significant, however-signifi-
cant in the manner of Sherlock Holmes's
dog that did not bark-is the total absence
of reference to the only other non-specialist
work that Nietzsche had published by that
time: namely, the famous Birth of Tragedy
.,. (1872) which we have just encountered
above. In view of Freud's sustained interest
in Greek literature, and of the fact that he
had been reading Sophocles for his Matura
only the year before the letter in question,
this deafening silence could be used equally
well to warrant exactly the opposite conclu-
sion from that drawn by Gedo and Wolf.
That is to say, from the evidence of the
Silberstein correspondence, we might infer
rather more plausibly that Freud was not in
fact aware of the more substantial portion
of what Nietzsche had published to date (i.e.
The Birth of Tragedy), even leaving out of
account his academic 'philological' articles.
Elsewhere, the same commentator (Diaz
de Chumaceiro 1992) argues further, on the
grounds of a remark in Moses and Mono-
theism (Freud, 1939, p. 108), that Freud
must have known more than he acknow-
ledged about Beethoven's instrumental music.
Freud refers there to Beethoven's 'splendid
creations', and casts him as a 'great man'
while insisting that such sublime creations
are not in themselves enough to qualify a
person as 'great', because certain personal
1144 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
qualities are also necessary to earn that ac-
colade. But, since Beethoven wrote only one
opera, in order to be conversant with his
splendid creations (so the argument goes),
Freud must have known (some of) his in-
strumental music as well; and since Freud
never went to concerts, as Anna Freud testifies,
he must have heard them either in private
performance or on the radio-contrary to
the impression that he repeatedly gives.
Now, this is another strange piece of
reasoning, because the textual evidence again
implies, if anything, a very different conclu-
sion. Freud writes as follows:
we should not unhesitatingly describe someone as
a great man simply because he was extraordinar-
ily efficient in some particular sphere. We should
certainly not do so in the case of a chess master
or of a virtuoso on a musical instrument ... If we
unhesitatingly declare that, for instance, Goethe,
Leonardo da Vinci and Beethoven were great
men, we must be led to it by something other than
admiration for their splendid creations (p. 108,my
italics).
It turns out, when we read on, that this
'something other' amounts to certain benign
paternal qualities of personality and influ-
ence writ large; and what follows, therefore,
is not that Freud must have known first-hand
a lot about Beethoven's music, but that he
must have known about Beethoven the man:
that is, about his humanistic, libertarian and
generally 'republican' attitudes, and his per-
sonal fortitude. In practice this means the
familiar stories about the dedication of the
Eroica symphony, his setting of Schiller's
Ode to Joy at the end of the ninth, his
intense involvement with the socio-political
message of his opera Fidelio, and his (inter-
mittent) defiance of aristocracy (shades of
Freud's Count Thun) which we now know
to have been symbolised in his explicit
quotations from other composers' music cele-
brating the French Revolution; not to men-
tion his heroic struggle against deafness,
isolation and depression, to which the poign-
ant 'Heiligenstadt Testament' of October 1802
bears witness. Freud could have taken the
general splendidness of the music on trust
from the likes of Max Graf, or even from
the received culture.
3) MUSIC AS SIREN SONG
Whatever the truth of these ad hominem
points, Kierkegaard had also argued, in a
similar vein to Nietzsche but some thirty
years earlier, that the 'absolute theme' of
music is 'the elemental sensuous-erotic', with
its 'lyrical impatience' (as some translators
put it):
If the elemental originality of the sensuous-erotic
in all its immediacy insists on expression,then the
question arises as to which medium is the most
suitable for this ... In its mediacy and in being
reflected in another medium, it falls within lan-
guage and comes under ethical categories. In its
immediacy, it can be expressed only in music... In
other words, music is the demonic. In elemental
sensuous-erotic originality, music has its absolute
theme. This ... does not mean that music cannot
express anything else, but nevertheless this is its
theme proper (1843, pp. 64-5).
3.1) Sensuality and structure
On the other hand, Pythagoras, Plato and
Aristotle are all credited with influential views
about the psychology of music. Pythagoras,
for all his pioneering theoretical expositions
of the arithmetic of pitch-intervals, was said
to have been interested also in its practical
application to what we might nowadays
call forms of 'music therapy'. Writing early
in the sixth century AD, as noted above,
Boethius could report that
the power of the art of music became so evident
through the studies of ancient philosophy that the
Pythagoreans used to free themselvesfrom the cares
of the day by certain melodies, which caused a
gentle and quiet slumber to steal upon them.
Similarly, upon rising, they dispelled the stupor
and confusion of sleep by certain other melodies,
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
knowing that the whole structure of'<soul and
body is united by musical harmony (Boethius, ed.
1867, pp. 185-6; quoted by Strunck 1965, p. 83).
Such references to the somewhat nebulous
'Pythagoreans' (and especially to the dis-
tinctly nebulous figure of Pythagoras him-
self) should be treated with some scepticism
according to Forrest (1963), who argues, in
the context of the alleged musical influence
of Terpander and Thaletas upon the politics
of Sparta, that the belief that 'musicians by
their music could influence men's character
and behaviour' cannot be traced back at all
firmly beyond the middle of the fifth century
BC, which is too late for Pythagoras. He does,
however, have another candidate in mind:
.,. Terpander and the others do not produce po-
litical results by ordinary political means; they
use their music. Fortunately the chief fifth-cen-
tury advocate of the theory that music could have
such effects is known, Damon, the Athenian mu-
sician, friend and adviser of Pericles. Indeed, it
seems likely that he invented the theory (p. 164).
From a more negative point of view, and
writing long after Damon and Pericles, Plato
(in the third chapter of his Republic) had
notoriously banned certain musical modes,
rhythms and instrumental tone-colours from
his ideal State on the grounds that they
were psychologically debilitating and mor-
ally corrupting. In chapter eight of his Poli-
tics, Aristotle had followed suit with a similar
discussion which contested some of Plato's
decisions. These much-quoted passages would
have been familiar to Freud from his 'clas-
sical' school education; but he would have
been much less clear about how the burden
of their cautionary tales had been institu-
tionalised in the aesthetic of western medie-
val Christendom.
For the Christian Church, in various guises
and at various times, had both employed
music to facilitate the religious atmosphere
of public worship and also banned the use
of certain specific harmonies and intervals
1145
from the liturgy as being irreligiously sensual.
The 'facilitators' had included Martin Luther
(himself a composer in a modest way) and
St. Augustine, who had held that, by contrast
with those who merely say their prayers, 'he
who sings prays twice'; on the other hand,
Pope John 22 and John Calvin had been
'prohibitionists' in different ways.
Nor would Freud have realised that it
was this ecclesiastical institutionalisation of
anxiety and inhibition which had paved the
way, indirectly and paradoxically, for the
development of the one musical genre which
he could enjoy-namely opera. What hap-
pened was that, because of these restrictions
imposed by the Church, it became necessary
to release the affective potential of harmony
and melody from its proscriptive shackles,
in order that it could be harnessed to the
deliberate use of art-music as a vehicle of
emotional communication in a secular con-
text. It was to this end, according to Le-
vade's historical sketch (1985, p. 417), that
'an aesthetic club of intelligent Florentines
at the end of the sixteenth century' launched
their liberating campaign to enable music,
as Galileo senior (the father of the astrono-
mer) put it, 'to express the emotions with
greater effectiveness, and to communicate
these emotions with equal force to people's
minds' (ibid; adapted).
If the burden of our song hitherto has
been largely negative, in the sense of being
concerned with the evidence for, and nature
of, Freud's problem with music, we now go
on to address more positively the fact that
he was able, in spite of that 'rationalistic'
mental trait which he recognised as an ob-
struction, to get some (and even a good deal
of) pleasure from music in the form of opera:
a form which is often regarded, paradoxi-
cally, as the least rational of the many that
it takes (as witness Dr Johnson's description
of it as 'an exotic and irrational entertain-
ment'). We ask what further light this throws
on the general nature of his problem; and
whether anything more specific can be learned
from the known handful of works which
1146 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
afforded him a degree of enjoyment alto-
gether at odds with his habitual protestations
that ~e was quite unmusical.
3.2) Words and music
Both Gay (1988, p. 168) and Vitz (1988,
p. 118) comment that it is easy enough to
see how the verbal, and especially narrative,
aspects of opera would have provided
Freud's 'rationalistic ... turn of mind' with
a cognitive shield against the Siren-like, or
even Dionysiac, allurements of musical sen-
suality. Nor is it difficult to elaborate this
in terms of Susanne Langer's wide-ranging
argument that music, or at least 'absolute'
music, is a kind of aesthetic language which
has syntax without semantics: it has quasi-
grammatical structures without denotative
reference (Langer, 1951, Ch. 8, esp. pp. 200-
206; cp. Cooke 1959). The verbal and visual
commentary added by opera may be said to
supply the music with an orientating com-
ponent of representation, denotation or ref-
erence; and this restores some reassuring
semantics to the aesthetic experience, espe-
cially when combined with Wagner's system
of tailor-made sonic 'signifiers' or Leitmotive
(Cooke, 1968, 1979; Reiser, 1993).
Certainly, Freud goes so far as to ac-
knowledge explicitly on one occasion, as we
have seen above (§2.l), that what had en-
abled him (so to speak) to be so affected
by the Mastersingers was the composer's
uniquely successful integration of the 'tones
of feeling' in the music with the 'real ideas'
of the drama; an achievement which had
been facilitated, obviously enough, by the
fact that Wagner himself had also composed
the words! But the effect of music illumi-
nating or clarifying the ideas of a drama,
rather than just enhancing its emotional im-
pact, can also be achieved when words and
music are by different hands, and even when
the relation between the two ingredients is
different from what it is in opera.
Nor are the psychological effects, of com-
bining words and music in these less ar-
ticulated ways, restricted to the merely 'emo-
tional': they may still sometimes serve the
apparently more cognitive purpose of clari-
fying the meaning of the actions or situations
involved. For, when Beethoven belatedly com-
pleted his 'incidental music' for Goethe's drama
Egmont, the poet remarked that the com-
poser had expressed his (Goethe's) 'inten-
tions' or 'meaning' (Meinung) exactly. Or
again, the story is told, of Laurence Olivier
and another musical 'setter' of Shakespeare,
that, when the actor was making his famous
film version of Henry V, he came to under-
stand certain aspects of his role only after
hearing the music which William Walton
had composed for the soundtrack. Thus did
Walton succeed in one of the tasks which
Wagner also had set himself just about a
century earlier, as we shall see below (§4.l).
It does seem to be the case, however, as
we have already seen, that when Freud re-
ports a musical phrase coming to mind un-
bidden but in response to some situational
stimulus, it is usually, if not always, an
operatic tune whose associated words furnish
the link with the here-and-now; and we have
noted already (end of §1.2) that one of the
'Wednesday meetings' debated whether there
might sometimes be non-verbal links. The
intrinsic risk of making mistakes when trying
to reunite words and music which have be-
come separated in the mind may perhaps be
illustrated by one of Freud's own examples:
the case of the 'Jo-fi melody' which we have
already encountered (§1.2), in which he finds
himself humming to his dog the tune of a
Mozart aria about the nature of friendship.
For it is by no means clear which 'aria from
Don Giovanni' it is to which Freud's pur-
ported 'quotation' in German, which trans-
lates as 'a bond of friendship ... " refers.
The problem is that perusal of Da Ponte's
libretto to the opera does not reveal a close
verbal parallel in the original Italian; and,
although a mysteriously bracketed 'Octavio'
(no doubt a classicist's misspelling of 'Don
Ottavio') has been introduced to the letter-
text in the abridged edition of Jones's bio-
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
graphy (Jones, 1961, p. 632), nevertheless Freud's
German phrase 'Ein Band der Freundschaft
bindet ... ' does fit the start of the most
catchy and hummable tune in the whole
opera, namely 'La ci darem' .. .' as sung by
Don Giovanni and Zerlina (Act 1, ix ; see
§4.2 below). However, it is also the case that
Freud's 'Ein Band .. .' will also fit Ottavio's
famous melody Dalla sua pace ... (Act 1,
xiv), in which he soliloquises about his
fiancee Donna Anna (in the third person),
just after she has declared that, only when
he has avenged her against Don Giovanni,
will she have any peace from her mental
anguish. On balance, it seems likely that this
is the number to which the bracketed gloss
is pointing us. It is indeed a memorably
beautiful tune, well suited to an atmosphere
of calm and secure affection. It is also, at
the same time, a rather complicated one for
an 'unmusical' person to store and repro-
duce, since it encompasses in its first four
bars (measures) all the basic note-values be-
tween crotchet (quarter note) and demi-semi-
quaver (thirty-second note) inclusive; but this
may merely indicate that Freud's problem
was with pitch rather than with rhythm,
consistently with his being a 'rhetorical' writer.
In the opera, Ottavio is resolving to do
as Anna wishes because his happiness de-
pends upon hers: he sings literally, 'On her
peace of mind my own depends' (Dalla sua
pace la mia dipende). It is not inconceivable,
no doubt, that one of the then-current Ger-
man versions which Rushton discusses (as
we have just seen) could have been content
to paraphrase the general sentiment in the
words that Freud quotes; though it is more
than a little odd to speak of a bond of
friendship, rather than love, between Ottavio
and his fiancee, especially when 'Ein Band
der Liebe .. .' would have scanned equally
well. However, speculation aside, it is plainly
a matter of ascertainable fact whether Freud's
words do come from a performed translation
or not.
There is the further point, relevant to the
overdetermination or condensation of the
1147
memory, that the particular aspect of love
on which Ottavio comments is dependency
. \
(my peace of mind depends upon Anna's),
while Freud's dependence upon his (daugh-
ter) Anna was very much on his mind at
the time of writing. In the same letter, he
specifically mentions his age, and his rumi-
nations weighing the sufferings of life against
the losses of death; and when he had written
to Lou Andreas-Salome in May of the pre-
vious year, voicing the same preoccupations
with his advanced age and his failing health,
he had added, 'I am, of course, more and
more dependent on Anna's care', and he had
driven the point home with a characteristic
quotation, this time unquestionably accurate,
from Part Two of Goethe's Faust (Act 1,
lines 7003-4): 'In the end we all depend/on
creatures we ourselves have made' (Freud,
1935, pp. 208-9).
Returning to the general idea that words
may serve to provide some kind of 'cognitive
control' over the affective impact of musical
sounds, it will be recalled that, in the his-
torical context when opera was being con-
sciously canvassed as a new musical form,
it was recommended (paradoxically for this
thesis) as providing a vehicle for a manner
of expression and communication that would
be less, not more, 'controlled' than had pre-
viously been possible (§3.l above). The music
was seen as enhancing and intensifying the
emotional message of the words; and this
constituted a 'romantic' development (so to
say) of the established principle of cross-
modal imitation and punning, whereby both
church musicians and secular madrigalists
had regularly set words meaning 'rising' and
'falling', for example, to scale-figures or ar-
peggios which were themselves going up or
going down.
Thus the words of opera were not being
regarded at that time, as we conjecture they
were later perceived by Freud, as 'containing'
and structuring the emotive power of the
music which otherwise might get out of
hand, but rather the reverse. How much he
would have enjoyed, we may suppose, the
1148 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
explicit debate, about whether words or
music should be given prime position in
opera, as staged in his last opera by Richard
Strauss, who took over Gustav Mahler's for-
mer rostrum at the Vienna State Opera seven
years after Mahler's death. But this work,
Capriccio, did not appear until three years
too late for Freud's appreciation.
From the very start of the piece, the
eighteenth-century characters are debating
the thesis 'Words first, then the music', as
expressed in the dictum Prima le parole, dopo
la musica: a dictum which encapsulates the
then-current historical controversy by com-
bining the content of Gluck's position with
the form of Salieri's reply. For, Gluck had
expounded a central tenet of his operatic
'reformation' in the preface to his Alceste
(1769) where he wrote that he had tried 'to
restrict music to its true role of serving
poetry'; and this had occasioned a retaliatory
salvo from Mozart's older contemporary An-
tonio Salieri in the shape of an opera (1786)
called Prima la musica e poi le parole. For
Gluck, the music follows the words; for
Salieri, it is 'First the music .. .'.
Even if it was usual, in the chronology
of operatic composition, for the words to
precede the music, there were, nevertheless,
exceptions. Treating the issue explicitly in
his quasi-Socratic dialogue Poet and Com-
poser (1813), that literary and musical pillar
of German romanticism, E. T. A. Hoffmann,
whose work Freud knew well (as did every-
body else), advocated the ideal, if seemingly
unrealistic, solution by making his protago-
nist, Lothar, ask and affirm:
Isn't perfect unity of text and music possible
when poet and composer are one and the
person? ... I believe that music and word
from the inspired poet and composer at the
instant (p. 189).
Unrealistic though this must have seemed at
the time, it may have functioned partly as
a piece of self-advertisement, since Hoff-
mann, nowadays perhaps best known as a
writer, went on to compose no less than ten
operas himself; in the ears of today's listen-
ers, however, Lothar's bold notion serves
inevitably as a prophecy of Wagner. For this
is exactly what Wagner makes his Walther
von Stoltzing do, in that scene from Mas-
tersingers which affected Freud so much:
trying to recapture and articulate his dream-
inspiration, Walther pours out both words
and music 'at the same instant' before our
very eyes and ears (Act 3, ii), with Hans
Sachs aiding and abetting him as amanuensis
and as Socratic 'midwife' to the delivery of
the song-child which he ceremonially chris-
tens as such just before the famous quintet
at the end of Scene iv.
On the other hand, Wagner is on record
as having noted down first the music for
this Prize Song and then written the poem
to go with it some months later (Newman,
1949, pp. 390-92). This is the sequence of
events which, at some points, he appears to
attribute also to our hero Walther, who, true
to the long-established dream-tradition of
the German 'Romantic Movement', com-
poses the song as an 'interpretation', recon-
struction or elaboration of his poetically
inspired 'morning-dream', as we have just
seen. It is this episode which Freud singles
out as having given him particular pleasure
when he heard the opera in the winter of
1897. It was Wagner too, of course, who
had tried to settle the Capriccio debate in
advance, so to speak, by arguing for a new
genre of integrated 'music-drama' which would
pay equal respect to a plurality of aesthetic
media (of which poetry and music were but
two), and would thereby constitute the ulti-
only mate comprehensive work-of-art or Gesamt-
same kunstwerk.
flow Perhaps one reason why it is hard to be
same clear, from the Mastersingers text, whether
the inspiration of Walther's morning-dream
was primarily poetic or musical is that Wag-
ner's own creative experience was itself some
kind of bardic or Dionysian amalgam of
various aesthetic elements, which was only
subsequently 'interpreted' out into specifi-
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
cally verbal, tonal and visual components.
This, indeed, is more or less the burden of
the composition-tutorial which Hans Sachs
gives to Walther, helping him to articulate
(interpret or deuten) his amorphous dream-
memory into a presentable master-song. It
is also more or less what Ernest .Newman
tells us about how Wagner himself composed
(1949, pp. 202-3), and he goes on to quote
a letter from Wagner to an anonymous friend
in which he writes:
I can conceive of a subject only when it comes to
me in such a form that I myself cannot distinguish
between the contribution of the poet and that of
the musician in me; and its completion in word
and tone is simply the ultimate realisation of some-
thing that had originally presented itself to me
only in vague outlines. This is the foundation of
all my productive, and more particularly my mu-
sical-productive, power.
Given that Freud was able, despite his
much-protested resistance, to let himself en-
joy at least 'conversational' or 'narrative'
music in the form of opera (or rather some
operas), what was it about two of them-
Mozart's Don Giovanni and Wagner's Mas-
tersingers-that caused him to pick them out
for special endorsement? The reasons for his
fascination with a third, Bizet's Carmen (about
which he had much more to say than about
the other two) will also concern us even
though they are much clearer: for they have
to do explicitly with his fundamental ideas
about personality-integration, and about art-
istic appreciation and creativity, and as such
they impinge directly upon the origins of his
ambivalent 'disturbance' about the enjoy-
ment of music.
3.3) Primacy and suppression again
There is some agreement among his inti-
mates that, of the operatic trio just mentioned,
Don Giovanni was his overall favourite, and
he is reported to have told his patient Joseph
Wortis that it was 'the greatest opera there
1149
is' (Sterba, 1965, p. 96). In so saying, he
was doing little more, after all, than follow-
ing Hamlet's advice about giving weight to
the censure of judicious critics: Schopen-
hauer had already (1818, Vol. 2, p. 104)
declared that opera to be one of 'the most
perfect masterpieces of the very greatest
masters'; and it had also become the subject
of a ninety-page infatuation on the part of
Kierkegaard (1843), to which we have al-
ready referred and which has been discussed
in its turn by the contemporary British
philosopher Bernard Williams (1981). Not
without insight into the risk of being carried
away by his own hypercathexis, Kierkegaard
invokes restraint from the spiritual guardians
of aesthetics:
you who guard the boundaries of the kingdom of
beauty, guard me lest I, in confused enthusiasm
and blind zeal to make Don Giovanni all in all,
do it an injustice, disparage it, make it something
other than what it really is, which is the highest!
(p. 87).
Such high regard has already earned for the
Mozart work a certain amount of psychody-
namic attention, ranging from broad-brush
comparisons between the 'idea' of Don Juan
and that of Faust (e.g. Kierkegaard, 1943,
pp. 87-92) to a purportedly 'psychoanalytic'
scrutiny of the single inarticulate cry of
Mozart's Giovanni in Act 2, xvii (Poizat
1987). We therefore return to it below (§4.2).
As for the Wagner piece, we have already
seen that Freud derived a peculiar satisfac-
tion from it, and that he described it as
uniquely successful in respect of one essential
feature of opera.
So both these works were at the top of
Freud's operatic chart; but the Mastersingers
differs from Don Giovanni in the present
context in having received surprisingly little
theoretical attention. So much so, that Diaz
de Chumaceiro has recently recommended
(1993, p. 273) that it is about time that it
got some more. Indeed, such attention has
perhaps been discouraged by Magee's judge-
1150 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
ment (1988, p. 36) to the effect that it is
unlike Wagner's other music-dramas in not
being another of his 'animated textbooks of
psychoanalysis'; thus it does not so obviously
invite this sort of interpretation. It does
feature, however, in Diaz de Chumaceiro's
campaign (1993, pp. 256-60) to convict Freud
of having suppressed his knowledge of Wag-
ner also (as well as of Beethoven; see §3.1
above) from the same motive as had led him
to disavow Nietzsche: namely, to avoid hav-
ing to admit that he had been anticipated.
The idea that any such suppression of
Wagner has occurred springs to some extent
from her own textual 'gloss' on Freud's
Mastersingers letter (1897d), which we have
already encountered (p. 1138, above). She
assumes that the phrase 'as in no other
opera' must mean 'as in no other opera by
Wagner' (1993, p. 249); and she argues that
this implies that Freud knew at least several
other Wagner operas (with which to compare
Mastersingers), whereas, as it stands, the
comparison implied is simply with other op-
eras in general (by anybody) that he knew
at the time. If Freud had indeed intended
to compare Mastersingers with other Wagner
operas, he would naturally have written (the
German for) 'as in no other opera of his'.
Since he did not write this, it is much more
natural to assume that the intended com-
parison is exactly the opposite one, namely
between Wagnerian and non-Wagnerian op-
era; because the relevant point about (almost
all) Wagner opera, by contrast with (almost)
'all other opera', is that Wagner wrote the
words as well as the music himself, thus
uniquely achieving precisely that aesthetic
word-music integration on which Freud com-
ments, and which he would have valued as
accommodating that 'rationalistic ... turn of
mind in me' which he later identified (1914,
p. 211) as tending to obstruct his enjoyment
of music.
In fact, the only comparison, between Mas-
tersingers and all 'other opera', which could
reasonably be drawn by someone who did
not know 'all other opera' (as Freud knew
he did not), would be a comparison based
on the second-hand knowledge of a broad
distinction, which he could easily have got
from the aesthetic study-group of his student
days (the Leseverein which we have already
met in §3.1): namely that Wagner wrote his
own words whereas other opera composers,
generally speaking, did not (an ever-popular,
but isolated, exception to this general trend
being Leoncavallo in his I Pagliacci). This,
then, would seem to be all that Freud can
mean without implicitly claiming, as grounds
for his comparison, first-hand musical ac-
quaintance with 'all other opera'; and that
claim would come impertinently, and even
absurdly, from 'a completely unmusical per-
son'.
It is necessary to make clear at the outset,
therefore, that there is not a shred of evi-
dence to support Diaz de Chumaceiro's idio-
syncratic 'reading' of the text: for it is com-
pletely unwarranted by either internal or
external considerations. As such, it amounts
to no more than an attempt to construct an
additional documentary 'source' (which would
otherwise not exist) for her contention that
'Freud's knowledge of Wagner's music was
greater than has been underscored in the
psychoanalytic literature to date'.
The evasion with which Freud is charged
is supposed to relate to whether he should
concede 'primacy' to Wagner on the question
of the role played by 'primary process' men-
tation in general, and by dream-imagery in
particular, in generating artistic creativity (a
question which Adorno (1952) had also raised).
Her claim is that, while working on the
'dream book' in the late nineties, he saw the
Mastersingers (as he reported to Fliess) and
was appalled to find that Wagner had said
it all in the dream-song-composition scene
(Act 3, ii) to which Nietzsche also refers at
the very beginning of The Birth of Tragedy
... The case is tenuous enough, in all con-
science, depending as it does upon arguing
from silence, by attributing significance to
the fact that Freud does not say things which
she supposes he would otherwise have said.
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR 1151

For example, when the 'Rat Man', in the ing', which is preserved in the published
course of his treatment, mentions a motif English translation based on MS holographs
associated with one of the characters, David, as well as in the typed transcript of Freud's
Freud does not display his knowledge of the MS, has been silently 'banalised' to Parsifal
opera; and yet, perhaps some twenty years in the published edition of the German (ed.,
later, he did discuss it in detail with another 1974a, p. 202) so that the evidence is lost.
sometime patient, the brilliant young musi- Another vindication of the philologists' maxim
cian Mark Brunswick. Or again, with refer- that the 'harder reading' takes precedence:
ence to Parsifal, when Wagner's work is praestat lectio difficilior. The tell-tale archa-
referred to in a letter from lung, Freud ism of Freud's spelling seems to be a con-
appropriately recognises Parsifal's sobriquet flation of von Eschenbach's Parzival with
'the blameless fool' (der reine Tor); Diaz de Percival (or Perceval) which was another of
Chumaceiro takes this as evidence that Freud the various Franco-German forms current
must have known Wagner's music-drama. in medieval literature; Wagner had explicitly
But this is not evidence for any such thing: rejected both of these when he opted for
almost any educated Austro-German of the Parsifal in 1877 (Newman, 1949, p. 676). So
time would have recognised the expression far, then, from being familiar with the music
from schoolroom acquaintance with the an- of Wagner's 'sacred festival drama', as Diaz
cient legend of Parsifal (or 'Parzival') as told de Chumaceiro supposes, Freud does not
classically by Wolfram yon Eschenbach, and even know how to spell its title.
would have been able to see in Wagner's The same critic's argument that Freud
phrase a less alliterative but psychologically must also have known (at least the text of)
subtler variant of the medieval image of 'the Wagner's Siegfried takes a similar form: she
senseless fool' which Wolfram had created infers this claim from another letter (li8p)
for his Grail-hero. For, while regularly des- in which Freud, replying to a worry which
ignating Parzival der tor, he also calls him lung had expressed (about what sort of
.separately tumpe (again 'foolish' or 'naive') father he would be to his new-born son),
and reine at various points; but the latter is writes, 'your regret at being unable to play
used less often, and neither is combined with the ideal hero-father ("My father begot me
the noun in a set phrase. Diaz de Chu- and died") struck me as very premature'.
maceiro's assumption, then, is as precarious Now, the editors say (Freud & lung, ed.
as inferring, from the fact that I can take 1974b, p. 186) that this is an 'allusion to
an allusion to William Tell sporting his apple the hero of Wagner's music drama Siegfried',
and his arrow, that I must know Rossini's and refer us to Act 2, iii. But, although it
opera based on the old story. is undoubtedly a reference to the parentage
The context is that lung has told Freud of the legendary orphan Siegfried, it is not
(letter 1151) that he has expressed to their a quotation from Wagner's version of the
colleague Abraham Brill some doubts about story: his hero does not say anything quite
an interpretation which Brill had made con- so ironically bathetic.
cerning a patient's apparent identification What he does say (as Diaz de Chumaceiro
with Parsifal. Freud replies, however, that points out), to the W oodbird towards the
he rather likes the interpretation (li6p); and, end of that scene, is: 'I ... have no brothers
in voicing his approval, he blatantly gives nor sisters; my mother died, my father fell; the
the literary game away by spelling Parsifal son never saw them' (meine Mutter schwand,!
as Parcival (ed., 1974b, p. 182), thus showing mein Vater fiel:! nie sah sie der Sohn!). The
that he is thinking more of von Eschenbach fact that Siegfried's father was killed in battle
than of Wagner! It is a stemmatic curiosity, while his mother was pregnant with him is
though, that this crucial and compelling 'read- as related in the old Volsunga saga from
1152 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
which Wagner drew (cp. Donington, 1974,
pp. 189-99; E. Magee, 1990, esp. pp. 67-71),
though the matricidal touch of the fatal
childbirth is the composer's own embellish-
ment. (Cosima Wagner's sister Blandine did
in fact die giving birth to a son, but that
was a few years after Wagner had finished
Die Walkiire in which Sieglinde dies.) This
legendary account of Siegfried's paternity
would have been quite widely known to
educated Austro-Germans in Freud's day;
also well known was that other relevant
medieval epic, which Wagner sometimes
quarried, the Nibelungenlied.
Indeed, Diaz de Chumaceiro makes a point
of saying (1993, p. 253) that Freud had been
'familiar with the Nibelungenlied' since 1875,
but what she does not say is that the story
told there about the fate of our hero's
parents is a totally different one! For in that
version, they both live on well past their
son's maturity, and Siegfried's father, so far
from being killed before the boy is born,
actually outlives him (Hatto, 1965, pp. 124-
40). Freud's acquaintance with that story,
which he demonstrates by referring in Ch.
7A of the 'dream-book' to the manner of
Siegfried's death (so reminiscent of that of
Achilles!), is therefore immaterial (Freud
1900, p. 515); but it is no surprise that he
was familiar with it, just as he was familiar
(already by the previous year) with the story
of 'Tristan and Isolde' in the version by
Gottfried von Strassburg (Freud, 1874, p.
53).
He was familiar with them because he
was a literate young man educated in a
certain cultural tradition. And it seems to
be the Siegfried of the Saga, rather than his
Wagnerian reincarnation, to whom Freud's
contrived 'quotation' refers Gust as it was
Wolfram's 'Parzival', and not Wagner's 'Par-
sifal', in the Brill episode). No doubt he had
picked up a good deal more, at second-hand,
about Wagner's treatment of these things,
such as making Siegfried's parentage inces-
tuous and changing Parsifal's nickname, both
from the Leseverein and from those Wednes-
day meetings with his musical colleagues;
but evidently not enough to produce a plau-
sible quotation from the Siegfried of the
Ring '" Such second-hand acquaintance with
facts about Wagner is, in any case, a far cry
from having read the poems themselves or
having heard much of the music.
4) RHAPSODY, RULES AND THE MOB
We return now to take a closer look at
those 'real ideas' ... in the Mastersingers,
whose fusion with the 'affective tones' ... of
the music so impressed Freud, and to see
what light they shed on all this. What are
the main ideas treated in that work? Precisely
questions about the relation between formal
intellectual structure and emotional expres-
siveness in music and song, and about the
need for the former to organise and direct
the latter: 'cognitive control' of emotional
response and expression, in fact, or 'Apollo
leading Dionysus' as Nietzsche put it. It is
even tempting to notice how readily the main
protagonists in the drama can be cast into
the roles of Freud's much-maligned struc-
tural components of the 'psychic apparatus'.
4.1) Dream, impulse and creativity
On my left, as id, the inchoate rhapsodis-
ing and wild imagination of the passionate
youth Walther von Stolzing who, although
quite untrained, is applying for membership
of the local Guild of Mastersingers (and who
thus personifies Kierkegaard's 'lyrical impa-
tience'). On my right, as superego, the accu-
satory, rule-obsessed totems and taboos of
the inflexible pedant Beckmesser, who has
the job of ensuring that new applicants meet
the technical entrance-requirements. And hold-
ing the ring as ego, the benign paternalism
of Hans Sachs; that sensitive but cautious
craftsman who, by valuing affective expres-
sion (even when a touch 'progressive') but
insisting upon what Rorschach-workers would
call 'form-control of colour-responses', con-
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
trives by the end of Act Three to strike the
balance necessary for preserving and propa-
gating the essential virtues of 'holy German
art'. In view of this, it is strange that Magee
regards the piece as not enacting psychoana-
lytic concepts and dynamics.
It will be evident from this sketch that
there is also in Mastersingers that same revo-
lutionary or 'parricidal' theme, of an arro-
gant authority-figure being overthrown, which,
as we have seen (at the end of §2.l above),
permeates the association between Freud's
Count Thun and Mozart's Count Almaviva.
For, in addition to the triumph of ego over
id, there is also the triumph of the people's
champion (Hans Sachs) and the younger
generation (Walther) over the oppressive schol-
asticism of the dictatorial establishment-figure
(Beckmesser). This hapless butt (the Count
Thun of sixteenth-century Nuremberg, as it
were) is musically 'hammered' by the cobbler
Sachs, physically hammered by the rioting
apprentices and finally beaten bardically at
his own game by Walther, the dream-in-
spired upstart.
It is the amorous youth's 'morning-dream-
melody', as interpreted and ego-controlled
by Sachs (in the Morgentraumdeutweise scene
(Act 3, iz), which wins the day in the opera
and also struck Freud as especially affecting.
Nor is it hard to imagine, therefore, how
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy would have
both fascinated and threatened the emerging
psychoanalyst who was at the time hoping
to be able to make a living (as we shall see
below) out of his new insights into the mean-
ing and function of dreams. For the essay
persistently appeals to the part played by
the dream in all aesthetic experience and
creativity, and at the start quotes, from the
'book' of this very scene, those lines which
Wagner had put into the mouth of Hans
Sachs, only four years previously, to the
effect that all bardic and poetic artistry con-
sists somehow in interpreting 'valid dreams'
(Wahrtraum-Deuterei).
Whereas Freud would have held, of course,
that all dreams contain some psychological
1153
'validity', Wagner's term Wahrtraum sug-
gests the need to distinguish 'true' dreams
from those that are not so true (or is the
wahr just a poetical 'transferred epithet' that
really belongs to Deuterei?). Both men were
working, in any case, in the shadow of the
dream-laden culture of German Romanti-
cism, which may have owed something to
an earlier English-language tradition of
'dream-vision' poetry involving a succession
of medieval writers from Chaucer to Skelton.
However that may be, the usage itself
(Wahrtraum) hints at a fundamental distinc-
tion made in the dream-folklore of classical
Greek literature, in which Wagner had read
widely, as we know, especially when working
on Lohengrin some twenty years before Mas-
tersingers.
The Greeks had distinguished carefully
between two sorts of dream-like experience:
a waking, and veridical, vision or apparition
of some kind (hypar) as opposed to an onar,
which resembles an ordinary, and therefore
potentially deceptive, sleeping dream. Hypar
is not quite a 'day-dream', for it is not a
wishful fantasy but a kind of visitation by
some reliable agency, such as a message from
the gods; and the distinction is thus crucial
to assessing the validity of the content of
the perceptual experience. It is essential, there-
fore, for the characters in Homer and in
tragedy to know whether what they have
had was an onar or a hypar. Thus, towards
the end of the Odyssey (xix, 547), Penelope
urgently needs to be reassured that what she
thought was an onar had in fact been a
hypar whose properly decoded message, about
the imminent return of her husband Odys-
seus, can therefore be relied upon.
The economic potential of this dream-
business, in professional terms, is something
on which Freud himself wryly comments.
He introduces the Yiddish word Parnosse,
meaning 'making a living', 'earning one's
bread-and-butter' etc., into the crucial para-
graph about the Mastersingers (1897d, p.
286). In the last scene of the opera, Walther
says that his victorious song, which has won
 1154 NEIL M. CHESHIRE

for him both Mastersinger-status and the eye on the visual imagery or 'dream-picture'
hand of Eva, has brought him to Mount (Traumbild) as Hans Sachs counsels. Once
Parnassus (home of the Muses) and to Para- again, the very idea of a potentially deci-
dise-Parnass und Paradies. Freud punningly pherable 'picture-language of dreams' tTraum-
alludes to this by writing, 'I would have bildsprache) was already familiar to the phi.
liked to. add the Parnosse to "Parnassus" losophy of German Romanticism, and had
and "Paradise"'; and the sentiment evidently been expounded in extenso by, for example,
is, 'Let's hope that this business of interpret- Gotthilf von Schubert in his book on 'the
ing dream-melodies, which I am working on, symbolism of dreams' (an enlarged second
will lead to a regular income-Parnassus and edition of which had appeared in 1837, some
Paradise can wait!'. twenty years or so before Wagner began
Any such hope had in fact been disavowed, work on the Mastersingers (Ellenberger, 1970,
just a few months previously, in the context p. 205)).
of reporting to Fliess the catastrophic 'dis- If these suggestions about why the Mas-
covery' (as he then thought it was) that he tersingers appealed to Freud are anywhere
had been deceiving himself about the sexual near the mark, then it will come all the more
aetiology of hysteria. In the September letter as a surprise to learn that another favourite
which had disclosed this supposed error, he opera of his, as is generally attested, was
had not only given up hope of making his Carmen (Jones, 1953, p. 362; Eissler, 1974,
name and fortune out of treating hysteria, p. 97; Gay, 1988, p. 169). Certainly, this was
but also regretted that no economic com- the opera about which he wrote at greatest
pensation was to be found in the dream- length, as remarked above (p. I 139a); and
business: it seems an unlikely favourite because, on
the face of it, it exemplifies the very opposite
The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, of the magnanimity, moderation and con-
as was that of certain wealth, complete inde- trolled emotion of Wagner's piece, having
pendence, travels, and lifting the children above been described by various critics (including
the severe worries that robbed me of my youth. Nietzsche himself) as wicked, licentious, sav-
Everything depended upon whether or not hysteria age and cruel.
would come out right. Now I can once again remain Indeed, it was just this conspicuous lack
quiet and modest, go on worrying and saving '" of impulse-control displayed by many of the
It is a pity that one cannot make a living, for characters, not least Carmen herself, that
instance, on dream-interpretation!(1897b,p. 266). caused the young Freud to reflect in a letter
to his fiancee:
As for Walther's dream, it is by no means
always clear from Wagner's text just what I remember something that occurred to me while
the content of the young hopeful's dream- watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives
experience is meant to be. In certain pas- vent to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves in
sages, it seems to have comprised at least order to maintain our integrity, we economise in
some verbal features along with its visual ourselves, our capacity for enjoyment, our re-
and melodic elements, and to have been lations; and we save ourselves for something,
almost a synaesthetic 'total-artistic-experi- knowing not for what. And this habit of constant
ence' (as it were a Gesamtkunsterlebnis by suppression of natural instincts gives us the qual-
analogy with Wagner's own ideal Gesamt- ity of refinement (1883, p. 65).
kunstwerk). In that case, the 'interpretation'
(Deutung) consists in articulating this con- We may contrast with this the way in which
fused multimodal material into both verbal the behaviour of the Nuremberg mob is
and musical specifics, while still keeping an treated in the Mastersingers. Given the above
\
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
comments, Freud would doubtless have been
reassured to observe that, when that mob
does riot briefly at the end of Act Two, it
is soon quelled by the single authoritative
presence of the protective Nightwatchman.
The latter is a figure who may well be
thought to personify the welcome social con-
trol which civilisation buys at the price of
that very inhibition and repression which is
so enviably absent from the impulse-life of
Carmen (as also from that of Don Giovanni
in person), and which Freud half resented
having to cultivate in himself as a respectable
middle-class professional. The point was un-
derlined independently in the next decade by
the exactly contemporary Irish writer Bernard
Shaw, who not only was a considerably less
apologetic music critic than Freud but also
expressed views on the psychopathology of
the family to which the latter occasionally
referred (e.g. 1916, p. 205). In his charac-
teristic fashion, Shaw stands the point on its
head by contending (l894a, p. 225) that
essential to the success of Carmen on stage
is 'the attraction ... of seeing a pretty and
respectable middle-class young lady harm-
lessly pretending to be a wicked person'. So
Shaw's defence against Freud's 'civilisation-
discontentment' is a kind of thespian disso-
ciation!
Wagner's defence, on the other hand, which
seems to have appealed to Freud, is in effect
to canvass 'ego-control'. The consequent need
to maintain firm formal structures, in order
to contain the provocatively emotive ele-
ments in mastersinging, is something that
Hans Sachs has to spell out to his too-freely
rhapsodising protege, the hopeful young
Walther. The Mastersingers' complex and
historic rules governing metre, imagery and
melody serve precisely to restrain the art-
istic expression of emotion within the bounds
of civilised propriety. Abandon these, and
you invite 'abandonment' of all sorts: from
young girls being led astray (Act 3, ii) to
the self-destructive brawling of the work-
force (Act 2, vii). In short, as anticipated
above (p. 1142b), the spectre of 'Dionysus
1155
unbound'. However, if Freud was inclined
to interpret the Mastersingers' rules and regu-
lations as allegories for more general psy-
chical agencies of libido-containment, he may
have felt that in this bardic tutorial Wagner
had answered (or indeed had anticipated his
own way of answering) the uneasy question
about impulse-control which Carmen had
posed for him.
4.2) When the ego fails: the trouble with the
Don
In another direction, this concern with
what we may call the 'Carmen question'
promotes the speculation that, for Freud,
one of the appealing aspects of Don Giovanni
may have been that, in that work at least
(as many commentators have noted), the
protagonist's self-indulgent abandonment to
sensuality, which even embroils him in a
quasi-oedipal killing, is finally overtaken by
fatal retribution; a retribution exacted by the
irresistible hand of the murdered father-
figure himself, reaching from beyond the
grave. And what a theatrical stroke it is, not
unlike that of Wagner's Nightwatchman, when
his sepulchral statue speaks out in the dark-
ness! Verily, the superego strikes at last. This
point is underlined by the fact that the title
by which the work is now universally known
was originally only the alternative sub-title
(literally an ossia reading) for the explicitly
moralistic one by which it was first adver-
tised: 11 Dissoluto Punito. This we may per-
haps render, with a wink at Hogarth-Strav-
insky, as 'The Rake's Punishment'.
Nor can we imagine that Freud himself
was indifferent to the operatic predicament
of the Don's principal 'victim' in the drama,
Donna Anna, since the name 'Anna' obvi-
ously meant a lot to him: it was the name
of that younger sister whose piano he had
required his parents to evict from the family
home, and for whose innocence he evinced
a youthful care by showing disapproval of
her reading Dumas and Balzac, whom he
regarded as too risque for her fifteen years
1156 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
of age (Gay, 1988, p. 14); and it was, of
course, the name that he famously chose for
his own youngest daughter.
The point about the significance of this
name has been noted independently, and
considerably elaborated, by Vitz (1988, p.
119) in the course of his speculations about
the reasons for Freud's particular fascination
with Don Giovanni, and he concludes his
argument by advancing a veritable family-
tree of onomastic associations:
Many of the names in Mozart's work would also
have struck deep responses in Freud. The hero-
ine's name of 'Donna Anna' would have evoked
his nanny, and possibly his sister (also, eventually,
his daughter). 'Don Giovanni' (Don Juan) would
have suggested his 'cousin' John. 'Leporello' is the
Italian for 'Lipperel', the diminutive of 'Philipp'.
It is as if Mozart chose his names precisely from
the Freud 'family romance'.
In an enigmatic and purportedly autobio-
graphical tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1812),
which is essentially his personal 'gloss' on
the opera, the ambivalent feelings about Donna
Anna which many commentators mention
(e.g. Hildesheimer, 1977, p. 223) are already
so strong that her very life is endangered. In
fact they conspire to 'kill off the lady, appar-
ently in the light of her confessed guilt at
having colluded with Giovanni's seductive ad-
vances, and having thus unwittingly precipi-
tated her father's death. Hoffmann explains:
She was not saved! He fled after the deed was
done, while she had become filled with a burning
sensual desire which rendered all resistance point-
less. He was the one who aroused in her the in-
sane lust with which she threw her arms around
him, the sinner totally consumed by the fiery spir-
its of Hell '" But she cannot surrender to Don
Ottavio's desire to marry her ... she will not live
that long' (p. 115).
He even underlines the message by having
the singer-character of Anna emotionally 'se-
duce' him, by visiting his box at the opera,
before dying of 'nervous exhaustion' during
the following night. This idea, that Donna
Anna, contrary to her later protestations,
was indeed infatuated with Giovanni and
had colluded with his advances, was taken
up by Wagner himself and actually imposed
upon Mozart, as Liebner relates:
Among the romantic misrepresentations, a distin-
guished place is occupied by Wagner's perform-
ance. He even composed an additional scene for
it, in which Donna Anna, having been seduced
by Don Giovanni, confesses her ardent love for
him! (1961, p. 191).
In terms of Freud's 'structural theory',
therefore, it is tempting to summarise the
dynamics of his three favourite operas by
saying that in Carmen the forces of the id
destroy themselves; in Don Giovanni, they
are eventually annihilated by the supernatu-
ral intervention of a superego from beyond
the grave; and in Mastersingers, they are
controlled, and converted into benign crea-
tivity, by the reality-logos of an ego which
also casts a token glance toward the vestigial
superego of aesthetics ('holy Art').
For Carmen both destroys Don Jose by
means of the erotic impulses which she per-
sonifies, and is herself destroyed by the mur-
derous rage which they stir up in him. In
Don Giovanni, as if to remind us that the
piece is ultimately about the supernatural
punishment of all-too-natural 'wickedness and
vice', Da Ponte's libretto underlines the link
between illicit seduction (of Zerlina by Don
Giovanni), on the one hand, and supernatu-
ral punishment (of the Don by the Com-
mander), on the other, by making the two
incidents, so very different as they are, turn
on one-and-the-same behavioural gesture:
namely, giving the hand to another as a
token of assent. In the first case, Giovanni
encourages Zerlina to join hands as a way
of 'saying yes' to him (La ci darem' la mano,
la mi dirai di si: Act 1, ix); and in the second,
the Commander requires Giovanni to give
him his hand as confirmation of the Don's
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR 1157

verbal consent to go with him, a request
with which the Don fatally complies in spite
of Leporello's explicit warning to 'say no'
(Lep. Dite di no!; D.G '" Non ho timor:
verro! ; Com. Dammi la mana in pegno!: Act
2, xvii). Thus does the superego, in punishing
the 'dissolute' Giovanni, use the very same
symbolic action as the id had used in wreak-
ing its erotic havoc through him; and, having
contrived, in his flagrantly oedipal crime, to
treat Ie 'non' du pere with pre-Lacanian dis-
regard, the Don is discovered, in these two
incidents, saying a correspondingly defiant
'yes' successively to both Eros and Thanatos!
The civilising and integrating role of ego-
processes which Hans Sachs impersonates in
Mastersingers, as previously described, is
underscored in the psychological sub-plot
concerning the problem of that irrational,
disorderly and violent 'craziness' (Wahn) which
the id is capable of arousing in otherwise
civilised people. In Wagner's piece, these
id-forces are not left to destroy each other,
as in Carmen, nor do they have to be over-
powered and punished by the moralising
agency of a ghostly superego, as in Don
Giovanni. Instead, they are dispersed by the
ego-control exercised, not this time by Sachs,
but (as we have also seen) by the peaceable
admonitions of a duly-appointed officer of
the civic authorities, the Nightwatchman.
Indeed, the psychological ineptness, and
even the socio-ethical irresponsibility, ofhav-
ing the dissolute Don's id-driven and Wahn-
inducing actions punished supernaturally by
a fantasy-agency, instead of having been
restrained by reality-based interpersonal con-
siderations or institutional sanctions, rankled
with our musical dramatist Bernard Shaw,
who protested:
As to Don Giovanni .. , the only immoral feature of ing the powerful animal's movement. But only too
it is itssupernaturalretributive morality.Gentlemen often there arises between the ego and the id the
who breakthrough the ordinary categoriesof good not precisely ideal situation of the rider being
and evil... do not, as a matter of fact get called on obliged to guide the horse along the path by
by statues,and taken straight down throughthe floor which it itself wants to go (1933, p. 77).
to eternaltorments;and to pretend that they do is to
shirkthesocialproblemthey present(l894b,p. 196).
However, this same Wahn, in another
sense nearer to Dionysian 'possession', can
be harnessed by the poet-artist-musician or
'bard' to creative ends. So we find Sachs
looking for a positive by-product of the
mob's 'craziness' when he says that we shall
see how he can bring it about that this
'possession' is 'delicately steered' and turned
into (what Tennyson called) 'some work of
noble note': daft er den Wahn fein lenken
mag,! ein edler Werk zu thun (Act 3, ii). But
this is not so much to anticipate psychoana-
lytic notions about sublimation as to recycle
some very old ideas about the relation be-
tween madness, divine enthousiasmos, bardic
inspiration and creative imagination.
Even the chosen metaphor of 'steering'
(lenken) echoes a famous passage of Plato,
where the need to control and direct fran-
tically impulsive forces is considered. In his
'two horse-power' model of the soul, which
he describes so vividly in the Phaedrus (sec-
tion 246), the impetus is generated by a pair
of temperamentally contrasted beasts who
need to be cleverly steered by a kind of
'executive self' in the form of the 'charioteer'
who is literally in the driving-seat. This 'dif-
ficult and troublesome' steering is necessary
to prevent the one brutish, impulsive, recal-
citrant (and generally id-like) horse from
pulling his noble and obedient partner (a
kind of ego-ideal) way off course and thus
the whole set-up headlong into destruction.
A somewhat different equestrian simile
was used also by Freud himself, of course,
in an oft-quoted passage, to illustrate the
precarious relationship between ego and id:
The ego's relation to the id might be compared
with that of a rider to his horse. The horse sup-
plies the locomotive energy, while the rider has
the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guid-
It seems that Wagner also knew of Plato's
1158 NEIL M. CHESHIRE

picture; for when Cosima Wagner read the it had permeated, of course, even his earliest
Phaedrus at the end of April 1870 (that is, work, and was to lead him eventually, as
two years after the premiere of Mas tersingers), Eissler observes (1974, p. 97), to revised
Wagner showed himself familiar enough with views on psychic economy and sublimation.
Plato's views about 'the soul' to discuss them It was specifically the twin themes of death
with her and to compare them with the and sexuality, however, which so conspicu-
psychology of Schopenhauer: ously characterise the action of Carmen, and
which had pervaded his initial explorations
At lunch ... he answered my question concerning of parapraxis (most famously in his proto-
the relationship of Plato's soul to Schopenhauer's typical interpretation of the Signorelli lapse),
will;I understood what he said, only I cannot write that were to drive Freud, nearly forty years
it down (C. Wagner, 1978, p. 214). after the letter about the Carmen mob, to
the fundamental and controversial revision
He was conversant also with classical ideas of motivational theory set out in Beyond the
on artistic inspiration and 'possession' from Pleasure Principle (l920a).
other passages of Plato, from the Greek For, in that study, the fatalistic paradox
myths surrounding Dionysus and from the concerning the potentially destructive power
Bacchae of Euripides in particular. Not for of the essentially creative instinctual drive,
nothing did Max Graf, in his series of 'par- which had hitherto been known as libido
allel lives' of creative artists (Abrams, 1993, but was now to be subsumed under the new
p. 286), pair up Wagner with Euripides! Eros, forced him to postulate a second, theo-
However, these various observations should retically parallel, drive whose very name was
suffice to make it clear that, contrary to Death (Thanatos); and at some point he had
Magee's view, Mastersingers does indeed have even seen their chronic co-existence epito-
its place in opera's 'animated textbooks of mised in that 'little death' of the momentary
psychoanalysis': not, however, as a case- lapse of consciousness associated with sexual
study of another aspect of psychopathology, orgasm (cp. Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 248).
but as an illustration of the dynamics of It can be no coincidence, therefore, that it
healthy personality-integration. Perhaps that is the clash of just these two primeval agen-
is why so many people find it congenial and cies which provides the musical and dramatic
restorative of faith in human nature (unless, substance of that episode in Bizet's master-
of course, they happen to be the young piece whose music Freud used to enjoy par-
unmarried daughter of the president of the ticularly: namely, the fortune-telling card-
Guild). Furthermore, there is the cheerful game at the start of Act Three (Freud 1907,
matter of fact, pointed out by Pollock (1993, p. 273). For what is it that those fateful
p. 208), that Mastersingers is unique in Wag- cards and their music alert Carmen to? It is
ner's oeuvre both in being supposedly based Eros and Thanatos in person: her lover and
on a real-life story and also in that, through- their deaths-'L'amour ... " she sings, 'et
out its four-to-five hours' duration, nobody pour tous les deux la mort'.
dies: or, as Pollock quaintly puts it, 'there How curious, Freud may have reflected,
is no death action'. that the French should make their words
for 'love' and 'death' sound so similar. Or
4.3) Love, death and operatic women again, if he had known the text of Siegfried
as well as Diaz de Chumaceiro supposes he
This besetting question of how to integrate did (§3.3 above), he could have reflected with
the instincts of the mob into the individual satisfaction how Wagner introduces the same
civilised personality was to occupy Freud at conceptual 'bisociation' at the final curtain
length in Civilization and its Discontents; but there: for, no sooner does the young hero,
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
newly 'awakened' by his first sight of a
woman, discern the prospect of love with
Brunnhilde, whom he has just literally awak-
ened from her fire-girt sleep, than he also
envisages death: 'She's mine for ever ... light-
giving Love, laughter in Death!' (Sie ist mir
ewig ... leuchtende Liebe, lachender Todiy. We
may well wonder whether Wagner is con-
sciously echoing here a central tenet of the
romantic psycho-philosophy of the influen-
tial Gotthilf von Schubert. For he, according
to Ellenberger (1970, p. 205), had set out,
already by 1820 (and thus several years be-
fore the young Wagner was even into his
'teens), the idea that in human nature 'the
longing ... for love cannot easily be separated
from the longing for death (Todessehnsucht)'.
However that may be, let us get back to
Carmen. Whether or not Freud did think
(auditif that he was) about the sound of the
respective French words for 'love' and 'death',
he certainly did reflect, as we know, on the
similarity between his own concept of Eros
as a basic psychological drive and that de-
scribed by Plato in the Phaedrus and the
Symposium (Santas, 1988, ch.7). On the other
hand, these loves-in-death or deaths-in-love
in Carmen are altogether more earthbound
and brutish, as were Freud's Eros and Tha-
natos, than those legendary Wagnerian prime
donne, such as Isolde and Brunnhilde, whose
'love-death' or Liebestod music is some of
the most sublimely impassioned that has ever
been written.
For in Carmen we are in the world of the
barracks, the knife-fight, cigarette-smoke, card-
games and contraband. Escamillo's taro is
not that of some half-mythical bull-jumping
ceremony in Minoan Crete, but is snorting
and charging in near-contemporary Seville;
and does not Carmen, in her seductive
Habanera warning any human object of her
desire against its destructive power, use es-
sentially the same phrase (prenez garde) as
Escamillo uses (en garde) to warn the tore-
ador against the attack of the enraged bull?
Freud, who conceded late in life that an
understanding of the psychology of women
1159
still eluded him, may have wondered which
was the more dangerous creature.
In the light of Bizet's parallel play on
l'amour and la mort, in that Carmen scene
which he liked so much, Freud would surely
have been fascinated to learn that the later
French composer Olivier Messiaen not only
discovered the corresponding antithetical 'love-
death' concepts in the very different cultures
of both Peruvian and Sanskritic folklore tharawi
and lila respectively), but also set them to
music: the former in the song-cycle Harawi
and the latter in the Turangalila symphony.
This pair of works comprised the first two-
thirds of a triptych consciously inspired by
the legend of Tristan and Isolde with its
culminatory Liebestod.
Well before its operatic endorsement by
Wagner, however, the Liebestod had been a
going concern in nineteenth-century roman-
ticism, and even in the medieval tales (such
as those of Gottfried von Strassburg) on
which the romantics drew; but a footnote
to the Schreber case (1911, p. 69) shows that
Freud was well aware of how Wagner had
established it monumentally in the literature
of opera, at the end of his own Tristan ...
and of Gotterdammerung. Nevertheless, some
will say that it was, after all, the English
composer Henry Purcell who had already
given the operatic Liebestod at least a uni-
lateral debut way back in 1689, in Queen
Dido's immolatory 'When I am laid in earth
... ' which brings down the curtain on his
Dido and Aeneas.
Nor is it only in the elevated thralls of
the music drama that this fatal consumma-
tion is devoutly to be wished. For it is also
no stranger to the artistic nether regions of
English Victorian Music Hall, where we can
find Fred Gilbert's well-known ditty about
a successful Riviera gambler, whose young
female admirers are so enamoured of his
newly acquired economic potency that
You can hear the girls declare
He must be a millionaire!';
You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
1160 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.
5) CORTICAL ORGANISATION AND PSYCHIC
ECONOMY
Ever the iconoclast, and doubtless quite
unschooled in even the rudiments of the art,
Freud may have relished the hazard of as-
serting to the city of Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert and Mahler that one does not have
to be musical in order to be cultured. Cer-
tainly his ignorance of the techniques of
music does seem to be no affectation: we
have already noticed an apparent muddle
about 'overtones'; and his surprise, expressed
in the Carmen letter from Rome, that an
orchestral violinist should tune his instru-
ment in the pit, instead of having done so
at home before coming out to work, argues
a mind genuinely innocent of the practicali-
ties of music-making, however responsive he
was to the finished product.
5.1) Laterality, rivalry and retirement
We know also that Freud regarded him-
self, neurologically speaking, as distinctly a
major-hemisphere sort of person (and per-
haps a 'temporal' rather than a 'parietal'
one at that) who could say in a letter to
Fliess (1898a, p. 292) that he had 'an in-
famously low capability for visualising spa-
tial relationships, which made the study of
geometry and all subjects derived from it
impossible for me'.
He also acknowledged an early deficit of
manual dexterity, which he described as
amounting to ambisinistrality. Add to this
some other orientational difficulties, a 'lack
of any mathematical talent whatsoever' and
'no memory for numbers and measurements'
(190Ib, p. 450), and we begin to suspect that
the subtle cortical organisation of the minor
cerebral hemisphere (his 'right brain') was
less highly developed than that of the major.
In the light of all this, we may be tempted
to postulate a neuropsychological aspect to
the 'disturbance' (as Eissler has called it) of
Freud's musical sensibility: for we have come
to think of that sort of aesthetic perception
as being mediated typically by the minor
hemisphere; in so far as such cortical local-
isations of function can be sustained. The
general evidence for this belief has been
reviewed by Sloboda (1985, pp. 260-666),
with the important caveat that it would be
'oversimplistic' to say baldly that 'music is
"in" the right hemisphere' (p. 263); and see
Schlaug et al. (1995).
Nevertheless, the counterfactual vehemence
with which he protested the general pose of
unmusicality will suggest to his theoretical
disciples some more intimate motivation. We
have hinted above that Freud may have
envied the Sevillian mob its licence to give
immediate vent to impulse and emotion, and
that he resented the burden of inhibition and
defence which civilisation puts upon the re-
spectable citizen. Certainly he elaborated a
thesis along these lines in his essay on 'civ-
ilised sexual morality' and its role in pre-
cipitating neurosis (Freud, 1908).
We also happen to know that he specific
ally resented the differential burdens which
their respective vocational identifications put
upon artists and scientists, to the latters'
disadvantage. Ernest Jones tells us that the
young Freud wrote to his future wife:
I think there is a general enmity between artists
and those engaged in scientific work. We know
that they possess in their art a master-key to open
with ease all female hearts, whereas we stand help-
less at the strange design of the lock and have
first to torment ourselves to discover a suitable
key to it (1953, p. 123).
No wonder he was impressed by Don
Giovanni's catalogue of conquests, of which
Leporello sings. Freud's jealous hostility to-
ward visual artists who presumed to tamper
with the Unconscious in order to gain their
aesthetic ends is evident in his initial attitude
to the Surrealists, from which he eventually
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
relented after a personal meeting with Sal-
vador Dali. So it may be that he also feared
the potentially therapeutic power of music
as a rival to psychoanalysis, and therefore
had to insist to himself (and to the world)
that he did not need it: as if to say, 'Who
needs your music? Psychoanalysis can do the
job on its own!'. But other commentators
have pointed to a more personal possibility,
very much in tune with our speculations
above.
They have drawn attention to the fact
that the two men whom Freud, as an im-
poverished young researcher, saw as rivals
for the affections of his future wife were
both artists; and also that the one who
constituted the more serious threat, Max
Meyer, was a musician (Jones, 1953, p. 110;
Spector, 1972, Ch. 2; Clark, 1980, pp. 52-3;
Gay, 1988, p. 40). For, although the other
one, the painter Fritz Wahle, apparently
had a Giovanni-like reputation for seduction,
when Freud confronted him face-to-face about
Martha, Wahle at first blustered and boasted
but then crumbled.
Meyer, on the other hand, played and sang
songs of his own composition to Martha,
and a cousin of hers is said to have taunted
Freud about the closeness of their associa-
tion. That all this did stir intractable jealousy
in the eventually successful suitor is sug-
gested by the report that he later forbade
Martha to refer to Meyer by his first name
and insisted that she call him 'Herr Meyer'
(Jones, 1953, pp. 122-4). A curious example,
perhaps, of an imposed 'nominal aphasia'
functioning as symbolic nominal annihila-
tion.
Consistently with this systematic suppres-
sion of Max the musician, it is worth noticing
that, of the few other occasions when Freud
speaks of someone having musical talent,
three concern the relative denigration, the
suppression and even the destruction of it.
We have already encountered (p. l130b) his
outburst against the material and psycho-
logical cost of training up Fritz Kreisler's
childhood genius for the violin-a cost which
1161
could have been saved by throttling the boy;
and we have also noted the remark that
instrumental virtuosity is not a qualification
for 'greatness'. Similarly, in the light (or
rather the shadow) of this, it is hard not to
raise an eyebrow at Freud's choice of exam-
ple when he wants to illustrate a defensive
tactic encountered in developmental psycho-
logy: that of a young child avoiding com-
petition by 'retiring in favour of another'.
This is the tactic whereby the younger of
two siblings, especially (as we now know)
when they are both boys and are less than
about three years apart in age, will tend to
counter-identify with the older one in respect
of some skill, interest or quality which is
characteristic of the latter; and where the
motivation is apparently to avoid direct com-
parisons in which the younger is likely,
because of his developmental 'inferiority',
repeatedly to come off second best. The
younger brother will do this even when he
himself has considerable (and sometimes even
greater) potential for the same trait as his
brother displays, and such near-equality of
potential is bound to occur often enough
because, as siblings, their separate genetic
endowments are drawn from the same pa-
rental pool.
Now the particular trait which Freud chooses
to mention, by way of illustrating this de-
fensive and suppressive phenomenon, just
happens to be musical talent. He writes:
Among brothers and sisters .,. this 'retiring' plays a
great part in other spheres as well ", For example,
an elder brother studies music and is admired for
it; the younger, far more gifted musically, soon
gives up his own musical studies, in spite of his
fondness for it, and cannot be persuaded to touch
an instrument again,
In short, the younger sibling consents to
throttle the infant Fritz Kreisler who is
within himself; and we have just recalled
that one of his two chosen examples of that
sort of supreme expertise which does not
qualify its exponent for 'greatness' was 'a
1162 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
virtuoso on a musical instrument'! (l920b,
p. 159)
On the other hand, was there a different
sort of 'retiring' that Freud himself had
deployed later vis-it-vis his non-sibling rival,
the musical Max? For if I am somehow a
self-confessed 'musical defective' ('musically
challenged', 'musically dyslexic') or am suf-
fering from 'acoustic atrophy', then you cannot
reasonably complain-so the rationalisation
goes-that my musical accomplishments com-
pare unfavourably with those of Max. It
also implies the reactive challenge, essential
to the ontogenetic function of this defence
in its routine context of identity-differentia-
tion: 'Who needs to be like Max anyway?;
I am a good enough person in my own
right'.
We have speculated at the outset (§1.2
above) that a generalisation of this challenge
may have underpinned the twin 'poses' (if
that is what they were) of hostility to Vienna
and indifference to music: as if he was saying
to the world, 'Who needs to be like these
anti-semitic Viennese with their much-vaunted
music, in order to be a cultured, civilised
and even famous man?'. For, although the
Viennese cult of Allgemeinbildung may have
made musicality a sine qua non, Freud had
been encouraged, by a line of Sophocles
which had haunted him since student days,
to believe that for him the path to greatness
lay via problem-solving (and verbal problem-
solving at that) rather than cultural virtuos-
ity. The line is spoken by the Chorus in its
final summing-up at the very end of the play
King Oedipus (line 1525); and the quotation,
which his friends inscribed first on a medal-
lion for his fiftieth birthday and then post-
humously on his bust for the University's
hall of fame (in fulfilment of a specific stu-
dent fantasy), had cast King Oedipus as the
greatest of men (kratistos aner], not because
of any aesthetic versatility but because he
had been able to crack the Sphinx's famous
riddles (Jones, 1955, p. 15). The equally
ancient enigmas of the dream, and of the
murky depths of mental Acheron, had done
for Freud (it was thought) what the Sphinx's
complex question had done for Oedipus.
Like most technically 'neurotic' dilemmas
and symptoms, however, Freud's problem
with music may be expected to be overde-
termined in various ways. So we have con-
sidered also Eissler's view that Freud was
not lacking in musical responsiveness but was
conflicted about it: so that his expressions of
indifference or denial clash awkwardly with
evidence of attraction and enjoyment-in a
manner reminiscent of an insecure child try-
ing to disclaim emotional involvement with
a caregiver. The 'overdetermined' scenario
was supplemented by Vitz's specific hypothe-
sis that, as a very young child, Freud had
indeed experienced precisely the sort of trau-
matic 'separation and loss', in a musical
context, which could be expected to prob-
abilify withdrawal, or ambivalence, of affec-
tive cathexis in the development of associated
aesthetic object-relations.
5.2) Ego triumphans
Maybe Freud was half aware that he
had himself deployed, to some extent, a
perverse variant of this tactic of 'retiring in
favour of another' with reference to music.
Maybe he came to realise that, just as he
felt he was unable to organise readily the
lines and angles of geometric constructions
into meaningful Gestalten (so as to concep-
tualise their relationships and implications),
so, for similar 'minor hemisphere' neurologi-
cal reasons, he could not impose cognitive
organisation (and hence ego-control) as read-
ily upon his musical experiences as he could
upon his aesthetic responses to the verbal
and visual arts; and that, as a result, his
non-verbal musical perceptions were likely
to be relatively unintegrated and incoherent.
He would then be conflicted about how to
deal with this cognitive dissonance (whether
to tolerate the tension or 'escape from the
field'), and would thus be at risk for just
that 'disturbance' of sensibility which Eissler
has described (p. 1140a, above).
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAR
Now, any such realisation that the organ-
isational power of his Logos was limited
would have chafed against Freud's wish to
believe in the triumph of ego over emotion-
ality, as triumph it must for the sake of
civilisation as he knew it. For if it does not,
we either endure the carnage of the id as in
Carmen, or else invoke the superstitious deus
ex machina of the ghostly Statue in Don
Giovanni; but triumph it does, through the ego-
agency of real people in the real world, in the
Mastersingers. And that may be another
reason why it impressed and affected him so
much. In effect, the therapeutic aim of the
'Talking Cure' itself has been achieved by the
apt integration of music, poetry and specta-
cle in Wagner's 'holy German Art'; just as
Aristotle had hinted in the Poetics, when he
spoke of that psychological catharsis brought
about by the combination of the same aes-
thetic ingredients in his recipe for Greek
Tragedy. Where id was, there ego shall be.
TRANSLATIONS OF SUMMARY
L'auteur reexamine la difficulte qu'eprouvait Freud
it apprecier la musique en se penchant sur sa facon
de traiter divers musiciens connus et particuliere-
ment la carriere musicale du 'Petit Hans', meme s'il
semble avoir ete l'un des auditifs de Charcot et
donne une place centrale it l'imagerie auditive dans
sa psychologie. L'auteur montre que la facon dont
Freud a exagere ses difficultes, combinee au plaisir
que lui procuraient certains operas et it son utili-
sation des metaphores musicales dans le contexte
de la theorie et de la therapie, confirme sa propre
intuition d'un conflit plutot qu'une simple defi-
cience. Ce conflit est examine par rapport aux
theories de Eissler et de Vitz, et it la lumiere de
son propre interet pour la culture grecque classique
et la nature de l'Art, Comme l'opera etait peut-etre
la seule forme de musique que Freud pouvait aise-
ment apprecier, l'auteur etudie le rapport entre les
mots et la melodic dans ce genre musical. A la
lumiere de certains des concepts theoriques de
Freud, l'auteur examine l'importance qu'avaient
pour Freud les oeuvres et les passages specifiques
qu'il cite dans ses ecrits: (a) en se referant particu-
lierement aux aspects 'oedipiens', it la dynamique
de 'eros' et 'thanatos', et it l'equilibre entre les
processus 'primaires' et 'secondaires' dans la crea-
tivite artistique; et (b) tels qu'ils sont exemplifies
dans ses operas favoris, Le Mariage de Figaro, Don
1163
Juan, Carmen, Les Mattres Chanteurs. L'auteur etu-
die aussi Ie role qu'a joue, dans Ie probleme de
Freud avec la musique, son envi du talent intuitif
de l'artiste pour seduire, ainsi que sa propre 'atro-
phie acoustique'. L'auteur s'insurge contre l'accu-
sation recente selon laquelle Freud a deliberement
donne une fausse impression sur ses connaissances
musicales afin d'eviter de devoir ceder it la primaute
d'autrui sur des points de psychologie.
Freud hatte offenbar Schwierigkeit damit, Musik
wirklich zu schatzen, obwohl er anscheinend einer
von Charcots auditifs war und den akustischen
Bildern in seiner Psychologie einen zentralen Platz
einraumte. Diese Schwierigkeit wird neu untersucht,
indem sein Umgang mit verschiedenen ausgezeich-
neten Musikern betrachtet und besonders auf die
musikalische Laufbahn des KIeinen Hans Bezug
genommen wird. Freud hat diese Schwierigkeit uber-
trieben, er konnte sich an bestimmten Opern freuen
und im Zusammenhang von Theorie und Therapie
gebrauchte er musikalische Metaphern. Nach Ansicht
des Autors bestatigt dies, daB Freud einen Konflikt
und nicht nur einen einfachen Mangel in sich spiirte.
Dieser Konflikt wird untersucht; dabei werden die
Theorien von Eissler und Vitz herangezogen und
Freuds eigenes Interesse an der klassischen griechi-
schen Kultur und am Wesen der Kunst betrachtet.
Nachdem Freud anscheinend als einzige Musikform
die Oper wirklich genieBen konnte, wird das Ver-
haltnis von Worten und Melodie in diesem Genre
untersucht. Freud erwahnt durch sein ganzes Werk
hindurch bestimmte musikalische Werke und Pas-
sagen. Deren Bedeutung wird im Lichte seiner eigenen
theoretischen Konzepte untersucht: a) es werden
insbesondere die odipalen Kennzeichen, die Dyna-
mik von Eros und Thanatos und das Gleichgewicht
zwischen Primar- und Sekundarprozef in der kiinst-
lerischen Kreativitat untersucht; b) dazu werden
Beispiele aus seinen Lieblingsopern, Die Hochzeit
des Figaro, Don Giovanni, Carmen und Die Meister-
sanger herangezogen. Dabei wird auch betrachtet,
welchen Anteil sein Neid auf das intuitive kimstle-
rische Talent zur Verfiihrung und seine eigene 'aku-
stische Atrophie' bei seinem Problem mit Musik
spielten. Der Autor verteidigt Freud gegen den
kiirzlich erhobenen Vorwurf, daB er bewuBt sein
musikalisches Wissen falsch dargestellt hat, um in
Fragen der Psychologie nicht seine Vorrangstellung
an andere abgeben zu miissen.
La dificultad de Freud para apreciar la musica
-a pesar de que parece haber sido uno de los que,
con Charcot, dio importancia a 10 auditivo y de
haber otorgado un lugar esencial, en su Psicologia,
a la imagineria auditiva-es vuelta a examinar a la
luz de su trato con algunos musicos eminentes y
haciendo una referencia especial a la carrera musical
del 'pequefio Hans'. EI autor sostiene que el hecho
de que Freud hable de su dificultad de un modo
exagerado, unido a su capacidad para gozar de
1164 NEIL M. CHESHIRE
ciertas Operas y a su uso de metaforas musicales
en el contexto de la teoria y de la terapia, confirma
su propia intuicion de un conflicto, mas que de
una simple deficiencia. Se examina este conflicto en
relacion con las teorias de Eissler y de Vitz y a la
luz del interes de Freud por la cultura griega clasica
y por la naturaleza del arte. Dado que la Opera
fue, quiza, la unica forma de musica con la que
Freud pudo gozar facilmente, se aborda la relacion
entre palabras y melodia en dicho genero. Se exa-
mina el significado de ciertas obras y pasajes que
Freud menciona a 10 largo de sus escritos, a la luz
de algunos de sus conceptos teoricos: a) con refer-
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