Freud, Strauss, and the Perversity of Modern Life Ena Kašlja, Druga Pleše: Freud, Strauss in Sprevrženost Sodobnega Življenja

L. KRAMER • ONE COUGHS, THE OTHER ... UDK 78:159.964.6 Lawrence Kramer Fordham University Univerza Fordham One Coughs, the Other Dances: Freud, Strauss, and the Perversity of Modern Life Ena kašlja, druga pleše: Freud, Strauss in sprevrženost sodobnega življenja Prejeto: 13. februar 2009 Received: 13th February 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009 Ključne besede: Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Keywords: Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Dora, Dora, Saloma, podzavest, Richard Wagner, Tristan Salome, nezavedno, Richard Wagner, Tristan und in Izolda, Schreber, Ples sedmih tančic Isolde, Schreber, Dance of the Seven Veils Iz v l e č e k ab s t r a c t Navkljub znani ravnodušnosti do glasbe jo Freud Despite his reputed indifference to music, Freud včasih prav poznavalsko omenja. Ta sestavek sometimes refers knowledgeably to it. This paper napeljuje na misel, da se je freudovska podzavest suggests that the Freudian unconscious is partly deloma oblikovala po glasbi pozne romantike modeled on the music of late Romanticism in as- v povezavi z opisi ženskega poželenja. Freudov sociation with representations of feminine desire. primer Dore in Richarda Straussa opera Saloma Freud’s Dora case and Richard Strauss’s opera se stekata v findesie`clovskem konceptu glasbene Salome converge on a fin-de-sie`cle concept of a podzavesti. musical unconscious. What is the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and music? To ask this question is tantamount to asking about the historical relationship between Freud and music, and so asked it may seem to be a question without a topic. On the musical side, it is quite remarkable how few canonical works of late Romantic or modernist art music seem to have been influenced by Freudian ideas, quite in contrast to the fiction, poetry, and film of the first half of the twentieth century. It is doubtful that the fabled afternoon that Mahler and Freud spent together in a ‘wild’ psychoanalysis (they traced Mahler’s 33 MUZIKOLOŠKI ZBORNIK • MUSICOLOGICAL ANNUAL XLV/2 affinity for Trivialmusik to a traumatic childhood memory) had any impact on Mahler’s symphonies (and certainly not on the Trivialmusik!); the Oedipus of Stravinsky’s Oedi- pus Rex is anything but Freud’s; Britten’s The Turn of the Screw eroticizes its ghosts but leaves little room for the popular-psychoanalytic interpretation (set in motion by Edmund Wilson) that sees the ghosts as symptoms of the governess’s repressed sexuality.1 The only famous work of musical modernism with a familiar Freudian subtext is Schoen- berg’s monodrama Erwartung, hardly a popular staple, and the subtext is supposed to be there only because Freud was ‘in the air’ in Vienna when the piece was composed in 1909. If you look for references to Freud in Schoenberg’s compendium Style and Idea, the only one you will find occurs in passing on a list of ‘great Jewish thinkers’; in Theory of Harmony the only reference is by the English translator, who glosses Schoenberg’s identification of ‘the unconscious’ with ‘instinct’—a long-familiar idea with little specific relevance to the Freudian unconscious—by inserting a footnote, to wit: ‘The impact of Sigmund Freud’s work (and that of Jung and Adler) on his Viennese contemporary, Schoenberg, . invites investigation and speculation.’2 On the Freudian side, Freud paid little heed to music and notoriously declared himself averse to it on the grounds that he did not like to be moved without knowing why. Pondering the situation in which a tune gets stuck in one’s head, he roundly states that what matters is not the tune at all but the words associated with it. Interestingly, he does not pause to ask what we might conclude from the capacity of music to act as a displaced form of language. It would thus seem that Freud was bedeviled not only by the question Was will das Weib?, but also by the equally vexing, Sonate, que me veux-tu? –which, within a certain longstanding tradition, is exactly the same question. Nonetheless, scattered throughout Freud’s work there are knowledgeable references to Wagner (both Tristan und Isolde and Tannhaüser), Beethoven (the Ninth Symphony), Hugo Wolf, and Mozart (both The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro). In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud even recalls an incident in which he sung, sotto voce, Figaro’s impudent aria ‘Si vuol’ ballare, Signor Contino’ as a gesture of political defiance when he came across a reactionary government minister in a Viennese train station. For someone so unmusical, Freud certainly knew his music, especially opera. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay reports that Freud’s daughters recalled their father being especially fond of five operas: Mozart’s Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, Bizet’s Carmen, and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.3 The list is intriguing, not least because all of these operas deal with misplaced and displaced desires that threaten to run wild but at the same time feature music of great sensuous beauty, music that often tends to invoke the very desires it is supposed to sublimate. So it may be only a little bit of a stretch to say that psychoanalysis does have some historical relationship to music, and in particular to the music that would have been classic fare in Freud’s world, but that this relationship is one that psychoanalysis, at least in the person of its founder, disavowed, or, if you will, repressed. 1 Edmund Wilson, “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (1934), in Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 88-132. 2 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 504; Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy Carter, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 416n. 3 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York, 1988), 168. 34 L. KRAMER • ONE COUGHS, THE OTHER ... This paper is a speculation on that possibility. Its thesis, bluntly put, is that the Freud- ian unconscious is modeled—not exclusively, to be sure, or as a hidden secret, but almost inadvertently, almost inevitably, among other influences--on the music of late Romanti- cism, or on music as conceived by late Romanticism. To set this thesis in motion we will need to refer to the medium in which it might have been posed at the time, again linking those two nagging questions: we will need to refer to the bodies of women. Eventually this will bring us to Wagner’s Isolde, whom Freud does mention, a figure situated in more than one sense at the end of the world. But before we can do that we need to con- sider the woman who was the best and the worst of Freud’s patients, the one he called Dora, together with her musical sister, involved, as Dora was, in a sleazy and perverted erotic triangle, the Salome of Oscar Wilde as rendered by Richard Strauss. It is only a coincidence, but an appealing one, that both women made their debut in 1905, when Freud’s case study (his first) was published and Strauss’s opera premiered. As I have suggested elsewhere, the story of Salome (which I assume is too well known to require summary) was the object of a virtual mania before and just during the fin-de-sie`cle,4 so it is perhaps no surprise that the Dora case should have something in common with it. In both, a girl who has barely reached sexual maturity becomes the focal point of a hotbed of prohibited and perverse desires, and in both the girl ends up performing what amounts to an act of symbolic castration: in Salome’s case the separation of John the Baptist (Strauss’s Jochanaan) from his head, and in Dora’s the premature termination of an analysis that the analyst, Freud, has planned as exemplary. Just as Salome takes revenge on Jochanaan for the religious zealotry that renders her a harlot in his eyes, Dora takes revenge on Freud for the theoretical zealotry that renders her, in his eyes, a perverted seductress, a harlot manqué. Freud even permits himself to lament her cruel stroke: ‘Her breaking off so unexpectedly, just when my hopes of a successful termination of the treatment were at their height, and thus her bringing those hopes to nothing—this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part.’5 Thanks to Freud, it is difficult to ignore the phallic subtext of Freud’s own statement. But Dora has good reason to want revenge, especially on paternal figures, as a whole generation of feminist critics took pleasure in pointing out during the later years of the twentieth century.6 Dora’s father, normally impotent, has been carrying on an affair with a friend’s wife, Frau K., who apparently is happy enough to perform fellatio on him for an unspecified return (though the surmise is obvious). To buy off the friend, Herr K., the father tacitly agrees to let him seduce Dora, which K. duly tries to do starting when Dora is only fourteen. Not being slow on the uptake, Dora understands the whole de- based situation all too well, but her father insistently denies its existence and, telling her in effect that she is delusional, he brings her to Freud in the hope that the famous nerve-doctor will cause her to see reason—in other words, teach her to shut up. Freud, of course, does exactly the opposite. He regards Dora as truthful ‘in every particular’ and notes mordantly that ‘The two men had of course never made a formal agreement 4 Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 128-140.

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