Musical pathology in the nineteenth century: Richard Wagner and degeneration

In 1872 Theodor Puschmann wrote a book, Richard Wagner: eine psychiatrische Studie, in which he outlined the symptoms of the composer's supposed mental illness. The next forty years saw a steady stream of books and articles that argued that Wagner was sick, that his music was the expression of his own degeneration and indeed that the music could have pathological consequences for the audience. Indeed Wagner was by far the most important figure in the development of the idea of degenerate music that was to have such a deleterious impact in the twentieth century. This dissertation seeks to explain how and why this pseudo-medical discourse of music arose in the nineteenth century and why Wagner played such a large role in this development. The central argument of this project is that what seemed to be a discourse of medicine was in fact a discourse on subjectivity and masculinity.;The first and second chapters outline the history of the ideas of decadence, degeneration and “mad genius” that were so influential on the discourse on Wagner as a degenerate. Chapter three gives an account of the Puschmann scandal and its influence on Nietzsche's critique of Wagner and on Max Nordau's compendium of fin de siècle decadence, Entartung. Chapter four considers the role of the new physiological model of listening on Wagner reception, and the specific musical features that seemed to provoke accusations of decadence. Chapter five discusses the power of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk to overwhelm the audience, and the hostility that this passive state provoked in some commentators. Chapter six deals with another form of intoxication—religion. The self-conscious religiosity of Parsifal mixed Catholic and Protestant tropes in a way that was very controversial in the midst of the Kulturkampf struggle between the victorious Protestant Prussian state and the Catholic church. This chapter also discusses the accusations of effeminacy and homosexuality that Parsifal's Catholic sensuality and Schopenhauerian Pessimism attracted. The final chapter brings together all of these themes and considers the fate of the idea of Wagner-as-decadent since the Second World War.