Let's Talk about Emotion

Abstract

Let me begin with some auto-ethnography. Early last year I presented a paper – by Zoom, alas – at a very fine Bach symposium organized by Erinn Knyt at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (‘Late Style and the Idea of the Summative Work in Bach and Beethoven’, 24 April 2021). My talk proposed that Bach’s Chaconne in D minor for solo violin expressed grief at the death of his first wife, Anna Barbara. The story is well known: in May 1720 Bach went to Carlsbad with Prince Leopold, and when he returned to Cöthen in July, he found that Anna Barbara had died suddenly in his absence. In a deeply controversial article, Helga Thoene had argued that Bach wrote the Chaconne as a tombeau for his late wife (‘Johann Sebastian Bach: Ciaconna – Tanz oder Tombeau: Verborgene Sprache eines berühmten Werkes’, in Festschrift zum Leopoldsfest, 15. Köthener Bachfesttage, 23. bis 27. November, 1994: Zum 300. Geburtstag des Fürsten Leopold von Anhalt-Köthen (1694–1728) (Köthen: Historisches Museum Köthen, 1994), 14–81). Thoene’s conjectures were numerological, whereas mine were stylistic. Nevertheless, my paper was shot down in flames by a distinguished colleague, and his silver bullet was that the entire partita, Chaconne included, was composed on Bohemian paper Bach acquired at Carlsbad, hence before his return to Cöthen. Now, I might have quibbled that Bach could well have brought the paper back with him and completed the Chaconne at Cöthen, especially given this finale’s unusual weight. Other roads were also open to me. The focus of the Chaconne’s grief might have been, say, one of his children, or a close friend. The point was, however, that my heresy was now out in the open: participants were exercised not by my philological blunder, but by my presuming to talk about emotion at all. The debate flared up again at the end of the day, and I was taken aback by the outmoded assumptions still prevalent, such as the idea that composers didn’t get to express emotion until the era of Empfindsamkeit, as if Lutheranism and late eighteenth-century sentimentalism weren’t in their distinctive fashions equally mediated ‘emotional regimes’, to use William M. Reddy’s influential phrase (The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129). Musicology and music studies generally – the latter including music theory and analysis, music aesthetics and criticism, performance studies and ethnomusicology – are arguably out of step with the new (or not so new) discipline of the history of emotions, which has been colonizing most of the humanities and social sciences for two decades. (What, we may ask, does music know of emotion?) The paradigm was changed by Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling; a recent landmark text in the field is the six-volume A Cultural History of the Emotions, edited by Susan Broomhall, Jane Davidson and Andrew Lynch (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Two texts besides Reddy’s have also been particularly seminal: The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), the magnum opus of German-Swiss historian Norbert Elias (1897–1990), originally published in 1939, and Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). A superb overview is provided by Jan Plamper’s The History of Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). And my own recent book, A History of Emotion in Western Music: A Thousand Years from