Conference: Music & Psychoanalysis 3

Lesley Chamberlain: Thomas Mann, Music and Civilisation’s Discontents

For Thomas Mann, German Romantic music, especially the music of Wagner, opened up the discontents of civilization, offering a regressive escape from excessive cultural pressures. Using Freudian insights to blend Nietzsche’s response to Wagner with worries about his own unadmitted homosexuality, and his role as a writer/artist in a strictly regulated middle class environment, Mann fictionalized the most catastrophic moments in German history as moments when civilization succumbed to the devil in the guise of music.