Melodies of the Mind: Mozart in 1778

Abstract

Although much has been written about Mozart's relationship with his father Leopold, this paper focuses on his relationship with his mother, Anna Maria. While on a journey with Mozart to Paris in 1778, Anna Marie became ill and died on July 3. Mozart's Piano Sonata in A Minor, K. 310, composed that summer, is invoked to illustrate how his mental life is represented in his music. Conceptualizing music itself as a point of entry into affective processes, the paper suggests that the formal properties of Mozart's A Minor Piano Sonata open for the listener an aural road to the unconscious on which music and psychoanalysis inform one another.

Psychoanalytic and Musical Ambiguity: the Tritone in Gee, Officer Krupke

“…Bernstein was famous for his probing musical insights and known for his verbal virtuosity with puns, anagrams, and neologisms. Although I do not believe that applying analytic concepts in absentia to a composer is particularly effective in analyzing music, I nevertheless suggest that Bernstein's musical manipulation of the tritone throughout West Side Story can be likened to musical wordplay, which leads me to speculate that the tritone was a multiply determined aural vehicle that allowed him to express his personal contradictions through sound (see Nagel 2007Nagel , 2008a.…”

“…Thus, sonic psychoanalytic data contribute to a musical-psychoanalytic appreciation of the subtleties of musical and mental ambiguity. Further, my focus is on the idea that not only does music arouse and convey emotion in listeners (Noy 1993(Noy , 2009Langer 1942;Feder 1993Feder , 2004Nagel 2007Nagel , 2008a, but that the listener mentally processes music in a way that organizes acoustic stimuli. This idea is compatible with Gabbard's work on film (1997), in which the audience-spectator is seen as creating meaning from what is presented on the screen, with Feder's proposal (1993) that music evokes feeling and meaning, affect and idea, and with Noy's claim (2009) that music not only evokes emotion in listeners but reflects a "'sum-total' of all the disparate and opposing emotions" (p. 1).…”

“…Continuing, Freud offers the thought that "with music, some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected, and what it is that affects me" (p. 211; emphasis added). Although Freud may not have known why he felt moved by certain music (Cheshire 1996;Nagel 2007Nagel , 2008aBarale and Minazzi 2008), 9 his comments, rather than dismissing music, suggest that he "rebelled" because he did not understand how or why it affected him. How Freud was sensitive to the sonic sphere and "unheard melodies" (Keats, cited in Lombardi 2008Lombardi , p. 1191) remains as unclear as his disclaimer rings paradoxical.…”

Melodies in My Mind: the Polyphony of Mental Life

“…Further, primary and secondary processes are conceptualized by these analysts not as hierarchical, but rather as oscillating and dynamic; both are viewed as contributing to the regulation of contrasting emotions. Thus, not only is music capable of arousing emotion (Noy 1993(Noy , 2009Langer 1942, Feder 1993Nagel 2007Nagel , 2008aNagel ,b, 2010, but multiple acoustic stimuli are believed to be fluidly, continually-or polyphonically-represented and processed in the mind. Such conceptualizations about primary and secondary processes, creativity, and music have implications for psychoanalytic theories of development and for analytic technique.…”

“…My "data" have included tonal relationships as they relate to affects of revenge and hate in Verdi's Otello (Nagel 2008b), bel canto style in examining Lucia's shame, humiliation, revenge, and mental decompensation in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (Nagel 2008a), the tritone as it pertains to musical and mental ambiguity in Bernstein's West Side Story , orchestration that portrays Peter's psychosocial development in Prokofieff's Peter and the Wolf (Nagel and Nagel 2005), and the distinctive tonality and compositional techniques in Mozart's A Minor Piano Sonata (Nagel 2007) that reflect, through sound, the composer's separation both from his previous musical style and from his family. If dreams with their visual content and verbal analysis are the Royal Oral Road to the unconscious, I suggest that music travels a Royal Aural Road to the same destination.…”