Following the Renaissance, with the growing “refinement” of melancholia, the music of the modern age evolved as the branch of melancholic art, permeated through and through by melancholia. (“Is there really such a thing as cheerful music?” Schubert asks.) Music has had a privileged position from the moment when the frozen melancholic of the Renaissance was resuscitated by earthly tensions (the tensions were already exceedingly this-worldly in the religious art of the Baroque as well), and he was overcome by an ambivalent attitude toward life. It was equally significant that it was a matter of ambivalence and feeling, or affect. It has been seen that the melancholic of the modern age was, before all else, sad (and less desperate than his fellows of the Renaissance); we have seen that the sadness was no obstacle to him living his life and being freely at the disposal of the world, and we have also seen that sadness, mingled with resignation, was regarded as a transient mood (it was not noticed that the melancholic was sad because he had been deprived of the possibility of autonomously creating a world; the order was inverted — his sadness was explained by his inertia). At the same time, the sadness of the modern melancholic resulted in his having an ambivalent way of looking at the world: since anything might evoke sadness, it had no palpable cause. Not a single cause could be pointed to, because by doing so the explanation of melancholia would be diverted onto the wrong track. By naming any cause, we would merely force an arbitrary scheme on melancholia instead of getting nearer to it. Nothing disturbs a melancholic more than if we try to console him, or even just define his condition, with words. In his previously cited work The Secret, Petrarch, in the second of his dialogues with St. Augustine, says:
After all, how many things are there in nature for which we have no appropriate words? How many other things are there which have names yet whose full merit cannot be expressed by human eloquence before we actually experience them? How many times have I heard you complain, how many times have I seen your silent indignation, when neither tongue nor pen could express thoughts that existed easily and with the greatest clarity in your mind? Of what use, therefore, is this eloquence of yours, so narrow and fragile that it cannot embrace all things and cannot hold together what it has embraced?
(73)
The modern melancholic has a positive aversion for language: for one thing, language, talking, attempts to objectify melancholia, even though there is no special object to which melancholia could be tied; for another, by giving things a name, language forces melancholia into existing patterns of the world, although it is precisely due to that world that he suffers. To rid himself of his own melancholia, Thomas Browne preferred to put on the blinkers implied by words when he wrote: “I thank the goodness of God, I have no sins that want a name; I am not singular in offences; my transgressions are Epidemical” (
Religio Medici
, pt. 2, sec. 7). Community in sin allays a guilty conscience, and if a name is found for the transgression, then the transgressor is also a member of a society that we know will, sooner or later, albeit not reassuringly, smooth everything over. The true melancholic, however, can find no words for his condition: it is not possible to speak satisfactorily about death, and therefore not about the fear of, or wish for, death either. Language reassures us, while there is nothing less reassuring than death. The fine arts have a better chance than language, though even they are too strongly bound to the objective world; they had a major role in evoking melancholia in the Renaissance, when the objective world was not yet alien but considered to be conquerable. But when the world did not offer the melancholic the possibility of establishing a home, and he was surrounded ever more threateningly by objects, the role of music grew, and — lacking in all objective reference as it does — it became the most melancholic of all the genres of art.
The connection between music and melancholia was known in all ages (it speaks volumes that in ancient times, music and augury, which was related to melancholia, were thought to share the same origin; to the mythological mind, music was the basis of life, and without it nothing at all could be perfect), but earlier that connection was externaclass="underline" music per se was not melancholic but a remedy (or poison) for melancholia. “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul,” the Bible recounts about Saul’s melancholia, “that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:23). According to Asclepiades of Bithynia, a famous Greek physician, a therapy for melancholia had to include tunes in the Phrygian mode; Galen explicitly recommended that melancholics listen to music — and that was also avowed throughout the Middle Ages.11 A medicine, however, was supposed to act on the body by being akin to — indeed, to some extent identical with — it; music was a cure for melancholia, which implied that a melancholic nature was also characteristic of it. Receiving more than the prescribed dose of this medicine was poisonous; if, on the one hand, music was a medicine, because it represented cosmic order (musica mundana—music of the spheres), on the other hand, it was potentially poisonous and a harbinger of death (siren song); it could ennoble, but it could also corrupt, because, as Plutarch professed, it could be more intoxicating than wine. “Truly,” Jean Starobinski quotes Soranus from the beginning of the second century CE, “music causes plethora in the head, which may be experienced even in the case of healthy people: in certain cases it is thought it may evoke madness; when those who are inspired sing their prophesies, it may seem as if a god had taken possession of them” (Starobinski, Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie des origines, 73). Linking music with madness and augury shows that music too was connected with understanding existence: when it is a medicine, it aids the understanding of existence, but when it is a poison, it inhibits such understanding and spreads gloom around. Music can embrace everything, and on hearing it one sees the world from a different angle from before: music not only sets the mood of its listener, but makes him reinterpret existence itself. Starobinski cites the Spaniard Ramos de Pareja, who in 1482, in a book entitled Musica practica, matched four primary pitches to the four humors and their planets: the tonus protus: phlegm, the moon; the tonus deuteros: the bile, Mars; the tonus tritus: blood, Jupiter; the tonus tetartus: melancholia, Saturn. Music was ubiquitous, extending its influence over everything; if, in the Middle Ages, God accepted responsibility for existence, then music could not be melancholic. With the decline of the Middle Ages, however, when everything depended on man, now abandoned to himself, music was also left to itself; instead of divine harmony, the voices of temperament were intoned. Following the Renaissance, music became intimately melancholic, and from then on it was regarded less and less as a medicine. A medicine can be recommended only if one can differentiate between sickness and health, if there is a standard for comparing the two kinds of condition. For melancholics of the Renaissance and the modern era, this absolute standard was lost, starting with God taking a step back and handing the mortal joy of self-determination to humans, and ending with sickness and health becoming — just as seventeenth-century thinkers proclaimed they would — relative concepts — in fact, with everything being determined by illness. But if the whole world is sick, then it is vain to hope to find a remedy — and the melancholic, while fearing and wishing for death simultaneously, does not even seek to be cured, since that would push him back into the old routine of an earlier state, shove him into the arms of the world, render his position unequivocal (albeit just as hopeless as in his melancholic days). Now music is no longer a medicine;12 it is useless for restoring an upset balance, but since everything has been shaken, it acts disruptively: it does not mediate a single external order for the benefit of the listener, but instead becomes hopelessly subjective, representing a mental state but not the world. A melancholic can have no hope of a remedy; he cannot trust anything, can count on only himself and compare music, the equivalent of wordless melancholia, to himself. Music no longer changes but preserves the existing condition. “I damn the melancholic inclination,” Ficino writes in a letter to Cavalcanti, “for me it is exceedingly bitter unless it is mellowed and sweetened through frequent use of the lute” (Epistolae, vol. 3, no. 24).13 Music sweetens melancholia, that is, the melancholic genuinely finds himself in music.