ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, psychiatry emerged as a specialist discipline with its own taxonomy of illnesses and treatment methods, including music therapy. A few evocative examples from the realms of fiction, history and philosophy will illustrate the perceived therapeutic ambiguity of music and its intimate association with psychiatric practice in nineteenth-century Europe. Music was perceived as a means of adjusting and calibrating psychological states and, hence, as a tool for psychiatric intervention. The natural place to administer musical cures to patients was the newly-founded curative insane asylum. Romantic music was also tonic as well as toxin. In 1840 the Czech physician, Leopold Raudnitz, published a popular book on music therapy summarizing the views of his French and German counterparts and presenting his own findings as director of the Prague insane asylum. For Peter Lichtenthal, musical cures were associated with pleasure.
