ABSTRACT
If European modernism can be identified with an intensified erosion of the authority of traditional beliefs and institutions, anxieties over subjective and collective identities – particularly as raised by the sense of alienation from ‘nature’ through forces of industrialization and bureaucratization – and a heightened artistic search for the new in response to these conditions, then there is strong consensus that European musical modernism emerges sometime in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, music was widely popular as model and inspiration for modernists across a range of artistic fields during this period. The essays of Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, and Friedrich Nietzsche about Richard Wagner are amongst the most famous examples. Music's apparently ineffable, abstract, or absolute quality (chose your favoured designator of ultimate profundity) and sensuous immediacy (the ecstasy of the exquisite moment) were central stimuli for, amongst others, the Wagnerism of the Parisian symbolists, the decadence of the Russian ‘Silver Age’, and the eroticism of the Viennese fin-de-siècle. 1
