Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters in this book. The book describes identifying the modes and forms of musical expressions of the relationship of these eroticized feminine figures with constructions of the creative male subject. A reading of an apparently 'absolute' piano piece will open up several of this book's key ideas concerning Romantic musical encodings of artistic creation in the realms of erotic fantasy. The book reveals how the cultural topic of the relationship of the male artist to the Muse forms a crucial aspect of the persistence, transformation and disintegration of Romantic aesthetics in the cultural products of Modernity and Modernism. It explains how the topic of eroticism intersects with, or is characterized by, fantasies involving pleasure, desire, melancholy, mourning, trauma and redemption, and the way in which these inform important aspects of musical style and criticism.