Music and the Uncanny in the 19th century

This article explores the musical means composers in the nineteenth century used to evoke the uncanny (das Unheimliche). While most existing attempts to determine these means rely on an author's subjective opinion with regard to particular evocations of the uncanny, this article draws exclusively from contemporary sources. Drawn from the RIPM database, thirteen examples have been selected pursuant to Ernst Jantsch's notion of the uncanny and based on a clearly defined set of selection criteria from works by Webern, Loewe, Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, Boito, and Ambroise Thomas. Compositional devices that recur in several of the works discussed prove to be of central importance. The article asks, finally, how these techniques generate the effect of the uncanny.