Art, Music, and Mysticism at the Fin de Siècle

Corrinne Chong, PhD, is Assistant Curator at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, USA. Michelle Foot, PhD, is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh.

Introduction: Aspiring Towards the Absolute Setting the Stage: A Symbolist Prelude 1. Music and Aesthetic Liturgy in Symbolist Art Salons: The Cases of Joséphin Péladan and Jean Delville 2. Deathbed Conversions, Troglodytes, and Baths for the Brain: Mysticism in the Fin-de-siècle Historical Imagination 3. “En blanc et immobile”: Erik Satie, Mysticism and Whiteness 4.“Josephin ‘Sâr’ Péladan, Charles Tournemire, and Apocalyptic Mysticism Synaesthesia in Scandinavia 5. Musical Interaction with Finnish Visual Arts: The Composer Jean Sibelius, and Artists Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Oscar Parviainen and Ellen Thesleff 6. Sexing Parsifal: Gendered Synaesthesia and Transpositions in Hilma af Klint’s Abstraction Vibrations, Abstraction, and Tonality: Giving Sound Form 7. George Frederic Watts’s “Mesmeric Dolls”: Music and Theosophy in the Painter’s Late Works 8. Composing “Symmorphies”: Chromatism, Astral Vision and Music of the Spheres in František Kupka’s Cosmological Modernism 9. Ringing Cosmos, Returning Souls: Expressions of the Beyond in Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 10 and Kandinsky’s All Saints Day Paintings 10. Music as Key to the Beyond: Steiner and Kandinsky’s Scenic Compositions against Materialism 11. Tonality and (the) “Beyond”: Elgar’s Gerontius and String Quartet Piacevole