On Microscopic Hearing: Fairy Magic, Natural Science, and the Scherzo fantastique

Abstract

In the 1820s, Mendelssohn was credited with the invention of a new kind of scherzo: a fleet, gossamer form associated with the Faustian and Shakespearian evocations of the Opus 20 Octet and the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture. In Germany, these pieces were linked to the aesthetics of the fantastic, a term also taken up by French critics, who assigned fairy scherzi on the Mendelssohnian model a new label—scherzo fantastique—applying it first to Berlioz's La Reine Mab. Later, composers including Antonio Bazzini, Franz Liszt, and Igor Stravinsky took up the rubric, generating a repertory of “fantastic” scherzi that stretched from the 1840s to the twentieth century. This article examines the genealogy of such works and the cultural forces that produced them, arguing that the characteristic soundworld of the scherzo fantastique emerged from a convergence of aesthetic and scientific impulses. Romantic fairies were the product of new approaches to entomology and microscopy, which collapsed the miniscule world under the microscope with the fantasized space of the elfin miniature, placing sylphs and sprites in the same category as insects. Mendelssohn and his imitators responded directly to this conflation, allowing entomological imitation to mingle with poetic invention in their elfin pieces, which hovered in a fantastic space between the “real” and imaginary. The result was not just a new scherzo type but a novel mode of listening and orchestrating and a shift in the definition of the “inspired” musician.

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