In the Presence of "Gypsiness": Dvořák, Ecocriticism, Stimmung

Abstract

This article is about Stimmung and "Gypsiness" (two aesthetic tropes of nineteenth-century culture) in the music of Antonín Dvořák. In visual art and music, Stimmung has long been associated with idyllic landscape scenes. Yet in Dvořák's music, its usage is more fraught. In his Gypsy Songs, Stimmung demands unmediated contact with "Gypsiness," an imagined amalgamation of alterity that is more often kept at arm's length. Insofar as it makes "Gypsiness" affectively proximate, this music is more ideologically challenging than other cultural products in the Stimmung tradition, and it prompts larger questions about the politicization of affect in the imperial creative imagination.