Sonneck consulted a doctor, a specialist in “female diseases,” and asked him to explain the power of music played this way. “[He] smiled in the strangest manner,” wrote Sonneck, “and at the same time said all sorts of things about magnetism, galvanism, electricity, of the contagion of a close hall filled with countless wax lights and several hundred perfumed and perspiring human beings, of historical epilepsy, of the phenomenon of tickling, of musical cantherides, and other scabrous things.”6 The doctor could not define the condition. The writer could. This was “Lisztomania,” a frenzy induced
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