Imagination in Hearing Music

Fan hysteria isn’t new—it just changes the name on the poster.

At one point the craze centered on the pianist Paderewski: people (especially women, according to the old telling) cried, clung, kissed, and generally lost all dignity. Sure, emotional playing can move emotional listeners. But a lot of the spectacle comes from imagination and social contagion—doing what seems “proper” for the moment.

Liszt proved the point. Once he was surrounded by a circle of excited women who begged him to play and deliver the promised ecstasies. He sat down and played; some listeners were so overwhelmed that they fainted.

Later Liszt confessed to a friend: he had intentionally played many wrong notes—some errors so obvious that, in a basic music school, he would’ve been thrown out as an impostor. That’s the power of hype: if someone unknown had played the same piece perfectly, the ladies wouldn’t have bothered to faint.