Music Against Horror: H.P. Lovecraft and Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics
Music Against Horror: H.P. Lovecraft and Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics

Summary/Abstract: “The Music of Erich Zann” was not only considered by Lovecraft to be one of his more artistically successful short stories, it was perhaps also one the most widely read in his lifetime. In “The Music of Erich Zann,” Lovecraft’s protagonist-narrator witnesses the struggle of the mysterious viol player Zann to keep a baleful cosmic force at bay with his strange, beautiful music. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer argues that it is music, above all other art forms, that facilitates abstract contemplation of Ideas unsullied by the blind, rapacious self-interest of the ‘Will’. Based on several explicit clues in the text, and also suggested by Borges’s homage to Lovecraft, “There Are More Things,” it is possible to position “The Music of Erich Zann” as a distillation of Lovecraft’s reading of Schopenhauer into a nuanced and effective dramatic narrative. A reading of Lovecraft that incorporates Schopenhauerian aesthetics, in this instance specifically related to music, can illuminate Lovecraft’s fiction and resonate with both Lovecraft’s and Schopenhauer’s world views.

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