Massimilla Doni (1820)

A story of music and neurosis set around the opera house of Venice.

Prince Memmi and the beautiful Massimilla Doni are in love, but unfortunately Massimilla is married to the aging debauchee Duke Cataneo. Prince Memmi finds himself curiously unable to consumate his love for Massimilla. His desire can only be quenched by another woman, the opera prima donna La Tinti, who loves him intensely but whom he treats with disdain. La Tinti in turn is loved by her singing partner Genovese so violently that when he is singing with her the only sound he can produce is an animal noise.

Enter a reknowned French doctor of the psyche who diagnoses Genovese's problem:

"When an artist is so unfortunate as to be full of the passion he wishes to express, he cannot depict it because he is the thing itself instead of its image. Art is the work of the brain, not of the heart. When you are possessed by a subject you are a slave, not a master; you are like a king besieged by his people. Too keen a feeling, at the moment when you want to represent that feeling, causes an insurrection of the senses against the governing faculty." (msmdn10.txt, Project Gutenberg)

The French doctor prescribes a simple substitution of Massimilla for La Tinti in the dark and La Tinti is sent to Genovese who truly loves her. The result: Massimilla becomes pregnant and Genovese can sing again.

During one of her conversations on art, Massimilla comes up with Baudelaire's theory of synaesthesia or correspondences (before Baudelaire came up with it):

When I spoke of the gloomy hue, and the coldness of the tones in the introduction to "Moses" [an Opera], was I not fully as much justified as your critics are when they speak of the 'color' in a writer's language? Do you not acknowledge that there is a nervous style, a pallid style, a lively, and a highly-colored style? Art can paint with words, sounds, colors, lines, form; the means are many; the result is one. (msmdn10.txt, Project Gutenberg)

Hunt traces it back to the Swedenborgian influence on Balzac which can also be found in Seraphita:

Light gave birth to melody, melody gave birth to light; colors were light and melody; motion was a Number endowed with Utterance; all things were at once sonorous, diaphanous, and mobile; so that each interpenetrated the other, the whole vast area was unobstructed and the Angels could survey it from the depths of the Infinite. (sraph10.txt, Project Gutenberg)

(Medium, Massimilla Doni, msmdn10.txt)