The Art of Happiness: Perspectives on Music as a Lifelong Resource

What do a Galuppi Sonata played by Benedetti Michelangeli, a Prelude of Rachmaninoff, and a scene from The Knight of the Rose by Strauss have in common? Happiness. Each of them shows a different form of this feeling. The first part of the chapter emphasizes the relationship between time, music and happiness as a key element of the emotional outline of music. Poetry can help us to seize such subtle but precisely defined feelings, namely the “fleeting happiness” that we find in Racmaninoff’s music, perfectly expressed in words by a poem of Montale. The Intermezzo considers another important expressive characteristic of music, also related to time and happiness: the emotion of occurrence, a feeling typical of Bach’s pieces. The last part of the chapter focuses on some other features of happiness. Bizet, Schubert, and Caetano Veloso shed further light on the most sought after, yet elusive, feeling of human experience