Review

In Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Music Lesson, also known as A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (ca. 1662–1665), a young woman plays the eponymous instrument. The inscription engraved on the bottom of its lid reads: Musica laetitiae comes – medicina dolorum (Music is a companion to joy and a medicine for pains). In the light of these words, music is not only, as Nikolaus Harnoncourt puts it, a unique “speech of sounds.” Exceeding its own limits, music is much more: it heals people and sparks off joy in their hearts. As such, it alleviates pain and soothes wounds, but also relieves one from the burden of sadness and sweetens the bitterness of the darkest melancholia; it can create a good mood, prompt merriment, or transform mundane moments of human life into truly Epicurean experiences. For centuries, these properties of music have been attested to by such masters of literature as the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski, who formulates the following observation in one of his Songs (...)