Program: Can music inspire mania?

Sana Qadar: In a busy concert hall, a crowd is whooping and cheering. There's a palpable buzz in the air. People are chomping at the bit, trying to catch a glimpse, or even a glove, from the performer on stage. I'm not talking about Harry Styles or the Beatles or even Taylor Swift. I'm talking about one of the hottest musicians of the mid-1800s, Franz Liszt.

Dr James Bradley: A ferocious, passionate player who carried the audience with him and almost beyond the music.

Associate Professor Stephanie McCallum: He's a very handsome, very striking young man. Of course, had this marvellous head of hair. His signature was to toss it back and sweep it back over his forehead.

Dr James Bradley: John Paul George and Ringo and Beatles all rolled into one.

Sana Qadar: The fervour and adoration around him was even given a name at the time:Lisztomania. I'm Sana Qadarand today on All In The Mind, resident Lisztie Farz Edraki has gone deep into Lisztomania.

Sana Qadar: Hey Farz.

Farz Edraki: Hey Sana.

Sana Qadar: I have to admit something.

Farz Edraki: What?

Sana Qadar: I've only ever heard of Lisztomania from the song by the band Phoenix. It was a hit of the mid-2000s, Indie Sleaze era. I didn't actually know it was a thing in the name of a phenomenon.

Farz Edraki: It's such a catchy song and it's stuck in my head this whole time I've been researching Franz Liszt. Also, we're really dating ourselves as ageing millennials.

Sana Qadar: We really are. I have to admit I did listen to that before coming into the studio. But anyways, tell me more about this guy, Franz Liszt.

Farz Edraki: He was a composer and piano player from Hungary and he was really big in his day. So big in fact, the poet Heinrich Heine described reactions to his performances in Germany in 1844 as Lisztomania, just like the name of the song.

Sana Qadar: But is it mania in the way we know it now?

Farz Edraki: That's what I was wondering as well. Where did Lisztomania come from? I've been hitting the archives, looking into how it fits into the history of mania, what it tells us about crowd psychology and female obsession. So I called in the experts.

Dr James Bradley: Dr. James Bradley, senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne in the history and philosophy of science program.

Farz Edraki: And someone who's very familiar with Liszt, Australian classical pianist, Stephanie McCallum, who's also

Associate Professor Stephanie McCallum: an associate professor in piano up at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Farz Edraki: What is it like to sit at the piano and to play his work?

Associate Professor Stephanie McCallum: I just get lost in the wonderful piano sound that he creates, you know, and you have to see the enormous arc that occurs during the work until you find your way to this pothiosis at the end, getting your brain in gear, taking off like an aeroplane, I think.

Farz Edraki: That's what it feels to invoke Liszt at the piano. But back to the 1840s, what was it like to be in the crowd of a Liszt concert?

Dr James Bradley: It seems to have been a transcendental experience. Audiences just getting carried beyond themselves into a state that people sometimes in retrospect would describe as mass hysteria. He's got this extraordinary retinue, like he travels around Europe from place to place. News of Liszt comes before him. People get phenomenally excited by the idea that they're going to see this force of nature play. It's reported beforehand that the piano will be set up so you can actually see his fingers in action.

Farz Edraki: Wait, what?

Dr James Bradley: One of the things that they wanted was not just the music, but the way that Liszt performed, the way that his fingers, from delicate to strong, across the keyboard. In advertising his concerts, they were often at pains to say, you will be able to see his hands on the keys.

Farz Edraki: Catching a glimpse of his hands wasn't the only thing people were after. According to Stephanie McCallum.

Associate Professor Stephanie McCallum: Everyone was interested in him, but women were mesmerized by him as a sort of sex symbol, I think. They tried to get his hair, they would try and get his gloves, his handkerchiefs. There's some suggestion that he occasionally discarded some of these to sort of keep people feeling as though they had a little part of him.

Farz Edraki: So he'd throw his hankey into the audience?

Associate Professor Stephanie McCallum: I don't know if he'd throw it into the audience, but he'd accidentally drop it, you know. They wore broken piano strings as bracelets, which I thought was an extraordinary story. And they even scavenged his coffee drinks and his cigar butts. And there's a story of a woman keeping one in a locket around her neck, which was quite aromatic.

Farz Edraki: So people were doing anything to get a sort of whiff or a taste or a memento of him.

Associate Professor Stephanie McCallum: Yep. And then, you know, there's the usual sort of merch that goes with these things. When Liszt toured Vienna in 1839, you could get little pastries in the shape of a grand piano with icing on the top spelling out Liszt.

Farz Edraki: No way. You could get a Liszt pastry?

Farz Edraki: A Liszt pastry. Delicious. Cigar butts and pastries aside, critics rave about him too. One describes a performance in Britain in 1840 as dancing in sunshine after playing in thunder. And that kind of description of him wasn't uncommon. James has some theories on why.

Dr James Bradley: There's this kind of association with nature, with the forces of nature, with the emotions or what would more commonly have been called the passions at that time. And it's this response that really brings us into the romantic core of why reactions to Liszt were like this. Obviously, you've got him as the player, him as the phenomenon, but you've also got this influence of romantic culture more generally, that seems to be, if you like, shaping the reactions to him, shaping the feelings, the passions, the emotions of his audience.

Farz Edraki: Liszt inspires deep emotion and passion in his audiences. And then the term Lisztomania comes about. But how does Lisztomania fit into how we understand mania?

Dr James Bradley: Mania had been around for not just centuries, millennia, and it was one of the principal diagnoses of people that had lost their minds. By the period of Liszt, the kind of system of diagnosis had got considerably more complex. But even then, there were only four or five different main categories of insanity. And there was mania, which in the British context was most often called raving madness. With mania, it put the individual into a complete state beyond reason, beyond rationality, frenzied behaviour, complete loss of control. I guess it would most often be associated today with the manic phase of bipolar, but it was an all-consuming single condition during the period when Liszt was inciting people to such a frenzied state.

Farz Edraki: So when the poet Heinrich Heine is using the term Lisztomania, is he talking about something physiological or is he talking about something psychological?

Dr James Bradley: He is most definitely talking about something that is both physiological and psychological. Essentially, what he's talking about is what would be called mesmerism or animal magnetism, which was extremely popular during this period.

Farz Edraki: Mesmerism, by the way, is a somewhat controversial theory from that era that everyone has an invisible natural force.

Dr James Bradley: They believe that this physical force within the body was extremely real. And for example, a medical practitioner could tap into that force and place a patient into a mesmeric trance, basically by manipulating the magnetic fluids that were coursing through the body. And this is what Heine is saying, in essence, is that Liszt, by the power of music, is affecting the vital spirits within the bodies of the audience and placing them into a trance-like state where they're transported beyond their normal mortal existence.

Farz Edraki: Now, obviously, Heine is not a physician. He's a poet, a writer.

Dr James Bradley: And I would say that he might be sceptical to a degree. I think that he is trying to present himself as someone who is not transported by the power of Liszt and that one of the reasons he's not is he kind of understands what's going on here. He's got the key to explaining it. And the key to explaining it is this mania that is connected to animal magnetism to mesmerism, which was fundamentally was a romantic science.

Farz Edraki: That's so interesting, because I guess when we think of psychiatric conditions in a modern context, we don't think about a sort of internal spirit or a feeling, or at least in a Western context, we don't so.

Dr James Bradley: We don't now. But the disappearance of that, I would say, is relatively recent. And then, you know, how do we conceptualise the emotions and how they work? To me, often the emotions are some kind of abstraction of something that we even now can't really understand.

Farz Edraki: But aside from romantic conceptions of emotional states, James says it's also really important to remember the historical context this is all going on in. For one thing, by the mid-1840s, international rail travel is a thing.

Dr James Bradley: This allows Liszt to take his culture from place to place. And before he arrives, the reports that he's coming are there. He's being promoted. People are waiting for him to arrive. There's expectation. I guess this kind of feeds into the whole kind of mania thing.

Farz Edraki: And music performance and technology was evolving at that time too. Back to Stephanie McCallum.

Associate Professor Stephanie McCallum: I think a lot of what he was doing was quite new. He invented the term recital, by the way, the idea that you would go onto a stage on your own without supporting artists and hold the attention of a crowd for an entire performance. That was quite new. It was also that suddenly you weren't just playing in lounge rooms or small ensemble rooms of aristocrats. You were on a concert stage in a concert hall with a decent-sized audience. The audiences were getting bigger. Pianos were getting bigger. Everything was getting bigger, orchestras and so on. The projection is on a different level. And he obviously tapped into something where he was able to do that, to project out to large numbers of people this larger-than-life personality through the music.

Farz Edraki: So, Sana, can you believe people would hold onto Liszt'scigarette butts?

Sana Qadar: I mean, I kind of can. People do all sorts of weird stuff when they're obsessed with someone. Like when I was a kid and I was obsessed with Hanson, I would have killed for a straw that they sipped out of or a lock of hair or whatever. I was very, very obsessed with that band back then. So I can imagine it.

Farz Edraki: And the same thing happened with Liszt. It happens today, right? The friendship bracelets with Taylor Swift.

Sana Qadar: But I guess in terms of the way people viewed fandom back then, how does that compare to how we view it now? Because back then that would have been a very new phenomenon, I'm guessing.

Farz Edraki: That's exactly what I asked Sasha Samlal. She's a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, and she looks at this exact topic, fandom, and how shame actually brings fan communities together.

Sana Qadar: Shame?

Farz Edraki: Exactly. But yeah, she doesn't research Liszt. She looks at a lot more contemporary musicians like One Direction.

Sana Qadar: Nice.

Farz Edraki: And she's a massive directioner herself.

Sascha Samlal: I had multiple social media accounts that I kept hidden from my friends and my family. And even though it was something that my parents didn't necessarily want me doing and they caught me multiple times, I would still go back to doing it because I felt that I was more intense than everyone else and I had to find that outlet.

Farz Edraki: And in case you're wondering, yes, she's seeing them perform.

Sascha Samlal: My 15-year-old self would be absolutely determined to tell you that Zayn and I locked eyes as he was sort of being lifted into the air during a song called You and I, which is one of my favorite songs.

Farz Edraki: Anyway, back to the research.

Farz Edraki: Sasha's One Direction fandom inspired interviews with other directioners, and she looked in particular at fans who wrote fan fiction. So fiction about One Direction.

Sascha Samlal: And I found with those fans, they expressed the same sentiment of having deeper connection with people who also read fan fiction because it was sort of this further shamed activity that they were engaging in. And that shame really contributed to that intimacy. I think one of my participants said it felt like whenever she talked about reading fan fiction with her internet friends online, it felt like having giggly conversations with her sisters. And that sort of really exemplifies that deep sense of intimacy that you create when you have shared shame with someone.

Farz Edraki: So where does Liszt fit into all of this? How have we viewed female fandom historically?

Sascha Samlal: This is definitely a historically recurring phenomenon of sort of demeaning feminine interests. If we look at the example of Lisztomania, it's always sort of referenced as the starting point in this long line of treating feminine interests as something that is needed to be pathologized to understand. I would say that Lisztomania is sort of the beginning point, and then we go to like Elvis fans and Beatlemania and immediately we're conjuring images of sort of like screaming teenage girls when we think of Elvis fans and Beatles fans. One Direction infection and Bieber fever, like that sort of language, that medical language was really important in emphasizing how sort of out of control and mindless these fans are.

Farz Edraki: Yeah, it's so interesting that you say that the mention of kind of, you know, fever, infection, Lisztomania. Why do you think we pathologize female obsession by giving it names like this?

Sascha Samlal: It sort of really boils down to the way that we view femininity as inherently less than masculinity. So in many ways, femininity is viewed as anti intellectual, sort of like a facade, sort of fake, not actually real, whereas masculinity is intellectual and strong and authentic. Anything that is categorized as feminine, therefore is less than.

Farz Edraki: But hold up, weren't there male fans of Liszttoo? Sasha makes an important distinction when it comes to how we use the term fangirl.

Sascha Samlal: We use fangirl in modern vernacular as a descriptor, it's not necessarily a category of identity. So it's often used as an adjective. So you could say that someone is fangirling about something and that has a certain connotation. You're not calling someone a fangirl necessarily because of their age or their gender. You're calling them a fangirl because they have intense passion over something.

Farz Edraki: So the term fangirl's not necessarily tied to gender, just the way that we perceive the expression of gender, I guess. And Sascha thinks because Lisztwas so popular with women as well, he would have been perceived as a feminine cultural product too.

Sascha Samlal: So you would call his fans fangirls, I suppose. I think of Carly Rae Jepsen of Call Me Maybe fame, and her fandom is predominantly gay men. Same with Lady Gaga. But all of these people would probably be referred to or call themselves fangirls.

Farz Edraki: The same we should say with another artist, Taylor Swift. She attracts a wide audience, from young girls to dads. James McCallum can attest to this.

Dr James Bradley: My son is a rabid, rabid Swiftie. God, was he transported. We got the video.

Farz Edraki: What did he look like in the video?

Dr James Bradley: Worse than me leaping around at the end of the Carlton Melbourne final game last year. He was absolutely screaming, I think for three hours.

Farz Edraki: That's incredible.

Dr James Bradley: It was a beautiful, beautiful, powerful, emotional moment in his life.

Farz Edraki: Yeah, I mean, there is something about the concert environment that does invoke this sort of fervorous feeling.

Dr James Bradley: Absolutely, absolutely. It's a communal experience. And that is what feeds into it.

Farz Edraki: There's something so, I don't know, special about music and live music and the ability to transport you somewhere.

Dr James Bradley: Absolutely. Music does have that power because it goes straight for the emotions. It goes straight for something that feels visceral. It taps into the body before the mind can start exploring it. And in the current context, particularly when I was a lot younger, volume, that is a very, very powerful emotional weapon. You know, I can testify to this with my extremely poor hearing, which was a result of my life as a teenage heavy metal fan.

Sana Qadar: So, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadarand I've got reporter Farz Edraki in the studio with me. And Farz, you've really got me reminiscing about that time in my life I was going to concerts and feeling like that because that story is so sweet from James.

Farz Edraki: I know. I want to feel like that again. It's been a while. What was the last concert you had that transcendent feeling?

Sana Qadar: Oh my god, I was thinking about this. It has been a while. I feel like it was in my early 20s. And the one that pops to mind the quickest is kind of embarrassing. It's Coldplay. Like 2008 Toronto Coldplay, you know, like they had a really spectacular light show to accompany all their really emotional music. And there was like 20,000 people in the stadium. So I feel like that's the one that springs to mind. I've seen a lot of many other shows.

Farz Edraki: I can just picture the skinny jeans and the navy outfits.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, and the sort of like military jackets. Yeah, it was a whole vibe. It was great. But it has also got me thinking about like, what is it about being in a crowd that can be so transcendent at a music gig? But then also like it's really interesting because that kind of experience can also be dangerous and it, you know, maybe not at a Coldplay gig, but like there have been instances where that kind of flow turns dangerous.

Farz Edraki: Yeah, you sent me that really interesting article, right, by Professor Alison Hutton. Yeah. She researches how to actually make big crowded events like concerts safer for people so they can fangirl without getting hurt.

Professor Alison Hutton: I'm a professor in nursing and I work at the University of Newcastle. And for quite a while now, I've been doing research in the area of mass gatherings. And I'm really interested in what motivates people to go to those events, how to promote health in those events, the harm that comes to people as well, because, you know, my nursing background. So I'm really interested in why people go to these events, what they expect to get out of it, and also how that might relate to what happens to them at the event.

Farz Edraki: For her research, Alison's been to hundreds of concerts, for fun too.

Professor Alison Hutton: I just love them so much. Singing along to the music with everybody. And like, I just have a big smile on my face. And I just feel like I haven't got a care in the world. And I normally go with my son, who's 22.

Farz Edraki: And he's normally in the mosh pit.

Professor Alison Hutton: I'm jumping up and down too. And I'm singing at the top of my lungs, but I'm not going into that pit. But, you know, yeah, it's quite transformative I think.

Farz Edraki: Alison's not the only one jumping up and down. So why do people act so differently at a concert?

Professor Alison Hutton: Escapism. You're there, you're present, you're in the moment, you are just having a great time. So I think it's a real freedom. But also they can become part of something greater than themselves.

Farz Edraki: A sense of community and freedom. And freedom can lead to people having fun, letting loose. But it can also lead to people throwing things on stage. People have thrown drinks at rapper CardiB, a cell phone at Drake, and no, it wasn't Kendrick. And in 2023, Harry Styles was hit in the face with what was thought to be a packet of Skittles.

Professor Alison Hutton: I think the worst thing I've seen is that people, you know, get agitated and throw punches at each other.

Farz Edraki: Things can go bad at concerts. Really bad. And a heads up, we're talking about a distressing incident at a Travis Scott gig at the 2021 Astroworld Music Festival.

Professor Alison Hutton: Ten young people passed away. They were crushed. And I think about another 60 people were injured.

Farz Edraki: And things went wrong even before the show started.

Professor Alison Hutton: The crowd was lined up for a long time prior to the show. And they actually broke the fence down and, you know, stampeded and went up to the stage before the event even opened. That's a warning flag. Like, that's a, this crowd is not going to be well behaved or this crowd is highly agitated. What can we do? Like, there were lots of warning signs saying something's going to happen.

Farz Edraki: And it did. Interestingly, Alison says it's the cues the performer gives off that can have a big role to play when it comes to crowd safety. Well,

Professor Alison Hutton: I think the performers would want their audience to be happy. I mean, they want their audience to have a good experience. But I also think they can probably see what's going on from a good, you know, from that angle. But also, like, placebo is another example. Brian Malko, if people pay him out at a Newcastle concert, he was like, excuse me, I'm working. And anyway, and these two boys, I don't know what they were saying to him, but he got them kicked out.

Professor Alison Hutton: Wow.

Professor Alison Hutton: He just went, security, can they go? I mean, maybe that's a bit over the top.

Farz Edraki: Aside from the cues the performer gives, there are other ways to make concerts safer. According to Alison.

Professor Alison Hutton: Good lighting so that people can see where they're going. Most people tend to go out of a venue exactly the same way they came in. So making sure that, you know, the exits are, you know, clear.

Farz Edraki: Performers can also plan their set lists really carefully.

Professor Alison Hutton: Also, they'll have a set that lifts the audience up, up, up, up, up, up. Everyone's jumping up and down, having a great time. And then they might play a ballad or have a softer song or just have a little bit of a break. And that naturally brings the audience down.

Farz Edraki: Then there's a type of barrier called D-barriers, which were developed as a response to a death at a Big Day Out concert in 2001.

Professor Alison Hutton: Those D-barriers control the crowd coming in by one entrance and then fanning out right and left.

Farz Edraki: There's also things like controlling occupancy levels and understanding the demographic.

Professor Alison Hutton: Making sure alcohol is really expensive so people don't buy too much. But then, of course, that allows pre's. Isn't it funny?

Farz Edraki: Is that a tactic?

Professor Alison Hutton: Oh, absolutely.

Farz Edraki: Is that why alcohol is so expensive at concerts?

Professor Alison Hutton: Absolutely.

Farz Edraki: I didn't know that.

Professor Alison Hutton: Absolutely.

Farz Edraki: And how else can you manage a crowd? Well, there's plenty of tricks up event manager's sleeves. And one of those tricks involves some unexpected music. Alison recalls one gig with Rammstein and Tool.

Professor Alison Hutton: And it was about six in the evening and the sun was starting to come down. So what we did is we played some kind of eerie opera music, not really too loud. But then there was also like a laser light show. So what it does is it just brings the crowd down. And it's purposeful. You know, you do that on purpose because you know that they're going to go and see Tool next. And that's going to be just as heavy and just as loud as Rammstein was. There was like a sense of wonder, like and a sense of what the? What? What? What is this? And that's what the event organiser's trying to do. They are actually trying to ensure that the event is a positive experience for everybody.

Farz Edraki: Maybe Liszt needed to incorporate a light show to settle down some of his fans.

Professor Alison Hutton: Yeah, maybe. But you know, I still can't get past the hair pulling. I just do. I still like, wow.

Farz Edraki: Like, yeah. They really went wild.

Sana Qadar: That was Professor Alison Hutton. You also heard from Stephanie McCallum, Dr. James Bradley and Sacsha Samlal. This episode was reported by Faraz Adraki. Thanks also to producer Rose Kerr. I'm SanaQadar. Thank you for listening.

Sana Qadar: And if you're a fangirl or boy of All in the Mind, maybe leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts or make us a friendship bracelet or a croissant, whatever it is. Or if none of those appeal, I will simply catch you next time.