The doctrine of the affections, also known as the doctrine of affects, doctrine of the passions, theory of the affects, or by the German term Affektenlehre (after the German Affekt; plural Affekte) was a theory in the aesthetics of painting, music, and theatre, widely used in the Baroque era (1600–1750) (Harnoncourt 1983; Harnoncourt 1988). Literary theorists of that age, by contrast, rarely discussed the details of what was called "pathetic composition", taking it for granted that a poet should be required to "wake the soul by tender strokes of art" (Rogerson 1953, p. 68). The doctrine was derived from ancient theories of rhetoric and oratory (Buelow 2001). Some pieces or movements of music express one Affekt throughout; however, a skillful composer like Johann Sebastian Bach could express different affects within a movement (Boetticher 2010) .
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History and definition
The doctrine of the affections was an elaborate theory based on the idea that the passions could be represented by their outward visible or audible signs. It drew largely on elements with a long previous history, but first came to general prominence in the mid-seventeenth century amongst the French scholar-critics associated with the Court of Versailles, helping to place it at the centre of artistic activity for all of Europe (Rogerson 1953, p. 70). The term itself, however, was only first devised in the twentieth century by German musicologists Hermann Kretzschmar, Harry Goldschmidt, and Arnold Schering, to describe this aesthetic theory (Buelow 2001; Nagley and Bujić 2002).
René Descartes held that there were six basic affects, which can be combined together into numerous intermediate forms (Descartes 1649, p. 94):
- Admiration (admiration)
- Amour (love)
- Haine (hatred)
- Désir (desire)
- Joie (joy)
- Tristesse (sorrow)
Another authority also mentions sadness, anger, and jealousy (Buelow 2001).
Lorenzo Giacomini (1552–1598) in his Orationi e discorsi defined an affection as "a spiritual movement or operation of the mind in which it is attracted or repelled by an object it has come to know as a result of an imbalance in the animal spirits and vapours that flow continually throughout the body" (Giacomini Tebalducci Malespini 1597).
"Affections are not the same as emotions; however, they are a spiritual movement of the mind" (Palisca 1991, p. 3).
A prominent Baroque proponent of the Doctrine of the Affections was Johann Mattheson (Poultney 1996, p. 107).
Examples for affects and corresponding musical figures
In the following table, the left column cites instructions from (Mattheson 1739) how to express affects. The right column cites baroque compositions expressing the same affects with, where available, moving musical scores.