Novecento

Novecento (pronounced no-vee-chen-toh)

(1) In Italian, nine hundred (900).

(2) In Italian the “twentieth century (1900s)”, the term used in the modern way to define the century as 1900-1999 rather than the strictly correct 1901-2000.

(3) As Novecento Italiano (literally the “Italian 1900s”), the Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 with the aim of representing the fascism of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943) in artistic form.

An Italian word which translates literally as nine-hundred (900), the construct being nove (nine) +‎ cento (hundred).  Nove was from the Latin novem, from noven (contaminated by decem, the original form preserved in nōnus), from the Proto-Italic nowem, from the primitive Indo-European hnéwn̥, the cognates including the Sanskrit नवन् (navan), the Ancient Greek ἐννέα (ennéa), the Gothic niun and the Old English nigon (which became the English nine).  Cento was from the Latin centum, from the Proto-Italic kentom, from the primitive Indo-European ḱm̥tóm, the formal cognates including the Sanskrit शत (śata), the Old Church Slavonic съто (sŭto) and the Old English hund (from which English, with an appended suffix, gained “hundred”. In Italian, the adjective novecentistico (feminine novecentistica, masculine plural novecentistici, feminine plural novecentistiche) is used generally of “twentieth century art” while “Novecento Italiano” was specifically of the movement (1922-1943) associated with Italian fascism.  However, “novecentistico” is sometimes used casually in the sense of “modern art”.  Novecento is a noun and novecentesco & novecentistico are adjectives.

Mussolini, Italian fascism and the Novecento Italiano 

In Italy and beyond, the curious coming to power in 1922 of Benito Mussolini (an event less dramatic than the Duce’s subsequent “March on Rome” propaganda would suggest) triggered many events (Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) always acknowledging the debt the Nazi state owed because "Mussolini was the one who showed us it could be done") and one of the more enduring footnotes of the epoch was the Novecento Italiano, opportunistically announced as having been “formed” in Milan in 1922 (although some “members” at the time appear not to have been aware they’d "joined".  What attracted the movement’s founders was the what Mussolini called “la visione fascista” (“the Fascist vision” and sometimes translated as “the Fascist platform” (la piattaforma fascista) although, as the years went by, most seemed to conclude Mussolini dealt more in concepts than plans (even the so-called "corporate state" was never really "corporatized").  The Duce had expressed his disgust at the decadence of the modern Italian people, believing they had been seduced by French ways into “elevating cooking to the status of high art”, declaring he would never allow Italy to descend to the level of France, a country ruined by “alcohol, syphilis and journalism”.  His vision extended also to reviving national vigour with “the beneficial hygiene of war”, something which worked only until his army was confronted by forces with more firepower than the brave but out-gunned (and out-gassed) Abyssinian (Ethiopian) tribesman.  Mussolini was harking back to the glories of the Roman Empire which has once stretched from “Hadrian’s Wall to the first cataract of the Nile, from Parthia to the Pillars of Hercules” and while so much of fascism was fake and bluster, the Duce genuinely was intoxicated at the notion he might be a “new Roman Emperor”.

Paesaggio urbano (Urban Landscape, circa 1924), oil on paper mounted on board by Mario Sironi.  Despite his latter day reputation, not all Sironi's representations of streets and buildings were gloomy, cold scenes but the ones now most popular seem to be; they must suit the twenty-first century zeitgeist.  Sironi was a devoted and leading Futurist and traces of that really never left his works; his most compelling technique was to exclude the human element from his urban scenes or deliberately have the figures dwarfed by the built environment.  The supremacy of the state over the individual was a core component of fascism and although as a motif it isn't apparent in all of the Novecento Italiano's output, it's a recurrent theme in Sironi's works. 

It was a vision which appealed to a certain sort of artist, one with a mind full of the grandeur of Italy's classical artistic heritage and the possibilities offered by science and the techniques of modernity, something seen as an authentic continuation of the works of Antiquity and the Renaissance whereas other threads in modern art, like the Futurism which had come to dominate avant-garde Italian art, were derided as “the work of skilled draftsmen”.  Futurism had also been disruptive and Italy had suffered more from the effects of World War I (1914-1918) that its status as a nominal victor might have been expected and like Mussolini, one of the Novecento Italiano’s key themes was a “return to order”, presumably the cultural analogue of “making the trains run on time”.  Again reflecting the post-Renaissance “construction” of a certain “idea” of the perfection of things in the ancient world, the movement sought a “return” to the Classical values of harmony, clarity, and stability.  They were pursuing a myth which remains to some persuasive, even today.

Lindsay Lohan as the Novecento Italiano might have depicted her: Lindsay (2019) by Sam McKinniss (b 1985), from a reference photograph taken 22 July 2012, leaving the Chateau Marmont, West Hollywood, Los Angeles.

The most obvious influence on the movement was a return to the imagery associated with Antiquity (albeit with many of the exemplars from later artists), with mythological or historical subjects, emphasizing form and balance, a deliberate rejection of the abstraction and dynamism of Cubism, Vorticism or Futurism.  Instead, a figurative and realist prevailed, an attempt deliberately to place the movement as the inheritor of Italy’s artistic heritage.  The movement was founded by a number of prominent figures but remains most associated with art collector, critic & journalist Margherita Sarfatti (1880–1961).  That focus is probably unfair to others but signora Sarfatti also wrote advertising copy for the Partito Nazionale Fascista (the PNF, the National Fascist Party) and perhaps more significantly, was also Mussolini’s mistress, a form of administrative horizontal integration not unfamiliar to the Duce.  Prominent members of the movement included Mario Sironi (1885-1961), known for his monumental and often sombre depictions of urban landscapes and political figures, Achille Funi (1890-1972) who focused on classical subjects with modern interpretations and Felice Casorati (1883-1963), in many ways the most interesting of the movement because few were more accomplished in the technique of fusing elements of modernism with a sharp focus on form and structure; the (not always complimentary) phrase “technical ecstasy” might have been invented to critique his output.  The most comprehensive collection of the movement’s works is displayed in Rome’s La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art).

Donna al caffè (Woman in the Café, 1931), oil on canvas by Antonio Donghi (1897-1963). The subject matter (a lone woman at a café table) was familiar in European art but the artists of the Novecento Italiano anticipated the later technique of "photographic clarity", achieved with the air of stillness, reminiscent of the precision with which Renaissance portraits were staged though without their sumptuous detailing.  As well as the movement's focus on clarity, order, and balance, there was a new interest in depicting "ordinary" urban citizens in scenes of a detached, almost serene realism.  In the work of the Novecento Italiano, woman tended to be represented as what the fascist state would have liked their citizens to be.

The comparisons with “Nazi art” are sometimes made but because art was a topic of little interest to Mussolini (who preferred the Autostrada (the world’s first motorways (freeways)), tanks and battleships, never in Italy as there anything so so dictatorial and the funding was spread to ensure the widest support for the regime.  That was a contrast with Hitler who to his dying day never ceased to think of himself as “an artist” and assumed the role of the Third Reich’s chief critic and censor, meaning there was a recognizably political theme to the art of the period.  Interestingly, while artists in the Reich increasingly “worked towards the Führer” and dutifully churned out what they knew would be “regime approved”, more than one memoir from his contemporaries recorded how little interest he took in them, responding with delight only to stuff like landscapes or portraiture he thought works of genuine beauty.  Really, there were probably fewer than a couple of dozen “Nazi” paintings or sculptures; it was just that hundreds of artists produced them thousands of times.

Dafne (1934), oil on plywood by Felice Casorati.  Casorati’s work often featured mythological subjects but unlike many he surrounded them with simplified forms, drawing attention to his sense of focus, precise structure and clarity.  Here, Daphne (in Greek mythology transformed into a laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo), is rendered in a figurative, geometric style with flat, muted colors, the work, while obviously modernist, owing a debt to classical traditions, Mannerism and hinting even at the Italian Primitives.

So the movement was neither monolithic nor “political” in the way things were done in the Third Reich and certainly nothing like the even more severe regime which prevailed in comrade Stalin’s (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) Soviet Union but it was supported to some extent by the Fascist state and while that association proved helpful, even before the tide of World War II (1939-1945) turned against Italy, as early as the mid-1930s the historic moment of Novecento Italiano had already passed as the world responded to the latest “shock of the new”, the language of surrealism and other adventures in abstraction capturing the imagination.  When in 1943 Italian Fascism “burst like a bubble” and Mussolini was removed from power, the movement was dissolved.  However, artistically, the legacy was real in that it did foster a dialogue between modernism and tradition in European art and ensured the Italian state during the inter-war years became involved in the commissioning of monumental and representational public art, beginning a tradition which continues to this day.

Appoggiatura

Appoggiatura (pronounced uh-poj-uh-too-r-uh or uh-poj-uh-tyoo- r-uh or ahp-pawd-jah-too-rah (Italian))

In musical composition, an ornament consisting of a non-harmonic note (short or long) preceding a harmonic one either before or on the stress (a note of embellishment preceding another note and taking a portion of its time).

1745-1755: From the Italian appoggiatura, from appoggiare (to lean; to prop; to support) from the Vulgar Latin appodiāre (present active infinitive of appodiō, from the Classical Latin podium) and related to the French appuyer, the Spanish apoyar and the Portuguese apoiar.  The meaning in music is for the sense of one note “propping up” another.

The Appoggiatura

As in many fields, fashions in music change.  There was a period, during the sixteenth century, when the rules of counterpoint were strict and discords permissible only if they were prepared and resolved in ways used in the previous sections; the only discord normally allowed on the strong beat was the suspension.  There the discord is prepared by the note being tied across from a weak to a strong beat and resolved onto the next weak beat; a type of syncopation.  In the mid-century however, there was a relaxation of the rules of voice leading which included experimentation with unprepared discords, the most important of which was the appoggiatura.  The appoggiatura started as a decorative note which displaced the first part of a note of a melody.  It occurred on the strong beat of the bar and could be either dissonant or consonant but in either case, the appoggiatura resolved (upwards or downwards) onto a consonance but, unlike the suspension, did not require to be prepared or tied from a previous note.  In order to overcome the earlier rule that all discords had to be prepared, the appoggiatura was originally shown as an ornament but later was written out in full.

An ornament: Bach, Orchestral Suite in B minor for flute and strings: Menuet.

That was just a fudge, a composer paying respect to a rule while breaking it because, as played, an appoggiatura is not a short ornament, it takes usually up a full half of the length of the note that it resolves onto and if resolved onto a note three beats long, it takes up a third or two thirds the length.  The appoggiatura is usually connected with the main harmony note by a slur and is normally played with a small degree of emphasis.

Haydn: Sonata in G major XVI:27 Allegro con Brio.

Haydn shows appoggiaturas at *1, *2 and *3, now written out in-full as was normal practice in the classical period. Their identity as elaborating notes is given away by the presence of the slurs.

The two superstars of the 1950s.  Maria Callas (1923-1977)  and Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), back-stage after the "Happy Birthday Mr President" performance, Madison Square Garden, New York, 19 May 1962.  Within three months, Marilyn Monroe would be dead.

December 2 2023 marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the singer Maria Callas, the soprano who remains still more famous than any other and the subject of a cult, something attributable certainly to her art but the tempestuous life she led off the stage attracted many; in the very modern sense of the word, Callas was a celebrity.  What Callas is in 2023 is thus a construct, a mix of myth, discography, and public persona although it’s more correct to say she’s a number of constructs; the criteria of trained musicians and critics likely to differ from those who just listen.  She was neither the most technically accomplished nor the most refined singer and yet, as Sir Rudolf Bing (1902–1997; General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York (the Met)) famously noted, “having once heard Callas, it was difficult to listen to anyone else sing the same music”.  That was because whatever the technical flaws or deliberate departures from what had become the accepted techniques of the mid-twentieth century, Callas brought to every performance a thrilling intensity which made the characters come alive in a way even the most virtuosic of her contemporaries couldn’t quite match.

The critics impressed only by technical ecstasy liked to label Callas a “singing actress” and there’s something in that but not in the way they mean; the “acting” wasn’t there to compensate for the voice, it was a part of the voice.  There are several recordings of the “madness” scene in Gaetano Donizetti's (1797–1848) Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) in which, as an exercise in singing, the performances are more accomplished yet it’s the Callas version which is the definitive because only she can send a shiver down the spine.  It was in the interpretation, just as it was when, in Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813–1901) Otello (1886), she played with layers of vocal tones variously to convey feelings of warm nostalgia, paranoia, depression and impending death.  Whatever was in the score to be expressed, it’s there but it wasn’t done with vocal pyrotechnics, indeed Callas, in both studio recordings and live performances often eschewed the cadential trills and appoggiature which, although unwritten, had entered Opera in the seventeenth century and become a signature of sopranos since at least the early nineteenth.  What she did with her voice has been called a kind of “operatic word-painting”, a lending of emotional depth which enabled her, more than any other to transcend the theatrical artificiality of opera and it’s this quality which means even roles for which she seemed an improbable choice (such as Giacomo Puccini’s (1858–1924) Madam Butterfly (1904)) demand attention.

Saint

Saint (pronounced seynt)

(1) Any of certain persons, said to be of exceptional holiness of life, formally recognized as such by churches by act of canonization (with doctrinal and procedural differences between denominations).

(2) In secular use, figuratively, a person of extraordinary virtue or who performed acts of extraordinary virtue (often as secular saint).

(3) As patron-saint, the founder, sponsor, inspiration or patron, as of a movement or organization (used formally by churches and informally otherwise).

(4) A religious icon or relic (archaic).

Pre 1000; A borrowing from the Old French, it existed in English as seint, sainct, seinct, sanct & senct, derived from the Latin sānctus (sacred; holy), adjectival use of past participle of sancīre (to hallow; to consecrate), the construct being sanc (akin to sacer (sacred)) + tus (past participle suffix).  The French borrowing replaced the Old English sanct which had been drawn from the Latin.  Variations were adopted by most Germanic languages; it was sankt in the Old Frisian, sint in Dutch and sanct in German; the Italian is santa.  As a verb in the sense of "to enroll (someone) among the saints", use was common by the late fourteenth century and the adjectival forms saintly & saintliness emerged in the 1620s.  Universal abbreviation is St and now often without full-stop, a welcome reduction in clutter.  One quirk in English is the name St John (Christian or surname) is properly pronounced sin-jin.

Originally an adjective prefixed to the name of a canonized person, by circa 1300 it had become a noun.    Saint Bernard, to describe the breed of mastiff dogs, was used first in 1839, the name adopted because the monks of the hospice of the pass of St Bernard (between Italy and Switzerland) sent them to rescue snowbound travelers.  The term secular-saint remains in wide use, the first known example being St Elmo's Fire (named for the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors, a corruption of the name of St Erasmus (fuoco di Sant'Elmo in the Italian), an Italian bishop martyred in 303) in the 1560s.  The phenomenon of weather is known also as corposants or corpusants, from the Portuguese corpo santo (holy body), and was described as long ago as Antiquity, mentioned in Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads (1572), a Portuguese epic poem written by Luís Vaz de Camões (circa 1524-1580) and earlier alluded to by the Greek poet Xenophanes of Colophon (circa 570–circa 478 BC).

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Unlike many of the buildings usually included in the standard tourist itinerary of Rome, the Cornaro Chapel (1626), at Santa Maria della Vittoria, close to the Repubblica metro station, is tiny.  In this intimate space is an elevated aedicule on which sits the little church’s famous installation, L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa; sometimes called The Transverberation of Saint Teresa), a sculptural group in white marble, carved by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) in 1652.

The interior of the church, also the work of Bernini, is sumptuously decorated, gilded stucco and multi-colored marble arranged so that barely a surface or crevice is left naked, this lushness the best setting imaginable for this masterpiece of high Roman baroque.  Bernini dismissed the suggestion he use an enclosed chapel and instead presented his composition as a theatre, cleverly lit by a window hidden by the pediment with, on the flanking walls, two opera-boxes containing sculptured representations of the family of his patron, the Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653). 

Bernini had reason to be grateful to the cardinal.  The work was completed during the pontificate of Innocent X (1574–1655; Giovanni Battista Pamphilj, pope 1644-1655) and Bernini had been the court architect of the previous pope, Urban VIII (circa 1568–1644; Maffeo Barberini, pope 1623-1644), regarded by Innocent as profligate.  With papal patronage withdrawn, Bernini was again an artist for hire and the cardinal granted the commission.  Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish founder of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, is depicted seated on clouds as if on a bed.  She is captured during the ecstasy she described in her mystical autobiography, experiencing an angel piercing her heart with a dart of divine love, causing both immense joy and pain.  Considering the long tradition of statuary in the Roman Catholic Church, that of Saint Teresa is quite a departure, her contorted posture and the ambiguous smile of the angel lending the scene a rare mix of passion and voluptuousness.  It’s reputed also to be the only Roman Catholic church with a painting depicting a battle scene above the alter and soldiers instead of angels holding up the organ, a legacy of the celebrations at the end of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Saint Teresa in white marble, 1652 (left) and Lindsay Lohan resting in a Cadillac Escalade, Los Angeles, May 2007 (right).  The striking similarity between the two saintly souls inspired one of 2007's most widely-shared memes.

Ecstasy

Ecstasy (pronounced ek-stuh-see)

(1) Rapturous delight.

(2) An overpowering emotion or exaltation; a state of sudden, intense feeling.

(3) Mental transport or rapture from the contemplation of divine things.

(4) A slang term for the drug Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) (often initial capital letter).

(5) A state of prophetic (especially poetic) inspiration (archaic).

1350–1400: From the Middle English extasie, from the Old & Middle French extasie (ecstasy, rapture), from the Medieval Latin extasis, from the Ancient Greek ékstasis (entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place" (in the New Testament "a trance")) from existanai (displace, put out of place, drive out of one's mind).  The construct of ékstasis was ek- (ec-)- + stásis. The construct of existanai was ex- (out) + histanai (to cause to stand) from the primitive Indo-European root sta- (to stand, make or be firm).  The  verbs ecstatize (1650s), ecstasiate (1823), ecstasize (1830) are extinct and the spellings ecstacy, exstacy, exstasy, extacy & extasy are all obsolete.  Ecstasy is a noun & verb, ecstatical is an adjective, ecstatically is an adverb, ecstatic is a noun & adjective and ecstaticize, ecstaticized & ecstaticizing are verbs; the noun plural is ecstasies.

Lindsay Lohan and her Lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

The adjectival use seems first to have emerged in the 1590s in the sense of "mystically absorbed" (from the Ancient Greek ekstatikos (unstable, inclined to depart from) & ekstasis, and something like the familiar modern meaning "characterized by or subject to intense emotions" is from 1660s, used by writers to describe mystical experiences, states “…of rapture which stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things".  That meaning shift to "exalted state of good feeling" seems to have been in general use early in the seventeenth century.  However, although now almost exclusively associated with feelings of exaggerated pleasure, it wasn’t always so, once associated in religious use with feelings anything but and there are those today for whom pain is an essential part of their ecstatic experience.  It’s a niche market.

Expert advice.  Lindsay Lohan confirmed Ecstasy is better than cocaine.

The slang use of ecstasy for the drug methylendioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) dates from 1985.  Taken as a pill (which can include other drugs as active ingredients), MDMA attracted slang including E, E-Bomb, Ekkie, Dancing Shoes, Love Drug, Love Potion, Molly, XTC, X, Bean Drug & Disco Biscuits.  One interesting footnote to emerge from studies of its use was that young women punctilious in checking supermarket labels to monitor their intake of fat, salt & sugar, seemed remarkably trusting of drug dealers offering pills.  Another phenomenon in the marketing of MDMA was the use of corporate trademarks, stamped onto the pills; it’s said Mitsubishis were very popular.  One interesting consensus which seemed to emerge from users that if enjoying a lollypop after MDMA, the best flavor was lemon.

Barnaby Joyce (b 1967; thrice (between local difficulties) deputy prime minister of Australia 2016-2022), House of Representatives, Canberra, ACT, Australia, February 2018.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Unlike many of the buildings usually included in the standard tourist itinerary of Rome, the Cornaro Chapel (1626), at Santa Maria della Vittoria, close to the Repubblica metro station, is tiny.  In this intimate space is an elevated aedicule on which sits the little church’s famous installation, L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa; sometimes called The Transverberation of Saint Teresa), a sculptural group in white marble, carved by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) in 1652.

The interior of the church, also the work of Bernini, is sumptuously decorated, gilded stucco and multi-colored marble arranged so that barely a surface or crevice is left naked, this lushness the best setting imaginable for this masterpiece of high Roman baroque.  Bernini dismissed the suggestion he use an enclosed chapel and instead presented his composition as a theatre, cleverly lit by a window hidden by the pediment with, on the flanking walls, two opera-boxes containing sculptured representations of the family of his patron, the Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653). 

Bernini had reason to be grateful to the cardinal.  The work was completed during the pontificate of Innocent X (1574–1655; Giovanni Battista Pamphilj, pope 1644-1655) and Bernini had been the court architect of the previous pope, Urban VIII (circa 1568–1644; Maffeo Barberini, pope 1623-1644), regarded by Innocent as profligate.  With papal patronage withdrawn, Bernini was again an artist for hire and the cardinal granted the commission.  Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish founder of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, is depicted seated on clouds as if on a bed.  She is captured during the ecstasy she described in her mystical autobiography, experiencing an angel piercing her heart with a dart of divine love, causing both immense joy and pain.  Considering the long tradition of statuary in the Roman Catholic Church, that of Saint Teresa is quite a departure, her contorted posture and the ambiguous smile of the angel lending the scene a rare mix of passion and voluptuousness.  It’s reputed also to be the only Roman Catholic church with a painting depicting a battle scene above the alter and soldiers instead of angels holding up the organ, a legacy of the celebrations at the end of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Saint Teresa in white marble, 1652 (left) and Lindsay Lohan resting in a Cadillac Escalade, Los Angeles, May 2007 (right).  The striking similarity between the two saintly souls inspired one of 2007's most widely-shared memes.

Verklempt

Verklempt (pronounced fur-klempt, ver-klempt, vuh-klempt, or fuh-klempt)

Someone rendered unable to speak because they're emotionally overwhelmed.

1990–95: From the Yiddish פֿאַרקלעמט‎ (verklempt, farklemt or farklempt (overcome with emotion)), the past participle of verklemen or farklemen (also spelled as verklemmen & farklemmen) (to clamp (in a vise), to pinch, to choke (in the sense of “choke up”)) from the German verklemmt (inhibited, hemmed in, feeling (figuratively) squeezed; uptight (literally, “pinched, squeezed”), the past participle of verklemmen (to become stuck).  Ultimately, the Germanic forms can be traced back to the Old English clam & clom (bond; fetter).

Verklempt is a Yiddish loan word and spellings like ferklempt, fahklempt & farklempt are sometimes seen because it’s only in recent decades it’s has become fashionable and many are familiar with it only through oral use and the variations reflect interpretations of the phonetic perception.  The way English works is that if any of the variations beginning with “f” become prevalent, eventually they’ll be acknowledged as alternative spellings and perhaps even an English word.  For its effect (replete with cultural history), verklempt will remain Yiddish and thus a foreign borrowing and purists will note the advice of the Yiddish Word Dictionary that verklempt is pronounced “fur-klempt”.  The construction followed the usual German spelling and grammatical traditions, the ver- suggesting something happening to the subject (on the model of vergessen (forgotten)).  There are dozens of words related to the behavioural consequences of human emotion but the closest synonyms to verklempt are phrases like “overcome with emotion”, “overwhelmed”, struck dumb”, “rendered speechless” or “choked up”; words like “flustered” or “nervous” aren’t quite right because they refer to cause rather than effect, verklempt being an effect.  The root was from klemmen (which enjoys a range of meanings from “to press, to squeeze” to “to block, to oppress”.  Verklempt is an adjective (the noun use (the noun plural being verklempts) is informal).

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, 2011.

To be verklempt is to be overwhelmed by emotion to the extent one is rendered unable to speak.  In modern use it’s associated with tell-tale phrases such as “choking back tears”, “quivering lips”, “moist eyes” et al but in Jewish tradition the Yiddish farklempt was associated not with any overwhelming emotional response but specifically to depression, loss and grief.  Encouraged by a variety of push & pull influences (notably talk-shows and click-bait), public displays of emotion are now more common than once and, in some circles, probably obligatory.  A state of verklemptness is one of the elements and in video feeds can function well as the “dramatic pause” which, as that phrase implies, should not too long linger or the audience will become impatient.  The comparative is “more verklempt” and the superlative “most verklempt” and subjects can, with the appropriate visual clues, operate anywhere in that spectrum but a frozen silence is essential and, cognizant of the audience’s attention span, it shouldn’t be maintained for more than about 7-10 seconds which doesn’t sound long but on a content-intensive medium like a video feed it’s quite a pause.

A verklempt Lindsay Lohan: Cady Heron and the bus scene (Mean Girls (2004)).

Verklempt is specific to being rendered physically unable to speak because of being emotionally overwhelmed although that’s just one possible reaction and one can be so emotionally overwhelmed one feels compelled to speak; it’s all about the circumstances of the moment.  In a sense verklempt is opposite of that described by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) who in the preface to the 1800 edition of his Lyrical Ballads wrote “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”.  The poet clearly was fond of the phrase because he’d used it before and it’s endured because probably no other fragment of thought so well captures the moment of the Romantic poets which shifted a whole generation from the Augustan neo-classical style which was eighteenth-century poetry towards something intensely emotional and accessible.

Romantic poetry was so appealing to so many because the words summoned the ecstasy of the soul rather than of technique, the latter something understood only by a tiny educated elite.  The public adored the romantic movement because it was so accessible but the among the elitists there was distaste for what they viewed as little more than a tawdry emotional manipulation of the masses and later TS Eliot (1888–1965) (a self-declared “classical poet” in the special sense TE Hulme (1883–1917) used the term) would maintain that after John Donne (circa 1571-1631), a “dissociation of sensibility” afflicted poets, making them unable to  think as keenly as if they were sensing something or experiencing a deep emotion. Thought and feeling, Eliot argued, were as one in John Donne; in later poets, they became “dissociated”.

Not verklempt, something else; Mitch McConnell freezes.  Twice.  July-August 2023. 

Nor is verklempt a suitable word to describe the manifestations of the conditions now on show in the upper reaches of US politics (senile decay, cognitive decline, old age etc) although the symptoms often overlap to the point of being indistinguishable.  Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (b 1942) attracted much recent interest when on two occasions in July & August 2023 he “froze in place”, mid-press conference, standing silent for some 20 seconds, apparently unable to respond until led away by aides.  The senator later informed the press he was “fine” and merely had felt “light-headed”, later releasing a letter from the attending physician of Congress that said that he was “medically clear” to continue his schedule.  Given the senate minority leader doesn’t operate heavy machinery and (at least directly) is probably a danger only to himself if he continues in office, presumably the medical bulletin is correct but the apparent state of his health (and others in the congress) has triggered some debate about whether term limits or retirement ages should be introduced.  Although technically it’s not possible with absolute certainty to define the point at which statutory senility is attained, the increasingly geriatric state of the US body politic suggests it shouldn’t be too hard to make an educated guess about which are afflicted.

To be verklempt might have better.  Joe Biden in Vietnam (not India as he appears to believe), September 2023.

In the White House however, there may be a feeling among his handlers that a verklempt Joe Biden (b 1942; US president since 2021) might be something easier to spin that the one they’ve got who just keeps talking, often descending into mumbling incoherence before shuffling off the stage, sometimes tripping over obstacles, real and imagined.  There is a (doubtlessly apocryphal) story told in Washington DC that President Biden was told it was time to meet the cabinet.  After a few minutes it was noticed he was missing but was then discovered in another room talking to a bookcase and arguing with a chair.  The real concern was he lost the argument.     

Anxiety

Anxiety (pronounced ang-zahy-i-tee)

(1) Fear, foreboding, worry, disquiet, distress, uneasiness or tension caused by apprehension of possible future misfortune, danger etc, often to a degree that normal physical and psychological functioning is disrupted (can occur without an identifiable cause in which case the patient may be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder).

(2) Earnest but tense desire; eagerness; an uneasy or distressing desire for someone or something.

(3) In psychiatry, a state of intense apprehension or worry often accompanied by physical symptoms such as shaking, intense feelings in the gut etc, common in mental illness or after a distressing experience; a generalised state of apprehension and psychic tension occurring in some forms of mental disorder.

1515–1525: From the Middle English anxumnesse (apprehension caused by danger, misfortune, or error, uneasiness of mind respecting some uncertainty, a restless dread of some evil), from the Old English angsumnes, from the Latin anxietatem (nominative anxietas) (anguish, anxiety, solicitude) a noun of quality from anxius (uneasy, anxious, solicitous, distressed, troubled in mind) from angō (to distress, trouble), akin to the Ancient Greek ἄγχω (ánkhō) (to choke).  The construct of the Latin anxietās was anxi(us) (anxious) + -etās, a variant of -itās used if appearing before a vowel.  The -itas suffix was from the Proto-Italic -itāts & -otāts (-tās added to i-stems or o-stems, later used freely) and ultimately from the primitive Indo-European -tehats.    Synonyms include foreboding, uneasiness, perplexity, disquietude, disquiet, trouble, apprehension, restlessness & distress and it’s become a popular modifier (range anxiety, climate anxiety, separation anxiety, performance anxiety etc).  Anxiety is a noun; the noun plural is anxieties.

Xanax tablets.

Xanax is the brand name for the drug alprazolam which is a benzodiazepine.  It is a prescription medication primarily used to treat anxiety disorders, panic disorders and (more controversially) depression.  A fast & short-acting benzodiazepine, Xanax works by enhancing the activity of a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which helps to reduce anxiety and promote relaxation.  Xanax is regarded as effective for treating anxiety and related disorders when used as prescribed but can be habit-forming, leading to dependence and addiction.  Lindsay Lohan released (or "dropped" in the fashionable parlance) the track Xanax in 2019.  With a contribution from Finnish pop star Alma (Alma-Sofia Miettinen; b 1996), the accompanying music video was said to be “a compilation of vignettes of life”, Xanax reported as being inspired by Ms Lohan’s “personal life, including an ex-boyfriend and toxic friends”.  Structurally, Xanax was quoted as being based around "an interpolation of" Better Off Alone, by Dutch Eurodance-pop collective Alice Deejay, slowed to a Xanax-appropriate tempo.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and panic disorder (PD) were formalized when the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) was released in 1980 although among clinicians, GAD had for some years been a noted thread in the literature but what was done in DSM-III was to map GAD onto the usual pattern of diagnostic criteria.  In practice, because of the high degree of co-morbidity with other disorders, the utility of GAD as defined was soon a regular topic of discussion at conferences and the DSM’s editors responded, the parameters of GAD refined in subsequent releases between 1987-1994 when GAD’s diagnostic criteria emerged in its recognizably modern form:

By the time the terminology for mental disorders began in the nineteenth century to be codified, the word anxiety had for hundreds of years been used in English to describe feelings of disquiet or apprehension and in the seventeenth century there was even a school of thought it was a pathological condition.  It was thus unsurprising that “anxiety” was so often an element in the psychiatry’s early diagnostic descriptors such as “pantophobia” and “anxiety neurosis”, terms which designated paroxysmal manifestations (panic attacks) as well as “interparoxysmal phenomenology” (the apprehensive mental state).  The notion of “generalized anxiety”, although not then in itself a diagnosis, was also one of the symptoms of many conditions including the vaguely defined neurasthenia which was probably understood by many clinicians as something similar to what would later be formalized as GAD.  As a distinct diagnostic category however, it wasn’t until the DSM-III was released in 1980 that GAD appeared, anxiety neurosis split into (1) panic disorder and (2) GAD.  When the change was made, the editors noted it was a response to comments from clinicians, something emphasised when DSM-III was in 1987 revised (DSM-III-R), in effect to acknowledge there was a class of patient naturally anxious (who might once have been called neurotic or pantophobic) quite distinct from those for whom a source of anxiety could be deduced.  Thus, the cognitive aspect of anxiety became the critical criterion but within the profession, some scepticism about the validity of GAD as a distinct diagnostic category emerged, the most common concern being the difficulty in determining clear boundaries between GAD, other anxiety-spectrum disorders and certain manifestations of depression.

The modern label aside, GAD has a really long lineage and elements of the diagnosis found in case histories written by doctors over the centuries would have seemed familiar to those working in the early nineteenth century, tales of concern or apprehension about the vicissitudes of life a common thing.  As psychiatry in those years began to coalesce as a speciality and papers increasingly published, it was clear the behaviour of those suffering chronic anxiety could culminate in paroxysmal attacks, thus it was that GAD and panic attacks came to be so associated.  In English, the term panophobia (sometimes as pantaphobia, pantophobia or panphobia) dates from 1871, the word from the Late Latin pantŏphŏbŏs, from the Ancient Greek παντοφόβος (all-fearing (literally “anxiety about everything”)).  It appears in the surviving works of medieval physicians and it seems clear there were plenty of “pantophobic patients” who allegedly were afraid of everything and it was not a product of the Dark Ages, Aristotle (384-322 BC) in the seventh book of his Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC) writing there were men “…by nature apt to fear everything, even the squeak of a mouse”.

The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I (1952) comprised what seems now a modest 130 pages.  The latest edition (DSM-5-TR (2022)) has 991 pages.  The growth is said to be the result of advances in science and a measure of the increasing comprehensiveness of the manual, not an indication that madness in the Western world is increasing.  The editors of the DSM would never use the word "madness" but for non-clinicians it's a handy term which can be applied to those beyond some point on the spectrum of instability.

Between Aristotle and the publication of the first edition of the DSM in 1952, physicians (and others) pondered, treated and discussed the nature of anxiety and theories of its origin and recommendations for treatment came and went.  The DSM (retrospectively labelled DSM-I) was by later standards a remarkably slim document but unsurprisingly, anxiety was included and discussed in the chapter called “Psychoneurotic Disorders”, the orthodoxy of the time that anxiety was a kind of trigger perceived by the conscious part of the personality and produced by a threat from within; how the patient reacted to this resulted in their reaction(s).  There was in the profession a structural determinism to this approach, the concept of defined “reaction patterns” at the time one of the benchmarks in US psychiatry.  When DSM-II was released in 1968, the category “anxiety reaction” was diagnosed when the anxiety was diffuse and neither restricted to specific situations or objects (ie the phobic reactions) nor controlled by any specific psychological defense mechanism as was the case in dissociative, conversion or obsessive-compulsive reactions. Anxiety reaction was characterized by anxious expectation and differentiated from normal apprehensiveness or fear.  Significantly, in DSM-II the reactions were re-named as “neuroses” and it was held anxiety was the chief characteristic of “neuroses”, something which could be felt or controlled unconsciously by various symptoms.  This had the effect that the diagnostic category “anxiety neurosis” encompassed what would later be expressed as panic attacks and GAD.

A: Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring more days than not for at least 6 months, about a number of events or activities (such as work or matters relating to educational institutions).

B: The patient finds it difficult to control the worry.

C: The anxiety and worry are associated with three (or more) of the following six symptoms:

(1) Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge.

(2) Being easily fatigued.

(3) Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank.

(4) Irritability.

(5) Muscle tension.

(6) Sleep disturbance (difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless, unsatisfying sleep).

The key change really was for the criteria for GAD requiring fewer symptoms. Whereas with the DSM-IV-TR (2000) individuals needed to exhibit at least three physical and three cognitive symptoms for a diagnosis of GAD, under DSM-5 (2013), only one of each was required so not only was the accuracy and consistency of diagnosis (by definition) improved, the obvious practical effect was better to differentiate GAD from other anxiety disorders and (importantly) the usual worries and concerns endemic to the human condition.  The final significant aspect of the evolution was that by the time of DSM-5, GAD had become effectively a exclusionary diagnosis in that it cannot be diagnosed if the anxiety is better explained by other anxiety disorders and nor can GAD be caused directly by stressors or trauma.

Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No 2 (The Age of Anxiety) was inspired by WH Auden's long poem of the same name.

WH Auden's (1907-1973) The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1944) divided critics, said by some to be "his best work to date" and by others to be "dull and an obvious failure", some of whom rubbed in the critical salt by adding Leonard Bernstein's (1918-1990) Symphony No 2 (1948-1949), inspired by the poem, was the finer piece of art.  It was better received in the US where it was written, winning the Pulitzer prize but whether or not influenced by the reaction, Auden would never again complete an epic-length work.  Like HG Wells' (1866-1946) Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), it was very much a work of the unhappy time in which Auden found himself and in some ways picked up from his lament September 1st, 1939 (a poem he later renounced).  As a poem, The Age of Anxiety is a delight for structuralists, its six sections (prologue, life-story, dream-quest, dirge, masque & epilogue (and emulated by the six movements in Bernstein's symphony (each movement sub-divided))) able to be deconstructed even mathematically but, the most common complaint is that although his four protagonists (three men and a woman) are very different people and all from a world of vernacular American English, their thoughts on the human condition and their own are expressed as if each had once gone up to Oxford to take a degree in English, as Auden in his youth had done.  Such voices in poems are not unusual but the critics go further in claiming that anyone new to the work, were the characters' names to be concealed, could not possibly guess which of the four is talking.  While it becomes clear the abstractions he maps upon his four represent thought, intuition, sensation & feeling, while helpful as a device through which his word-view can be discussed, as flesh & blood characters they are vague indeed.  Still, literature should perhaps be enjoyed for what it is rather than what it's not; one doesn't need to find plausible what Philip Roth (1933-1918) thinks might be the thoughts of a woman to find pleasure in the text and it's the same with Auden's The Age of Anxiety.  Those interested in poetry as art will read such cleverness with relish, ticking the boxes on the path to technical ecstasy.  Those who want to feel something should stick to Sylvia Path (1932-1963).      

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

WH Auden in The Age of Anxiety (1944).