neurasthenic

The work’s initial good fortunes — and its composer’s bright future — were infamously derailed in 1936, when Joseph Stalin walked out of a production in Moscow and an unsigned editorial appeared in Pravda, condemning the “stream of deliberately discordant sounds” and the “fidgeting, screaming neurasthenic music.”

But on Tuesday, remarkably little sounded discordant, fidgeting, screaming or neurasthenic.

That is why Richardson thinks Minny was uppermost in James’s mind when, a month after her death, he experienced what he described as an “acute neurasthenic attack” of “religious bearing” that caused “a horrible fear of my own existence.”

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke referenced Carpaccio in his 1910 novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” a rambling, first-person narrative by a hypersensitive, neurasthenic young man who seeks to write a few, perfect verses of poetry.

Zaslavsky’s takedown of “Lady Macbeth” is vulgarly imaginative, centering on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.”