Metaphor, Emotion, and Music Analysis 289 2. Persona Theory The persona theory claims that we respond to emotion expressed in a piece of music because it somehow resembles the psychological state of a virtual person, a ‘per-sona’. Is this really true? After all, the ‘cries’ of a musical lament don’t really sound like the sobs and wails of a real grieving person. We need to exercise our imagina -tion – a familiar caveat, despite the problem that there are no agreed rules to how the imagination operates. The beginning of Schubert’s rst group is a case in point (see ex. 2):Example 2 The tremolando of the strings may remind the listener of a person shivering with fright. The bass pizzicati are suggestive of heart-beats, a common signi er of fear in lm music. And the rising tension unfolded by the rising melody could also be heard as expressive of rising panic. 3. Hermeneutic A deeper kind of metaphorical transfer happens across the rst subject itself, when we move from considering the musical material as merely expressive of an emotion-al state, to hearing it analogous to a way of being. In some highly suggestive lines on the cognitive role of fear, Heidegger compares the bewilderment of frightened people, dashing about thoughtlessly, to the inhabitants of a burning house who ‘save the most indifferent things that are most closely ready-to-hand’ (p. 392). Fear affects how we think, inducing panic behaviour. The strange C sharp/G natural dis-sonance between the outer voices can be heard as a musical instance of such panic behaviour: the music rushing about aimlessly, failing to attend to proper dissonance treatment. More broadly, the fact that the rst subject group cadence on the tonic – immediately before the famous horn pivot progression into the new key of the second group – can be heard as a circling back to the opening. Exposition tonic groups don’t conventionally cadence in the tonic; they segue into a modulating transition. This kind of metaphoric interpretation is more sophisticated, because it a knowledge of stylistic context-dependency: hermeneutic interpretation.