Introduction : The muse as eros and masculine creative anxiety ; Locating musical evocations of the erotic muse ; Eroticism, imagination, and fantasy ; Erotic fantasy in Liszt, Wagner, and Scriabin : an interpretative exemplar -- The muse as immaculate beloved : Stendhal's 'crystallization' process and listening to Rossini and Beethoven -- Schumann, Chopin, the fan of eros, and the beloved's kiss -- The muse as temptress and redemptress : Sibelius's early symphonic narratives -- Mahler's fifth and sixth symphonies : idyllic fantasies, the sublime, formal mastery, and processes of mourning and reparation -- 'She dies' : trauma and erotic elegy in Bartók's pre-First World War music -- Names, chords, and the 'pale princess' in Debussy's musical language of love -- Poulenc's erotics of humour, melancholy, abjection, and redemption -- Names, chords and Lulu's portrait as muse -- Fetishistic 'inventions on a chord' : Szymanowski, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Weill, and Poulenc