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Richard Strauss Online Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2024-04-17 David Larkin
In an era when historical statues can be toppled and reputations smashed, critical editions remain one of the more durable monuments to the significance of a composer. Initiated by the nineteenth-century Bach-Gesellschaft and Händel-Gesellschaft editions, the practice of trying to produce a ‘correct’ text of the complete musical works of a single composer reached its apogee in the decades after World
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Nineteenth-Century Women in Music: MuGI, Sophie Drinker, Art Song Augmented and BID Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Chanda VanderHart
This article focuses on four digital resources for researching nineteenth-century women in music. Two are over two decades old and hail from the German-speaking world: Musik(vermittlung) und Gender(forschung) im Internet (MuGI) and the Sophie Drinker Institut online lexicon. The remaining pair are emerging digital resources based in the United States: Art Song Augmented and the Boulanger Initiative
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Letting the Lark Ascend: Vaughan Williams's ‘Most Popular Work’ and the Limits of Revisionism Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Ryan Ross
Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending is a perennial favourite in the British classical music radio station Classic FM's ‘Hall of Fame’ poll. In spite of its apparent popularity, however, the work sits uncomfortably with the way revisionist critics and scholars have wanted to portray the composer. As an escapist piece of English musical pastoralism, The Lark undermines their preferred view of
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Delphine von Schauroth, Corinna-Sister Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Amanda Lalonde
Despite her current marginal position, the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Delphine von Schauroth (1813–1887) once ranked among the most prominent virtuosos of the nineteenth century and had connections with Fanny Hensel, Ferdinand Hiller, Josephine Lang, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and others. Drawing on large body of music criticism, as well as compositions, letters, images
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From Musical Writings To Writing Music: Book-Writing Leading to Music School in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Anirban Bhattacharyya
Print created the urge to innovate new modalities of musical knowledge production and dissemination in nineteenth-century Bengal. Publication of music books made the bifurcation between music theory and practice clearer, but only as a textual category. As the literature suggests, these were two categories for organizing musical knowledge, intimately entwined, where one produces the other and also doesn't
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Digitized Publications of Spirituals from the Nineteenth Century Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Chris Fenner
Compilers and editors of hymnals and scholars of hymnology have often lacked suitable tools for identifying the earliest sources of spirituals, or even key sources that serve as models for later arrangements. In the twenty-first century, the development of internet-based repositories of digital books has enabled the ability to search for publications of spirituals using strings of lyrics or keywords
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Moniuszko and the Revival of the Noble Traditions: The Countess and The Haunted Manor Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Anne Swartz
The two recently recorded CD sets of Hrabina (The Countess) and Straszny dwór (The Haunted Manor) in complete concert versions with eighteenth-century instruments add enormously to the Polish operatic repertoire in the nineteenth century, and offer a fresh listening experience for those who have long wished for first-rate recordings of lesser-known, yet brilliantly executed, works of the hitherto neglected
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Félicien David's Grand Opera Herculanum (1859): Rome, Early Christianity, Multiple Exoticisms, Great Tunes – and Satan Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Ralph P. Locke
The longstanding practice of building opera librettos on stories from classical antiquity (especially Greece and Rome, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, Persia and Babylonia) waned in the early 1800s, as impresarios began to favour plots with more obvious current-day resonance (though sometimes set a few centuries in the past, to skirt objections from government censors and, in some lands, church authorities)
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Digital Sources for Nineteenth Century Music in Portugal: ‘A Long Way to Run’ Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Luísa Cymbron, Joana Peliz
Discussing music in Portugal in the nineteenth century, and the digital resources that the country makes available for musicological research on this historical period, requires, first of all, a clarification about the chronological boundaries that limit this temporal unit. One can naturally understand that the periodization to be adopted should be the most obvious, that is, the one that determines
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Phryné as opéra comique: Saint-Saëns contra Offenbach Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Steven Huebner
This study of Camille Saint-Saëns's opéra comique Phryné (1893), representing the famous Greek courtesan in the title role, outlines how the composer made the case for the continued viability of the opéra comique genre in a context where lighter opérettes by Jacques Offenbach on classical subjects were much celebrated on French stages. Saint-Saëns's efforts are seen through both his dislike of Offenbach's
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The Memory Man: Jacques Offenbach, Le Bonhomme Jadis and the Origin of an air connu Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-06-02 Richard Sherr
This article is in essence a study of intertextuality in two musico-dramatic genres in Paris of the 1850s: the comédie-vaudeville and straight plays with incidental music. The ‘texts’ that are considered here are interpolated songs in the comédie-vaudeville and purely instrumental interpolations in plays. Their intertextuality depends on the age-old process of contrafactum. Yet a problem arises when
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Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Joe Davies, Nicole Grimes
In the course of the last two hundred years, different facets of Clara Schumann's artistic, creative and performative persona have been highlighted and different narratives have been produced. As the articles to follow demonstrate, these facets include Clara Schumann as a performer, an improviser, a virtuoso, a priestess, a prophetess, a celebrity, a composer and a curator of flowers and photographs
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The Technological Priestess: The Piano Recital, Photography, and Clara Schumann Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-05-02 April L. Prince
Musicologists often consider Clara Schumann to be one of the most influential figures in the establishment of the solo piano recital – a musical experience that encouraged the dominance of the serious music aesthetic. Schumann's connection to this ideal is perhaps most evident in her enshrinement as the priestess, a nineteenth-century title that honoured the interpretive power of her virtuosic performances
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The Socio-Political Faces of Clara Schumann on German Film Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Nicole Grimes
Filmic portrayals of Clara Schumann from World War II to the present provide a fascinating insight into changing conceptions of her professional and domestic roles. Just as fictional reshapings of her biography from the late-nineteenth century to the present can be understood to relate to changing social and political contexts, filmic portrayals of this great musical figure over the past 80 years speak
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The Emergence of the Romanian National School of Composition in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Between the Western Canon and the Resources of the Local Music Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Theodor Constantiniu
This article aims to explain the rise of Western art forms in the musical creation of the Romanian Principalities in the first half of the nineteenth century, as dictated by a particular European political and economic dynamic. I analyse the spread of Western music – usually described as a consequence of the gradual modernization of Romanian society – in terms of the power relations between the European
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Speech and Silence: Encountering Flowers in the Lieder of Clara Schumann Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Christopher Parton
Around a third of Clara Schumann's vocal compositions include references to flowers, whether as passing metaphors or as the principal addressee of her chosen text. At first glance this may seem unremarkable given the central place flowers held in the symbology of Romantic literature. But the survival of documents such as the Blumenbuch für Robert (1854–56), in which she collected flowers from her travels
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Creativity, Performance and Problems of Authorship: Clara Schumann's Cadenzas for Mozart's D minor Concerto, K466 Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Christian Thomas Leitmeir
In memoriam Manfred Hermann Schmid (1947–2021), Mozartian extraordinaire The cadenzas to the Piano concerto in D minor, K466 that Clara Schumann published for the Mozart centenary year raise intriguing questions about authorship: Upon correcting the proofs, she identified an uncanny overlap with a cadenza by Brahms. Following an ambivalent response from the latter, she went on publishing the work under
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Recurring Hauntings and Trauma in Schubert's ‘Unfinished’ Symphony Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Sio Pan Leong
Schubert's interest in Gothicism is explored in numerous songs written between the 1810s and early 1820s and, in recent years, has served as an aesthetic agenda that some scholars have applied to his instrumental music. One notable exception is the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (D. 759, 1822), a work whose thematic presentation and form have been frequently related to states of terror and horror, but rarely
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Giuseppe Verdi's Jérusalem between Adaptation and Self-Borrowing Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Francesco Izzo
Giuseppe Verdi's first French opera, Jérusalem (1847), has often been described as a French version of his fourth opera, I lombardi alla prima crociata (1843). It is hardly a straightforward translation, however; the process of adapting the source to the French stage involved substantial rewriting of the libretto, thoroughly recasting the storyline and therefore requiring numerous changes in the music
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Musical Self-Borrowing in Ottocento Opera and the Composer's Toolbox Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Self-borrowing was a common practice in primo ottocento opera. Even though commentators of the era could find it somewhat troublesome, composers indulged in the practice. Drawing on existing scholarship, and reflecting on the work of my co-contributors to this journal issue, I ponder a few sundry notions about the procedure and its context, addressing theoretical, historical and practical perspectives
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Rossini's Self-Borrowings as a Stylistic Weapon Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Daniele Carnini
Between 1812 and 1816 Rossini took Italian stages by storm and performances cycles of his operas soared in an unprecedented way. The present essay investigates the fundamental role played by self-borrowing in this achievement. As it will be preliminarily clarified, at least for Rossini, self-borrowing does not represent a sub-category of borrowing (i.e. from others: he seldom resorted to other composers’
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The Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini and Self-Borrowing Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Andrea Malnati
Self-borrowing and Rossini: music theatre scholars are well acquainted with this topic. Many publications have been dedicated to it, most of which concentrate on compositional-analytic aspects, the artistic and communicational nature of self-borrowing and its reception in nineteenth-century periodicals. At present, however, no study has attempted to question the relation between Rossini's self-borrowings
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Donizetti's Self-Borrowings as an Artistic Practice Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Candida Billie Mantica
Gaetano Donizetti's versatile production unfolded over three decades (1818–43) and was staged in the foremost Italian and European theatres. In this article I question his self-borrowing as a chiefly economic practice, offering novel keys to reading his re-use of existing materials. In the introductory section, I offer a preliminary discussion of the coeval discourse on Donizetti's self-imitation as
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L'art de la flûte française Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2023-01-09 James William Sobaskie
Some albums entail more than meets the ear. In the Age of Ravel and In the Age of Debussy surround representative works of Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) and Claude Debussy (1862–1918) with contextualizing selections from contemporaries. Compellingly rendered by Ransom Wilson and François Dumont, these discs document six decades of innovation. They also illuminate intriguing connections as well as fascinating
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Salons in Belgrade in the Nineteenth Century: The Coexistence of Different Cultural Models Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-12-09 Marijana Kokanović Marković
The aim of this study is to describe the emergence of court and bourgeois salons in the nineteenth-century Principality of Serbia, in the context of the socio-historical circumstances and geopolitical background. A selection of examples of salon gatherings organized in Belgrade from the 1830s to the 1870s show the emergence of a new cultural identity through the coexistence and merging of different
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Digital Sources for Nineteenth Century Music in Spain: The Digitization Project of the National Library in Context Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-09-26 Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco, Gorka Rubiales Zabarte
The National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) is the head of the Spanish library system. It holds all books published in Spain, and also several collections of different types, including the Music and Audiovisuals Department's sound recordings and sheet music. Its Department of Bibliographic Control of Periodicals catalogues both newspapers and magazines. In addition, the BNE offers
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Music-Making as Witness in the Mexican–American War: Testimony, Embodiment and Trauma Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-09-26 Elizabeth Morgan
During the two years of the Mexican–American War (1846–48) and in its immediate aftermath, American composers and publishers produced numerous pieces on topics related to the conflict. Many of these were written for solo piano or voice with keyboard accompaniment and marketed as popular entertainment to amateur musicians performing in the home. This repertoire comprises lament songs, battle pieces
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Lysistrata in Kleindeutschland: The German-American Reception of Schubert's Die Verschworenen (D. 787) Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-09-08 Evan A. MacCarthy
Franz Schubert's final attempt at a Singspiel was Die Verschworenen (The Conspirators, D. 787), a loose adaptation of three comedies by Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae (Assemblywomen) and Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria). Composed in 1823, but not premiered until 1861 (in Vienna), the work was successfully revived for its United States premiere 18 months later, in Hoboken, New
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Under Cover in Babylon: Rossini's Cyrus the Great for the Lenten Season Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Robert C. Ketterer
Rossini's Ciro in Babilonia, ossia, La caduta di Baldassare (Cyrus in Babylon, or, The Fall of Belshazzar) was performed during Lent in 1812 at Ferrara's Teatro Comunale. This study examines how the opera's librettist Francesco Aventi synthesized disparate sources that included the Greek historian Herodotus and the Biblical prophets, ancient and early modern prose treatises on the Persian king Cyrus
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Data Scraping YouTube for the Study of Lieder Reception Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Rachel E. Scott
A growing body of literature has shifted aesthetic attention from composition to performance, or the performing activity, and asserts that the act of performance creates meaning.1 Scholars have emphasized differences between the passive consumption and active making of – or even listening to – music.2 As I sought to understand the impact of performance on Alma Mahler's legacy, I identified the need
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John Field's Russian Landscape and the Early Nineteenth-Century Piano Nocturne Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-07-28 Katelyn Clark
This article examines the creation and early dissemination of John Field's nocturnes, tracing this œuvre through initial publications in St Petersburg by Dalmas (1812; H24–25) to the posthumous collected editions by Schuberth and Liszt first released in the 1850s. Inspired by discourse on music and environment, I take the peculiar qualities of Russian night landscapes as a key factor in understanding
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Navigating the Local Elites: Travelling Musicians and their Encounters with the Russian Court and Aristocracy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-07-28 Rutger Helmers
This article studies the interactions of travelling musicians with the Russian court and aristocracy from the 1830s to the 1870s. Drawing on a broad corpus of memoirs, travel reports and personal documents of musicians who visited St Petersburg and Moscow in the course of their careers, it discusses the courtly dimensions of the Italian Opera; the role of the aristocracy and court in the organization
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International Networking in Russian Music Theatre around 1800: Sheremetev, Yusupov and Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Anna Giust
This article investigates the role played by aristocrats in the exchange of repertoire and musical personnel between Russia and Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It discusses the involvement of three significant figures in the political and cultural milieus of the Russian Empire: Count Nikolay Petrovich Sheremetev (1751–1809), Prince Nikolay Borisovich Yusupov (1750–1831)
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Tsarist Russia and the Musical World Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-07-20 Tamsin Alexander, Rutger Helmers
The articles in this issue address and illustrate elements that are essential for furthering the current understanding of Russia's embeddedness in the international musical culture of the long nineteenth century: the exchange of musicians and repertoires; the social and political conditions in which these exchanges took place; the range of mediators, from aristocratic patrons to musical professionals;
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Cosmopolitan Connections: Yevgeny Onegin as realist drame lyrique in Nice Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Tamsin Alexander
In the build-up to the French premiere of Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin in Nice in 1895, critics, speakers and writers on music were declaring the opera a masterpiece of psychological realism. Such a reading seems to resonate more with recent assessments of the opera; but in 1890s France, a combination of interest in the Russian realist novel and new trends in realist opera had led critics to make the
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Songs of Famine and War: Irish Famine Memory in the Music of the US Civil War Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-05-13 Sarah Gerk
This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000
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Theorizing Trauma and Music in the Long Nineteenth Century Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-04-26 Michelle Meinhart, Jillian C. Rogers
Investigations of how people have used music to represent, perform, enact and cope with trauma have proliferated in the last decade, although these have often focused on post-World War II musicians and musical phenomena. This work has engaged various methodologies and drawn on myriad bodies of trauma theory in order to better understand the relationships between music and trauma for Holocaust survivors
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Rethinking Salon Music: Case-Studies in Analysis Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-04-07 Anja Bunzel,Susan Wollenberg
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‘The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-04-06 Erin Johnson-Williams
Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to
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Ohé! les p'tits agneaux!: A Parisian revue de fin d'année for 1857, edited by Richard Sherr. Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 82–83 (Middleton, WI: A-R editions, 2021). Introductory Materials and Act 1. clix + 205pp. $450. Act 2, Act 3, Critical Report, and Appendices. viii + 207pp. $450. Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-04-05 Callum Blackmore
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Music and Modernity in the Colonial City: A Biography of Melbourne's Marshall-Hall Orchestra (1892–1912) Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Suzanne Robinson
The Centennial International Exhibition held in Melbourne in 1888 showcased the city's exceptional wealth and cultural aspirations. As part of the exhibition, the visiting English conductor Frederic Hymen Cowen presented 263 orchestral concerts, cultivating a taste for classical music that would sustain a further orchestra, conducted by the English composer G.W.L. Marshall-Hall, that presented several
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Longing for the Tonic in Robert Schumann's ‘Meine Rose’ Op. 90 No. 2 and Fantasiestück Op. 73 No. 1 Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Lauri Suurpää
This article studies two late works by Schumann: the Lied ‘Meine Rose’, Op. 90 No. 2 (1850), and the Fantasiestück, Op. 73 No. 1, for clarinet and piano (1849). It analyses the works in the light of nineteenth-century developments in approaches to the treatment of tonality. Both ‘Meine Rose’ and the Fantasiestück are miniatures and can thus be linked with music-making in private salons. The choice
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Letting the Music ‘Speak For Itself’? Dvořák as Strategist Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-03-07 Eva Branda
‘I only write music and let it speak for itself’ – such was Antonín Dvořák's attitude, according to Josef Kovařík, the composer's personal secretary in New York. Indeed, throughout his career, Dvořák seemed reluctant to share his views publicly. He did not contribute articles to Czech periodicals, his acquaintances were well aware of his dread of making public appearances and speeches, and contemporary
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Wagner's Shakespeare: Das Liebesverbot, the Problem Comedy and the Carnivalesque Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-03-07 Justin Mueller
This paper explores Wagner's early comedic opera, Das Liebesverbot. Though his ‘mature comedy’ Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been the focus of much scholarly attention, the composer's first and only other foray into the genre has been much less studied and often outright dismissed. While contemporary scholars have increasingly looked to Wagner's pre-Dutchman operas, they often read them purely
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Modalities of Assimilation: Subcultural Currents in Felix Mendelssohn's Lieder Ohne Worte – ERRATUM Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Dan Deutsch
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Nicholas Temperley, Edward Loder, and Retrospect Opera's Raymond and Agnes Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Justin Vickers
In memory of Nicholas Temperley
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Historiographical Reflections on the Beethoven Year 250 Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Rose Mauro
For a certain subset of eminent Beethoven scholars, the celebration of Beethoven's 250th birthday in 2020 represented a challenge. In taking up the opportunity to communicate with a wider population of educated music lovers, the standard vehicle, a Beethoven biography, was off the table for them – because they had already written one. In the three books reviewed here, each author responds to this dilemma
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The Boatswain's Mate, music and libretto by Ethel Smyth. Edition by Valerie Langfield Lontano Ensemble, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez Nadine Benjamin, sop; Edward Lee, ten; Jeremy Huw Williams, bar; Simon Wilding, bass; Ted Schmitz, ten; Rebecca Louise Dale, mezzo-sop; Mark Nathan, bar Retrospect Opera RO001, 2016 (2 CDs: 73 minutes, 74 minutes). - Pickwick, music by Edward Solomon and libretto Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-14 William A. Everett
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Stylistic Duality in Gabriel Fauré's Music for Pauline Viardot's Salon Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-14 James William Sobaskie
When Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) became a ‘regular’ at the Parisian salon of opera legend Pauline Viardot in 1871, he encountered businessmen and politicians in addition to aristocrats and socialites, plus artists and authors as well as amateur musicians and professional peers. Encouraged by Madame Viardot and inspired by her ‘artistic salon’, Fauré produced sophisticated works with stylistic duality:
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‘Wanted – An Opera’ Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-14 Paul Rodmell
The title of John Fuller Maitland's article ‘Wanted – An Opera’, in which he argued for the establishment in Britain of a state-supported national opera house, could almost be read as a statement of desire for an operatic work of British origin itself. The perception that composers produced little opera of value in the period of the so-called ‘British Music Renaissance’ has become a trope, despite
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Retrospect Opera: Reviving Britain's Operatic Past Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-10 Christina Fuhrmann
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The Tambourine, Joseph Dale's Grand Sonata and Its Role in the Appearance of Women Musicians in the Salon Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-07 Sam Girling
By the turn of the nineteenth century composers such as Daniel Steibelt and Muzio Clementi were writing keyboard pieces with tambourine (and, occasionally, triangle) parts that were clearly intended for private salon performances by girls and young women. These works were introduced to public and private European salons during the early nineteenth century. Steibelt performed such pieces, typically
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‘Unearthly Music’, ‘Howling Idiots’, and ‘Orgies of Amusement’: The Soundscapes of Shell Shock at Edinburgh's Craiglockhart War Hospital, 1917–18 Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-07 Michelle Meinhart
Military hospitals in Britain during the First World War cultivated a variety of activities that promoted healing for soldiers, of which music was central. This music was documented by soldiers in hospital-sponsored magazines such as The Hydra at Craiglockhart, an officers’ hospital in Edinburgh that specialized in treatment of shell shock. There, this article argues, music and sound were associated
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Sonic Scars in Urban Space: Trauma and the Parisian Soundscape during l'année terrible Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-04 Erin Brooks
In the “terrible year” of 1870–71 – spanning the Franco-Prussian War through the Commune – Parisians looked on with horror at the nightmarish transformation of their Ville Lumière. They not only watched, they listened – garnering crucial information but also failing to shut out belliphonic sounds that rendered them sleepless, sick or even unable to function. In a flood of lectures and treatises, a
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Retrospect Opera: Reviving a Forgotten Mainstream Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-02-02 James Brooks Kuykendall
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Musical ‘Magic Words’: Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-01-27 Jillian C. Rogers
Upon hearing Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1918 Jean Roger-Ducasse was disturbed by the incongruity between each movement's music and its dedication to a fallen soldier. Similarly, historians have noted the ‘strangeness’ of Frontispiece and La Valse, which Ravel wrote after his war service and his mother's death in 1917. When taken together, these instances of ‘strange’ music – written during an
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Recontextualizing Brahms's Handel Variations, Op. 24 through Robert Volkmann and Emanuel Moór Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2022-01-19 Joanna Chang
Brahms's Handel Variations, Op. 24 (1861) stands out for its direct quotation of the Baroque master's Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B-flat (HWV434), as well as its treatment of the theme in ‘old forms’. While the composer's knowledge of antiquated forms finds expression through canonic treatment, a siciliano, musette and fugal finale, the 25 variations written in the strict Baroque variation style further
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To a Camia: Piano Music from Romantic Manila Sally Pinkas, piano MSR Classics MS 1645, 2019 (1 CD: 76 minutes) $12.95 Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Jacquelyn Sholes
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From Extraordinary Success to No Considerable Results: Victorian Music Entrepreneurialism and the Crystal Palace Brass Band Competition 1860–1863 Nineteenth-Century Music Review Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Philip Boardman
The July 1860 Crystal Palace Brass Band contest brought brass bands out of their heartlands to London in unprecedented numbers, The Times (12 July 1860, 9), lauding its success as ‘quite extraordinary’. This landmark event was repeated in three successive years, but in 1863 it was abruptly terminated, and no cogent explanation has been established for its failure. The entrepreneur organizing the contests