Showing papers in "Nineteenth-century music review in 2021"

The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music: An Introductory Overview

Abstract: The digital humanities have grown to encompass multiple disciplines; they embrace everything from online resources that have the potential to democratize scholarship to computational approaches that allow a higher order analysis of large datasets. That the digital humanities has significantly influenced musicology is evidenced by the number of leading journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Notes, Journal of the Society of American Music and Nineteenth Century Music Review, that regularly review digital resources and by the increasing use of the tag ‘digital musicology’. This special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review (NCMR) and this introduction reflect a broad definition of the digital humanities; they embrace digital archives, born-digital projects, and studies employing computational methodologies and tools.

Digital Humanities and Nineteenth Century Music: Some Perspectives and Examples from Latin America

Abstract: The advent of digital resources, the Internet, and an interconnected globe has deeply affected the humanities and its research. Music scholars in Latin America, like everywhere else, have observed this explosion of digital information sharing, but not everyone has been able to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by this technology. On the one hand, advantages of digitization are slowly becoming recognized as tools to fight the enormous size of the region (Latin America), especially through technology's ability to easily and promptly disperse sources across great distances. In addition, digitization acts as an aid in countering the endemic lack of economic resources, and more broadly offers a path towards making the academic world a more connected and equal place. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the digital revolution has not reached people across the globe equally. Digital segregation is a problem that deeply impacts numerous nations around world; and for Latin America and the Caribbean, it has meant a slower pace of incorporation into the digital era. Key databases like JSTOR and the various READEX products are still largely unavailable to scholars in Latin America, and, given the steep price of such resources, the fight for a world of open-source information is becoming increasingly political.

Saint-Saëns and Sophocles

Abstract: Saint-Saëns's incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone (Comédie-Française, 1893, trans. Meurice and Vacquerie) gives witness both to his engagement with culture classique and an experimental orientation in the context of fin-de-siècle music theatre. This essay situates Saint-Saëns's highly idiosyncratic score within the frame of late nineteenth-century research into ancient Greek music by François-Auguste Gevaert and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray. It documents how Saint-Saëns aimed to participate in the creation of an authentic experience of ancient Greek theatre, one enhanced by the initiative of the Comédie-Française to stage its production at the open air Théâtre d'Orange in southern France. The article also shows the limitations of authenticity resulting from the nature of the translation as well as from Saint-Saëns's own compositional instincts.

The French School of Violin Playing between Revolution and Reaction: A Comparison of the Treatises of 1803 and 1834 by Pierre Baillot

Abstract: Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) was a central figure in the development of the early nineteenth-century French School of violin playing. This school was itself the source of the twentieth-century Russian and American schools, and all the great players of the modern era can trace their lineage back to Baillot and his colleagues. The French School was the first to systematize violin teaching within an institutional framework with normative aspirations. Its history is bound up with that of the Paris Conservatoire, established in 1795. Work by French scholars of the Conservatoire and its teaching has tended to assert a continuity of ideals and aesthetics across time, even an essential Frenchness, and work by English-language scholars has been more concerned with the influence of the School on developments in playing styles and composition than on the evolution of attitudes to music teaching. This analysis of the language of the two founding pedagogical texts reveals a contested cultural landscape, and explores how a revolutionary institution with lofty principles could be overtaken by cultural change in a few short decades. It finishes by questioning the traditional elision of the French and Franco-Belgian schools, and suggests that Brussels, rather than constituting a mere branch of the Paris school, rescued it from premature irrelevance.

The Harp, the Lied and Ossianic Narratives in Massenet's Werther

Abstract: The climactic scene in Massenet's opera Werther – as in Goethe's novella – occurs when Werther reads a poem by Ossian. The air resembles a German lied, with a rippling harp accompaniment that may be a reference to other Ossianic settings. Steven Huebner has suggested that the lied reference is meant to create a sense of German local colour in the opera. However, little work has been done to explain why Massenet would have chosen to set an Ossianic text in the style of a German lied. The current article addresses this question by considering the references to specific German lieder by Schumann and Schubert heard by early critics in the Ossian reading. The subsequent discussion explores the French reception of German lieder and Massenet's personal knowledge of Schubert and Schumann's music. These references to Schumann, Schubert and Ossian expose a complex set of intertextual relationships between Massenet's opera and other Ossianic music, the characters in Massenet's opera and their milieu, and Massenet's depiction of German music and culture. Despite Huebner's well-chosen criticisms of Massenet's depiction of the German setting, I argue that the lied and its harp accompaniment are dramatically meaningful gestures that highlight Werther's Ossianic character arc throughout the opera, hinting at his sentimentality, weakness, and non-normative masculinity in relation to nineteenth-century gender stereotypes. This interpretation, following Massenet's own account of the opera's genesis, prioritizes the Ossian reading as the crux of the drama. The resulting analysis demonstrates the audible influence of Schumann and Schubert on Werther, and Massenet's musical approach to the Ossianic tropes of nature, decay and fate.

Printing Piano Pedagogy: Experimental Psychology and Marie Jaëll's Theory of Touch

Abstract: In her 1899 pedagogy manual Touch: Piano Instruction on the Basis of Physiology, the composer and pianist Marie Jaëll (1846–1925) describes pianistic touch as a ‘polyphony of sensations’, a synthesis of vibrations that is both physical and psychical. This article examines Jaëll's recourse to nineteenth-century experimental science, specifically experimental psychology, to develop a theory of pianistic touch. Touch, Jaëll contends, necessitates a pianist's attention to haptic and aural impulses in an elusive, ‘simultaneous and successive’ process that collates the pianist's tangible sensation of the keyboard and the ineffable mental impressions conjured by sound. This braided sense of musical touch can be cultivated in performers and transmitted to listeners. Jaëll makes this assertion using a novel kind of visual evidence: fingerprints. Fingerprinting her students before and after the execution of selected piano études and treating the prints as diagnostic documents, Jaëll posits that isolating and attending to minute variations in touch is akin to attuning to the aesthetic content of a musical work. Jaëll crystallized her methodology in a vibrant collaboration with Charles Féré (1852–1907), a criminologist and one-time student of Jean-Martin Charcot. More broadly, Jaëll's treatise is a striking exponent of the era's ‘graphical method’, pioneered by Étienne-Jules Marey, which sought to supplant scientific rhetoric with ‘objective’ truth, depicted as machine-generated wave forms. The ethos that motivated the creation of such representations, propagated by an array of influential scientists including Ernst Heinrich Weber and Hermann von Helmholtz, underscores a tendency to intertwine physiology and psychology in an enterprise that quantified sensation as a fact of mechanistic causes. Jaëll's emphasis on attention – how thought modifies touch and sound – sets her theory apart from experimental psychology's more determinist premises. In Jaëll's experimental apparatus, fingerprints are not objective; rather, they index the variable haptic and sonic sensations experienced by the pianist. As a nascent theory of embodied cognition, Jaëll's pedagogy bespeaks a fluid relationship between mind and body at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Opera as a Moral Vehicle: Situating Bellini's Norma in the Political Complexities of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires

Abstract: On 25May 1849Vincenzo Bellini’s operaNormawas premiered at the Teatro de la Victoria in BuenosAires. It was performed four years before the downfall of JuanManuel deRosas, Governor of Buenos Aires for more than 20 years, in what it has been considered in Argentine historiography as a ‘terror regime’. The success of the opera combined with the political situation enables the understanding ofNorma in political terms. A year prior to the premiere of the opera, the story of the elopement of a young, aristocratic, federal girl, Camila O’Gorman with the priest Uladislao Gutiérrez, had shocked local society. It was followed by another shocking event when, once the couple was found, Rosas decided to have them executed. I argue that the inadvertent similarity between the plot of Norma and the events in relation to Camila O’Gorman’s death led to possible interpretations of the opera performance as a justification of Rosas’s decision to execute Camila and her lover, whilst also providing a moral lesson to young aristocratic women. In this article, I therefore explore the plausible political overtones hidden in the performance ofNorma by comparing librettos and analysing the opera’s reception between 1849 and 1851 in the periodicals of the time. In this way, I cast light on a heretofore overlooked, but undeniably rich, period of operatic life in Buenos Aires.

Violin effects from the early nineteenth century: The extended techniques of Pierre Baillot

Abstract: Pierre Baillot (1771–1842), an eminent French violinist and pedagogue of the early nineteenth century, offers a surprisingly modern role model to musicians in today's fast-changing world of music. First, Baillot's career foreshadows the resilience and versatility required of entrepreneurial musicians today. Baillot lived in turbulent times through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic years, and restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. His life spanned the transition from Classical to Romantic eras of music and he combined a virtuoso performance career with that of teacher, composer, concert entrepreneur, exponent of new music and violin textbook author. Second, as in the case of contemporary creative performers, Baillot sought to extend his art by experimenting with ways to extend the range and expressiveness of the violin. This essay discusses Baillot's embrace of old and new approaches to violin music and practice. Drawing on his textbook, L'Art du Violon (1834), and research literature on music-making of the era, this essay analyses three of Baillot's innovative approaches: harmonic preluding as an improvisation method, his four-string Adagio composition using an extended bowing technique, and his empirical exploration of acoustically enhanced Tartini tones. While Baillot regarded the art of harmonic preluding, for example, as a link to improvisational traditions, he also saw it as integral to creative development and to technical mastery of harmony, the latter sometimes lacking in violinists more accustomed to playing the melodic line. Even today we find Baillot's extended violin techniques surprising.

Gottschalk and Cuba - Antonio Iturrioz pf Steinway & Sons 30102, 2018 (1 CD: 74 minutes)

Abstract: In the liner notes to Gottschalk and Cuba, pianist Antonio Iturrioz remarks that, because of the six years Louis Moreau Gottschalk spent in Cuba and his facility with composing music in the Cuban musical idiom, ‘it might be appropriate to speak of him as a “Cuban composer”’. The synthesis of musical styles in so many of Gottschalk’s compositions, including those Latin American-inspired works but also the rest of his oeuvre, have marked him as a central figure in the history of American music. Iturrioz comes to Gottschalk’s works from a different angle than most performers of his music: as a native Cuban himself. This perspective works to shape an album that takes the music of Gottschalk as both a starting and ending place, both inspiring and inspired by the music of Cuban composers, who are also represented on the recording. The chronological program spans over 100 years of music from the island, some of it recorded here for the first time. Iturrioz’s extensive career has included an extended foray into piano music for the left hand, while he recovered from an injury to his right. He released two documentary films on the repertoire, The Art of the Left Hand and The Buddha of the Piano, the latter focused on Leopold Godowsky. Since his return to two-handed music, Iturrioz has focused on exploring the music of his homeland and transcribing a one-piano version of Gottschalk’s first symphony, La nuit des tropiques, featured here as the first piece on the recording. While Gottschalk’s journal-cum-publication Notes of a Pianist records no commentary about the composition or performances of the work, he likely worked on it during his 1860 stay at Caimito, a remote region in the Cuban interior where composed several works during a two-month respite from his otherwise frantic touring schedule. In the liner notes, Gottschalk biographer S. Frederick Starr states: ‘Gottschalk originally composed this work for piano. In this recording, we hear it for the first time in the original one-piano version.’ Starr is referringmore to the original circumstances of composition, which would have been at a piano, than to any known or intended performances of the work for solo piano. There is no evidence of any manuscripts for one piano in Gottschalk’s hand, and a fragmentary one-piano version by the Portuguese composer-pianist Artur Napoleão dos Santos may have dated from their time together in Rio de Janeiro during the years before Gottschalk’s death in 1869, much later than theHavana orchestral performances of the symphony. The two-piano transcription by Nicolás Ruiz Espadero, currently housed at the New York Public Library, has no annotations in Gottschalk’s hand, and may have been created to increase the work’s posthumous popularity and circulation. There is no existing evidence that Gottschalk ever envisioned the piece being publicly performed on piano, solo or otherwise. Therefore, Iturrioz’s transcription should be heard more as a new interpretation

‘Distant Reading’ in French Music Criticism

Abstract: This article offers a series of experiments exploring the potential for ‘distant reading’ in French music criticism. ‘Distant reading’, a term first coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti, refers to quantitative approaches that allow for new insights into a large corpus of texts by aggregating data. While the main corpus employed here is the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1831–1877), I also use secondary corpora of reviews of Félicien David's Herculanum in 1859, Berlioz's reviews of Gluck and Beethoven in the Journal des débats and reviews that mention Gabriel Fauré in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. My experiments employ a text analysis tool named Voyant, built by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, thereby also offering a basic introduction to the range of visualizations employed in distant reading. My experiments focus on areas in which quantitative methods are particularly well suited to generating new knowledge: corpus-wide visualizations and queries, moving beyond traditional text searching, investigations of music critics’ authorial styles and detecting sentiment in reviews, and finally, to geographies of music criticism.

Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music

Abstract: Music criticism research is burgeoning. For instance, Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism, a collection edited by Teresa Cascudo and published in 2017, presents 22 essays in four languages. The Journal of Music Criticism, also launched in 2017, provides even more evidence of sustained and widespread interest. The Cambridge History of Music Criticism (2019), edited by Christopher Dingle, profiles its subject from the Middle Ages to the present. And Nineteenth-Century Music

The Iowa Bird That Inspired Antonín Dvořák's American String Quartet in 1893: Controversy over the Species’ Identity and Why It Matters

Abstract: Antonín Dvořák composed the String Quartet in F major (op. 96, the ‘American’) in June 1893 while visiting the town of Spillville, Iowa, USA. Based on accounts from Dvořák's secretary Josef Kovařík, portions of the quartet's Scherzo movement were inspired by birdsong Dvořák heard in Spillville. Kovařík's account included both Dvořák's visual description of the bird that inspired him and a transcribed fragment of the birdsong Dvořák reportedly used. In 1954, Clapham identified the bird as a scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea), based mainly on the visual description. This widely accepted identification was questionable because of the poor match of the tanager's song to musical material in the Scherzo. In 2016, Floyd proposed the red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus) as Dvořák's inspiration, based on song rather than appearance. The vireo's song is clearly identifiable in the Scherzo as well in the birdsong fragment recorded by Kovařík. The mismatch between the visual description and the transcribed song fragment could have occurred when Dvořák heard and recorded the persistent singing of a cryptic red-eyed vireo, but misidentified the song's source when he caught sight of a brightly coloured tanager. Correct identification of the birdsong changes the interpretation of the movement. Previously, birdsong has been considered the source of a short secondary motif. But red-eyed vireo songs are highly variable, and a slight variation of Kovařík's song fragment could be the basis of the main theme of the Scherzo. Therefore, Dvořák may have used American birdsong in the movement considerably more than previously appreciated.

Joseph Joachim. Fantasy on Hungarian Themes (1850), Fantasy on Irish [Scottish] Themes (1852) for Violin and Orchestra. Piano Reduction. Edited by Katharina Uhde, arranged by Martin Schelhaas. Urtext ed. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2018. BA 7898–90. ISMN: 9790006566020. 26.95 Euros. $36.75 USD.

Abstract: The first two pieces that Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) composed for solo violin and orchestra were his Fantasy on Hungarian Themes and Fantasy on Irish [Scottish] Themes, completed in 1850 and 1852, respectively. Conceived as vehicles for Joachim’s own career as a violinist, theworkswere designed in particular to appeal to audiences in England, where Joachim spent several summers during this period. As Uhde notes in the introduction to the volume, the fantasies feature many technically challenging elements, including rapid passagework, multiple stops, complex textures and voicing and diverse bow strokes (x). Both pieces employ variation techniqueand featuredistinct sections characterizedbycontrasting tempos, textures and moods (xi). In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the young Joachim was associated with the virtuosic school of Franz Liszt, under whom he served as Concertmaster in Weimar. By 1857, Joachim had moved to Hanover and distanced himself from this aesthetic; Liszt’s style had grown distasteful to him, as he declared openly in a letter to Liszt that year. Although these works were wellreceived, Joachim performed them only a handful of times, between 1850 and 1853, apparently because of his turn away from the Lisztian aesthetic; these two works remained unpublished and widely unknown until now (xi). The two fantasies survive in a single autograph source located in the library of the University of Lodz, bound together with Joachim’s cadenza for the Beethoven Violin Concerto. The history of the autograph prior to its arrival at the Hochschule, as well as the timing and circumstances of that arrival, are unclear. A book plate on the manuscript suggests that the source arrived at the Hochschule sometime between 1918 and 1933. Other available evidence, including an account from Joachim biographer Andreas Moser, who claims to have seen these pieces in autograph, suggests that Joachim had given the scores to a family friend, a Dr Hunyady of Pest in the 1850s. Upon Hunyady’s death in 1865, the works appear to have been returned to Joachim, who then gave them to his student Henri Petri in Berlin in the 1870s; Petri returned them to Joachim’s family following

Digital Editions and the Creative Work of the Performer

Abstract: One of the aims of this article is to clarify and align more closely the respective priorities of researchers and practical musicians in using music notation. To that end, the first part surveys existing digital editions of music both in general and from the standpoints of different types of performer. Consideration is then given to a new ‘digital edition concept’ which might achieve more creative engagement with music on the parts of instrumentalists and singers alike. Two ostensibly conventional editions of nineteenth-century music serve as the basis of case studies that show how the notorious limitations of the printed page might be transcended more effectively and propitiously. The conclusion is that digital editions of music (DEMs) are unlikely to replace printed editions and that wholesale replacement should not be the goal in any case. Instead, in developing future DEMs for performers, the aim should be to take fuller advantage of the affordances of the digital medium so that musicians can engage with and make music all the more creatively. Only by moving conceptually beyond the stasis of ‘the material medium’ and harnessing the dynamic flux of the digital medium can the dynamic flux inherent in music itself best be captured. At the same time, it is important to recognize and respect musicians’ need for a fixed version of the score on given performance occasions, even if it is bound to be superseded thereafter.

Digital Methods for the Study of the Nineteenth-Century Orchestra

Abstract: The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conducting gradually began to supplant other forms of time keeping and instrumental leadership in opera and concert orchestras. Little or no empirical work has attempted to investigate the musical, social and perceptual consequences of this development, largely due to the technical challenges that must be addressed. This article describes the development and implementation of innovative digital methods to provide a detailed and multifaceted picture of a large ensemble in action, investigating the consequences of different distributions of individual musical agency for: 1) musicians’ playing experiences; 2) ensemble coordination and expressive timing; and 3) listeners’ evaluations. These methods include a polling application, implemented on participants’ smartphones, to provide fast-turnaround feedback from orchestral musicians about their experiences of playing under different conditions; and the use of digital methods to analyse acoustical data from the individual instruments of an orchestral string section, to facilitate a quantitative analysis of orchestral togetherness. Analyses of the experiential, quantitative and listener data from a preliminary study with an orchestra of musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, London, are presented, together with a discussion of the insights that these methods provide. The article concludes by considering the prospects of these methods for investigating nineteenth-century rehearsal and performance practices.

The Expression of Self and Grief in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Distant Readings

Abstract: When writing about grief, Peter N. Stearns and Mark Knapp (‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harre and W. Gerrod Parrot (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 138) speculate that ‘[i]n contrast to eighteenth-century songs about death, which were set in the artificial pastoral world of shepherds and written in the third person, Victorian grief songs were personal and immediate’. Inspired by this claim, we investigated the usage of pronouns, as well as topics surrounding grief, in ballads taken from broadsides in the nineteenth century. We found that the use of first-person pronouns increases over the nineteenth century, and that this was not a linear trend; there were sharp increases in the usage of first-person pronouns beginning in 1815, which leveled off in the third quarter of the century. Additionally, we examined the usage of lyrical topics about death, grieving, negatively valenced emotion and sadness, and asked whether such topics correlated with the increased usage of first-person pronouns. We found that there was not a strong correlation with the usage of pronouns and such topics, though there was a small correlation between the usage of such pronouns and sadness and a stronger positive correlation between a focus on the present and positively valenced emotion. These findings suggest that first-person pronouns are not reliable indicators of lyrical topics surrounding grief, or vice-versa. Using personal pronouns as a measure of intimacy, we conclude that songs written in the beginning of the nineteenth century did see a rise in intimacy in song lyrics. However, this increase does not appear to be tied to songs about grief, specifically. Despite the existence of many personal grief songs in the Victorian period, our distant reading reveals linguistic trends and interrelations that challenge the intuition that nineteenth-century grief songs were more personal than earlier ones.

Why Do We Need Another Recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? - Symphony No. 9 Benjamin Zander Discusses Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - Rebecca Evans sop, Patricia Bardon mezzo-sop, Robert Murray ten, Derek Welton bass-bar Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, Stefan Bevier chorus master, Benjamin Zander cond. Brattle Media 610877733781 3 CDs: 58 minutes [music] + 159 minutes [discussion] Notes and discussion in English

Abstract: After more than 150 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, why do we need another? According to Benjamin Zander – who also recorded it with the Boston Philharmonic in 1992 – the answer is that ‘none of the available versions I know actually follow Beethoven’s instructions literally throughout. Neither in the matter of tempo, nor dynamics.... I believe that we are offering, as closely as we are able, Beethoven’s stated intentions.’Accordingly, Zander takes Beethoven’s metronome marks as holy writ, and every section starts exactly at the indicated speed and stays there, with very few departures from the tempo that are not explicitly indicated in the score, and a fairly rigid adherence to the printed dynamics. As a result, and with a few exceptions that will be discussed below, Zander’s recording follows Beethoven’s tempo indications and dynamics to an unprecedented extent. Thismight surprise those familiarwith the recordings of this symphonybyperiod instrument ensembles such as theLondonClassical Players andAnimaEterna, or the 2011 recording by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly, and others that made similar claims about the tempo and often even printed the published metronome marks in the CD booklet. Nevertheless, all of these ensembles

Schumann contra Wagner: Beethoven, the F.A.E. Sonata and ‘Artwork of the Future’

Abstract: For Karol Berger This article begins with an analysis of the ‘F.A.E. Sonata’ (fall 1853), a work for violin and piano composed jointly by Robert Schumann (movements 2 and 4), Albert Dietrich (first movement), and Johannes Brahms, for their returning friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. The title of the work derives from the musical motto that Joachim had chosen as his own, representing the words ‘Frei aber einsam’ (free but alone). The analysis identifies the unifying elements of the movements; allusions play a role, especially regarding Beethoven. The study then proposes that Wagner's 1850 essay ‘The Artwork of the Future’ inspired this collegial effort as a rebuttal to several ideas, suggesting that Joachim took his personal motto as a contradiction of Wagner's statement: ‘The solitary individual is unfree’ (Der Einsame ist unfrei). One of the more intriguing sections for Schumann and his followers was likely the chapter entitled ‘The Artist of the Future’. There he asserts that individuality will never be as consequential as a collective effort, proclaiming that ‘the free artistic community is therefore the basic prerequisite for the artwork itself’. Schumann challenged his devoted disciples to take Wagner at his word and compose something as a collective. The stakes of the dispute between Schumann and Wagner were high: a path into the future that best continued the line connecting both of them to Beethoven. This sonata was composed at the same time as Schumann's article, ‘New Paths’ (Neue Bahnen), which also constitutes a response to Wagner's The Artwork of the Future.

How Reliable Are Nineteenth-Century Reviews of Concerts and Operas?: Félicien David's Le Désert and His Grand Opéra Herculanum

Abstract: The vast quantity of French-language music journalism and reportage in the nineteenth century can tempt us into citing one or another review that reflects our own view of the topic or work. We sometimes state or imply that a review stands for the attitudes and opinions of most musicians and music lovers of the day. The idiosyncratic career of Félicien David was reported with great interest and vivacity by dozens of critics. Selected reviews reveal patterns that apply not just to David's works, but to nineteenth-century music generally. These patterns include: 1) the greater reliability of reviews by critics who were musically trained (e.g., Berlioz, Reyer, Gounod and Saint-Saëns), despite the possibility of bias; 2) critics sometimes conferring with each other before they wrote their review, or echoing each other's written opinions; 3) a willingness on the part of some critics to carry out a near-vendetta against a composer or work, whether for personal reasons (e.g., conflict of interest) or because of a deep-seated intolerance for any aesthetic and musical approaches that were at variance with the critic's own; 4) the sense of a positive mission, in writings by critics who were themselves prominent creative artists (see point 1); and 5) the power of a review to help determine the success or failure of a work, composer, or performer. A recently published letter by Berlioz (translated here for the first time) reveals how conscious this remarkable composer-critic was of his own biases and aesthetic commitments, and how willingly he allowed them to shape his reaction to a new work by a younger, lesser-known composer. The responses of Berlioz and others to two works of David, Le Désert and Herculanum, provide the primary material for discussion. These responses include an insightful and previously undiscussed review (of Herculanum) by Ernest Reyer.

Imagination and Memory: Inter-movement Thematic Recall in Beethoven and Brahms

Abstract: Like several of his predecessors, Brahms reintroduces themes from one movement into a later one in several of his instrumental works. Historical circumstances and changing historical consciousness affected a composer's use of thematic recall. For Beethoven (per Elaine Sisman) recalling an earlier theme provided the creative stimulus to move forward to the end of a piece, in accordance with the linear concept of history that defined Beethoven's Enlightenment world view. Brahms's use of inter-movement thematic recall often expresses a more wistful and melancholy view of the past and focuses on the ability of recall to provide a dramatic narrative. In his earliest use of cyclical return, the Op. 5 Piano Sonata (1853), the Andante second movement is echoed and transformed by the ‘Ruckblick’ fourth movement, as Brahms plays on the poetic inscription of the former movement to raise the specter of lost love and mortality. In a more complex web of thematic recall, the op. 78 Violin Sonata (1878) combines allusions to a pre-existing pair of interrelated songs from his Op. 59 with a newly composed, recurring instrumental theme to create a multi-layered, somber character in the piece. Both of those works draw on an earlier, romantic sense of yearning for return. Near the end of his career, however, the quiet emergence and eventual dissipation of opening material at the close of the Op. 115 Clarinet Quintet (1891) reflects Brahms's awareness of his place at the end of an artistic tradition, and thereby conveys a post-Romantic conception of history.

Anja Bunzel and Natasha Loges, eds, Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019). xviii + 284 pp. $115.00.

Abstract: also contain reflections of considerable interest. In turn, we begin to reflect on the hapax represented by the word ‘autobiography’ in the text of the Mémoires (Chapter IV). Likewise,we are struck by the fact that theword ‘orchestration’ appears only once in the text. Elsewhere, we aremade aware of the literary effect of the poetic implications that the Invocation à la nature provides (the text of which is inserted into the LIV chapter of theMémoires). Bloom showshowBerlioz seems to savour their use, even though hewas critical of this poetic destabilizationwhen he discoveredHernani in 1830. Finally, it must be gratefully acknowledged that the humour of Peter Bloom comes up quite regularly, whether it is to clarify a joke on the violists (p. 683), to point out the quirks of the French language (p. 259), or to be self-deprecating. When in Chapter LI, in the middle of his first trip to Germany, Berlioz cites a letter sent to Mendelssohn, Bloom enriches it with three footnotes (p. 527): ‘With these three little notes at the bottomof the page’, he comments, ‘Berlioz seems tomake fun of scholars who add endless notes of this style. (He’s notwrong!)’As this suggests, with Bloom’s edition we have editorial annotation in perfect harmony with Berlioz’s text. As yet, nothing has been said about the formal perfection of thewhole (the shell on the French word ‘ambiguë’ is the only one evident in this dense volume!), nor the extraordinary Introduction, which is almost a book before the book. Opening with the marine metaphor used by Berlioz to describe his literary enterprise – a long sea voyage – and closing on the famous quote comparing his prose to ‘the gait of a drunkenman’, the volume invites us to conceive of theMémoires as a sort of ‘drunken boat’, if we can evoke here the magnificent poem by Arthur Rimbaud devoted to the visionary force of artistic creation. Above all, it sheds light on the genesis of Berlioz’s story, whose complexity and entanglement of sources are deployed in a didactic way, which leads Bloom, for example, to challenge the thesis that the publication of the Mémoires d’outre-tombe of Chateaubriand would have prompted the writing of Berlioz’s own Mémoires. The Introduction makes it possible to date the writing of each chapter; it traces the destination of the preserved copies of the 1865 edition, sheds light on the immediate reception of the first publication in 1870, establishes a chronology of the main editions and translations of theMémoires, and finally delivers substantial clues to the story of their broad reception. Several tables and a very valuable index finish embedding this Berliozian jewel in a magnificent case.

Steven Huebner and François de Médicis, eds, Debussy's Resonance (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018). xiv + 625 pp. £95.

Abstract: The centenary of Debussy’s death, 2018, was a banner year for the composer, marked by conferences, publications, concerts, and new releases of recordings of his complete works. Debussy’s Resonance, edited by Steven Huebner and François de Médicis, is a worthy contribution to these centenary celebrations and is, indeed, essential reading for those interested in the current state of musicological thought on the composer. The collection brings together many of the foremost figures in Debussy scholarship from the past several decades, highlighting the strides the field has made since the centenary celebration of the composer’s birth in 1962 – foremost among them the work performed thus far on the Œuvres complètes begun in 1982, with 21 volumes of the projected 36 now complete (including the vocal score of Pelléas et Mélisande and all of the piano music); the publication in 2005 of the Correspondance, edited by François Lesure and Denis Herlin, a magisterial collection of over 3,000 letters (mostly written by Debussy) over the course of his lifetime; and a comprehensive dossier de presse from the early reception of Pelléas et Mélisande, edited by Christophe Branger, Sylvie Douche and Herlin. Debussy’s Resonance appropriately reflects on these achievements of the past few decades. The first essay in the volume, ‘Debussy Fifty Years Later: Has the Barrel Run Dry?’ by Richard Langham Smith, takes this retrospective viewpoint very explicitly. Langham Smith lays out a compelling overview of Debussy studies since the 1960s – not as a dry blow-by-blow of biographies and editions, but as a field of endeavour tied to the emergence of a community of scholars, on both sides of the Atlantic, committed to promoting the work of Debussy. Complementing Langham Smith’s account, Roy Howat’s contribution, ‘The Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy Thirty Years On’, discusses the editorial work of the Œuvres complètes, focusing on the volumes of piano music (some of which Howat himself edited). In addition to highlighting the contributions to our knowledge of Debussy’s body of work that the Œuvres complètes has made, Howat offers the reader valuable insights into the editorial decisions that informed the project, including the use of recordings made by Debussy of a number of his

The Flageolet: A Woodwind Instrument that Transcended Social Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract: The flageolet – a woodwind instrument closely akin to the recorder – achieved considerably popularity in nineteenth-century England. It was predominantly an instrument of the amateur musician, and its story becomes a mirror of the musical society in which the instrument flourished. An account of the organology of the flageolet in both its English and French forms, and of its evolution into double, triple and transverse versions, precedes a study of pedagogical material and repertoire. The work of William Bainbridge, who modified the flageolet to simplify its technique and hence enhance its suitability for amateur players, is emphasized, along with his skill as an innovator of complex flageolets. The flageolet attracted a small number of professional exponents who tended to favour the French form of the instrument. The principal focus of the article is an examination of the role of the flageolet within the context of musical praxis in England and its societal implications during the long nineteenth century. After consideration of matters of finance, social class and gender, the article examines the use of the flageolet by amateur and professional musicians, particularly highlighting the importance of the instrument in domestic music-making as well as in amateur public performance. Professional use of the instrument within the context of the concert hall, the theatre, the ballroom and the music hall is explored and examples given of prominent players and ensembles, some of which were composed entirely of female musicians. Final paragraphs note the playing of the flageolet by itinerant and street musicians.

RIPM: A Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1760–1966)

Abstract: RIPM (Le Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale) is widely regarded as the most comprehensive resource offering electronic access to music periodicals from the early Romantic era to the twentieth century. Founded in 1980 by H. Robert Cohen, RIPM is the youngest of the so-called ‘4 R's of International Music Research’; its partner initiatives include RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale), and RIdIM (Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale). Cohen's ambitious project was notably visionary in its use of technology: not only did it use computing from the start (beginning with DOS-based indexing systems), but it was also the first of the 4 R's to explore full text searching. RIPM seeks to address ‘two main problems that have prevented these [historic music] journals from being systematically collected and examined: (1) the limited number of libraries possessing the journals, and (2) the difficulty encountered when one attempts to locate specific information within an available source’. The project has thus focused on collection building, curation, indexing and accessibility. This international cooperative's accomplishments are impressive: as of July 2020, the database contains 527 music periodicals, 430 available in full text complete runs, totalling 996,000 annotated records and 1.47 million full-text pages of music periodicals.

Joe Davies and James William Sobaskie, eds, Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019). xxix + 348 pp. £70.00.

Abstract: intended an orchestral cantata along the lines of Mahler’s Second Symphony. This monograph certainly speaks to the current trend of Brahms-focused scholarship, and it does deepen our understanding of the composer’s intellectual engagements and the rich source history of the choral works at hand. But seen in light of critical approaches in other studies of nineteenth-century music culture− notably those dealingwith opera, gender and social identities, andmusic as performance − the project has a somewhat retro quality. The focus on work-related details comes at the expense of particular social contexts, leaving an intellectual history of famous male thinkers in timeless dialogue with each other. Grimes does not address the apparent conflict between her positioning of Brahms as an atheist modernist and her uncritical acceptance of Brahms as an ‘ardent admirer’ of fundamentally conservative nationalist figures such as Bismarck and Wilhelm II− a glaring contrast with the politically resistant writings of Nietzsche and Adorno. Not all modernists need to be (or were) politically progressive, but the lack of critical interrogation of Brahms’s German nationalist views is conspicuous. Nonetheless, the insights into Brahms’s music and its resonances with the German literary tradition make this an important new work of Brahms scholarship.