Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle's treatise La tonotechnie, ou l'art de noter les cylindres (1775) claimed that automated instruments driven by pinned cylinders would grant listeners direct access to music as the composer conceived it. Standard notation was insufficient, as it did not capture the music's mouvement – its temporal flexibility from moment to moment. Denis Diderot provided an aesthetic justification for automated instruments in terms that linked them to materialist philosophy. Like android automata, which simulated life through automated motion, automated musical instruments encoded live music to simulate the ideal performance of a composer. Yet Engramelle's collaboration with the composer Claude Balbastre, which resulted in a pinned-cylinder notage of one of Balbastre's keyboard pieces, raises crucial questions about the effectiveness of the technology and its notation, and about Engramelle's claims and his own musical skill. Engramelle's project is best understood as a performance unto itself – a manifestation of the cultures of public science that were widespread in the European Enlightenment.

The question of what happens when a composer alters a poet's poetic cycle haunts examinations of many song cycles and has proven especially problematic for Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe. The long-held view that Schumann crafted a clear plot from Heine's non-narrative Lyrisches Intermezzo has recently been questioned in favour of a view of the cycle as an incoherent fragment. Using the tools of narratology, this article argues that Dichterliebe is both a fragment and a coherent whole, a string of memories held together by a distinct narrative logic. Identifying two poetic voices illuminates the cycle's narrative strategy and also sheds light on problematic aspects of the music, including Schumann's deletion of four songs, the voice–piano relationship and the enigmatic final postlude. This article proposes answers to age-old questions about Dichterliebe while also offering a fresh approach to the study of song cycles.

Current studies of burlesque position it as a subversive genre that questioned cultural and social hierarchies and spoke to diverse audiences. Central to this interpretation are burlesque's juxtapositions of high and low culture, particularly popular and operatic music. This article problematizes this view, proposing that mid-Victorian burlesques lost their satirical bite. Demonstrating little concern for the tastes or interests of the poorer or the most elite members of the audience, they specifically targeted the bourgeoisie. The article places three mid-Victorian burlesques in the wider context of the commercial development of the West End following the 1851 Great Exhibition. It proposes that this broader context, and not the genre's perceived social role, provides the key to understanding the impulses driving the musical choices. It argues that juxtapositions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music were far from subversive; rather they were included for commercial reasons, offering variety – but variety within strict bourgeois limits.

Discussions of Dvořák's Sixth Symphony typically focus on its connections with Vienna. Dvořák wrote the symphony for the Vienna Philharmonic and dedicated it to Hans Richter. Its allusions to Brahms and Beethoven led David Brodbeck to describe it as a piece in which Dvořák ‘speaks German with an unusual degree of clarity’. Contemporary Czech critics tell a different story. After its 1881 Prague première, the work was dubbed the ‘Czech Spring Symphony’. One critic stated that it ‘speaks to us in pure Czech’. Indeed, the Sixth is Dvořák's only symphony to include a furiant, and Czech scholars have long sought to prove that the work's themes were derived from Bohemian folk songs. Can these narratives be reconciled? This article suggests that political tensions and Dvořák's growing international renown made Czech critics eager to claim him, giving Czech labels to a piece that could be interpreted as conforming to the Austro-German tradition.

Although philosophical and biographical accounts of Nietzsche and Wagner abound, the musical issues at stake in the late text Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888) have rarely been addressed within their wider cultural context. This article explores the nineteenth-century concepts of decadence and degeneration as relevant for understanding the ambivalence of Nietzsche's late critique of Wagner. Emphasizing his affinity with contemporary French criticism, it argues that his late texts advance a theory of decadence pertinent to current music history and criticism. It locates The Case of Wagner within the larger discourse of degeneration, probing similarities to and differences from the work of surrounding critics of Wagnerism. Nietzsche's critique combines a condemnation of Wagner's music with a more positive appreciation of the composer's historical relevance. Yet his writings also reveal a fundamental conflict between his personal involvement with Wagner's music and his philosophical quest to analyse this music as expressive of modernity.

Birtwistle's Punch and Judy arrived at a crucial moment for new opera. It premièred in 1968 at the Aldeburgh Festival, the home of a vision of British opera that Punch and Judy seemed actively to confront. However, Punch and Judy also engaged closely with operatic traditions and institutions, and while its Aldeburgh première is remembered as a scandalous provocation, a closer look at this event suggests that the opera was welcomed as a subtle intervention into the British operatic scene rather than a repudiation of it. The opera itself, moreover, performs a similar sense of revolt as inseparable from tradition, of individuality as inseparable from institutions and audiences, and of the supports for artistic production as necessarily also constraints.