This article examines the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick's reception of the music of Bedřich Smetana during the 1880s and 1890s. In three case studies, it suggests that the critic's reviews are best understood in terms not of Smetana's Czech nationalism, but of Hanslick's German liberalism, and of the critic's memories of the youthful background he shared with Smetana in German-speaking yet nationally indifferent Vormärz Prague.

Although Ralph Vaughan Williams's operas Hugh the Drover (1924) and Sir John in Love (1929) both prominently feature English folk and traditional tunes, the dramatic ends such music serves differ significantly between the two works. This article compares the ways in which Vaughan Williams uses folk music in both operas, with the larger aim of providing a more nuanced perspective on the changing musical and dramatic potential the composer saw for indigenous English music within the context of opera.77

This article focuses on three twentieth-century composers – Weill, Krenek and Stravinsky – whose stylistic ‘voices’ underwent radical changes during their compositional careers. It reflects on how these transformations have been received by critics and musicologists, and asks how far the criteria of value found within musicological and compositional practice have been contingent upon the requirement that composers possess a distinctive, and original, personal style.

Roland Barthes's perception of voice having a ‘grain’ is one of the best-known legacies of the last century's history of ideas, especially in discussions of popular music. His evidence, the singing of Charles Panzéra, compared with that of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is explored and illustrated here in the context of a discussion of the origin of ‘grain’ and its wider implications. It is only rhetorically that one may consider the ‘geno’-song separately from the ‘pheno’-song, but the implied interplay of structure and effect is a powerful critical resource, neglected to date because Barthes's vision requires explanation, as proposed here.