Johann Strauss Sr's most famous composition, his 1848 Radetzky March, was premièred during revolutionary times. The March soon became a standard piece for Habsburg bands in the nineteenth century and was considered ideal for fostering patriotic sentiments at the start of the First World War. After the Great War, however, commentators portrayed the work very differently. No longer a part of contemporary culture, the Radetzky March now belonged to a bygone era. Biographers of the Strauss family found this work to be proof of Strauss Sr's support for the conservatives during the Revolution, a claim not supported by evidence. More generally, treating the piece as a relic from another age transformed it into a marker of nostalgia in the 1930s, as is best demonstrated in Joseph Roth's novel, Radetzkymarsch (1932).

Using the famous death-themed Cantata 82 as a case study, this article offers a model for situating J. S. Bach's cantata output in the wider cultural sphere of early eighteenth-century Leipzig life. Looking beyond the immediate and well-studied liturgical and theological contexts, the article reconstructs a broader range of associations that Bach's music may have evoked for his contemporary listeners, drawing out allusions to operatic topics, popular fears of deadly diseases, fictions of heavenly music and macabre dances of death. By locating the question of musical meaning in the interpretative space between the piece and its historical listeners, the article offers an alternative to conventional hermeneutic approaches that view Bach's cantatas as conveying a singular and clearly audible message of Lutheran doctrine.

When Stravinsky composed The Flood in 1961–2, he was already an experienced practitioner of serialism. It is undeniably noteworthy, then, that compositional documents for the work include two diatonic sketches, presumably the earliest versions of a passage from the Prelude. Later serial versions of the passage, which differ significantly from the diatonic sketches, nonetheless retain numerous important features introduced at that initial stage. The existence of the diatonic sketches suggests that even late in his career, Stravinsky harboured diatonic and tonal impulses. Taking into account the audible results of these impulses will contribute substantially to an understanding of his last works.

These Introductions, Directions, or Principles, as they were variously styled, contain what we should now term the Rudiments of Music, or at all events, as much of them as is needed for those who wish to sing a simple melody. They have an interest peculiarly their own, as illustrating the efforts made by the pioneers of congregational psalmody to secure an intelligent, as well as a general participation in its rendering.

The last time we had any discussion of aesthetics in our Association was in 1945, when I read a paper written by Dr. Glen Haydon, which related art to theory of knowledge. This intellectual line is favoured by American philosophers. Susanne Langer, a pupil of Whitehead, has in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) used not so much art in general as music in particular as the key to her theory of knowledge, which is a semantic theory like Glen Haydon's. This trend is worth noting and contrasting with theories of musical aesthetics in which emotion is the kernel. Among musicians it is almost axiomatic that the stock-in-trade in which they deal is feeling in the medium of sound. They apply their technique to sound production in order to do a deal with their audiences in feeling. One of the fundamental problems of the aesthetics of music is therefore to examine this presupposition.

Two centuries claim Beethoven for their own—two centuries which in the history of music will always appear as very opposites, close though their relations are: the eighteenth century with its worship of form, the nineteenth with its worship of the idea. In Beethoven both meet, in him both find their greatest representative—in him first, and in him alone, their leading principles become reconciled. He is the only composer in whose works the great ideas which were agitating his time, some of the problems which have occupied man's mind since the beginning of man's history, have found an echo. Not that he deliberately took as it were those ideas and problems as the text of his compositions, but so much had he thought about them, so deeply was he imbued with their importance, so much had they become keynotes of his mode of feeling, so much in fact part and parcel of his personality, that the freer the expression he allowed to the latter in his music, the more was it bound to reflect those ideas. At the same time, it was Beethoven who put the last finishing touches to the grand edifice of musical forms, the material for which had been brought together in hundreds of years of slow, persistent, and consistent work, till in Ph. E. Bach, in Haydn, and in Mozart arose the architects who with master-hands were to shape and fix its outlines for all time. Beethoven accepted the forms from them, but soon he began to alter and to extend them: again not because he deliberately wished to improve on his predecessors, but because he did not find these forms an adequate medium for the expression of his individuality. It was in obedience to the demands of the latter that the inherited forms gradually assumed a new aspect altogether, gradually gained that power and pliability which enabled them to give voice to every shade of feeling with a directness, an intensity and subtleness which they had never been thought capable of.

The first necessity in a paper of this nature is to offer some definition of the term ‘Mannheim concerto’. In the past there has been some tendency to view the musicians working at the Palatinate court during the reign of the Elector Karl Theodor from 1743 to 1778, and the last years of his predecessor Karl Phüipp, as a somewhat isolated school. It is clear, however, from the studies of Hugo Riemann and more recently Gerhard Croll, that not only did the orchestral personnel come from many different parts of Europe, including Düsseldorf, Innsbruck, Vienna, Bohemia and Italy, over a period of many years, but that they were also constantly leaving Mannheim for posts elsewhere, or else going on often lengthy concert tours, especially to Paris, which throughout the period remained the great centre of attraction for the Mannheimers in view of its important publishing trade and flourishing concert life, both public and private. In addition, the Elector, who in musical matters was certainly among the more enlightened and generous rulers of his day, was continually sending promising young musicians off on study tours to Italy to complete their musical education. Among such musicians can be counted Christian Cannabich, Johann Ritschel and Georg Joseph Vogler. Thus the musical contacts with the outside world were indeed wide, and it is often impossible to tell whether particular concertos were composed for Mannheim, Paris or elsewhere, especially as the Mannheim court music library has long since totally disappeared, and we now rely on the relatively few printed sources and the manuscript copies to be found distributed throughout Europe. For present purposes the term ‘Mannheim concerto’ will be taken to include all concertos by composers whose activities were centred for a substantial time at the Mannheim court, and will thus include the works of those such as Carl and Anton Stamitz, the sons of Johann, who spent their formative years within the Mannheim circle, even though they both left Mannheim in 1770.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen,—I must first of all apologize to you for presenting a paper which has been, I regret to say, very hastily prepared, owing to my recent severe illness, and to consequent pressure upon the time at my disposal. I must next ask you to believe that I approach my subject with great diffidence for two reasons—-firstly, the inability of any one mind to comprehend the various and multitudinous thoughts and ideas that must from time to time possess the soul of every true musician; and secondly, because of my personal inability to give adequate expression—even to my own views upon so difficult and delicate a matter as the consideration of the relative position of our Art-Science to the unenlightened or popular world.

Alfred, Dvořåk's first opera, has long hovered at the edge of our awareness of the composer. If there are signs of a growing realization that opera was to Dvořåk quite as important as other areas of his output, the detail needed to flesh out the picture of ‘Dvořåk the opera composer’ is to a large extent lacking. In the case of the composer's first six operas the inaccessibility of material has meant that an assessment of his early work in the area is still very much the province of specialist scholars. Published vocal scores exist for only three of these early operas, and none of them are in any sense scholarly editions; in the case of Krål a uhlíř (King and Charcoal-Burner) the available edition is of a revision of the score made 13 years after the work was composed, with an entirely recomposed final act. Vanda, the fascinating first version of Krål a uhlíř, and Alfred remain unpublished, although a vocal score of Krål a uhlíř has been submitted to the Czech publishing house Artia.

This article offers a contextual reading of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's and Richard Strauss's 1927 opera Die ägyptische Helena. For Hofmannsthal and Strauss, the marital rift between Menelas and Helena caused by her infidelity operated as the symbolic manifestation of a similar schism in pan-Germanic politics, society and the arts – thus highlighting the concomitant necessity for unity through recognition and celebration of a common culture. By recasting the story of Menelas's and Helena's homeward journey from Troy in order to create an aesthetic answer to the problems of the present, Hofmannsthal and Strauss pointed to the distinct similarities between the Trojan War and the recent conflict that had completely changed the political, geographical and social landscape in Europe. As this article demonstrates, Die ägyptische Helena stands as an artwork both expressly aware and uniquely representative of its historical moment through a multi-faceted literary and musical referentiality inherently characteristic of its creators.

An extended, unaccompanied violin passage labelled ‘Capriccio’ occurs towards the end of the first and last movements of each of the 12 solo violin concertos, op. 3, by Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695–1764). These concertos, all of which observe the three-movement fast-slow-fast layout, were published in 1733 by Le Cène in Amsterdam under the title L'arte del violino, but were probably written in the late 1720s. The capriccios may last up to a few pages, and some are longer than the whole of the rest of the movement to which they belong.

Those familiar with Herman Melville's last novella, published posthumously in 1924 and entitled Billy Budd, Foretopman, will know that one of the most memorable scenes is in fact barely there. In the so-called ‘missing’ scene, all that readers know with any certainty is that Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the warship Indomitable (later editions rename the ship Bellipotent), communicates to Billy Budd, a sailor, the verdict of a drumhead court. Billy is to die in the early hours of the following morning for the crime of striking and killing the master-at-arms, the malevolent John Claggart. Precisely what passes between Vere and Billy in the crucial scene — one pivotal for the denouement of the story — has remained for ever a literary mystery. Although the narrator provides some conjecture as to what may have happened in the compartment where Billy is held, all he can say for sure, in a sentence endlessly cited by Melville's critics, is ‘Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this interview was never known.’

This article interprets Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci (1892) as a voicing of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ – the problem of the underdeveloped and socially troubled Italian South. Pagliacci juxtaposes cultural symbols that include a commedia dell'arte figure representative of the Italian South and antique genres perceived to be emblematic of ‘civilized’ northern culture. By interpreting the interaction of costumes and musical styles, I argue that the work incorporates images of southern Italy – that ‘violent’, ‘uncontrollable’, yet ‘picturesque’ region – into a broader, northern-dominated conception of Italian nationhood (an interpretative mechanism typical of contemporary image-making media such as magazines and novels).

This article explores the filmic relationship between music, text and image through an intertextual reading of Herzog's two Amazonian films, Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. When Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo encounter each other in the rainforest, 300 years apart, a complicated interplay of history and legend, truth and fiction, is initiated. Awash with magical occurrence, the forest has its own endlessly repeating soundtrack (written by Popul Vuh). The ability of both explorers to defend themselves from the forest depends on their relationship to this music: Aguirre, the earlier explorer, is deaf to the circular sound and attempts to overlay it with a written account of their journey. Fitzcarraldo, on the other hand, enters the forest equipped with a gramophone that plays Verdi arias; he comes with his own soundtrack. Comparison between the two journeys exposes the conventional uses of text/speech and music/song in film, to reveal music as the predominant driving force behind filmic narrative.

In the seventeenth century the process of appointing court musicians was often complicated by struggles between conflicting agendas. Recently discovered letters of Saxon Prince Johann Georg II (1613–80) document the nature of the process in Dresden during the tenure of court Kapellmeister Heinrich Schütz, and the attempts of Schütz and the prince to steer Elector Johann Georg I's hiring decisions in a direction that would further their cause: the cultivation of an awareness of the modern Italian style of singing in the Dresden court musicians. The letters reveal the previously unknown collaborative effort of Schütz and the prince to fill the position of vice-Kapellmeister with the ‘right’ musician (i.e. an Italian or Italian-trained one), and to keep the ‘wrong’ man out of the job. In the course of this enterprise, the prince participated in the negotiations for several appointments, including that of Christoph Bernhard, whom he then sent to a northern court to study with an Italian singer. Although the collaborators' mission ended in failure, the story of their efforts casts light on the musical politicking at a seventeenth-century court and on the implications such campaigns had for the lives of individual musicians.