In an enticing article for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Hans von Bülow suggested that Joseph Joachim would be well suited to achieve a reform of violin playing in the 1850s, which would effectively close the door behind Virtuosentum. The Golden Age of virtuosity had been on its way out for several years, impacting also violin performance. And yet, violin programming in the musical metropolises London and Paris was slow to adapt. As recent work on Joachim's virtuoso years has shown, his repertoire during the 1840s encompassed far more than German classics. It accommodated plenty of virtuoso music by H.W. Ernst, de Bériot, Ferdinand David, and Vieuxtemps, as well as his own substantial, virtuoso compositions, composed for his London tours in the 1840s. As this article argues, Joachim's programming did not change overnight: the shift from performing and composing virtuoso pieces to identifying himself with lofty and serious works happened gradually. One vehicle through which Joachim transformed the state of ‘violin playing’ of the 1840s was the violin romance. Joachim, who spent three months in Paris in early 1850, used the aesthetic of the romance to transform not only the state of violin playing but also the violin romance itself. Two simple romances he composed in 1850 were followed by a third romance in 1857. The third was, in effect, a Bravourstück in disguise, exhibiting none of the older virtuoso tricks such as flying bow strokes that had fallen out of favour. Rather, in Joachim's third romance, the conspicuous, ‘1840s’ virtuosity merged into ‘shape-oriented virtuosity’, a term used in a 1854 review of Joachim's playing. Many later nineteenth-century composers of violin romances from Bruch to Sibelius adopted Joachim's romance model, negotiating between melodic simplicity and violinistic demand, resulting in lyrical pieces in which virtuosity was an undercurrent, hidden but present.

This article discusses illusions of ‘three hands’ in the circle of Joachim and the Mendelssohns, arguing that manifestations of ‘three hands’ at play created an aesthetic both in dialogue with the Golden Age of Virtuosity, and going beyond it. Though techniques alluding to three hands or multiple performing bodies diminished sharply in popularity after 1830–50, violin and piano music from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained highly virtuosic and often ‘unplayable’ in other ways. The difference between before and after the half-century mark is that later examples tended not to celebrate so overtly such special effects, because doing so would revive the no-longer-tenable principle of ‘virtuosity as a reward in itself’. Rather, double-stop harmonics, left-hand pizzicato, three-hand techniques and their related sleights of hand were largely escorted off the stage into a pedagogical realm. As this article shows, Joachim helped to exorcise the spectre of Paganini, and to sweep effectively out the door the residual confetti of the Golden Age of Virtuosity. Following in the footsteps of Mendelssohn, Joachim did so with Clara Schumann, viewing himself, Clara Schumann (and, we might add, Brahms) as a cohort of artists seeking to reverse the tawdry display of virtuosity. It was precisely Joachim's acute historicist perception, solidified during the 1850s, that allowed his musical aesthetics to turn so sharply from his openness to, tolerance and acceptance of dazzling violinistic tricks in the 1840s, to their absolute rejection in his later career.

A recurrent trope in the reception of Joseph Joachim's performances is the notion that that he magically transformed himself into the composer of the work. In particular, his performances of violin concertos frequently evoked this perception, as documented by Andreas Moser, Otto Gumbrecht, Hans von Bülow, and Johannes Brahms. Building on work by Katharina Uhde and Karen Leistra-Jones, this article will propose that Joachim's cadenzas played a central role in fostering the perceived slippage between the composer and performer. Joachim composed – and performed – cadenzas for many of the concertos in his core repertoire, including works by Giuseppe Tartini, W. A. Mozart, Giovanni Battista Viotti, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Brahms. I will argue that Joachim's cadenzas enact a compositional approach to the thematic material. The depth of this engagement is profound, encompassing not only the soloistic passages but also the ritornello sections as material for developmental reworking and modulatory processes. In fact, he often explores harmonic avenues that are only hinted at in the ‘parent’ concerto, highlighting and fulfilling moments of unrealized potential. Joachim's cadenzas thus create the impression that the composer of the concerto is revising and expanding his own work. I propose that he inhabits the genre of the cadenza as a site of compositional and performative virtuosity, fusing the two personas at a time when they were becoming increasingly polarized in European musical culture.

As the largest and most comprehensive Chinese database in the world, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI: Zhong guo zhi shi ji chu she shi gong cheng 中国知识基础设施工程, also commonly known as Zhi wang 知网)1 is supervised by Tsinghua University and Tonfang Knowledge Network (TKN), a high-tech enterprise funded by Tsinghua University in 1997. It is supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the State Administration of the Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China and the State Planning Commission of the PRC. In December 1996, CNKI began providing CD-ROM and CAJ-CD for Chinese academic journals, and it was officially launched in 1999. This repository initially focused on Chinese academic journals and later expanded its coverage to PhD dissertations, masters’ theses, conference proceedings, yearbooks, books and patent documents. It is divided into three categories: ‘databases’, ‘specialized sources’, and ‘international sources’, including ProQuest and Taylor and Francis journal databases. Ten service centres are established across the world, including Beijing, North America, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong; users include universities, research institutions, government think tanks, industries, hospitals and public libraries.2 CNKI (or CIKRD) updates its information on a daily basis, and its current growth rate is approximately 350,000 new journal articles per month.

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 War II, leading to marquee projects like the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (1954–2007) and the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (1955–91). So pervasive was edition-making in this era that it led Joseph Kerman to complain ‘there is something wrong with a discipline that spends (or spent) so much more of its time establishing texts than thinking about the texts thus established’. But despite such criticisms and amid the proliferation of alternative forms of musicological research in the last 40 years or so, the making of critical editions has continued, with new projects taking in figures such as Janáček (1978–), Verdi (1983–), Donizetti (1989–) and Bartók (2016–), among many others. Even if it may be nowhere near as dominant a part of musicological endeavour as it once was, edition-making has survived, a tacit refutation of the challenges that the canon has met with.

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 Database (BID).

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 Vaughan Williams as a progressive or even ‘modernist’ participant in his artistic milieu. To combat this image, some critics and musicologists have argued for complex, harder-edged interpretations of the work that have little to no basis in the music's primary source materials or the composer's stated priorities in his own writings. Such emphases reflect a problem in recent revisionist literature, wherein traditionalist, nationalist, or Romantic aspects of Vaughan Williams's music are excessively downplayed (or re-situated) in favour of arguments that better support elite sensibilities. As a work consisting of accessible, melody-centric music, and following from a poem excerpt suggesting an idyllic scene, The Lark serves as a bulwark against revisionist overreach and a check against over-emphasis on trendy priorities.