Hypnosis used sound and musico-dramatic methods to effect previously unanticipated kinds of changes in body and psyche, showing a ‘sonic turn’ in this new kind of medicine. For Franz Anton Mesmer, musical techniques and instruments were essential elements of his theory and practice, not merely adjuncts, as previous research has tended to assume. The musical structures of the Classical style provided Mesmer with patterns for artificially inducing and regulating his patients’ crises, whose periodicity medicine previously considered fixed and unchangeable. Mesmer executed these therapeutic strategies using the recently invented glass harmonica. From the Marquis de Puységur to Jean-Martin Charcot, Mesmer's successors turned their attention to somnambulism and catalepsy, sleep-like states often induced by the sound of a tam-tam, an Asian gong new to Western music. The contrast between harmonica and tam-tam reflects the passage in musical techniques from modulating dramatic crises to obliterating consciousness itself. Even considered as suggestion, hypnosis followed processes of intensification and dramatization characteristic of Classical and Romantic music.

Berlioz's essay ‘Le chef d'orchestre, théorie de son art’ (1855) was among the first and most widely disseminated attempts to describe the art of modern conducting. Drawing together technical with literary and scientific language, it aimed to capture the relationship between leaders and players and, more broadly, the modes of animation underpinning nineteenth-century orchestral performance. Central to the essay are notions of electricity – animal, artificial and mesmeric. For Berlioz, the conductor's job is no longer simply to marshal his orchestral troops but to galvanize them: ‘his inner flame warms them, his electricity charges them.’ Here, I examine the medical and physical technologies that underpinned these descriptions – the ways in which podium conducting became newly intertwined with theories of bioelectricity, notions of spiritual or metaphysical ‘spark’, and emerging forms of electrical communication that rewired European conceptions of the body politic.

In Part I, I examine the ‘electric baton’ which allowed Berlioz to control the enormous orchestral forces of his 1855 Exposition Universelle concerts, generating a quasi-telegraphic network with imperialist resonances. Part II examines the role of nervous electricity in Berlioz's accounts of conducting, and his conception of music itself as a charged substance. Part III draws technological and medical discourses into conversation with magical cultures, showing how notions of nervous power (and peril) united Berlioz, Mesmer and the famous Robert-Houdin. The new romantic conductor, as I conclude, was a figure poised at the intersection of medicine, electric technology, and a newly charged spirituality.

As many scholars have shown, regardless of its popularity today, the ‘mad scene’ of Lucia di Lammermoor was not popular in the several years that followed the premiere in 1835. In fact, audiences, critics and publishers of opera selections for the salon preferred the love duet of act 1 or the final scene of the opera when Edgardo kills himself upon hearing the news that Lucia is dead. In this article, I explore early nineteenth-century notions of hysteria, a disease that manifested with both physical and emotional symptoms. If undiagnosed, the individual suffering from the disease would experience muscle contractions, pupil dilations, delusions, cardiac arrest and eventual death. One of the seminal studies of hysteria in the first half of the nineteenth century was written by the French physician and medical historian Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (1799–1873), who published in 1833 Histoire philosophique de l'hypochondrie et de l'hystérie, a 500-plus page investigation into the cause and cure of hysterics and hypochondriacs. Through an investigation of the diagnosis of hysteria in d'Amiens's work and the sound and look of hysteria in Donizetti's opera, now made more acute through familiarity with the newly invented stethoscope (1816, René Laennec) and its ability to deliver the internal sounds of the body, we can see how close the opera comes to mirroring the look and sound of the disease, which may explain the lack of enthusiasm and in some cases outright hostility to Lucia's fall into madness in the early reception of the work in France.

This article discusses the delineation between physiology and music theory in Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). It takes the phenomenon of ‘false relations’ as a point of departure to question the methodology Helmholtz devised to study music and hearing. The key to understanding this experimental method is the concept of ‘controlled deviation’, which is substantiated in two main sections. After providing some background information on the history of music theory, the first section explores ‘false relations’ within the context of physiological experimentation and hydrodynamics, the two most important areas of Helmholtz's scientific research. The second section of the article is centred on the experimental methods of Helmholtz as used in his investigation of vision and hearing. More specifically, it introduces notions of distortion, defamiliarization and deviation to distinguish levels of physiology that relate to the body and to cognition. As it turns out, music posed specific problems for the researcher. Beyond the ephemerality of sound, the malleability of hearing and of musical aesthetics proved even more of an obstacle for controlled experimentation. The article concludes with a discussion of Hugo Riemann, who continued to explore the central finding of Helmholtz, namely that the rules of music change due to the habits of the listener.

In memory of Nicholas Temperley

The title of John Fuller Maitland's article ‘Wanted – An Opera’, in which he argued for the establishment in Britain of a state-supported national opera house, could almost be read as a statement of desire for an operatic work of British origin itself. The perception that composers produced little opera of value in the period of the so-called ‘British Music Renaissance’ has become a trope, despite research in recent years showing the extent of activity, both in terms of composition and performance, during the 20 years either side of 1900.

For a certain subset of eminent Beethoven scholars, the celebration of Beethoven's 250th birthday in 2020 represented a challenge. In taking up the opportunity to communicate with a wider population of educated music lovers, the standard vehicle, a Beethoven biography, was off the table for them – because they had already written one. In the three books reviewed here, each author responds to this dilemma by focusing on themes in reception history. I will attempt to clarify their main points, comment on similarities and differences in their approaches, and evaluate how successful each one might be in in making recent Beethoven scholarship more accessible for the general reader. I will argue that all three of these books successfully target the more musically literate segment of lay readers, and that any weak points arise at the intersection between their academic content and the address to these members of their presumed readership.