On 25 May 1849 Vincenzo Bellini's opera Norma was premiered at the Teatro de la Victoria in Buenos Aires. It was performed four years before the downfall of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Governor of Buenos Aires for more than 20 years, in what it has been considered in Argentine historiography as a ‘terror regime’. The success of the opera combined with the political situation enables the understanding of Norma in political terms. A year prior to the premiere of the opera, the story of the elopement of a young, aristocratic, federal girl, Camila O'Gorman with the priest Uladislao Gutiérrez, had shocked local society. It was followed by another shocking event when, once the couple was found, Rosas decided to have them executed. I argue that the inadvertent similarity between the plot of Norma and the events in relation to Camila O'Gorman's death led to possible interpretations of the opera performance as a justification of Rosas's decision to execute Camila and her lover, whilst also providing a moral lesson to young aristocratic women. In this article, I therefore explore the plausible political overtones hidden in the performance of Norma by comparing librettos and analysing the opera's reception between 1849 and 1851 in the periodicals of the time. In this way, I cast light on a heretofore overlooked, but undeniably rich, period of operatic life in Buenos Aires.

Luigi von Kunits (1870–1931) had a substantial impact on classical music in Toronto. Born and educated in Vienna, he emigrated to Chicago in 1893 and then moved to Pittsburgh in 1896 as the concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Orchestra. After 17 years in the USA, he returned to Vienna for two years, before moving to Toronto to take up a teaching position at the Canadian Academy of Music. From the time of his arrival in Toronto in 1912 to his death in 1931 he was active on many fronts: teaching violin, composing, editing The Canadian Journal of Music (1914–1919), performing as a chamber musician and violin soloist, and serving as the conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1922–1931). To many he seemed the very embodiment of the great Central European musical tradition: a pupil of Bruckner and Hanslick, associated with Brahms and acquainted with celebrated European musicians and composers. Much of what we know about Kunits derives from statements issuing from the musician himself or his immediate circle, with little or no corroborating evidence to support his assertions. As a result, it is difficult at this remove to separate fact from fiction. This article takes stock of the sources of information that are available and attempts to construct as accurate an account of his life and activities as possible.

The evidence of more than three hundred concerts of early music given by the Parisian Schola Cantorum and its sister association, the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, as well as more than four hundred performances of this repertoire outside the Schola shows that the most consistently performed composer in Paris at the French fin de siècle was the German Johann Sebastian Bach. This is coupled with a shift at the Schola, from a preponderance of works by Palestrina in the 1890s to a new emphasis on Rameau operas in the early 1900s. This article is an attempt to understand these repertorial preferences as manifestations of at least two types of nationalism: first as a mass movement to attain ethnic-linguistic homogenization and second as a movement by the social elite as a means of establishing its difference. All three composers examined in the case studies emerge as vehicles for both types of nationalism, though there is more evidence of the second type than there is of the first. This article also shows that there is a distinction between the ways in which these repertoires were either co-opted or received by the social elite and the intelligentsia, the latter using early music as a metaphor for the ‘serious’.

The ending to Brahms's Schicksalslied confounds scholars for two reasons: his setting of Hölderlin's ostensibly despairing poem ends with an orchestral section that evokes comfort and reconciliation, and the postlude transposes the material of the introduction down to C major, ending in a key other than its opening. This represents ‘a rare instance of a composer not merely placing an arbitrary interpretation on words but explicitly contradicting a poet's statement’ (Petersen, 1983). Daverio (1993) and Reynolds (2012) hold similar views, seeing Hölderlin's poem as if divorced from the novel Hyperion.

Although the poem marks the chronological endpoint of the novella, it is intricately bound up with levels of time, and it serves a continuous engendering function. The recollection of music in an altered key in Brahms's postlude is apposite to Abrams's notion of ‘the ascending circle, or spiral’. Drawing on musical and hermeneutic analysis, on evidence from Brahms's personal library, and on newly discovered correspondence from Hermann Levi, I argue that Brahms's ‘eccentric path’ – like Hölderlin's – leads us away from the original unity of the work in order to restore it in a heightened manner. The postlude prompts reflection and realization on the part of Brahms's listener akin to that of Hölderlin's reader.

The music culture of Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is characterized by the coexistence and interdependent development of three types of music: (1) traditional music passed down from the Edo period (1603–1867) as exemplified by gagaku (court music); (2) the Western music that entered the country and became established after it was opened to the outside world; and (3) modern songs that were the first to be created in East Asia, such as shōka and gunka (school and military songs). These three types of music each played the role required of them by the Meiji state, and they became indispensable elements of the music culture of modern Japan. Traditional music is an irreplaceable fund of original musical expression intrinsic to Japan, Western music offers a common language facilitating musical contact in international society, especially with countries of the West, and modern songs are an essential tool for unifying the Japanese people through the act of ‘singing together in Japanese’.

This article examines the way in which the coexistence of these three types of music began, from the perspective of the musical expression of national identity in the state ceremonies of the Meiji era, namely imperial rites, military ceremonies and school ceremonies. Gagaku was reorganized and strengthened in the 1870s as the music of Japan's imperial rites, and it was given priority both within Japan and overseas, as the most intrinsic of Japan's genres of traditional music. The gagaku scales, defined clearly only from 1878 onwards, were used to amalgamate the musical language of Japan's state ceremonies by their use in ceremonial pieces for military and school ceremonies. This article clarifies the special role played by gagaku in post-Restoration nineteenth-century Japan.

The digital humanities have grown to encompass multiple disciplines; they embrace everything from online resources that have the potential to democratize scholarship to computational approaches that allow a higher order analysis of large datasets. That the digital humanities has significantly influenced musicology is evidenced by the number of leading journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Notes, Journal of the Society of American Music and Nineteenth Century Music Review, that regularly review digital resources and by the increasing use of the tag ‘digital musicology’. This special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review (NCMR) and this introduction reflect a broad definition of the digital humanities; they embrace digital archives, born-digital projects, and studies employing computational methodologies and tools.

To discover that one of popular music's most famous and enduring composers wrote a march-characteristic called ‘The Red Man’ immediately arouses curiosity about the nature and substance of such a work, the reasons for writing it, and how audiences received it. John Philip Sousa composed ‘The Red Man’ in 1910 for his world tour and, like much of his music, it is still played and recorded today. I will attempt to answer these questions by examining this lesser-known but highly distinctive Sousa composition in detail. That necessarily involves seeing the piece through a variety of lenses. Since the way in which audiences listen to music has fundamentally changed in a hundred years, the closest we can come to hearing the piece through ears of 1910 is to explore a variety of critical responses from the time published in newspapers in different countries. Since these accounts are written in a stylistic language considerably different from the way modern critics write about music, the responses need to be seen in context. Many were rooted in notions of race and ethnicity prevalent among the middle- and upper-class audiences for which Sousa composed. Moreover, Sousa's audiences listened with a host of associations that accrued during the nineteenth century and are lost to us today. This was enhanced by the type of programmes on which ‘The Red Man’ was performed, which encouraged the perception of music through a national or exotic lens, or through the filter of a narrative. The musical language of this ‘Indian’ piece is hardly unique, since it owes many of its metaphors to Sousa's contemporaries. For all his originality, Sousa was also an expert assimilator. There isn’t space here to examine every derivation in this work, but by exploring a few of them we can learn much about his music and his audiences.

22 July 1824. Many Londoners had waited years for this night. They thronged to the English Opera House, filling the boxes and cramming the benches in the pit and gallery. It was worth the heat, the expense, the danger from pickpockets. After hearing of its success for three years, after glimpsing snatches of it in concert and sheet music excerpts, and after enduring weeks of advertising for the English Opera House production, they would finally be the first in London to witness the most celebrated German opera of the time: Weber's Der Freischütz.

‘Are you musical?’, asks Gustav Kobbé of some imaginary interlocutor in the introduction to How to Appreciate Music (1906). ‘No’, comes the reply, ‘I neither play nor sing’. ‘But, if you can read and listen’, Kobbé continues, ‘there is no reason why you should not be more musical … than many of those whose musicianship lies merely in their fingers or vocal cords’. Kobbé's response epitomizes the shift in emphasis that had begun to occur in music education at the turn of the century from the acquisition of technical proficiency on an instrument or the voice to the cultivation of an appreciative, aesthetic understanding of music. The acquisition of performing skill had been perpetuated by the hegemony of the singing class in British music education throughout the nineteenth century. Initially, such teaching took the form of the government-sponsored continental system of ‘fixed’ sol-fa devised by Guillaume Wilhem for use in the public singing classes and commune schools of Paris and, from 1840, adapted by John Hullah for use in the teacher-training institution founded by James Kay-Shuttleworth at Battersea. Subsequently, there was the tonic sol-fa system with its movable doh devised by John Curwen; this system came to replace the Hullah–Wilhem method after the Education Act of 1870, which introduced compulsory schooling in Britain and established school boards to implement local policy.

Although largely forgotten today, bands of German musicians (generally from the Westpfalz region) were regular visitors to New Zealand’s shores from the 1850s up until the outbreak of World War I, making them among the earliest professional European musical ensembles to be heard in the country. Plying their trade on the streets and in other public spaces, German bands were also routinely hired to perform for garden parties, school sports days, dances and boat trips, as well as on countless other occasions. Yet despite their apparent popularity, contemporary comment published in newspapers of the day demonstrates that reactions to their performances were decidedly mixed. While some members of the public clearly enjoyed the contribution German bands made to local musical life, others were less than delighted by their (often noisy) presence. In 1893, for example, one Wellington resident complained that ‘a German Band … may be heard braying at every street corner at all hours of the day and night’, while noting also that ‘It is the genuine article, all the performers being wanderers from the “Vaterland”, unmistakeable “sauerkrauts”’ Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, ten members of a German band had been arrested in Auckland and taken to Somes Island in Wellington harbour, where they were interned for the duration of the conflict. This article examines the New Zealand public’s changing perceptions of this particular brand of street musician from colonial times until shortly after the end of the First World War.

Schubert is famous for his remote modulations, especially his third relations. He therefore has a reputation for harbouring an aversion to the dominant, both in terms of its function as a harmonic preparation for new keys and as a structural pole to the tonic home key. I turn to the history of theory to reveal a more nuanced history of Schubert’s attitude towards the dominant. In a revision of ‘Geistes-Gruß’ (D. 142), a song he sent to Goethe in 1816, Schubert added a brief dominant-seventh chord to soften an abrupt modulation to a remote key. Such an insertion between remote keys was coined an ‘intermediate dominant’ by Schubert’s contemporary Anton Reicha and was understood to be a sufficient preparation for a new remote key. In four subsequent versions of ‘Geistes-Gruß’, Schubert strengthened, rather than weakened, this intermediate dominant – only to remove it altogether in the final published version. I scrutinize Schubert’s use of intermediate dominants that, together with other techniques such as the use of silence, act as a harmonic cushion between abrupt third relations in a range of early multi-sectional songs and in the medial caesura-fill in the Unfinished and Great Symphonies. I compare Schubert’s compositional strategies with the theories of modulation and harmonic juxtaposition by his contemporary music theorists Anton Reicha and Gottfried Weber, and I argue that they share a strikingly similar aesthetic of the power of the intermediate dominant.

Although definitions of orientalism and racism seldom achieve consensus, the significance of their interplay is universally acknowledged amongst theorists of non-Western cultures. Tony Ballantyne, in his recent Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, describes their relationship in terms of mutuality, and Ziauddin Sardar, in Orientalism, describes them as ‘circles within circles’. Edward Said, of course, deals with their relationship exhaustively in Orientalism, and describes them as inextricably linked. Writing of the nineteenth century, he suggests that ‘Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West most easily associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality.’

While there exist numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century annotated editions of repertoire such as the violin sonatas of Beethoven, the repertoire for the cello was in general edited significantly less frequently. The cello concertos by or attributed to Haydn constitute an exception, both in the number of versions and the degree of editorial intervention. Three cello concertos were associated with Haydn's name: the well-known concerto in D Hob.VIIb:2, another concerto in D Hob.VIIb:4, and a concerto in C Hob.VIIb:5. The first is now known to be a genuine work of Haydn's although this attribution was not universally accepted in the nineteenth century. The second is an unattributable eighteenth-century concerto claimed to be by Haydn and accepted as such at its publication in 1895. The third was compiled by the cellist David Popper who claimed to have based it on Haydn's sketches, providing orchestration and linking material. This article discusses aspects of the five performing editions of Hob.VIIb:2 by Bockmühl, Servais, Becker, Klengel and Whitehouse, the two editions of Hob.VIIb:4 by Grützmacher and Trowell, and Popper's concerto, considering these texts, the reception of the concertos as compositions, and the reception of individual performances. This article surveys the period of the greatest diversity of editions, a period whose later limit is determined by the eventual entry of this work into the cello canon. It will be suggested that this diversity is a consequence of non-canonicity.

This article attempts to describe the shift in the Romanian public’s musical taste brought about by musical borrowings and imports from the West. It focuses on the period between the end of Phanariot rule (1821) and the establishment of Romania’s capital in Bucharest (1862). These decades of change yielded rich intercultural encounters and fusions, whereas the years that followed – from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War – show a more unified phase of assimilation of Western music.

After looking at the boyar class and the bourgeoisie of Bucharest (the social segment from which an opera- and concert-going public emerged in the last quarter of the century), I move on to the everyday musical practices of the population of Bucharest, using musical examples and travellers’ accounts as a descriptive means. Finally, I analyse the shifts in musical tastes that took place in the upper layers of society as a complicated process of exclusion, inclusion and assimilation of various musical influences; as we shall see, the mixing and hybridization of musical practices not only shaped the tastes of music lovers, but also influenced the creation of Romanian music, which entered a new phase.

At the crux of Byron's epic poem The Corsair lies a moral dilemma for its imprisoned hero, Conrad. Should he kill his sleeping enemy, Seyd, and thus evade impending torture and execution the next morning? Or should he accept death as the just recompense for his crimes? His decision is swift. He resolutely refuses the path of the ‘secret knife’; in contrast, Seyd's favorite slave and concubine, Gulnare, declares her readiness to do the deed instead. When Conrad, pursuing her through the winding passages of the high tower, sees her again, he at first thinks that her ‘softening heart’ had spared Seyd's life.