Our contemporary perspective of the relationship between the composer, the score and musical performance during the nineteenth century has been largely shaped by Lydia Goehr's widely accepted and equally widely contested narrative regarding the appearance of the regulative concept of the ‘musical work’ at the end of the eighteenth century. This narrative has been based on the assumption that during the nineteenth century the score was regarded as the locus of the work and the music. Goehr's account, however, is contrary to the essence of performance-oriented discourses of the nineteenth century. In this article, I present a narrative account of a neglected thread running along the music theoretical, aesthetic and pedagogical discourses of this period leading to the emergence and establishment of a profound conceptual transformation in the way the fundamentals of music making were understood and explained, and depict the rise of the concept of ‘phrasing’ as a specifically nineteenth-century phenomenon that diverges from the fundamentals of eighteenth-century performance pedagogy. I discuss the role of the new concept of phrasing in the performance theories of Mathis Lussy, Tobias Matthay and Stewart Macpherson and point out some of the widely employed metaphors and images in the teaching of phrasing during this period. The article posits that in the performance-oriented discourses of the nineteenth century, the performer's first and foremost loyalty was expected to be to ‘the music’ rather than to the score, the work or the composer.

In spite of rigorous exploration of nineteenth-century performing practices, performers are still apt to characterise ‘Romantic’ performance as slovenly, sentimental and tasteless. This article challenges this view by examining the practice of a violinist whose artistic outlook was seen at the time as highly disciplined and artistically motivated – Joseph Joachim. Joachim, closely allied to the Leipzig ‘school’ and the conservative branch of German music in the nineteenth century, left ample evidence of his artistic approach in terms of a performance treatise, numerous annotated editions, and five sound recordings made towards the end of his life. This evidence attests to his rigorous application of performance theory to performance practice. In addition, Joachim's pupils Karl Klingler and Marie Soldat were known as faithful adherents of this approach and they too made a number of revealing sound recordings which help to create a fuller picture. This article examines a number of these recordings in detail in order to propose that they show significant correspondences with Joachim's own practice and, by extension, provide evidence of the outworking of a Classical German ‘school’ of performance theory.

The article suggests that, by acknowledging the basis of this tradition in performance theory (much of which displays the heritage of eighteenth-century ideals) present-day performer scholars should be encouraged to see nineteenth-century performance aesthetics not so much as devoid of principle as embodying a now unfamiliar performance language. The acquisition of this language is perhaps important to a fuller understanding of nineteenth-century music.

It has long been recognized that journalistic discourse about the string quartet in early nineteenth-century sources stressed its elevation and seriousness in comparison to other genres, and that the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were described as ‘classical’ very early in the century. Less well known is that the idea of performance is embedded in this discourse – particularly around the question of the group dynamics of ensemble performance. The tendency to blur the roles of the parts and the roles of the players are evidence of this, as is the discussion of the relation between first-violin-centricity and the ideal of free and equal contribution by all four parts/players in ‘true’ or ‘classical’ works. This ideal, I argue, is distinct from the longstanding metaphor of ‘conversation’ to describe the relations of the parts. The first part of this article explores these broad topics. The second part of the article focuses on a single measure in the slow movement of Beethoven's op. 59 no. 2 and argues that in various ways it raises and thus exemplifies the issues of the distribution of power, of musical initiative or the ‘genius of performance’, and ultimately of differing subjectivities in the early nineteenth-century notion of the quartet.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's discussions of performance, largely ignored in the current literature, proclaim a key aspect of his aesthetics: performance should transport its listeners to that ‘other world’ of the music itself. To underline the point, Hoffmann resorts to elaborate metaphor, most strikingly in the essay on Beethoven's Piano Trios op. 70.

In seeking to understand this aspect of Hoffmann's aesthetics, I briefly situate his ideas in the context of early nineteenth-century aesthetics. However, his accounts of transcendent listening correlate with modern theories of absorbed attention and, more generally, inform current debates concerning the relationships between performance, listening, and the secondary discourses of musical exegesis. Does knowledge about music always or necessarily promote deep listening? In considering such questions, I turn to the philosophical accounts of audiencing in Gadamer and Adorno. Adorno in particular is aware of the limits of conceptualisation and the need to acknowledge the power of music to transcend what we can say about it.

There are many problems with Hoffmann's aesthetics, but I argue that these do not invalidate his central argument, which is also Adorno's: that the finest music is not a discourse wholly accessible to conceptualization, for the latter may at times detract from the deeper listening experience. I illustrate the point by considering the pre-war recording of Beethoven's op. 135 quartet by the Busch Quartet, arguing that this recording achieves its longevity not by complying with Beethoven's score but by adopting strategies that draw its listeners into its own magical arena.