The Crystal Palace held a key position in London concert life during the 1860s and 70s as one of the few public venues to host high quality orchestral music. Importantly, audience members were able to buy single tickets on the day, as opposed to the prevailing practice of paying for a whole-season subscription, making the Saturday Concerts accessible to a much greater range of people. To cater to this newly-broadened audience, the programme booklets featured lengthy programme notes, a form of writing that was still in its infancy (the earliest examples date from the 1840s). These notes were a crucial part of the institutional context for performances of new or unfamiliar music in the nineteenth century, helping create the idea of ‘classic’ works and composers at the key moment of first impressions.

The Saturday Concerts were especially important for Schubert reception in Britain. The promotional efforts of August Manns, the conductor, and George Grove, then Secretary of the Crystal Palace Company, led to important performances of several early symphonies and the incidental music for Rosamunde. Grove's programme notes were especially influential on an audience that had never heard this music before. A close examination Grove's texts shows how they made ‘classics’ of Schubert and his music, referring to financial status, gender, religion, classical history, and imperial identity. This strategy was common to all composers that Grove and Manns wished to promote, though Schubert required special handling on certain key issues. However, these texts also suggest that ‘classic’ did not necessarily equate to ‘canonic’. After all, the ideological promotion of Schubert often failed to secure his works a permanent place the repertoire of the Saturday Concerts. Overall these programme notes suggest some complexity to the emergence of ‘the classics’, and provide valuable insights many areas of Victorian thinking around music.

Musical sources from the nineteenth century in Argentina are very scarce. The first challenge, therefore, is to locate these materials across multiple repositories. In the last 15 years, certain state policies have been introduced to unify access to information in digital and non-digital archives. However, the country's economic instability, successive changes of government and the discontinuity of public policies in reference to cultural and educational programmes continue to impede a consistent systematization of collections and catalogues of these repositories. Additionally, it is also necessary to consult other repositories – both public collections, managed by provinces rather than the national government, and private ones that may offer online resources such as catalogues, transcriptions or digitized materials. Much of the musical production in the first half of the nineteenth century occurred within religious contexts, which means that a large part of these sources is located in ecclesiastical repositories that are very difficult to access. Many lack websites, the extent of their holdings remains unknown, and in cases where catalogues do exist, they are often not digitized.

In 1811, Beethoven opted for ‘Allegretto' for the second movement of his seventh symphony, to which he added the metronome mark crotchet = MM76. Ever since the work's inception, however, this has been mitigated by taking it as ‘Andante'. By investigating the purpose, rationale, and background, this article attempts to clarify why the original tempo made performers, listeners, and commentators uncomfortable. Exploring the tension between what Beethoven prescribed and what is taken to be good musicianship, three historical processes are evaluated: (i) performances of the symphony during Beethoven's lifetime; (ii) the activities by Beethoven’s one-time companion Anton Schindler in the 1830s and 40s; and (iii) a vast landscape of interpretational enterprise from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

Following the historical record, the article inquires into the conundrum of Beethoven's intentions, in pursuit of a broader perspective. The case is made that ‘Allegretto' inhered within it an immediacy of performance and that it expressed a repudiation of romantic aesthetics. It is argued that there are good prudential reasons to do away with ‘Andante', an encrustation of romantic error, and to acknowledge, affirm, and valorize ‘Allegretto’ as a thumbprint of style.

Franz Liszt's symphonic poem Mazeppa (1854) recreates a narrative that portrays Cossack commander Ivan Mazeppa's torturous Ride – bound naked to an unbroken horse – to miraculous survival and triumph. To evoke this legend, Liszt incorporated familiar musical tropes: persistent galloping triplets, fanfares, apotheosis and a march-like finale. These tropes illustrate a consistent story, but they risk sounding merely clichéd and mimetic. To appreciate how Liszt uses these tropes to create depth and compositional creativity in Mazeppa requires consideration of the myth's intertextuality. This article considers the broader sources that informed Liszt's Mazeppa and offers an interpretation that includes the programme's preface and an array of Mazeppa ‘texts’ that have appeared since the mid-eighteenth century. These texts include a quasi-historical narrative, poetry and visual art along with Liszt's original commentary for Mazeppa and his defence of programme music in his Berlioz and His ‘Harold’ Symphony essay. Taking all of this together, my approach in this article is to analyse Mazeppa as if listening for the protagonist and letting the character of his musical subject inform my interpretation. Hearing the musical subject in this work requires attention to voice, expressivity, motives, gestures, themes and extramusical intertexts to construct, layer by layer, an interpretation of Mazeppa's symbolic significance. I argue that connecting these threads of cultural history illuminates the piece's theme of suffering and death as inescapable companions in the life of the creative genius.

Studies of cinema's emergence from nineteenth-century cultural forms have historically privileged its visual attributes over its sonic ones. This article redresses the balance by examining a musical device commonly associated with early film exhibition across Europe: the fairground organ, whose spectacular audiovisual appeal was exploited in public squares and fairgrounds long before the invention of cinema. Drawing on insights from the field of media archaeology, I ask whether we can locate an archaeological layer of cinematic prehistory in the fairground organ itself. In so doing, what emerges is the critical importance of Italy in the cultural history of the mechanical organ. Partly this is because the individual widely acknowledged as the ‘father of the fairground organ’, Ludovico Gavioli, was an Italian. Yet the Italianness of mechanical organs was also rooted in the stereotypical repertoire of such instruments (well-known excerpts from Italian opera), and on discursive tropes that emphasized an affinity between portative barrel organs – said to have been invented in Italy – and the itinerant operators of such instruments, often perceived to be Italian. Ultimately, I suggest that instead of treating fairground organs as the backing-track to early film exhibition, we might profitably conceive of early cinema as the latest visual enhancement to grace the exhibition of the mechanical organ.

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.