A summary of two rival careers, including international travel and differing outlook in the 1848 Revolution.

This chapter first outlines the Romantic perspective on performance as it was elaborated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates on key writers who made music central to their philosophical and literary works, most notably E. T. A. Hoffman and Walter Scott. Both writers foregrounded the immediacy and social intimacy of performance as fundamental to musical beauty, even as they simultaneously discussed music in terms of objects (works, songs, poems). The chapter proceeds with case studies of three early-nineteenth-century performers – Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz (as conductor) – who were considered ‘Romantic’ or who inspired writers to use Romantic literary and journalistic tropes. Each case study considers the interrelations between the performer’s look, onstage behaviour, and musical phenomena, as well as the literary elaborations they inspired. The conclusion suggests ways in these three key performers shaped performance ideals well into the twentieth century.

Program music, a category that applies explicitly to Mahler’s early symphonies and implicitly to all of them, had a long and complicated history by the time he made his first attempts. Purely instrumental works by Froberger, Frescobaldi, Kuhnau (Biblische Historien), Bach (Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo) and François Couperin (Le Parnasse ou l’Apothéose de Lully); Parisian symphonies ca. 1800 by composers such as François Lesueur, Francesco Antonio Rosetti, and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf; and “characteristic” music of early nineteenth-century Austria and Germany formed the backdrop of better-known efforts by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, all of which played in Mahler’s mind when he began to forge his own path. The survey and typology provided by this chapter serve to frame Mahler’s conflicted attitude, which led him ultimately to a public repudiation of programmaticism, but not a private one.

The early reception of Beethoven’s Eroica proves to be a complex phenomenon. The new audiences that emerged around 1800 were interested in understanding music both through listening and through reading about it in new journals devoted to music. Beethoven’s music was considered very difficult, but worth the challenge. The dominant image of Beethoven and the status of the symphony both played an important role in the Eroica’s early reception. From the nineteenth century onwards there has been a strong desire to understand Beethoven’s music by relating it to biography. In the case of the Eroica Symphony there has been a focus on the title, and on the unnamed great man or hero, as well as on the interpretation of the Marcia funebre. Authors such as Hector Berlioz, Ferdinand Ries, Anton Schindler and Carl Maria von Weber contributed to interpretations that ranged from relating the symphony to the ancient world to the attempt to establish a programme related to Napoleon, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Admiral Horatio Nelson or General Ralph Abercromby. So the Eroica has been understood variously as a political statement. Others commentators, such as Richard Wagner, saw Beethoven himself is the hero of this symphony.