In 1912 Ezra Pound set himself in opposition to one particular sonic form: ‘the sequence of a metronome.’ With its symmetrical ticking or beating, the metronome became for Pound and some of his contemporaries an apt figure for a metrical tradition, often equated with an outmoded Victorian versification based on a regular succession of beats. In fact, the figure of metronome had been structuring debates about the appropriate sonic form of poetry for roughly a century before Pound issued his pronouncement about it. From the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Johann Maelzel’s musical chronometer began to offer a standard of temporal measurement for musical and vocal compositions, the metronome and practices attuned to its ticking featured regularly in elocutionary and prosodic literature. From the first tick of Maelzel’s machine to the modernism of Pound, a dispute about the practice of reading and reciting verse, as well as composing in it, found an apt correlate in the figure of the metronome. This chapter suggests that Pound’s anti-metronome modernism belongs to an evolving debate about a culture of sing-song and deliberately repetitive prosody.

Brahms witnessed a period of staggering scientific and technological advances throughout Europe and the burgeoning USA. The nineteenth century offered new modes of transportation: musicians could now travel to distant cities to perform. With this mobility came the need for standardisation, both of technological devices as well as musical parameters, such as concert pitch, which varied considerably among cities. Brahms was both interested in, and delighted by, advances which related to music and its performance, from train travel to new research in the natural sciences. Indeed, he became an interlocutor with a number of leading natural scientists of the period.

By the 1830s, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Britain, and German cities were slowly experiencing the effects of mechanisation. A crucial development in both production and communications was the steam engine, which powered factory machinery, facilitating mass production.

We begin our consideration of Brahms’s politics and religion with the great historical turn that occurred in the centre of Europe in the year 1870. With the decisive German military defeat of France and proclamation of King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. Brahms probably would have preferred a Larger German solution that included Austria, Prussia’s traditional rival for leadership in the loosely bound German Confederation that was established by the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. But what mattered most was that Germany had at last emerged from its political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognised achievements in the cultural sphere.