This chapter explores the genealogy of the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, tracing the saying from Romantic period attributions to Thomas Paine and Napoleon back to seventeenth-century debates about the sublime as a literary style. Ridiculousness haunts sublimity from Longinus’s discussions of the comic in his treatise to Kant’s consideration of humour as an affect uncannily akin to the sublime. Returning to Romantic period theorizations of the ridiculous, the chapter considers Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics and his influence on S. T. Coleridge’s thinking about humour as providing alternative perspectives on key Romantic concepts including our relationship to nature, society, and childhood.

It is well known that Britten visited the Soviet Union on five occasions between 1960 and 1971 and established warm friendships with members of the Soviet musical elite: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Galina Vishnevskaya. Using a range of declassified archival material, this article places this engagement in the wider historical context of Anglo-Soviet political, commercial, and cultural relations, from the wartime alliance with Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It considers the operation of the Anglo-Soviet Cultural Agreement, alongside the importance of individuals such as the impresario Victor Hochhauser and a sequence of supportive British ambassadors and cultural attachés. It also examines the role of the British Council on the ground and some of the constraints placed upon this cultural engagement through resourcing and the rules of the political game. Finally, it assesses engagement beyond Britten’s lifetime, in the light of the visits of pop artists such as Sir Cliff Richard and the Bootleg Beatles to the Soviet Union and the first performances of works hitherto taboo, such as Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.

A symbiosis in music between performance and composition prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. It was particularly evident among conductors. Conducting did not emerge as a distinct profession until the last quarter of the century. But even then, those who sought to make conducting a career either dabbled in composition or harboured lifelong hopes to succeed with their own music. The instincts of a fellow composer dominated the approach to interpretation from the podium.

In Johannes Brahms’s circle of close friends and colleagues, there was perhaps no better example of this link between composing and conducting than Otto Dessoff (1835–92). Dessoff is remembered only as a conductor, despite many fine works to his name. It was to Dessoff that Brahms entrusted the first performance, in 1876, of his First Symphony Op. 68Dessoff was born in Leipzig to Jewish parents; he met Brahms in 1853 but became a close friend in the 1860s, after they both settled in Vienna.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.