More than half of Schubert’s chamber works from 1824 to 1828 feature his preferred instrument, the piano. Yet in none of them does it function as an instrumental accompaniment, being instead an equal participant in a duo or trio chamber format. Especially in solo chamber works written for performance in recitals by befriended virtuoso instrumentalists, Schubert was perfectly willing to adapt the style brillant that flourished between 1820 and 1830. Based on the assumption that Schubert applied the style brillant solely for reasons of economy, his virtuoso chamber music has previously been considered to be of lesser value, mentioned only in passing. More recently, however, his turn to extroverted forms of expression has been described as a deliberate counterfoil to the introverted sublimation of his other ‘late’ works. This chapter considers the Fantasy in C Major (D934) and Variations in E Minor on ‘Trockne Blumen’ (D802) to show how Schubert discovered the sophisticated and outgoing mannerisms of the style brillant; it also discusses the development of ornamented variation techniques as an alternative to thematic development, and how this shift of emphasis between musical substance and figuration seems to anticipate the aesthetics of the Romantic arabesque.

Franz Schubert’s waltzes may seem small, but they bear more than meets the eye. Leopold von Sonnleithner tells us that Schubert ‘never danced, but was always ready to sit down at the piano, where for hours he improvised the most beautiful waltzes; those he liked he repeated, in order to remember them and to write them out afterwards’. The composer appears to have been inspired by the motion and joy he saw and caused, for certain waltzes communicate physical momentum and personalised interiority – reflections and echoes from the past.The effects expressed within Schubert’s waltzes arise from expectations elicited by their voice-leading, coupled with changes in texture, register, dynamics, metre and rhythm. This chapter will explore representative examples from Schubert’s Originaltänze, Valses sentimentales, Valses nobles, and the Zwanzig Walzer (Letzte Walzer) to demonstrate how they convey impressions of physicality and flow, perceptions of distance and disturbance, plus aspects of sonority and spatiality. In turn, these reflections and echoes offer insights regarding Schubert’s art and aesthetics, as well as the past they inhabited.

The word ‘Klavier’ occurs only twice in the texts of Schubert’s lieder, but both times in a prominent position – namely, in the titles of Christian Daniel Friedrich Schubart’s ‘An mein Klavier’ and Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Laura am Klavier’, both set to music in 1816 (respectively D342 and D388). The first poem deals with two figures – the narrative persona and his piano; the second with three – Laura, the piano and the narrative persona. In Schubart, the emphasis falls on the piano’s expressive potential; in Schiller, mainly on the impression it imparts. The two poems thus present the instrument in quite different, even antithetical, guises: introverted versus extroverted. Although Schubert turned to poems that were already a generation old (they were first published in 1785 and 1782, respectively) and had a different sound in mind compared to the two poets (this was an age of rapid evolution in keyboard instrument construction), the instrumental aesthetic displayed in Schubart’s and Schiller’s poems still applied with undiminished force in 1816. The antitheses marked by the poems Schubert chose with respect to the Klavier reveal the breadth of notions associated with the instruments that went by that name around 1800.

In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

In contrast to many contemporary composers, Franz Schubert was neither a virtuoso at the piano nor on any other instrument. His relationship to the piano appears rather pragmatic, in that he turned to the instrument when he was in demand: as a song accompanist and for dance music at Schubertiaden, as a four-handed partner or as a page-turner at larger events. He certainly did not see himself as a pianist, but first and foremost as a ‘composer’.This chapter explores Schubert’s public and semi-public appearances as a pianist by evaluating the contradictory statements about the quality and the quantity of his piano playing. It is concerned with his musical education, explores his piano playing in his later years and highlights his public appearance as a pianist. The comparison of Schubert’s biography with those of Viennese piano virtuosos and other composers sheds new light on the rapid development of the musical tastes of the Viennese bourgeois society in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Finally, the question of whether and to what extent the fact that Schubert was not present in the public concert life of his time diminished his career as a composer of ‘great’ works is discussed.

From 1810 to 1830, Viennese piano construction evolved in an attempt to combine the special sonority of Viennese instruments with new advances in technology. One important factor was the possibility of varying the sound between full and reduced or dampened action. A particularly striking change of sound could be produced by the soft or una corda pedal, which shifted the hammer rail so that the hammers struck only one rather than the standard three strings of a triple-strung piano. Although detailed knowledge of which composers wrote which works for which instrument is lacking, hypotheses can be advanced regarding the influence of the action of certain instruments on compositional style. A comparison of works by two composers from different generations – one earlier (Beethoven) and another later (Mendelssohn, who had a predilection for Viennese instruments in his youth) – sheds light on several peculiarities of Schubert’s piano music. Beethoven’s late works and Schubert’s works of the 1820s both exploit this potential in order to coordinate sonority and structure. However, the two composers differ in one key respect: Beethoven tended to use the sonic contrasts he exploited (and meticulously notated) to articulate the work’s architecture, whereas Schubert used them to refine atmosphere and mood.

This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.

In the early 1820s, music critics called attention to an innovative feature of certain Schubert Lieder: musical imagery in the piano accompaniment that both unifies the song and creates dramatic immediacy. Writers hailed this aspect of ‘Erlkönig’ (Op. 1) and ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (Op. 2) in particular. The two songs’ main musical motifs – racing triplet rhythms evoking a galloping horse and a whirling sixteenth-note pattern evoking a spinning wheel – do more than provide unity and vivify the represented scene, however; they also powerfully contribute to the expression of changing emotions. The outer and inner worlds of the song persona(e) converge in, and are projected through, the piano accompaniment. This chapter examines the nature of musical imagery in Schubert Lieder, different ways that the musical motifs evolve, and the interpretive significance of those changes. The motif might be placed in new contexts, altered from within, fragmented, interrupted, or sounded with greater or lesser frequency, to the point of disappearing. Paradoxically, it might even evolve in meaning by resisting change. Songs analysed include ‘Erlkönig’, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Meeres Stille’, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, ‘Jägers Abendlied’, ‘Halt!’, ‘Gefrorne Tränen’, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, ‘Im Dorfe’, ‘Der Wegweiser’ and ‘Die Stadt’.

Analysis of addressee and writer–recipient relationships is a common methodology for the interpretation of written correspondence of ‘great’ composers. By contrast, when a musical text is the object of study, music philologists and performers alike tend to neglect such a contextual perspective when attempting to reveal its meaning – as if composers had no particular audience in mind when they wrote their piano music. This chapter attempts a characterisation of Schubert’s pianistic audience in Vienna as reflected in contemporary Viennese pianoforte treatises. The first part presents evidence to support such a geographically focused source selection – the distinctly nationalist stance of the Viennese pianoforte scene in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna. The second part compiles a brief genre history of the Viennese pianoforte treatise – both produced in Vienna and imported from abroad – during Schubert’s lifetime. The third part deduces several common principles from this fascinating corpus of sources and reads selected passages from Schubert’s works through this lens, exemplifying how some of the traditional ‘problems’ can be resolved in the context of early nineteenth-century Viennese pianism.

Schubert’s piano music and songs contain several examples where triplets are notated alongside dotted rhythms. Editors, writers and performers disagree about the performance of these rhythms, which exist in keyboard music from at least the late Baroque to the early twentieth century. This chapter surveys evidence from the long nineteenth century, drawing on previous literature and introducing new lines of enquiry. It situates the problem as it applies to Schubert within a broader view of the meaning of notation through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that many aspects of rhythmic notation remained unfixed during the period.A broader range of evidence than previously considered is documented, including contradictory passages from performance tutors and other literature, anomalous notation in the music of several composers, different versions of Schubert’s works and rhythmic alignment in a range of sources. A study of engraving practice offers insight into the rhythmic presentation of published sources. Finally, early recordings demonstrate that rhythmic performance continued to be controversial into the twentieth century.Because of the scant and sometimes contradictory nature of the evidence, it is not possible to arrive at definitive solutions to the performance problems. Nevertheless, this chapter draws some distinctive conclusions from the sources.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term “literature” was used broadly to describe any printed text. By the turn of the century, its meaning had narrowed to refer specifically to aesthetic verbal objects with distinctive features of authorship and form. This change was brought on by rapid transformations in print culture. Literature created its readership mainly through periodicals: newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, illustrated weeklies, magazines of mass and high culture. Periodicals were not only the medium for all literary genres but were also key in the professionalization of writers and the making of national literatures. They were a powerful tool to shape the literary imagination of a growing and increasingly more diversified reading public. Through the publication of serialized novels, essays, and reviews, periodicals such as La Nación, Sud-América, and Caras y Caretas were essential to the process of literary autonomy in Argentina. In this chapter the history of this process is outlined and those cases in which developments in print culture framed some of the most significant works of Argentine literature are discussed.

The main aim of this chapter is to show that sexuality and capitalism are intrinsically related. Such an endeavour demands extracting sex from the domains of nature, reproduction, and the private, and relating it to the intricate norms of capitalism. The first part of the chapter looks at why capitalism and sexuality have been articulated as belonging to separate spheres of life. How did it come to seem that “being a sex” and “having sex” is so entirely removed from the “investment of money to make more money”? The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution of capitalism and its relationship to sexuality, focusing on the nineteenth-century transition from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free labour economy. The main characters of this chapter are homo economicus and his economically invisible wife, the producers of valuable social relations, as well as various “reformable” or “irreformable” others whose sex is deemed of no value or even against value. The chapter presents social relations as capitalist and sexual, and treats the dichotomies social–natural, public–private, and economic–cultural as interwoven in the (de)politicization of both sexuality and capitalism.

This chapter analyzes the works of brother and sister Lucio Victorio Mansilla and Eduarda Mansilla, two fundamental figures in the cultural life of nineteenth-century Argentina, whose personal trajectories took them to Europe and the United States. Journalist, military man, and politician Lucio penned what can be considered the first ethnographic record of the Indigenous peoples of the Pampas; Eduardo was an accomplished novelist, travel writer, journalist, and musician who published in both Spanish and French. In this chapter the work of both siblings is read together. It takes into account the centrality of Lucio in the field of Argentinean literature and proposes that Eduarda illuminates different areas of the cultural intellectual life of nineteenth-century Argentina. Focus is on Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870) by Lucio V. Mansilla and two novels by Eduarda Mansilla – El médico de San Luis (1860) and Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas, published in French in 1869 and translated by Lucio – to reflect on the relationship between narration and the state, practices of everyday life, sociability, and family stories, as well as their circulation and consecration mechanisms.

Sex in nineteenth-century Cairo played out on a stage of relentless change and adaptation. The city’s urban life witnessed a significant rise in population growth, transformations in family and household structures, the rise of an Egyptian nationalist elite, and the gradual demise of African and Circassian slavery. Because of the divergent approaches taken with this topic, this chapter focuses on the unequal power relations that shaped Cairene sex, using canonical texts and archival documents to tease out the connections between sex and family life, nationalism, slavery, the justice system, and sex work. Specifically emphasized are stories and narratives written by literate Egyptians and Europeans, and how their ideas of domesticity, freedom, and political authority operated in relation to sexual practices. In doing so an explanation of sex in nineteenth-century Cairo is put forward that highlights celebrated and forgotten sources, prioritizing key works that inform our current understandings of sex. The chapter discusses memoirs and political treatises written by prominent Egyptian nationalists, explores the rich possibilities raised by archival records and their differences from European traveller accounts, and concludes with what nineteenth-century sources can (and cannot) tell us about queer ideas of sex.

This chapter explores London as a site of sexual pleasure and danger in the nineteenth century, a period during which as an imperial centre it became the world’s largest city. Focused on the complex sexual landscape of this urban environment, it examines sexual activity in both private and public spaces including homes, theatres, public houses, pleasure gardens, royal parks, and toilets, paying particularly attention to the ways in which social class determined the personal experiences of sexuality in the Victorian era. Many of these acts were frequently monitored and policed and could result not only in moral censure but also in arrest, imprisonment, or public humiliation in places such as divorce courts. Most likely to run afoul of the law were those in the British metropolis who transgressed gender and sexual boundaries by working as prostitutes, cross-dressing, or engaging in intimate acts with members of their own sex. The sexual history of nineteenth-century London also involved the proliferation of a thriving and diversified trade in pornographic texts and images, ranging from erotic novels to photographic postcards. Central to this chapter are considerations of the ways in which sex and sexuality figured in economic life, urban geographic configurations, and various forms of self-fashioning.