This article examines the change in the Viennese reception of Donizetti's operas in relation to the internationalization of the city's theatrical life during the last fifteen years of the Metternich regime (1833–48), as well as the ensuing tensions between German nationalist ideology and the cosmopolitan aspirations of Habsburg cultural policies. While the transformation of Donizetti's image from Italian to cosmopolitan composer resulted in part from the development of his career in Paris from 1838, it was also inseparable from evolving ideas of cultural cosmopolitanism in Vienna's political landscape. As the Habsburg court sought to contain the dissemination of national ideologies in the Austrian Empire, the construction of a Viennese operatic identity was increasingly set apart from national discourses. In Vienna's press, discussions of Donizetti's two operas written specifically for the Kärntnertortheater, Linda di Chamounix (1842) and Maria di Rohan (1843), focused on the different ways in which these works combined Italian, French, and German elements, and aligned with conceptions of cosmopolitanism that advocated for the overcoming of national divides. Viennese attempts at reconciling operatic cultures, however, collided with the universalizing aspirations that German nationalists had reckoned as the mission of their own national culture. Charting the flow of ideas emerging from the Viennese reception of Donizetti's operas for the Kärtnertortheater allows us to rethink the relationship between opera and politics in Vienna in the 1830s and 1840s, and to reconsider our approach to “national” designations as focal concepts of nineteenth-century music historiography more broadly.

In discussing those passages of an opera in which not only the audience but also the characters of the story hear music, musicologists often write of “diegetic” music, adopting well-established terminology from film studies and narratology. The terms “diegesis” and “diegetic” stem from ancient Greek, and owe their long-standing fortune to their presence in seminal writings by Plato and Aristotle; scholars of narrative, drama, film, and music occasionally note, however, that the meaning assumed by “diegesis” and “diegetic” in recent decades is very different from (or even opposite to) the historical one. In fact, the two meanings coexist in current scholarly usage, engendering terminological (and therefore conceptual) confusion. The goal of this article is to explain how this situation came about. Ancient Greece witnessed the emergence of the basic narratological distinction between recounting and enacting, and its gradual (and far from straightforward) association with the terminological distinction between “diegesis” and “mimesis.” A misinterpretation of Aristotle by French filmologues around 1950 gave rise to the modern meaning of “diegesis” (“storyworld,” or even simply “story”), while the misapprehension by which the ancient and modern terminologies are deemed to have arisen entirely independently of each other originates in the influential work of narratologist Gérard Genette. The story reconstructed here involves to-ing and fro-ing between words and concepts: what may appear as a purely lexical study is also, of necessity, a study about ideas. Moreover, this story might serve more generally as an apologue, reminding us of the sometimes peculiar ways in which bits of our collective wisdom emerge and become accepted.

DeFord Bailey (1899–1982), an African American harmonica virtuoso, performed regularly on the Grand Ole Opry radio program from 1926 to 1941 and afterward fell into obscurity. Decades later, however, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame (2005), overseen by the Country Music Association (CMA), amid calls to diversify a predominantly white country music canon. Motivated by racially progressive ideals and seeking to rehabilitate the genre's image, many fans and industry advocates misrepresented Bailey's achievements in the surrounding conversations, or they relied upon essentializing notions of black music in their advocacy on his behalf. Resistance to his candidacy for the Hall was cited as evidence of the industry's institutionalized racism. While his eventual induction allowed the CMA some room in which to refute that charge and promote a multiracial narrative for the genre's history, consistent with its long-standing desire to cultivate middle-class respectability, that same multiracial narrative obscured Bailey's role in the production of a distinctly white image for country music in the 1920s and 1930s. Highlighting this discrepancy, this article compares the historical and contemporary reception of Bailey's music and legacy, drawing upon newspaper accounts, Opry promotional materials, archival interviews, and commercial recordings. Opry broadcasts played host to blues, blackface, and other racially coded repertoires; Bailey's blues-based style did not distinguish him from his white Opry peers. Opry marketing worked assiduously to present a singular white image for the show and its repertoire, marginalizing or obscuring Bailey's racial identity in its programming and publicity. In this manner, Bailey's career has paradoxically been made to serve narratives asserting both the whiteness and the multiracialism of country music.

In chapter 27 of the last book of his Speculum musice , Jacobus faults an unnamed theorist for misattributing some ars nova doctrine to the ars antiqua ; he then excuses the offense by explaining that the oldest ars nova theory might already seem old to current practitioners. This passage and several others suggest that Jacobus was writing at a time when the ars nova was hardly new. And yet the earliest ars nova theory dates from 1319, while the completion of the Speculum musice is often placed in the mid-1320s or ca. 1330. Since the Speculum cites a range of ars nova treatises that in turn cite a repertoire of motets, Jacobus's comments serve as a terminus ante quem for the ars nova writ large. This study reconsiders the date of completion for the last, seventh book of the Speculum musice . It is clear that Jacobus was older than the moderni and finished his treatise as an old man, but he also reveals that he wrote over a long span of time and revised his work repeatedly. His notational proclivities are those of a musician who came of age in a post-Franconian idiom prevalent until ca. 1320, but the latest notational developments he mentions include semiminims, dragmas, and even note shapes otherwise associated with the so-called ars subtilior . In light of this, I suggest that the Speculum musice could have been finished as late as the 1350s by an author in his mid- to late seventies. This redating, in turn, invites broad reconsideration of the transition between ars antiqua and ars nova .