The development of modern styles of elite music education played a crucial role in entrenching Werktreue as the dominant practice within classical music performance. Focusing on Germany’s first conservatory, the Leipzig conservatory, which was founded in 1843, this article analyzes how Werktreue , understood as a set of tacit competencies and sensibilities that must be learned by musicians, was produced at a single historical site. Archival documents of the institution, as well as the correspondence and writings of teachers and students like Felix Mendelssohn, William Rockstro, and Ethel Smyth, show that the central objective of musical pedagogy was the faithful interpretation of musical works. Isolated as a discrete subject of training, performing musical works also functioned as the principal mode of student assessment through semesterly examinations. To transmit the necessary skills for this paradigm of performance, pupils’ bodily capacities ( Technik ) and ability to understand and interpret canonic compositions ( Vortrag ) became essential targets of conservatory pedagogy. Ubiquitous visibility among students, and the intense competition that this visibility engendered, went hand in hand with institutionalizing styles of musical expertise that continue to this day. In exploring these developments, this article asks how the productive power of modern conservatory training contributed not only to Werktreue ’s rise over a wide geography, but also to the remarkable stability with which it has pervaded performance practice across multiple generations.

In recent years scholars have made great strides in contextualizing the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868−1935) within the politics and culture of the interwar period. Many of Schenker’s closest pupils and disciples have now also come under investigation. Few present as bewildering a story as Walter Dahms (1887−1973), a music critic and one of Schenker’s fiercest advocates in the German press. Though they met on just one occasion, Dahms and Schenker corresponded extensively over a period of eighteen years (1913−31), revealing a mutual concern for the social and political climate of interwar Germany. In some cases their correspondence served as a springboard for many of the extra-musical ideas Schenker published in his analytical pamphlets of the 1920s, Der Tonwille and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik . In other cases it demonstrated Dahms’s and Schenker’s bitter disagreements about the Great War and its main perpetrators. Along with an array of articles he wrote on Schenker, Dahms published two books that brought Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “Music of the South” into contact with Schenker’s developing theories of musical structure. Dahms further proposed a concept of “vocality” that he saw as the key to restoring the notion of musical genius in Western music. Schenker’s analysis of Mendelssohn’s Venetianisches Gondellied in F-sharp minor, op. 30, no. 6, published in issue 10 of Der Tonwille , unearths Schenker’s own take on the South and on Dahms’s vocal principle. In the end, this case study exemplifies the intermingling of aesthetic, performative, and analytical concerns within Schenker’s work at this time, and it exposes the many ideological tensions between Schenker’s and Dahms’s outlooks on music, culture, and politics.

The notion that there might be autobiographical, or personally confessional, registers at work in Mendelssohn’s 1846 Elijah has long been established, with three interpretive approaches prevailing: the first, famously advanced by Prince Albert, compares Mendelssohn’s own artistic achievements with Elijah’s prophetic ones; the second, in Eric Werner’s dramatic formulation, discerns in the aria “It is enough” a confession of Mendelssohn’s own “weakening will to live”; the third portrays Elijah as a testimonial on Mendelssohn’s relationship to the Judaism of his birth and/or to the Christianity of his youth and adulthood. This article explores a fourth, essentially untested, interpretive approach: the possibility that Mendelssohn crafts from Elijah’s story a heartfelt affirmation of domesticity, an expression of his growing fascination with retiring to a quiet existence in the bosom of his family. The argument unfolds in three phases. In the first, the focus is on that climactic passage in Elijah ’s Second Part in which God is revealed to the prophet in the “still small voice.” The turn from divine absence to divine presence is articulated through two clear and powerful recollections of music that Elijah had sung in the oratorio’s First Part, a move that has the potential to reconfigure our evaluation of his role in the public and private spheres in those earlier passages. The second phase turns to Elijah’s own brief sojourn into the domestic realm, the widow’s scene, paying particular attention to the motivations that may have underlain the substantial revisions to the scene that took place between the Birmingham premiere and the London premiere the following year. The final phase explores the possibility that the widow and her son, the “surrogate family” in the oratorio, do not disappear after the widow’s scene, but linger on as “para-characters” with crucial roles in the unfolding drama.