This article investigates the work of philosopher and experimental psychologist Carl Stumpf with a focus on embedding his scientific perspective in a practice of musicianship. Stumpf wrote in an autobiographical essay from 1924 that he had considered becoming a professional violin player before taking up the study of philosophy. I claim that the practice of learning and playing this instrument sheds light on his concept of music, and at the same time signals its relevance for nineteenth-century musical aesthetics. To carve out the role of Stumpf's musicianship, I propose a “psychoanalytic” approach of tone psychology in the sense of Gaston Bachelard. For this I read through Stumpf's writings to trace the function and role of practices like analyzing tones and tunes, memorizing and notating pitch and melody, and using related tools and techniques like phonography. This is held against a reconstruction of his mentioning of the violin and of the context of violin pedagogy in the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing, I hope eventually to sharpen the notion of tone in Stumpf and thereby to contribute to a better understanding of his concept of complex qualities as opposed to the notion of Gestalt in the generation of his students.

In his symphony “Il maníatico” (1780), Gaetano Brunetti gave a musical portrayal of monomania decades before it became a staple of nineteenth-century alienism (psychiatry), as well as of Romantic music and art. A detailed analysis of his symphony shows both the presenting features of what he called manía as well as the stages of the “maniac's” interaction with the surrounding “normal” world. These stages respond to widely known mental peculiarities of several generations of Spanish royalty, whom Brunetti served as court composer. Though its court audience would likely have compared this portrayal of obsession to Cervantes's Don Quixote, Brunetti's symphony may also have sent a coded message of sympathy to his patron, the crown prince who would later reign as Carlos IV and who struggled with his obsessional father, then reigning as Carlos III. At the same time, Brunetti mocked Luigi Boccherini, his rival as court composer. By presenting a subversive reimagining of the “normal” symphonic world, Brunetti characterized the mannerisms of classical style as monomania writ large. In the following decades, the term fixe Idee emerged in German literature and usage considerably before the French idée fixe . Both concepts emerged from literary, rather than medical, sources. Though Don Quixote remained a touchstone for reflections on “madness,” Brunetti's symphony anatomized obsession decades before medical discourse gave its clinical description.

Quadrilles were a popular genre of group dancing in the nineteenth century. Existing melodies were normally used to accompany the dancing sessions, but the monotony of their repetition and the cost of a professional piano player capable of improvising were an issue. Thus, the idea of a “machine” that would be able to endlessly produce quadrille music at no cost was suggesting itself. The Quadrille Melodist , a paper-based system for the generation of piano pieces, was published in nineteenth-century Victorian London by John Clinton, a “professor in the Royal Academy of Music.” Already in 1650, Athanasius Kircher proposed in his Musurgia Universalis a device consisting of stripes with short snippets of music that could be used to create combinatorial pieces and variations. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a whole genre of quasi-algorithmic compositions was emerging, spurred by the popularity of such works as the Musikalisches Würfelspiel , a piece attributed to Mozart. In this article, I analyze the Quadrille Melodist against the background of the history of combinatorial music. I contrast its unique features with other predigital, as well as later digital, music systems and discuss its design with respect to the phenomenon of predictability in dance music. Additionally, I discuss reasons for the circumstance that the historically advertised number of possible quadrilles, 428 million, is much smaller than the real number of combinations.

In 1878, at the height of his fame, Helmholtz asked what was objective in perception, declaring that—in contrast to empirical science—it is the “artist [who] has beheld the real.” His lecture sought to show how sensory perception can be law-like, and how the effects of art are ultimately grounded in such law-likeness. Such a claim for an objective measure of perception was not unprecedented, yet it failed to distinguish cleanly between what is objective and what is real, opening up a discursive space regarding what sound “is,” and what its objective perception may be. Its arguments followed calls for “a science of beauty” based on number, and was motivated, in part, by Helmholtz's attempt to distance himself from the “weaknesses of Romanticism.” This articles argues that Helmholtz's bold claims were only possible on the basis of the writings of German materialists during the 1840s and 50s, and because sound had been figured for decades as an ambiguous object. On this basis, the article considers the role of sound within epistemological debates over sense perception and concepts of the real during the later nineteenth century. It examines the ways in which sound's abstract character became co-opted within Anglo-German discourse concerning objective perception and the scientifically real, initially through the lens of Helmholtz's 1878 lecture, but later broadening this focus to include the mid-century architects of a philosophical materialism, as well as their detractors. A closing case study, a closely documented wager between a geologist and a philosopher about the “real” of sound ca. 1850, demonstrates the imaginative uses of sound as a metonym for philosophical debate. This raises questions about the relation of sensation and number, the contested affinity between sound and concepts of the absolute, and the underlying desire to possess objects of sensory experience.

The male falsetto enjoyed a brief period of acceptance, even adulation, as it was wielded by tenors such as John Braham and Giovanni Rubini in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the last castrati to tread the stage were winding down their careers, while in Germany and Austria female impersonators such as Karl Blumenfeld, who possessed highly cultivated falsetto voices, were achieving a kind of fame of their own. These three kinds of falsetto—the castrato voice was heard at this time as having the same two registers standard for all voices, falsetto and chest voice—were, to a degree probably startling to modern readers, considered analogous to one another. The decline of the ”legitimate” falsetto as an extension of the tenorial chest voice was concurrent with the phenomena of the disappearing castrati and the wildly over-the-top female impersonators—all of whom were both implicitly and explicitly compared to one another. Both the tenors and the falsettists bore an uncomfortable, even ridiculous, perceptual proximity to the epicene, effeminate, always/already maimed state of the castrato, under the regulation of an anxious version of the male gaze. This proximity played a large role in the rapid disappearance of the tenorial falsetto after 1840.

A high point of almost every performance of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is the tragic and time-stopping aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben,” BWV 244/49. It appears to make sense in context, but commentators have long wondered how Bach and his librettist could have reused such somber music in the so-called Cöthen Funeral Music, BWV 244a, with a new text that opens “Mit Freuden sei die Welt verlassen”; the invocation of joy apparently represents a strong contradiction in affect with the music, almost uniformly understood to be very slow. The slow tempo did not originate with Felix Mendelssohn, who included the aria in his second performance of the Passion in 1841. The aria’s character appears to have been established later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in critical writings that regarded it as transcendent and representative of the Passion’s supposed pure tragedy. The aria arguably came to be seen as the St. Matthew Passion ’s transcendent “slow movement,” a much-venerated instrumental type. Its character was codified in influential nineteenth-century editions that assigned slow tempo and metronome markings, and the recorded history of the work documents very slow tempos, only recently moderated. Adaptations of the aria have taken it to be very slow as well, and represent readings of the received performance tradition of the work. The aria’s doctrinal and affectively neutral text and its musical construction suggest the plausibility of a much faster tempo. And this, in turn, could explain why it occurred to Bach and his librettist Picander to reuse it for a text that begins with the concept of joy. The slow tempo of “Aus Liebe” and the problem of its reuse with a very different text turn out to be an inheritance from the nineteenth-century reception of the work.

In the mid-1830s, Henri Herz (1803–88) was an internationally renowned pianist, but his reputation today, for the most part, is that of a second-rate musician who wrote trivial variations on opera themes. This enduring picture of Herz was painted first in France in 1834 by the Gazette musicale . The Gazette ’s campaign has been understood by modern scholars as a conspicuous moment in a broad aesthetic shift away from French salon music and toward high German Romanticism, and the Gazette has garnered praise for its prescience. But a closer examination of the Gazette ’s articles, the events surrounding the coverage such as a pistol duel and a libel case, contemporary correspondence, and Herz’s publishing record indicate that the Gazette ’s negative treatment of Herz was not an organic assessment of his output, but rather a revenge scheme orchestrated by the Gazette ’s owner and Herz’s former publisher, Maurice Schlesinger (1798–1871). As a case study, the Gazette ’s Herz campaign exposes the endemic corruption of the nineteenth-century press that has been portrayed as an unseemly rarity rather than a central component of historical criticism’s production. But taken more broadly, the Gazette ’s articles on Herz highlight limitations in the history of reception. This article turns to media studies to explore the problematic relationship between propaganda and reception and shows how the Gazette , and other nineteenth-century journals, are still manipulating our cognition.

This article challenges the privileged position that Glinka’s Kamarinskaia (1848) has assumed in accounts of Russian instrumental music. The first half of the article investigates nineteenth-century reception of Glinka’s orchestral works and demonstrates that his Jota Aragonese (1845) and Memory of a Summer Night in Madrid (1851) were just as popular as Kamarinskaia among Russian audiences of the time. It also traces the persistent references that critics such as Vladimir Stasov and Alexander Serov made to the organic qualities of all three of these orchestral fantasias. Although the variational techniques that Glinka employs in the fantasias have commonly been viewed as the very opposite of organic, Stasov and Serov appear to have been relying on a different theorization of musical organicism, namely that of Adolf Bernhard Marx. A Marxian framework helps to explain the popularity of Jota and Madrid alongside Kamarinskaia in nineteenth-century Russia, and it also provides an entry point for closer analytical investigations of the three fantasias. These analyses, comprising the second half of the article, illustrate certain distinguishing features of each fantasia as noted by nineteenth-century musicians and suggest that the fantasias represent highly divergent approaches to orchestral composition. Given the prominence of all three fantasias in nineteenth-century Russia, an awareness of these contrasting approaches allows for a more nuanced understanding of the compositional choices made by subsequent generations of Russian composers.

Scholars who have analyzed performances of Schubert’s Lieder have generally focused on the voices of masterful professionals, whether looking at performances before or during the age of sound recordings. This tendency overlooks one historically important group of performers: the amateurs who made up the broad marketplace for the genre during Schubert’s lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century. Studying this group of performers with any level of aesthetic particularity is, however, difficult: documentary evidence of particular singers in this group in the nineteenth century and even the early twentieth is scarce. Yet as the real-life practice of the amateur singing of Schubert’s Lieder in the home gradually dwindled after the nineteenth century, fictional representations of this nineteenth-century practice began to appear in period sound films across the twentieth. While not a substitute for documentary evidence of real practices, this film phenomenon meaningfully engages with nineteenth-century cultural history, literary sources, and musical practices through presentist conventions and concerns. Such films thus offer a vehicle through which to think about continuity and change in the relationship between Schubert’s song and the figure of the amateur in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and today. This article analyzes three period film scenes involving nineteenth-century “amateur” performances of Schubert’s “Ständchen” ( Schwanengesang , D. 957, no. 4). It does so in order to think about the combined aesthetic and social ramifications of the figure of the amateur in relationship to Schubert’s Lieder. I look at scenes in the following three films: the operetta-influenced Schubert picture Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933), in which operetta star Mártha Eggerth sings as the Countess Esterházy, the classic novel adaptation Jane Eyre (1934), in which Virginia Bruce sings as the titular character, and a newly written piece of “governess fiction,” The Governess (1998), in which Minnie Driver performs the song as said governess. None of these scenes offers unmed­iated or simple access to amateurism. Instead, in each scene, a professional, twentieth-­century celebrity woman movie star both sings and otherwise portrays the nineteenth-century amateur musician and character onscreen. Keeping this tension in mind, I explore how this contradiction and other elements in each scene would have and can still provide audiences opportunities to think about the relationship between amateurism and Schubert’s most popular songs. In so doing, I explore the term “amateur” in a number of overlapping senses that embrace positive and, to a lesser extent, pejorative meanings. My analysis ultimately shows how these three diverse film stagings valorize the figure and, indeed, the voice of the amateur in relationship to Schubert’s music. These conclusions have implications regarding Schubert’s songs and successful modes of performance that might attend them.

Unlike Wagner, Mahler, or Schoenberg, Johannes Brahms is often absent from discussions of Viennese fin-de-siècle psychological theories and their intersections with musical culture. The privileged context depicting an aging Brahms resistant to new trends in politics and the arts discourages the notion that he would have known and been influenced by any such developments in the developing field of psychology or psychological arts. As a case study exploring Brahms’s potential engagement in these areas, this article reexamines the contested “legend” of Brahms playing piano in dive bars as an adolescent, not to determine its veracity, but in part to reveal how this motif functions in two different narrative models of Brahms biographies to about 1933. In the first model, the composer emerges spotless from the trials of a low-income childhood; in the second, however, he remains scarred by the unhealthy sexual climate of the bars. I argue that cultural-intellectual contexts in fin-de-siècle Vienna influenced Brahms’s attempts to shape his biographical narratives and that both models could have originated with Brahms himself. From Paolo Mantegazza’s sexology treatises to Hermann Bahr’s scandalous plays, the Viennese reading public was confronted with both scientific and literary material that conflated psychology, sexuality, and personal identity, while other artists such as Max Klinger sought to explore the unconscious motivations behind behaviors. In this context, we may reevaluate anecdotal evidence in which Brahms accords his adult problems to a traumatic childhood experience of playing piano in dangerous establishments: it suggests that Brahms could have taken part in fin-de-siècle trends of self-analysis and psychologized autobiography.

Joseph Joachim’s role in nineteenth-century English concert life is long celebrated. As yet unexamined, however, is how his performances and reception informed critical debates on sentimentalism. Joachim was a prominent celebrity in the domestic salons of mid-century, for example the Holland Park Circle, where his performances were described as perfect echoes of beautiful interior designs and his status confirmed by G. F. Watts’s famous portrait. This article builds on the relationship between “sublime sentimentality” and “domestic aestheticism” in the writings of John Ruskin, a prominent member of these salons. It explores how Ruskin’s idea of moving from domestic “sites,” through “patterns” to “states” in which the heartfelt is expressed in coded, synecdochal or allusive evocation, even in abstract design, can offer insight into the sentimental dimensions of Joachim’s salon performances. Crucially, Ruskin considered both domesticity and sentimentalism as designs and expressions of feeling which are capable of expansion into large forms and contexts, of moving from the intimate to the public. The second part of this article explores sentimentalism in works composed for the concert hall, provoking critical debate at the turn of the century. Tovey’s Victorian tastes were strongly influenced by both Joachim and Ruskin, but Tovey’s assessments of Joachim as the violinist reached the end of his career exemplify the wide critical turn against mid-century sentimentalism. In 1902 Tovey praised Joachim for making no concession to public sentimentalism, in particular through demonstrating a “Classical” grasp of form, by contrast with those who seek sentimental effect through slowing down the performance of “beautiful” passages. In a late echo of Ruskin, Tovey desired that one must be susceptible to the beauty of “design.” The article ends by comparing Sargent’s late portrait of Joachim, presented at the Jubilee celebrations of 1904, with that of Watts.