Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ( Pathétique ) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) was a vocal superstar of the late nineteenth century. With tens of thousands of ardent followers in Britain and America—and an income that eclipsed even what Adele Patti and Nellie Melba earned—Lloyd was a vocal sensation. Biographers of the prima donna, the female vocal celebrity, are often quick to turn their subjects into heroines through the conferment of appellations such as “The Swedish Nightingale” (for Jenny Lind), “The Queen of Song” (Adelina Patti), and “The Voice of Australia,” in the case of Nellie Melba. Marie Lloyd was also bestowed a heroic title, but in an entirely different milieu: “Queen of the Music Hall.” This article probes the varied reasons—and ambiguities—of this appellation in biographical constructions of Lloyd, especially in relation to the dexterity of her voice that was arguably more varied in its scope than most of her operatic peers. Lloyd's biographers provide disembodied narratives of her career and achievements, since they have virtually nothing to say about the extraordinary range and versatility of her voice. With the aid of historic recordings it is possible to finally make an estimate of Lloyd's technique, and the results are surprising: she was no mere music-hall singer. Lloyd's voice and acting encompassed techniques ranging from eighteenth-century melodrama to nineteenth-century diseuse , allowing for an alternative reading of Lloyd's reputation as Queen of the Music Hall and the varied range of singing found in this institution.

In 1853 a writer for the London-based periodical Fraser's Magazine remarked that Berlioz's “heroic temperament” could be “read legibly in the noble style of his compositions. His own life forms to these works the most interesting accompaniment and commentary.” The linking of life and work in Berlioz's case is nothing unusual. However, a particular set of circumstances unique to London meant that critics based in that city persistently used Berlioz's biography to further their own agendas while also promoting his music. In this article, I argue that, when writing about Berlioz's London performances, critics employed biographical ideas and narratives that enabled them to use the composer as a means to shape local debates about the future of London's orchestral institutions: the Philharmonic Society and its latest “rival”: the New Philharmonic Society. Biography proved a powerful rhetorical device from which Berlioz profited and is central to our understanding of his critical reception in London. It was used to introduce, to persuade, to simplify, to generate sympathy, admiration, and outrage. However, I reveal that in later visits biographical narratives overshadowed the coverage of Berlioz's music. In some articles, Berlioz was reduced to a rhetorical device to be employed to give strength to criticisms of either the old Philharmonic or the new, with the critic offering little insight into Berlioz's music. Biography had given Berlioz a foothold in musical London, but it could not win him the lasting success he craved.

Very little critical attention has been directed toward biographical writings on Haydn and Mozart in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, following the first wave of work by Friedrich Schlichtegroll and Franz Niemetschek (for Mozart, 1793, 1798) and Georg August Griesinger and Albert Dies (for Haydn, 1809, 1810). Examining varied biographically oriented materials in books, short profiles, anecdotes, and fiction, this article establishes contrasting narratives for the two composers during this period: Mozart was regarded as thoroughly immersed in music from beginning to end, born into it as an infant prodigy and dying in the act of writing it for the Requiem, encapsulating a unified life and oeuvre; and Haydn embraced a rags-to-riches, triumph-over-adversity story—poor at birth and in his youth but eventually feted as one of Western music's greatest figures—with full-fledged life-work alignment at death potentially compromised by a perceived decline in compositional powers toward the end. The article also traces influences of one narrative on the other, especially Mozart's on Haydn, including through accounts of Haydn's Creation and death. By explaining the diverging and converging narratives associated with Haydn and Mozart, I identify the second and third decades of the nineteenth century not as a protracted biographical cold spot but rather as a springboard and inspiration for future scholarly endeavor, including the serious, extended studies of Georg von Nissen, Alexandre Oulibicheff, and Otto Jahn (1828, 1843, and 1856 respectively).

André Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus (1923), a song cycle scored for mezzo soprano soloist, women’s choir, string quartet, and two harps, has a lush sound world and dramatic vocal declamation, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece by the Parisian musical press. The work’s religious topic—mysteries of the rosary—has long been taken as the unambiguous sign that the piece and its composer were unapologetically Catholic, like the author of the poems, the convert Henri Ghéon. In the context of a secular French nation, unambiguous Catholicism can easily signal reactionary politics. Moreover, since it does not project images of anarchy, flappers, or committed nonchalance toward morality, when interpreted vis-à-vis the narrative of French musical aesthetics in the 1920s, the work’s status changed from masterpiece to footnote. Yet, though the work’s early reception by Catholic writers cemented its classification as a sacred work, Caplet’s own goals were less clear. Through a comparative musical analysis of characteristics that Le Miroir shares with Caplet’s secular works whose themes come from classicism or mystery, I demonstrate his agnostic aesthetic. Through an investigation of archival sources relating to Caplet’s smaller contemporaneous projects, including a 1923 setting of a poem by Baudelaire, his contribution to La Revue musicale ’s 1924 Le Tombeau de Ronsard , and his response to a 1924 survey about “new music,” Caplet’s interest in classicism emerges as a salient context for understanding his largest postwar composition. Additionally Caplet’s real-time documentation of his creative process and goals in detailed correspondence with his wife, Geneviève, contributes further evidence of Caplet’s pragmatism. Rather than moralistic and reactionary, Le Miroir can be understood in the context of postwar artists attempting to render spirituality less institutional and more personal.

In July 1892, Dr. Arthur Chervin (1850–1921), director of the Institut des bègues de Paris, was named physician of the Opéra, thus joining the group of health specialists tasked with the care of artists. A recognized specialist of vocal physiology and speech afflictions, Chervin was also the recent founder and editor of La Voix parlée et chantée , a periodical that straddled the worlds of medicine and lyrical performance. Vocal health and medicine, he and his community argued, were key to the execution of vocal prowess and the successful pursuit of lyrical ambitions for singers. This article explores the relationship of medicine and the burgeoning field of laryngology to the world of lyrical training and performance of the Belle Époque. In particular, we focus on the many roles played by laryngologists and physicians at the Opéra and the Conservatoire as well as in the pages of Chervin’s leading medical-musical journal. We argue that concerns driving the medical innovations of the increasingly sophisticated subfield of laryngology evolved in synergy with concerns about how to meet the demands of the changing world of the second half of nineteenth-century Parisian operatic performance. In so doing, we claim for medicine a key position in Paris’s vibrant world of lyrical performance during the Belle Époque.

Operatic versions of the femme fatale, the preeminent figure of European modernist aesthetics, compel and allure because we witness her coming into material presence through the course of her opera. Through vocalizing, the femme fatale manifests her corporeality under imminent threats of erasure by coopting and manipulating the offstage world as represented by the orchestra. The Seguidilla seduction scene in George Bizet's Carmen and the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in Richard Strauss's Salome raise the question of how subjectivity and material presence, especially of the femme fatale character, are depicted sonically, dramaturgically, and metaphysically.

This article shows how discourse on Beethoven's late works has been underpinned by material fascination with the composer's body, most apparent in the cult veneration of his dying face, which was commodified in the form of his mask. From 1890 to 1920 in Germany and Austria, Beethoven's mask became a ubiquitous item of decor for the music room, a devotional object linked with the face of Christ in the popular imagination. This mislabeled “death” mask was cast during Beethoven's lifetime, a stoic visage that put a face to the legend: that is, to the legendary 1868 account by Anselm Hüttenbrenner that recounted Beethoven's death as a heroic battle with the storm clouds. Two conflicting physiognomies—the stubborn Napoleonic commander and the suffering Christ-like redeemer—led to a critical divide that saw late works as either transcendent of, or marred by, suffering. When we unmask a prehistory of late style, we see how modern discourse on lateness still orbits around this tension between the spiritual and material, between transcendence and decay, and how this critical tradition crystallized around Theodor W. Adorno's stark resistance to the transcendent deathbed that was epitomized by the writings of Ludwig Nohl. Lateness, then, has a hidden backbone in a popular fascination with the artist's body. This same fascination led many to imagine Beethoven's final compositions as almost tangible traces of his person, hearing his late Adagios as “grave-songs,” as the composer's dying voice.

The theoretic model of the “unreliable narrative” in fiction took flight in the early 1960s; it has since become a key concept in narratology, and an indispensable one. Simply put, first-person unreliable narrators are ones about whom we as readers, in collusion with the author, learn more than they know about themselves. Romantic precursors of modernist experiments in fiction—incipient cases of narrative unreliability—arise in the works of, among others, Jean Paul Richter and Heinrich Heine, two of Robert Schumann's favorite writers. In his early solo piano cycle, Papillons , op. 2, Schumann draws inspiration from Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre , surely capturing something of the author's unreliably quirky literary style, in part through the strategy of tonal pairing . Whereas Schumann ultimately played down the programmatic elements of Papillons that trace back to the unpredictable Jean Paul, a genuine instance of the unreliable narrator is Heine's troubled poet-persona in Schumann's Dichterliebe . Here the composer invites us to perceive a second persona through the voice of the piano—one that understands the poet better than he does, and whose music reveals from the outset that rejection in love lies ahead. The emergence of narrative unreliability in fiction may have served as an influence that drove experimentation not only for Schumann but also for some of his contemporaries and successors. Debates about musical narrativity might profit from considering the recent literary concept of a “feedback loop,” in which the author, the narrator (text), and the narratee (reader)—in our case, the composer, the performer, and the listener (including analysts, performers, and composers, who are also intensive listeners)—continually and recursively interact.