On 25 May 1849 Vincenzo Bellini's opera Norma was premiered at the Teatro de la Victoria in Buenos Aires. It was performed four years before the downfall of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Governor of Buenos Aires for more than 20 years, in what it has been considered in Argentine historiography as a ‘terror regime’. The success of the opera combined with the political situation enables the understanding of Norma in political terms. A year prior to the premiere of the opera, the story of the elopement of a young, aristocratic, federal girl, Camila O'Gorman with the priest Uladislao Gutiérrez, had shocked local society. It was followed by another shocking event when, once the couple was found, Rosas decided to have them executed. I argue that the inadvertent similarity between the plot of Norma and the events in relation to Camila O'Gorman's death led to possible interpretations of the opera performance as a justification of Rosas's decision to execute Camila and her lover, whilst also providing a moral lesson to young aristocratic women. In this article, I therefore explore the plausible political overtones hidden in the performance of Norma by comparing librettos and analysing the opera's reception between 1849 and 1851 in the periodicals of the time. In this way, I cast light on a heretofore overlooked, but undeniably rich, period of operatic life in Buenos Aires.

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion.

Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

This article locates social relationships within late-nineteenth-century German orchestral music by examining orchestration practices and aesthetics. Wagner's innovations in tone colour, Liszt's use of programmes, and Hanslick's formalism all took attention away from orchestra performers and forged a more direct relationship between audience and composer. This article argues that commercial exchange of serious music displaced social relationships between composer, performer and audience into aesthetic dictums. In particular, the widely agreed upon subordination of orchestration and colour to compositional ‘content’ was a manifestation of the social subordination of performers to composers and resulted in the decreased visibility of performers to consumers.

In ultimately breaking from both New German and formalist conventions, Strauss's Don Juan and Mahler's First Symphony brought unwanted attention to orchestration and a renewed focus on performance and performers. In contrast to Wagner's use of doublings, which created timbres without clear instrumental provenance, the orchestration choices of Strauss and Mahler emphasize distinctions between instruments and themes, further highlighting the virtuosic demands they place on performers. Strauss and Mahler made performers into co-producers of their music and raised orchestral colour to the status of content. By employing Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, which Adorno himself largely obscures, this article goes beyond Adorno's and Dahlhaus's analysis of the ‘emancipation of colour’ to show how concert consumption objectified social relations and hierarchies as issues of mere aesthetic form, while compositions themselves became imbued with life-like subjectivity.

This essay explores the musical life of a German-American ‘Forty-Eighter’ and his family, with particular attention to their domestic musical preferences as reflected in five surviving sheet-music albums. Otto Dresel, easily confused with the far more prominent German musician of the same name who settled in Boston, was a gifted amateur whose public musical activities, both choral and instrumental, typified those of many German arrivals of that generation. This was a largely male realm of affirmative, expansive ideals; here the stress was on civic virtues, happy fraternal bonds, and the celebration of German musical culture as an elevating force in America. The family albums suggests that the music he shared with his wife and children at home in Columbus, Ohio, served quite different purposes. It was performed intimately, in an often melancholy and even mournful mode that reflected the need for personal consolation and was thus more in keeping with typical Victorian attitudes toward the domestic, womanly sphere. Evidence about the troubled course of Dresel's life helps us understand his growing need to take refuge in his home and family as well as in music that helped him and his loved ones deal – for a time, at least – with deepening feelings of regret, failure and loss. This marked contrast between the public and private sides of the Dresels’ musical lives points to a need for greater attention to the distinctive character and functions of intimate family music-making in nineteenth-century America, especially during the years of widespread disillusionment and cultural reorientation that followed the Civil War.

Brahms's Handel Variations, Op. 24 (1861) stands out for its direct quotation of the Baroque master's Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B-flat (HWV434), as well as its treatment of the theme in ‘old forms’. While the composer's knowledge of antiquated forms finds expression through canonic treatment, a siciliano, musette and fugal finale, the 25 variations written in the strict Baroque variation style further underscore his commitment to tradition.

Several earlier revivals of Handel include settings by Louis Spohr, Ignaz Moscheles and Robert Volkmann of Handel's familiar ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ tune. In 1856, Volkmann treated the theme to the fantasy variation, winning approval from performers and critics alike. Unnoticed, however, was the finale's remarkable modernization of Baroque keyboard styles through the revival of harpsichord texture, timbre, harmony, rhythm and melodic figurations. The unprecedented fidelity to the keyboard medium, literature, as well as expressive modes deserves a re-evaluation in relation to Brahms's setting.

Brahms's return to the Baroque style variation served as a model for later composers. One case study is that by the neglected Hungarian composer Emanuel Moór (1863–1931). A former student of Volkmann and an ardent admirer of Brahms, Moór composed his Variations and Fugue on a Hungarian Theme. Op. 24 in 1890, which coincidentally bears the same opus number, as well as a Baroque fugal finale. This article examines Brahms's musical predecessors in the Handel revival, as well as his influence on Moór, allowing us to reassess the historical context and import of Brahms's Handel Variations, Op. 24.

In this article I examine the impact of Felix Mendelssohn's affiliation with a German-Jewish subculture on his music as reflected in the Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words) for piano solo. To better understand the interrelationship between musical formations and sociocultural realities, I associate the real and imaginary tensions between the German, the Jewish, and the German-Jewish with stylistic ambiguities in Mendelssohn's piano songs, which often destabilize the lyrical simplicity projected by the lieder framework through formal complexities that exceed the narrow scope of the piano miniature.

I establish the connections between Mendelssohn's music and sociocultural disposition by identifying a correlation between his so-called stylistic ‘conservatism’ and the anachronistic devotion of German Jewry to the universal ideals of the Enlightenment during the rise of German nationalism. Against this background, I primarily reveal the generic heterogeneity of the Lieder ohne Worte, which feature ‘progressive’ stylistic frameworks associated with the lied traditions yet concurrently point toward the formal ideals of eighteenth-century classicism. And following this, I position the stylistic duality of Mendelssohn's piano songs within a broader context through Heinrich Heine's essay The Romantic School, which sheds crucial light on the negotiation of Jewishness within German culture as it is reflected in aesthetic movements, historical changes, and political climates.

The July 1860 Crystal Palace Brass Band contest brought brass bands out of their heartlands to London in unprecedented numbers, The Times (12 July 1860, 9), lauding its success as ‘quite extraordinary’. This landmark event was repeated in three successive years, but in 1863 it was abruptly terminated, and no cogent explanation has been established for its failure. The entrepreneur organizing the contests, Enderby Jackson, later wrote in his autobiography that other business dealings prevented him from further involvement in the series. Jackson had made full use of his talents and contacts to bring these remarkable working-class musical ensembles to the emergent national attraction that was the Crystal Palace. However, Jackson's manipulation of publicity and managerial style obstruct easy analysis of the contests. Moreover, Jackson later sought to protect his legacy by conjuring a smokescreen in his memoirs to obscure the real reasons for the failure of the Crystal Palace contests after 1863.

The entrepreneurial environment is never a stable one, and it should not be presumed that the accolades accorded to the opening contest would translate into its continuance on an annual basis. However, the fact that the contests were attended by many thousands of visitors each year and Jackson's assertion that they were a financial success stand in stark contrast to what is implied by their sudden end. This article demonstrates how close examination of previously unconsidered letters, surviving documentation, and other sources cast doubt on whether the contest series was ever an extraordinary success.

‘I only write music and let it speak for itself’ – such was Antonín Dvořák's attitude, according to Josef Kovařík, the composer's personal secretary in New York. Indeed, throughout his career, Dvořák seemed reluctant to share his views publicly. He did not contribute articles to Czech periodicals, his acquaintances were well aware of his dread of making public appearances and speeches, and contemporary critics often commented on his humble and unenterprising nature.

Yet Dvořák was not as passive as his alleged statement to Kovařík would imply. While visiting England during the 1880s, he became particularly concerned about forging a certain kind of image for himself in the Czech lands. Not only did Dvořák take an interest in English reviews of his music, he also sent several of these critiques to his contacts at home with the request that they be reprinted in Czech translation in the newspapers and journals of Prague. He proved to be equally strategic in some of his other professional choices, including the surprising decision to dedicate his patriotic cantata Hymnus: Heirs of the White Mountain ‘to the English people’, which can be understood as a clever tactical ploy, meant to signal the composer's international credentials to audiences at home.

Drawing upon various letters and the many excerpted English reviews that appeared in the Czech press, this article shows that Dvořák played an active part in determining which aspects of his reception in England would be relayed to the Czech public. More broadly, the article examines Dvořák's role as strategist – an aspect of the composer's career that has remained largely unexplored. Ultimately, Dvořák was mindful of what Michael Beckerman calls ‘the public-relations aspect of nationalism’, and the suggestion that he was content simply to let the music ‘speak for itself’ does not tell the whole story.

A growing body of literature has shifted aesthetic attention from composition to performance, or the performing activity, and asserts that the act of performance creates meaning.1 Scholars have emphasized differences between the passive consumption and active making of – or even listening to – music.2 As I sought to understand the impact of performance on Alma Mahler's legacy, I identified the need to gather as much data as possible on who, what, where, when, why, and how her songs were performed. This need led me to evaluate the metadata associated with recordings of Alma Mahler's songs in the WorldCat union catalogue and the video sharing platform YouTube. Recent studies have shown the utility of leveraging big data for musicology, although few scholars have done so to investigate reception history. This essay outlines one approach to data scraping YouTube with emphasis on the value to those researching recent Lieder reception, and in doing so highlights some of the promise and limitations associated with web scraping.