Johann Herbeck (1831–1877) served in his native Vienna as conductor of the leading choral and instrumental organizations. He showed his devotion to the legacy of Franz Schubert in his performances and also in his edition, published by C.A. Spina and successors, of 51 selected works of the master for men’s, women’s and mixed chorus. Originally conceived as part-songs for ensembles of soloists, this repertoire had become choral music by Herbeck’s time. Included also are arrangements by Herbeck and others of pieces originally written for different performing media. Surviving copies of numbers in the edition, as well as two additional publications, reveal startling inconsistencies in editorial technique, ranging from a lack of intervention to a much freer approach, including liberal sprinkling of unauthentic markings and other deviations from the originals. In the latter category, the editor’s additions may be said to document the performance practice of these works during his time. His choice of sources was also inconsistent, in some cases resulting in faulty versions of the works presented. This study also documents the production and reception history of Herbeck’s edition.

In Edwardian England many of the most widely acknowledged qualities of the national character coalesced around the figure of the English gentleman. One of his defining features was his emotional restraint, his ‘stiff upper-lip’. But these were also years during which patriotic and even nationalist sentiment rose to a high tide, and there was considerable tension between the whole-hearted expression of nationalism and the restrain demanded by gentlemanly manners. This article explores this tension as it was staged and negotiated in the folk-song rhapsodies and nature portraits by Vaughan Williams, Holst, Delius and others during the years from 1904 to 1914. As a methodological basis the article adopts the notion of musical subjectivity – that is, the idea that music can offer a virtual persona with which the listener is invited to identify, and as whom he or she may participate in the musical activity. In this context it is possible to identify aspects of musical rhetoric, namely, the manners which regulate the interaction between the virtual subjectivity and the listener. Ultimately the article suggests that it is the embodiment of gentlemanly manners, every bit as much as the use of folk-song or the representation of English landscape, that accounts for the particularly English quality commonly identified in this music.

Johannes Brahms’s well-known historical consciousness took a particularly formative turn in the mid-1850s when he embarked upon a self-imposed hiatus from composing to deepen his knowledge of the music-historical past. This conscious embrace of historical study was characteristic of his time. Following the 1848 Märzrevolution, a growing contingent of German intellectuals, sceptical of the more speculative teachings of philosophy and theology, became increasingly receptive to the concrete lessons of history. Brahms’s reading habits suggest his inclination toward a politics of historical knowledge closely associated with the ‘Prussian School’. The writings of these historians, including Johann Gustav Droysen, Henrich von Sybel and Heinrich von Treitschke, exhibit a blend of idealist philosophy and dogmatic empiricism oriented above all toward the goal of legitimating German national unification under Prussia. Particularly influential was Sybel’s seven-volume Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I (The Founding of the German Reich through Wilhelm I), completed in the 1890s. Brahms, a Hamburg-born sympathizer of Prussian Kleindeutsch nationalism, who was a permanent resident of the Austrian capital of Vienna for the last 26 years of his life, was uniquely situated in relationship to the ‘German Question’. His well-marked copy of Sybel’s magisterial text adds illuminating granularity to our understanding of his personal and political values and ruminations on history spanning four decades. Brahms’s reading of Sybel makes legible a longer trajectory stretching from his ‘years of study’ in the 1850s, conveying how the studious historicism of his youth is best understood as an aesthetic stance densely interwoven with, and at the end of his life ratified by, the cultural and political agendas of Prussian School ideology and the meanings of the past forged in the crucible of the German historical imagination.