Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) was a central figure in the development of the early nineteenth-century French School of violin playing. This school was itself the source of the twentieth-century Russian and American schools, and all the great players of the modern era can trace their lineage back to Baillot and his colleagues. The French School was the first to systematize violin teaching within an institutional framework with normative aspirations. Its history is bound up with that of the Paris Conservatoire, established in 1795. Work by French scholars of the Conservatoire and its teaching has tended to assert a continuity of ideals and aesthetics across time, even an essential Frenchness, and work by English-language scholars has been more concerned with the influence of the School on developments in playing styles and composition than on the evolution of attitudes to music teaching. This analysis of the language of the two founding pedagogical texts reveals a contested cultural landscape, and explores how a revolutionary institution with lofty principles could be overtaken by cultural change in a few short decades. It finishes by questioning the traditional elision of the French and Franco-Belgian schools, and suggests that Brussels, rather than constituting a mere branch of the Paris school, rescued it from premature irrelevance.

Despite the recent flurry of revisionism in Schumann biography, the last months of his career are still misunderstood. Biographers describe a gradual psychological decline, which led to Schumann's removal from his position. But there is no evidence that Schumann was suffering from mental illness before 10 February 1854. According to Clara's diary and correspondence, Schumann was healthy and contented in the fall of 1853, and his psychotic break came as a shock. Two recently published sources – a report to the Düsseldorf city council and correspondence between Schumann and a Berlin colleague – suggest that Schumann decided to resign and seek his fortune elsewhere. The fall of 1853 was one of the most prolific periods in his career and he may have felt that he could support his family on his earnings as a composer. Schumann's resignation was not the irrational response of a desperate man, but a reasonable course of action.

In her 1899 pedagogy manual Touch: Piano Instruction on the Basis of Physiology, the composer and pianist Marie Jaëll (1846–1925) describes pianistic touch as a ‘polyphony of sensations’, a synthesis of vibrations that is both physical and psychical. This article examines Jaëll's recourse to nineteenth-century experimental science, specifically experimental psychology, to develop a theory of pianistic touch. Touch, Jaëll contends, necessitates a pianist's attention to haptic and aural impulses in an elusive, ‘simultaneous and successive’ process that collates the pianist's tangible sensation of the keyboard and the ineffable mental impressions conjured by sound. This braided sense of musical touch can be cultivated in performers and transmitted to listeners. Jaëll makes this assertion using a novel kind of visual evidence: fingerprints. Fingerprinting her students before and after the execution of selected piano études and treating the prints as diagnostic documents, Jaëll posits that isolating and attending to minute variations in touch is akin to attuning to the aesthetic content of a musical work. Jaëll crystallized her methodology in a vibrant collaboration with Charles Féré (1852–1907), a criminologist and one-time student of Jean-Martin Charcot. More broadly, Jaëll's treatise is a striking exponent of the era's ‘graphical method’, pioneered by Étienne-Jules Marey, which sought to supplant scientific rhetoric with ‘objective’ truth, depicted as machine-generated wave forms. The ethos that motivated the creation of such representations, propagated by an array of influential scientists including Ernst Heinrich Weber and Hermann von Helmholtz, underscores a tendency to intertwine physiology and psychology in an enterprise that quantified sensation as a fact of mechanistic causes. Jaëll's emphasis on attention – how thought modifies touch and sound – sets her theory apart from experimental psychology's more determinist premises. In Jaëll's experimental apparatus, fingerprints are not objective; rather, they index the variable haptic and sonic sensations experienced by the pianist. As a nascent theory of embodied cognition, Jaëll's pedagogy bespeaks a fluid relationship between mind and body at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The climactic scene in Massenet's opera Werther – as in Goethe's novella – occurs when Werther reads a poem by Ossian. The air resembles a German lied, with a rippling harp accompaniment that may be a reference to other Ossianic settings. Steven Huebner has suggested that the lied reference is meant to create a sense of German local colour in the opera. However, little work has been done to explain why Massenet would have chosen to set an Ossianic text in the style of a German lied.

The current article addresses this question by considering the references to specific German lieder by Schumann and Schubert heard by early critics in the Ossian reading. The subsequent discussion explores the French reception of German lieder and Massenet's personal knowledge of Schubert and Schumann's music. These references to Schumann, Schubert and Ossian expose a complex set of intertextual relationships between Massenet's opera and other Ossianic music, the characters in Massenet's opera and their milieu, and Massenet's depiction of German music and culture.

Despite Huebner's well-chosen criticisms of Massenet's depiction of the German setting, I argue that the lied and its harp accompaniment are dramatically meaningful gestures that highlight Werther's Ossianic character arc throughout the opera, hinting at his sentimentality, weakness, and non-normative masculinity in relation to nineteenth-century gender stereotypes. This interpretation, following Massenet's own account of the opera's genesis, prioritizes the Ossian reading as the crux of the drama. The resulting analysis demonstrates the audible influence of Schumann and Schubert on Werther, and Massenet's musical approach to the Ossianic tropes of nature, decay and fate.

The flageolet – a woodwind instrument closely akin to the recorder – achieved considerably popularity in nineteenth-century England. It was predominantly an instrument of the amateur musician, and its story becomes a mirror of the musical society in which the instrument flourished.

An account of the organology of the flageolet in both its English and French forms, and of its evolution into double, triple and transverse versions, precedes a study of pedagogical material and repertoire. The work of William Bainbridge, who modified the flageolet to simplify its technique and hence enhance its suitability for amateur players, is emphasized, along with his skill as an innovator of complex flageolets. The flageolet attracted a small number of professional exponents who tended to favour the French form of the instrument.

The principal focus of the article is an examination of the role of the flageolet within the context of musical praxis in England and its societal implications during the long nineteenth century. After consideration of matters of finance, social class and gender, the article examines the use of the flageolet by amateur and professional musicians, particularly highlighting the importance of the instrument in domestic music-making as well as in amateur public performance. Professional use of the instrument within the context of the concert hall, the theatre, the ballroom and the music hall is explored and examples given of prominent players and ensembles, some of which were composed entirely of female musicians. Final paragraphs note the playing of the flageolet by itinerant and street musicians.

Saint-Saëns's incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone (Comédie-Française, 1893, trans. Meurice and Vacquerie) gives witness both to his engagement with culture classique and an experimental orientation in the context of fin-de-siècle music theatre. This essay situates Saint-Saëns's highly idiosyncratic score within the frame of late nineteenth-century research into ancient Greek music by François-Auguste Gevaert and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray. It documents how Saint-Saëns aimed to participate in the creation of an authentic experience of ancient Greek theatre, one enhanced by the initiative of the Comédie-Française to stage its production at the open air Théâtre d'Orange in southern France. The article also shows the limitations of authenticity resulting from the nature of the translation as well as from Saint-Saëns's own compositional instincts.

Antonín Dvořák composed the String Quartet in F major (op. 96, the ‘American’) in June 1893 while visiting the town of Spillville, Iowa, USA. Based on accounts from Dvořák's secretary Josef Kovařík, portions of the quartet's Scherzo movement were inspired by birdsong Dvořák heard in Spillville. Kovařík's account included both Dvořák's visual description of the bird that inspired him and a transcribed fragment of the birdsong Dvořák reportedly used. In 1954, Clapham identified the bird as a scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea), based mainly on the visual description. This widely accepted identification was questionable because of the poor match of the tanager's song to musical material in the Scherzo. In 2016, Floyd proposed the red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus) as Dvořák's inspiration, based on song rather than appearance. The vireo's song is clearly identifiable in the Scherzo as well in the birdsong fragment recorded by Kovařík. The mismatch between the visual description and the transcribed song fragment could have occurred when Dvořák heard and recorded the persistent singing of a cryptic red-eyed vireo, but misidentified the song's source when he caught sight of a brightly coloured tanager. Correct identification of the birdsong changes the interpretation of the movement. Previously, birdsong has been considered the source of a short secondary motif. But red-eyed vireo songs are highly variable, and a slight variation of Kovařík's song fragment could be the basis of the main theme of the Scherzo. Therefore, Dvořák may have used American birdsong in the movement considerably more than previously appreciated.

The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Richard Wagner's Parsifal in December 1903 stirred what was arguably the first American religious controversy over an artistic event to claim national attention in the twentieth century. Although the outcome was predictable – the protests appeared only to fuel box office success – the significance lies in what this controversy reveals about the music drama's most ardent opponents and supporters at a key moment in American religious history. The 1903 Parsifal controversy unfolded in the midst of a crisis in American Protestantism, as conservative establishment Protestants defended their weakening hold on American culture, and their theologically liberal brethren viewed that same culture as both a source of spiritual inspiration and a cause for redemption. Drawing primarily upon accounts published in the New York press, nationally circulated periodicals (including strongly partisan contributions to the debate by The Musical Courier), and the writings of several prominent Protestant clergy and lay leaders, this reception study argues that the religious controversy surrounding the 1903 Parsifal production was a substantive skirmish in this American Protestant crisis, and brought forward competing interpretations of the music drama which highlighted the cultural implications of what had been, until that point, largely a theological dispute. Conservative response fastened onto elements of the drama found to be sacrilegious, while liberal response was conditioned by its kinship to the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Kunstreligion, and a broad view of redemption that extended beyond the individual soul to the artwork and the artist, and to all of culture.

Pierre Baillot (1771–1842), an eminent French violinist and pedagogue of the early nineteenth century, offers a surprisingly modern role model to musicians in today's fast-changing world of music. First, Baillot's career foreshadows the resilience and versatility required of entrepreneurial musicians today. Baillot lived in turbulent times through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic years, and restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. His life spanned the transition from Classical to Romantic eras of music and he combined a virtuoso performance career with that of teacher, composer, concert entrepreneur, exponent of new music and violin textbook author. Second, as in the case of contemporary creative performers, Baillot sought to extend his art by experimenting with ways to extend the range and expressiveness of the violin. This essay discusses Baillot's embrace of old and new approaches to violin music and practice. Drawing on his textbook, L'Art du Violon (1834), and research literature on music-making of the era, this essay analyses three of Baillot's innovative approaches: harmonic preluding as an improvisation method, his four-string Adagio composition using an extended bowing technique, and his empirical exploration of acoustically enhanced Tartini tones. While Baillot regarded the art of harmonic preluding, for example, as a link to improvisational traditions, he also saw it as integral to creative development and to technical mastery of harmony, the latter sometimes lacking in violinists more accustomed to playing the melodic line. Even today we find Baillot's extended violin techniques surprising.