Two years after completing his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy began to write of another vision: visiting his friend, the composer Adolf Fredrik Lindblad, in Sweden. Over the coming years, as Mendelssohn continually returned to this idea, additional reasons to make such a journey presented themselves: performances of his works in that city, including the Shakespearean overture, were well received; he became personally acquainted with Crown Prince Oscar, to whom he dedicated the op. 44 string quartets; he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; his first cousin, Josephine (‘Peppi’) Benedicks, lived in Stockholm; and his friendship with Jenny Lind in the last years of his life only strengthened his interest in the north.

While Mendelssohn’s letters to Lindblad have long been known to scholars, the Gegenbriefe from Lindblad remain unpublished. For the first time, his voice is now fully restored to the conversation in an extensive correspondence that contributes to knowledge of Mendelssohn’s interpretations of his own music and his early reverence for the late Beethoven string quartets. In addition, this article also uncovers epistolary evidence of a cluster of related compositions by Mendelssohn and Lindblad spawned by Mendelssohn’s interest in the quartet in F Major (op. 135), including a little-known song that Lindblad dedicated to Felix on the occasion of his marriage.

Mendelssohn’s journeys to Scotland and Italy inspired his musical imagination in ways that have richly benefitted the concert repertoire. How might he have translated his impressions of Nordic history, culture and geography into new aural atmospheres, had he followed his dream to travel northwards?

When Franz Liszt died, the world lost an innovative composer, mentor, and pianist. Although his influence did not die with him, few of his successors can claim to have walked in his footsteps – to have lived and taught in the same rooms – and to have shared many of his ideals. Ferruccio Busoni did just that when the Grand Duke Carl Alexander invited him to hold piano master classes in Weimar in 1900 and 1901, just as he had invited Liszt to do nearly two decades earlier (1881–1885).

This article shows how Liszt's activities in Weimar as Pedagogue and as Kapellmeister (1848–1861) became models for Busoni as he sought to position himself as a prominent ‘musical polymath’ at the turn of the century. Yet Busoni not only emulated Liszt, he also promoted him in an age when the older composer was considered of only tangential importance.

By producing authoritative editions of Liszt's music, and perhaps more significantly, by emulating Liszt's activities as a transcriber and composer, Busoni enhanced piano sonority while extending Liszt's ideas about the future of music. In that way, he shared attitudes associated with the Zukunftsmusik movement, and his outlook was rooted in Liszt's compositions, as opposed to Richard Wagner's. At the same time, he helped foster a lineage of young musicians who patterned their careers and music after Liszt.

Drawing on surviving memoirs, letters, scores, essays and concert programmes, this article thus explores Liszt's impact on Busoni and his mentees. It reveals a musician not only emulating Liszt, but also expanding upon his ideas and promoting them to others.

From the 1850s, Saint-Saëns regularly employed cyclic form: the practice of establishing large-scale relationships (especially in symphonies, chamber works, etc.) by reintroducing materials from earlier movements in later ones. Nonetheless, he became weary of such procedures following the Third Symphony (1886) for cultural-political reasons: Franck's most important cyclic works date from the 1880s, d'Indy declared la forme cyclique a historically determined canon, and period writers considered cyclic form a franckiste hallmark – all while Saint-Saëns's relationship with Franck's followers deteriorated.

In this essay, I argue that Saint-Saëns's First String Quartet (1899) ‘misreads’ his rivals’ approaches to cyclic form as exemplified by d'Indy's Second Quartet of 1897 (in which a four-note cell suffuses most themes) and Franck's Quartet (in which themes from previous movements climactically accumulate in the final coda). Saint-Saëns's themes abound with miniscule motivic connections, which catch listeners’ ears but seem too fleeting and insubstantial to register as binding elements comparable to d'Indy's pellucid cell. Such relationships straddle the threshold of apprehensibility, and they produce a distinctive affective quality: where d'Indy fosters perceptions of genetic relationships, Saint-Saëns elicits a sensation of déjà entendu. The final coda similarly teases by reintroducing fragments from the slow introduction, encouraging anticipation of a Franck-like apotheosis. What follows is a mirage of one: timbres and textures of previous movements return, but incipient citations of themes dissolve. Where Franck delivers a full-blooded synthesis, Saint-Saëns follows through with trompe l'oreille.

Saint-Saëns's misreadings of franckiste technique point to broader aesthetic conflicts. D'Indy enlisted cyclic form as a means to monumentality, which served the enseignement he esteemed as art's purpose. Déjà entendu and trompe l'oreille, on the other hand, register as classicising attributes which diverge from d'Indy's didactic objectives and which Saint-Saëns grouped under the rubric of ‘charm’, a conduit to what he considered an ideologically neutral ‘aesthetic sense’.