The wide variety of nineteenth-century images of the great pianist—composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) provides both art historians and musicologists with a rich resource through its sheer diversity and comprehensiveness. Of great potential value are the insights that Lisztian iconography may provide into the changing nature of Romanticism and music during much of the nineteenth century.

In his collection of essays Music and Morals (1871), music critic the Rev. H.R. Haweis devoted several pages to the relationship between music and memory. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that music could trigger recollections in acute and intense ways. He suggested that there are ‘many mediums which connect us vividly with the past but for freshness and suddenness and power over memory’ the sense of hearing is paramount. He imagines a middle-aged woman caught unawares by a few bars of music.

Eschewing the polemic surrounding Franz Schubert's private life, as well as the habit of judging his art by Beethovenian criteria, many musicians now have chosen to focus on unique aspects of the composer's œuvre in order to illuminate its distinctive aesthetic values. In particular, some have sought to isolate and explain contextual processes responsible for compelling perceptions of drama and unity in Schubert's later instrumental works. The objects of their inquiries consist of progressive sequences of internally defined musical elements, relations and events that confer effects of internal momentum and comprehensive coherence on Schubert's music. These contextual processes complement tonal, formal and thematic procedures in Schubert's compositions and reveal an ingenious artist engaged in a restless search for new ways of organizing music.

‘Are you musical?’, asks Gustav Kobbé of some imaginary interlocutor in the introduction to How to Appreciate Music (1906). ‘No’, comes the reply, ‘I neither play nor sing’. ‘But, if you can read and listen’, Kobbé continues, ‘there is no reason why you should not be more musical … than many of those whose musicianship lies merely in their fingers or vocal cords’. Kobbé's response epitomizes the shift in emphasis that had begun to occur in music education at the turn of the century from the acquisition of technical proficiency on an instrument or the voice to the cultivation of an appreciative, aesthetic understanding of music. The acquisition of performing skill had been perpetuated by the hegemony of the singing class in British music education throughout the nineteenth century. Initially, such teaching took the form of the government-sponsored continental system of ‘fixed’ sol-fa devised by Guillaume Wilhem for use in the public singing classes and commune schools of Paris and, from 1840, adapted by John Hullah for use in the teacher-training institution founded by James Kay-Shuttleworth at Battersea. Subsequently, there was the tonic sol-fa system with its movable doh devised by John Curwen; this system came to replace the Hullah–Wilhem method after the Education Act of 1870, which introduced compulsory schooling in Britain and established school boards to implement local policy.

The history of nineteenth-century pianism has, not unnaturally, been told largely in terms of the work of the central Austro-German (and related) ‘schools’: essentially, Beethoven and his contemporaries and successors. This has remained the popular view, although certainly it has in the past been counteracted in various ways, including, in the specialized literature, vast geographical surveys such as the final volume of Newman’s sonata trilogy. Nevertheless, this publication, indeed not unreasonably, sets out its agenda at the start with ‘four composers – Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms … as main cornerstones of the Romantic sonata’, thus establishing these assuredly as its framework, while ‘the main Austro-German centers – notably Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin’ are viewed as ‘the international meccas’. As far as I am aware, the study of ‘pianos and pianists’ in a specific location and time, as presented here, and in terms of social history rather than a ‘composers-and-works’ narrative, has only recently begun to impinge on this area. And in relation to my chosen location, Oxford, the historical viewpoint has also been skewed by factors peculiar to a university city of this type. The time is ripe for a new look at pianos and pianists in nineteenth-century Oxford, drawing information from archival research and contemporary printed sources.

The founding of the Philharmonic Society in 1813 has traditionally been seen to represent a significant milestone in the development of English concert life, standard musicology holding that the Society emerged from a period of orchestral inactivity in London stretching back to the departure of Haydn from the city some eighteen years earlier. Tracing the origins of these claims to the writings of the Society's founders and early historians, this article will attempt to reassess the validity of this ‘myth’ surrounding the Philharmonic. Offering a detailed examination of certain previously under-explored elements of turn-of-the-century London concert culture it will illustrate that, although the Philharmonic clearly did provide a prominent new institutional focus for the performance of symphonic repertory after 1813, concert series prior to that point can no longer be assumed to have been entirely devoid of orchestral music.