In Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes (1851–1853), George Sand responded to the French government’s newly announced project of collecting the ‘popular’ or folk songs of France, with a critique of their methods of collection as perfunctory. Sand was adamant not only about a more rigorous approach to amassing the nation’s folk songs but also about the inclusion of the music with the lyrics, and her concise, insightful critique of archival methods came after nearly two decades of her own occupation with rendering music in her fiction and, more immediately, a decade focused on folk music in many of what are known as her ‘rustic’ novels. In particular, I bring to the fore in this article discussions in Sand’s expansive novel Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842–1844) which both insist upon the historical, cultural and personal significance of the preservation of folk music and navigate the tensions of preserving an art form that is fundamentally non-static and ephemeral, in order to articulate the value Sand places on musical sensibility, memory and heritage. I argue that Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes stands along with Sand’s fiction as an ardent defense against the loss of the musical heritage of provincial France in the hands of the state’s archivists. This article thus situates George Sand’s investment in the cultural production from the Berry region within the early history of nineteenth-century music ethnography in France, while maintaining Sand’s own understanding of her cultural production as poetic rather than scientific.

If as a performer and Brahms’s close collaborator Joachim promoted the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, a process relatively unsympathetic to programme music of the Neudeutsche Schule, as a composer Joachim’s works do not display such an aesthetic stance. His own music, which he dubbed ‘psychological’, was intended to ‘detect and save’, that is faithfully to perceive and record his emotions. As part of this process, Joachim’s Abendglocken, the second of the Drei Stücke, Op. 5, for violin and piano (1853), betrays a striking use of ciphers, taking Robert Schumann’s musical word games to a heightened level and using notational signs such as double bars as framing devices that suggest an intriguing link to the daguerreotypes of early photography.

‘Psychological music’ describes a compositional approach Joachim pursued in the 1850s, when positivism began clashing with the existing idealist philosophy, as demonstrated in the emergence of empirical psychology from philosophy and metaphysics. Enrolled in philosophy at Göttingen University in 1853, Joachim would have encountered psychology from a pre-empirical, phenomenological perspective, which may have initiated his ‘psychological music’. The dedicatee of Abendglocken and the constant subject of his thoughts – and arguably of his music – was Gisela von Arnim (1827–1889), daughter of Bettina von Arnim, with whom he was romantically involved and whose encrypted name – G♯–E–A – provides a valuable key to understanding Abendglocken in particular, and Joachim’s psychological music in general. This article considers the autobiographical, philosophical and cultural influences on Joachim to interpret ‘psychological music’ as it played out in Abendglocken.

Fromental Halévy’s five-act grand opera La Reine de Chypre premiered in Paris in 1841. Many critics viewed the work as a great success and seen as a true rival to La Juive (1835). Wagner, who was in Paris at the time, even went so far as to claim the composition ‘a new step forward’ in the world of opera, evidenced in the many review articles and publications he wrote about the work. This article attempts to uncover what Wagner admired about Halévy’s composition, especially within the context of the German composer’s ‘artistic exile’ in France (1839–1842) and the completion of a new dramatic conception of German romantic opera in Der Fliegende Holländer (1843). The connections between the two works are explored, revealing an affinity for the exile and the desire for redemption.

The Viennese premieres of Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908 and 1911 occurred over a decade after Maeterlinck’s literary style and Fernand Khnopff’s paintings were praised by Secessionist critics, including Hermann Bahr and Ludwig Hevesi. In Vienna, fin-de-siècle discourse treats impressionism and symbolism as aesthetic outgrowths of Ernst Mach’s notion of ‘antimetaphysical’ modes of existence. This article explores the broader Viennese reception of symbolism and its influence on music criticism, which predominantly contends that Debussy and Dukas divert from Wagnerian techniques by cultivating Klangempfindungen (acoustical sensations) and anti-thematic symphonic approaches to generate musical equivalents to the poetic and painterly incitation of psychophysical stimuli. Julius Korngold and other prominent music critics, some of whom were Debussy’s and Dukas’s exact contemporaries, describe how symbolist compositional syntax emerges as a musical terrain that produces a stark contrast between the suspension of latency and frenetic episodes. Symbolist composers accentuate this contrast to increase sensitivity to a literary device at the core of Maeterlinck’s art: the protagonists’ fixation on environmental conditions and changes, descriptive imagery that apprises audiences of their emotional state.