This article examines the contentious relationship between the prima donna Angelica Catalani and the British musical festival in the 1820s. The inclusion of Catalani, the most famous soprano of her generation, at the great musical festivals in this decade, such as those of Birmingham, York, Derby and Manchester, among other places, was a sign of the aspects of spectacle festival producers thought necessary to capture the middle-class audience. At the time, contemporaries assumed this audience was increasing in number and importance. Catalani attempted to use her fame to dictate musical and aesthetic terms to festival committees, particularly by transposing arias within performances of Handel's Messiah, and interpolating Italian sacred music by Pietro Carlo Guglielmi and Pio Cianchettini into the same. The British musical press responded by invoking the figure John Bull to roundly condemn Catalani: the allegorical everyman, crying ‘cant’ and ‘humbug’ was used to portray the singer as a tasteless and ‘foreign’ other while at the same time forwarding the education of the middle-class audience into aspects of the nascent concept of ‘the composer's intentions’. The condemnation of Catalani was also an attempt to integrate the middle classes into the cultural life of Britain, while denigrating the purported taste of the British aristocracy, which made star turns such as Catalani's possible.

Several writers, beginning with Gustav Nottebohm, have made mention of a movement entitled ‘la gaiete’ that was at one stage intended for Beethoven's String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, but none of them have previously given a full account of this movement. It appears in several sketch sources, notably Artaria 206 (currently in Kraków), and although it was not incorporated into the final version of the quartet, it played an important role in shaping the slow movement of the work. It also had an indirect influence on the coda of the finale. Its precise function in the creation of the quartet becomes much clearer through a detailed study of Beethoven's sketches, which are scattered in many different sources and appear in four formats that run concurrently, making assessment of them difficult. Examining the sketches for the movement also throws light on the chronological relationship between the various sketch sources. Contrary to some accounts, the movement appears never to have been part of a planned six-movement scheme for the work – a scheme that was extremely fleeting and only one of many possibilities for the work's structure.

The ending to Brahms's Schicksalslied confounds scholars for two reasons: his setting of Hölderlin's ostensibly despairing poem ends with an orchestral section that evokes comfort and reconciliation, and the postlude transposes the material of the introduction down to C major, ending in a key other than its opening. This represents ‘a rare instance of a composer not merely placing an arbitrary interpretation on words but explicitly contradicting a poet's statement’ (Petersen, 1983). Daverio (1993) and Reynolds (2012) hold similar views, seeing Hölderlin's poem as if divorced from the novel Hyperion.

Although the poem marks the chronological endpoint of the novella, it is intricately bound up with levels of time, and it serves a continuous engendering function. The recollection of music in an altered key in Brahms's postlude is apposite to Abrams's notion of ‘the ascending circle, or spiral’. Drawing on musical and hermeneutic analysis, on evidence from Brahms's personal library, and on newly discovered correspondence from Hermann Levi, I argue that Brahms's ‘eccentric path’ – like Hölderlin's – leads us away from the original unity of the work in order to restore it in a heightened manner. The postlude prompts reflection and realization on the part of Brahms's listener akin to that of Hölderlin's reader.

The issue of vibrato's presence in the nineteenth-century orchestral string section has become controversial, with musicians often asked to accept the proposition that vibrato existed rarely, if at all. Fortunately an extensive, hitherto overlooked, body of primary source material exists that goes straight to the heart of the matter, offering a definitive answer to the question of whether or not vibrato was an intrinsic component of period orchestral string sonority. It comes from the organ literature and from the history of the instrument's evolution over the course of the long nineteenth century. A group of artists and artisans, working from approximately 1830 to 1930, documented the importance of vibrato to any attempt at reproducing, or at least approximating, the authentic timbre of the orchestral string section. Organ builders and performers noted vibrato's use both as an intrinsic constituent of string tone and as an actively applied expressive device. They discussed it extensively in their literature, gave their instruments the capacity to simulate its effects, and specifically notated its presence in their transcriptions of orchestral music. The information they have left behind dispels the modern myth of ‘pure’, vibratoless orchestral string tone as a timbral norm, and provides a truer sense of the era's prevailing aesthetic.