Anyone who ventures into the vastness of German song territory encounters a juggernaut almost immediately. Over and over again, the supplier of the words is identified as Heinrich Heine - a very great poet, to be sure, but other great poets did not leave the same mammoth imprint on the history of song as this man. Günter Metzner's catalogue, Heine in der Musik (Heine in Music), consumes twelve oversize volumes, and both Peter Shea and I have found settings that are not cited in this Herculean source. Those who peruse Ernst Challier's Grosser Lieder-Katalog (Great Song Catalogue) of 1884 discover that nineteenth-century composers frequently chose Heine for their op. 1 entrée onto the scene, as if setting Heine to music was a rite of passage, a guarantee that attention would be paid.

Present-day players of the ‘English’ concertina (see Fig. 1) must make a number of important decisions when delving into and performing the large repertory of art music that was written for the instrument in Victorian England. These decisions become especially critical for those who would perform the music in a manner that may at least approximate the way it may have sounded in the nineteenth century.

As is well known, Wagner began creating the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen by writing a three-act dramatic poem entitled Siegfrieds Tod, the story of a mythical hero, Siegfried, and his downfall. But Siegfrieds Tod was burdened by extended moments of static, explanatory narrative, and Wagner's dramaturgical instincts ultimately led him to write three works that would precede the tragedy of Siegfried's fall. Der junge Siegfried, ultimately retitled Siegfried, presents the rise of the hero, Die Walküre the hero's origins, and Das Rheingold serves as a one-act prologue to the Ring-trilogy. The character of Siegfried was, thus, the generative impulse behind Wagner's cycle and is central to its dramaturgy. The opera Siegfried focuses upon the upbringing and, more importantly, the coming of age of this pivotal character.

Alan Tyson (1926–2000) was one of the most remarkable, influential and prolific Beethoven scholars of his generation. Yet his achievements ran wider than Beethoven, and even wider than music: he studied psychoanalysis, practised as a psychiatrist, and learnt German specifically in order to translate many of the writings of Siegmund Freud. Even before the claims of his musicological researches finally won over his medical career, he was the first to demonstrate the importance, and indeed authenticity, of many English editions of Beethoven. He published a huge amount of bibliographical material on Beethoven, both articles and books, particularly (in collaboration with Douglas Johnson and Robert Winter) a complete catalogue of Beethoven's sketchbooks. Not content with that, however, he turned his attention to Mozart, becoming the prime authority on the paper types and watermarks of Mozart's autograph manuscripts. Shortly before his death a Festschrift was dedicated to him, in which the complete bibliography of his publications occupies nine full pages.

From the earliest reviews, the trope of music has shaped the image of Tennyson for critics and readers. Tennyson's talent is one that joins voice and ear:

Nature […] has taught Mr. Tennyson to sing as a poet should sing, – she has taught him to throw his whole soul into his harmonies.

He has a fine ear for melody and harmony too – and rare and rich glimpses of imagination. He has – genius.

Perhaps as a consequence of the late-nineteenth-century tendency to differentiate Brahms from the Wagnerian coterie at all costs, his enduring interest in exoticism has received little attention. This is not unreasonable, since his untexted works show no evidence of any foreign links further than Hungary. In addition, for obvious reasons, the specific tropes associated with exoticism, or more specifically orientalism, manifested themselves most clearly through art-forms better equipped to portray specific verbal content, such as opera, literature and painting, none of which is strongly associated with Brahms. Biographically, it is even harder to reconcile Brahms with exoticism, since the connotations of sensuality sit oddly with the bürgerlich North German Protestant work ethic that generally defines perceptions of him. Still, the effect of over 30 years in cosmopolitan Vienna cannot be overlooked; also Brahms was a friend and supporter of artists as well as of musicians. Although Max Klinger and Adolf von Menzel spring primarily to mind, his interest in German painters dated from his early twenties, following his visit to the Schumanns in Düsseldorf. In particular, from the mid-1860s onwards he expressed constant interest in the works of the painter Anselm Feuerbach. Interestingly, both Brahms's and Feuerbach's concept of orientalism, specifically through the Persian poet Hafis, was mediated by the poetry of Georg Friedrich Daumer. This study will explore the simultaneous burgeoning of interest shown by Brahms in his Hafis settings and Feuerbach in his works Hafis vor der Schenke and Hafis am Brunnen in the mid-1860s, as well as the background of the poet who inspired them both.