While there exist numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century annotated editions of repertoire such as the violin sonatas of Beethoven, the repertoire for the cello was in general edited significantly less frequently. The cello concertos by or attributed to Haydn constitute an exception, both in the number of versions and the degree of editorial intervention. Three cello concertos were associated with Haydn's name: the well-known concerto in D Hob.VIIb:2, another concerto in D Hob.VIIb:4, and a concerto in C Hob.VIIb:5. The first is now known to be a genuine work of Haydn's although this attribution was not universally accepted in the nineteenth century. The second is an unattributable eighteenth-century concerto claimed to be by Haydn and accepted as such at its publication in 1895. The third was compiled by the cellist David Popper who claimed to have based it on Haydn's sketches, providing orchestration and linking material. This article discusses aspects of the five performing editions of Hob.VIIb:2 by Bockmühl, Servais, Becker, Klengel and Whitehouse, the two editions of Hob.VIIb:4 by Grützmacher and Trowell, and Popper's concerto, considering these texts, the reception of the concertos as compositions, and the reception of individual performances. This article surveys the period of the greatest diversity of editions, a period whose later limit is determined by the eventual entry of this work into the cello canon. It will be suggested that this diversity is a consequence of non-canonicity.

Comparison of the various printed and manuscript sources in the early songs of Gabriel Fauré reveals considerable discrepancies between the punctuation and formatting of the poems in their original published forms and the way in which they appear on the musical page. Numerous articles of punctuation are omitted, others appear in different form to their poetic originals and new symbols occasionally appear. Despite the many source variants and lacunae (notably the absence of engraving copy and proofs), together with the composer's occasionally haphazard notation, the disparities between musical and literary sources are often sufficiently numerous and consistent as to suggest deliberate compositional intervention. While critical editions of song and opera typically allow for compositional initiative with regard to changes to the words of poems, punctuation and formatting are generally (and often tacitly) amended to match literary, rather than musical sources. This study tests that standard editorial practice – one little discussed in the critical literature – against a more nuanced methodology, viewing the demands of a grammatically and semantically coherent text within a musical rather than an exclusively poetic context. It explores the symbiosis of musical and grammatical symbols, which Fauré often seems to have used almost interchangeably, and tests the implications for performers of Fauré's text-setting practices. In seeking a balance between fidelity to the poet and the composer, it also readdresses our editorial responsibility to the performer.

William Crotch's Specimens of Various Styles of Music Referred to in a Course of Lectures Read at Oxford and London was a remarkable new type of score anthology when it first appeared in three volumes published between 1807 and 1810. Many anthologies in this period effectively serve as memorials to an earlier classical tradition, but Crotch compiled the Specimens with an almost museum-like detachment and intended it only for the practical pedagogical purpose of tracing the evolution of music. Crotch's empirical, dispassionate, and one might say scientific approach in the Specimens mirrors a turn in British culture generally around the turn of the century toward empiricism, a shift that has been discussed at length in connection with the painter John Constable and his circle. Crotch himself was, not coincidentally, a significant landscape painter and a friend of Constable during the years in which the Specimens were published.

Crotch's relatively objective approach to criticism in the Specimens is most noticeable in his treatment of so-called “national” music. In this area his remarks are strikingly different from the criticism of contemporaries, especially Charles Burney. In connection with concert music, however, Crotch is less successful at pursuing a programme of value-free criticism. In some cases he clearly selects examples with the goal of influencing a composer's reception and stresses qualities that are in line with his developing conception of what might be called “classical music”.

The Harmonicon was, in its day, London's premiere music periodical, gaining a wide and loyal readership at home and abroad. Perhaps the most the distinctive feature of the journal was its deliberate imperative to raise what it considered to be the ‘lamentable’ level of musical knowledge held by the British reading public. The journal's editor, William Ayrton, was deeply concerned that there was a lack of a national school of music in his own country that could ever match that which his rival French and German critics called their own. In this light, I argue that the journal's appeal and economic success was due to a didactic philosophy of ‘collegiality’ and ‘miscellany’ – to borrow William Weber's terms – as a means of disseminating musical knowledge to the broadest readership possible. Through reviewing, critiquing and publishing a remarkably assorted array of national styles and genres of music, the Harmonicon attempted to create a very general type of musical knowledge in Britain in the early nineteenth century, one which looked necessarily beyond national borders in an effort to build up a shared knowledge of music. Data drawn from musical examples spanning all 11 years of the journal's print run is analysed, assessing in particular the high number of international composers featured in the journal. The many miscellaneous strands interwoven throughout the Harmonicon reflect a mode of thinking about music that was integral to a valiant effort to raise the status and awareness of music in early nineteenth-century British culture.

Arthur Sullivan's Walter Scott-based opera Ivanhoe, despite attaining great success at its 1891 premiere, has since quickly fallen from musicological grace. Substantive criticism of this work in the twentieth century has concentrated on the static, tableau-like dramaturgy of the opera, a lack of dramatic coherence, and its undeniably conservative musical language. Taking its bearings from such criticisms this paper explores Sullivan's problematic magnum opus from the perspective of its relationship with time, understood from multiple levels – his opera's musical-dramaturgical, historical, and music-historical temporalities. Starting from Michael Beckerman's insightful analysis of what he terms the ‘iconic mode’ in Sullivan's music, Ivanhoe can be viewed as an attempt at creating a different type of dramaturgical paradigm that emphasizes stasis and stability located in the past – highly apt for a work seeking both to crystallize past history and to found a new tradition for future English opera. Moreover, investigating this work and the composer's stated aesthetic concerns more closely reveal a conscious desire to opt out of continental European narratives of musical progress and build a composite, pageant-like vision of English history, therefore inevitably partaking in a process of constructing national identity. These features are teased out in the context of Scott's impact on the Victorian mind and their affinities with other historicist tendencies in the arts such as the Pre-Raphaelite movement.