This article reconstructs the biography of a musician of Spanish-French background whose name and existence have hitherto been unknown, the guitarist and singer Mariano Castro de Gistau (c. 1800–1856). He arrived in Britain around 1829, during the relatively brief period when the guitar was widely fashionable there. The article discusses the factors that created this fashion as well as some of the principal forces that would soon challenge the instrument’s position and complicate the life of musicians like Castro (such as the rise of a canonical repertoire performed in concert halls built ever larger). Castro remained in the British Isles until his death in 1856, with a career unfolding mainly in provincial centres like Edinburgh, Dublin, Aberdeen and Cheltenham. Contemporary reviews show that he was a highly respected musician who appeared in concerts both as a guitarist and singer, often accentuating his Spanish background in the choice of repertoire. In addition to giving singing and guitar lessons, he was teaching the French language (increasingly so in later years when the guitar had lost much of its status) and after 1845 he was also engaged as a teacher in various private schools and academies.

The oratorio genre was regarded amongst the most edifying and instructive artforms of the Victorian era, and it was to these lofty ideals that George Tolhurst (1827–1877) aspired when composing his 1864 oratorio Ruth. The first work of its kind written in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, Ruth received an initially favourable local reception; Tolhurst was urged by the Melbourne press to aim higher and present his work to a wider and more discerning audience. Consequently, he took his work to London where it was roundly criticized, widely mocked and eventually dubbed ‘the worst oratorio ever’. It might be assumed that a work so poorly received in the cultural metropolis of London would be, like so much other Victorian music, immediately forgotten. However, through its notoriously bad reception, Ruth – in what Percy Scholes describes as a ‘succès de ridicule’ – found a cult following that has spanned from the nineteenth century to the present day. This article examines the critical reception of Ruth through the lens of colonial social relations, arguing that the treatment of Ruth in both London and Melbourne is emblematic of broader trends in the nineteenth-century relationship between parent state and settler colony. It also explores the surprising phenomenon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century consumption of Ruth in Britain, questioning whether the legacies of certain Victorian social and cultural prejudices relating to the artistic products of the colonies have been mitigated. Aesthetic and representational decisions made in recent revivals of Ruth suggest that cultural hierarchies forged during the Victorian era continue to be reinforced in the present day.

In James Clifford’s influential text, Routes (1997), he makes the point that, contrary to the entrenched belief that only the ethnographer is a traveller to faraway places, the local people and communities are also travellers. This article takes his notion as its point of departure and investigates the implications of travel within the context of my research among the members of three church congregations of coloured people in Kroonvale, South Africa, where I undertook fieldwork in 2004 and 2005. Historically, the international journeys of colonial officials, European missionaries and slaves from the Cape, along with large-scale migration of the indigenous peoples across the country’s frontiers, resulted in the encounters which gave rise to this congregational music. More recently, while the community appears static and fixed in a certain place, there is an ongoing occurrence of small journeys: mobile ministers, church members travelling between denominations, moving from place to place in and around Kroonvale and, perhaps most poignantly, the congregations’ move from the main town of Graaff-Reinet to Kroonvale as part of the implementation of the apartheid-era Group Areas Act (1950). In this article, I examine Clifford’s theories in conjunction with notions of music and place in order to argue that these short journeys have made an important contribution to the sound and style of congregational music in Kroonvale.

This article traces the development of national opera on political-historical themes in Germany between 1815 and 1848 and attempts to explain why this genre ultimately did not succeed. The focus will lie on the warrior hero Arminius/Hermann, one of the most potent national symbols of the nineteenth century, who was indeed brought to the German opera stage, but could never conquer it. The period between 1815 and 1848 not only forms a crucial phase in the coming of age of German opera against the background of a burgeoning national conscience, but also presents a lacuna in the current literature on Arminius as an opera character. Two early nineteenth-century Arminius opera projects will be discussed: musical realizations of August von Kotzebue’s 1813 libretto Hermann und Thusnelde and French composer Hippolyte Chélard’s 1835 opera Die Hermannschlacht, based on a libretto by Carl Weichselbaumer. Questions of authorship, patronage, musical style and reception will be addressed. This article presents a history of an operatic ‘misfit’ that fills a hiatus in the study of German nineteenth-century opera and will add to our understanding of the peculiar relation between opera and German national thought during the first half of the century.