Much musicological and historicist criticism has tended to ‘flatten’ Goethe by confining him to the thought-clichés of his time, and this in turn has led to an implicitly patronizing view of him as musically conservative. This article will show how Goethe proves again and again to be more musically intelligent and perceptive than scholars have given him credit for. Certain musicological questions engross the poet throughout his life: the nature of major and minor tonalities; musical identity throughout the ages; music and text; the rhetoric of attentive listening; musical language and its capacity to occlude and exclude. Yet Goethe’s thought, this article demonstrates, is anything but static; his writings keep returning to, modifying and complicating his musical preoccupations.

This article challenges the salient misconception that Goethe’s lack of musical judgement divorced him from the development of the nineteenth-century Lied and that Schubert’s settings ran counter to the poet’s intent. Two new readings of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ and ‘Erster Verlust’ show how Schubert is listening to the poetry and the upshot is not a song that reflects the poem but one that reflects on it.

Schubert is famous for his remote modulations, especially his third relations. He therefore has a reputation for harbouring an aversion to the dominant, both in terms of its function as a harmonic preparation for new keys and as a structural pole to the tonic home key. I turn to the history of theory to reveal a more nuanced history of Schubert’s attitude towards the dominant. In a revision of ‘Geistes-Gruß’ (D. 142), a song he sent to Goethe in 1816, Schubert added a brief dominant-seventh chord to soften an abrupt modulation to a remote key. Such an insertion between remote keys was coined an ‘intermediate dominant’ by Schubert’s contemporary Anton Reicha and was understood to be a sufficient preparation for a new remote key. In four subsequent versions of ‘Geistes-Gruß’, Schubert strengthened, rather than weakened, this intermediate dominant – only to remove it altogether in the final published version. I scrutinize Schubert’s use of intermediate dominants that, together with other techniques such as the use of silence, act as a harmonic cushion between abrupt third relations in a range of early multi-sectional songs and in the medial caesura-fill in the Unfinished and Great Symphonies. I compare Schubert’s compositional strategies with the theories of modulation and harmonic juxtaposition by his contemporary music theorists Anton Reicha and Gottfried Weber, and I argue that they share a strikingly similar aesthetic of the power of the intermediate dominant.

At the crux of Byron's epic poem The Corsair lies a moral dilemma for its imprisoned hero, Conrad. Should he kill his sleeping enemy, Seyd, and thus evade impending torture and execution the next morning? Or should he accept death as the just recompense for his crimes? His decision is swift. He resolutely refuses the path of the ‘secret knife’; in contrast, Seyd's favorite slave and concubine, Gulnare, declares her readiness to do the deed instead. When Conrad, pursuing her through the winding passages of the high tower, sees her again, he at first thinks that her ‘softening heart’ had spared Seyd's life.

Although definitions of orientalism and racism seldom achieve consensus, the significance of their interplay is universally acknowledged amongst theorists of non-Western cultures. Tony Ballantyne, in his recent Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, describes their relationship in terms of mutuality, and Ziauddin Sardar, in Orientalism, describes them as ‘circles within circles’. Edward Said, of course, deals with their relationship exhaustively in Orientalism, and describes them as inextricably linked. Writing of the nineteenth century, he suggests that ‘Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West most easily associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality.’

22 July 1824. Many Londoners had waited years for this night. They thronged to the English Opera House, filling the boxes and cramming the benches in the pit and gallery. It was worth the heat, the expense, the danger from pickpockets. After hearing of its success for three years, after glimpsing snatches of it in concert and sheet music excerpts, and after enduring weeks of advertising for the English Opera House production, they would finally be the first in London to witness the most celebrated German opera of the time: Weber's Der Freischütz.

To discover that one of popular music's most famous and enduring composers wrote a march-characteristic called ‘The Red Man’ immediately arouses curiosity about the nature and substance of such a work, the reasons for writing it, and how audiences received it. John Philip Sousa composed ‘The Red Man’ in 1910 for his world tour and, like much of his music, it is still played and recorded today. I will attempt to answer these questions by examining this lesser-known but highly distinctive Sousa composition in detail. That necessarily involves seeing the piece through a variety of lenses. Since the way in which audiences listen to music has fundamentally changed in a hundred years, the closest we can come to hearing the piece through ears of 1910 is to explore a variety of critical responses from the time published in newspapers in different countries. Since these accounts are written in a stylistic language considerably different from the way modern critics write about music, the responses need to be seen in context. Many were rooted in notions of race and ethnicity prevalent among the middle- and upper-class audiences for which Sousa composed. Moreover, Sousa's audiences listened with a host of associations that accrued during the nineteenth century and are lost to us today. This was enhanced by the type of programmes on which ‘The Red Man’ was performed, which encouraged the perception of music through a national or exotic lens, or through the filter of a narrative. The musical language of this ‘Indian’ piece is hardly unique, since it owes many of its metaphors to Sousa's contemporaries. For all his originality, Sousa was also an expert assimilator. There isn’t space here to examine every derivation in this work, but by exploring a few of them we can learn much about his music and his audiences.

This article attempts to describe the shift in the Romanian public’s musical taste brought about by musical borrowings and imports from the West. It focuses on the period between the end of Phanariot rule (1821) and the establishment of Romania’s capital in Bucharest (1862). These decades of change yielded rich intercultural encounters and fusions, whereas the years that followed – from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War – show a more unified phase of assimilation of Western music.

After looking at the boyar class and the bourgeoisie of Bucharest (the social segment from which an opera- and concert-going public emerged in the last quarter of the century), I move on to the everyday musical practices of the population of Bucharest, using musical examples and travellers’ accounts as a descriptive means. Finally, I analyse the shifts in musical tastes that took place in the upper layers of society as a complicated process of exclusion, inclusion and assimilation of various musical influences; as we shall see, the mixing and hybridization of musical practices not only shaped the tastes of music lovers, but also influenced the creation of Romanian music, which entered a new phase.

The wide variety of nineteenth-century images of the great pianist—composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) provides both art historians and musicologists with a rich resource through its sheer diversity and comprehensiveness. Of great potential value are the insights that Lisztian iconography may provide into the changing nature of Romanticism and music during much of the nineteenth century.

‘Are you musical?’, asks Gustav Kobbé of some imaginary interlocutor in the introduction to How to Appreciate Music (1906). ‘No’, comes the reply, ‘I neither play nor sing’. ‘But, if you can read and listen’, Kobbé continues, ‘there is no reason why you should not be more musical … than many of those whose musicianship lies merely in their fingers or vocal cords’. Kobbé's response epitomizes the shift in emphasis that had begun to occur in music education at the turn of the century from the acquisition of technical proficiency on an instrument or the voice to the cultivation of an appreciative, aesthetic understanding of music. The acquisition of performing skill had been perpetuated by the hegemony of the singing class in British music education throughout the nineteenth century. Initially, such teaching took the form of the government-sponsored continental system of ‘fixed’ sol-fa devised by Guillaume Wilhem for use in the public singing classes and commune schools of Paris and, from 1840, adapted by John Hullah for use in the teacher-training institution founded by James Kay-Shuttleworth at Battersea. Subsequently, there was the tonic sol-fa system with its movable doh devised by John Curwen; this system came to replace the Hullah–Wilhem method after the Education Act of 1870, which introduced compulsory schooling in Britain and established school boards to implement local policy.

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.

The digital humanities have grown to encompass multiple disciplines; they embrace everything from online resources that have the potential to democratize scholarship to computational approaches that allow a higher order analysis of large datasets. That the digital humanities has significantly influenced musicology is evidenced by the number of leading journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Notes, Journal of the Society of American Music and Nineteenth Century Music Review, that regularly review digital resources and by the increasing use of the tag ‘digital musicology’. This special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review (NCMR) and this introduction reflect a broad definition of the digital humanities; they embrace digital archives, born-digital projects, and studies employing computational methodologies and tools.