The atmosphere of innovation and experimentation in the 1960s was not lost on Leonard Bernstein. His advocacy for the Mahler symphonies, for instance, was highly influential to a generation of composers excited by Mahler’s stylistic heterogeneity. Indeed, one of the best-known examples, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, was dedicated to Bernstein and a New York Philharmonic commission. Bernstein also collaborated with two other mavericks of that decade: the pianist Glenn Gould and the composer John Cage. With the former, Bernstein led a much-understood but controversial performance of the Brahms first piano concerto; with the latter, he created a programme with the Philharmonic about what he called aleatoric music, including a performance of Cage’s indeterminate work Atlas Eclipticalis. These encounters were of immense importance to all three artists.

From the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Britons were in thrall to German composers. In 1940, music editor Ralph Hill complained of ‘the fanatical worship of the public as well as the average professional musician for the German tradition’. Instead of any unified Austro-German tradition, this was Britain negotiating a changing set of stylistic currents, played off against other continental identities and shifting ideas of old and new. Before the First World War, British musicians considered Austrians and Germans wardens of traditional styles (Brahms) as well as promulgators of modernism (Strauss and Schoenberg). British composers after Elgar, among them Holst and Vaughan Williams, responded directly to French exemplars and to the emerging folk revival. With Britten and other British composers of the 1930s, there was a marked shift of allegiance away from the musical ‘Hun’ – apart from an increasing interest in Mahler. By the later 1950s, ‘The Hun’ had ceased to be an entity for UK music lovers. Indeed, the Britain-vs.-the-continent duality was already moribund when the young Manchester group brought homegrown rather than continental modernism to London in 1956.

If not an idée fixe in scholarship, the notion of musical exchanges among intimates of the Schumanns’ circle probably counts at least as a Leitfaden. Clara Schumann’s wistful instrumental romances – and those composed by Robert Schumann, Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms – encourage a reconsideration of the role that ‘conversations’ played for her within the miniature genre. We begin with a chronology of the romances composed by this circle between 1829 and 1893 – predominantly for solo piano, but also for violin and piano, oboe and piano, string quartet, piano or violin and orchestra, orchestra, and cello and piano – and discuss how these ‘conversations’ could yield subtle allusions, performative physical memories and nostalgic recollections. Focusing on Clara Schumann’s Romances Opp. 21 and 22, this study brings forward aspects of formal and textural ambiguity, and virtuosity, all of which help reveal Clara Schumann’s contribution to the genre, while elucidating how her complex, multifaceted roles in the private and public spheres did not impede her from continuously challenging herself as a composer as she engaged in nuanced musical dialogues inspired by her circle.

The composers, performers, teachers, and fellow pupils with whom Mahler rubbed elbows during his first period as a resident of Vienna represented the upper echelon of European musical culture. He was both eager and well suited to make the most of this opportunity; his musical ability, his capacity for work, and his fervent sense of ethical responsibility to the art encouraged him to draw all he could from this rich array of colleagues. This chapter presents salient information on these figures, concentrating on teachers (Josef Hellmesberger, Julius Epstein, Robert Fuchs, and Franz Krenn), student colleagues (Ludwig Krzyzanowski, Hugo Wolf, Hans Rott, and Arnold Rosé), and establishment figures (Johannes Brahms, Eduard Hanslick, and the peculiar outsider Anton Bruckner). By the time of his departure in 1883, Mahler would know the city from the inside, but that experience would not protect him in his maturity from the hard lessons learned by so many of his teachers, peers, and idols: that living as a Viennese musician inevitably left scars.

Germany’s musical heritage is remarkably rich, but much of German music history is associated with smaller towns rather than Berlin and other large cities. Meiningen and Weimar are but two examples. Meiningen’s Court Orchestra boasts an illustrious history. In 1867, the town hosted the first meeting of the General German Music Society (ADMV or Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein), founded a few years earlier by Franz Liszt and Franz Brendel to promote the cause of “new music.” It was in Meiningen that Hans von Bülow introduced the young Richard Strauss to orchestral conducting. Between 1889 and 1894, and in Weimar, Strauss consolidated his growing reputation as an orchestral leader and a controversial composer of “new music.”Until illness forced him to resign his position, Strauss conducted works by Cherubini, Haydn, Robert Schumann, and Smetana as well as portions of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and his own symphonic poem Don Juan.

For the first one hundred and fifty year of its existence, the Eroica was a mirror of shifting political aspirations and fears. It framed the hopes of the century as well as its disappointments. This chapter discusses the views of Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz, as well as the opinions of Felix Weingartner and Anton von Webern. Brahms’s connection to the symphony is examined in the context of ideologies of cultural decline at the turn of the century, and the public perception of the Eroica is looked at by examining the analyses of the symphony as presented and popularised in several guidebooks to the symphonic repertoire. Throughout the chapter the connection to Napoleon and the ideals of heroism in politics and the arts functions as a recurring theme.