In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

While it was critics who wrote not none too favourably about Berlioz’s innovative symphony, his work was also noticed by composers, two of whom also wrote symphonies they called ‘fantastic’. Berlioz himself reacted to his own work by producing its sequel (Lélio, or the Return to Life); the protagonist wakes from his nightmare and, eventually, determines to return to his art. Other composers who responded in diverse ways included Franz Liszt, who transcribed the symphony for piano – the form in which it was first published – and Robert Schumann, whose essay is considered in Chapter 10. Later composers took up the challenges posed by the symphony, connecting movements by recurring themes, following the lead of Beethoven and Berlioz by adding instruments to the ‘classical’ orchestra, and composing music of demonic character, some of it using the Dies irae itself.

This chapter first outlines the Romantic perspective on performance as it was elaborated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates on key writers who made music central to their philosophical and literary works, most notably E. T. A. Hoffman and Walter Scott. Both writers foregrounded the immediacy and social intimacy of performance as fundamental to musical beauty, even as they simultaneously discussed music in terms of objects (works, songs, poems). The chapter proceeds with case studies of three early-nineteenth-century performers – Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz (as conductor) – who were considered ‘Romantic’ or who inspired writers to use Romantic literary and journalistic tropes. Each case study considers the interrelations between the performer’s look, onstage behaviour, and musical phenomena, as well as the literary elaborations they inspired. The conclusion suggests ways in these three key performers shaped performance ideals well into the twentieth century.

Arrangements for string instruments were highly popular in the first part of the nineteenth century, but they had served a purpose and market different to that for the piano transcriptions that now took centre stage. The former were played by men, the latter by women; the focus during string quartet parties was on developing the performer, the latter on displaying the performer to best advantage. Piano performances, whether solo or in ensemble combinations, tended to be demonstrations to the audience of feeling, taste, and a moderate level of technical accomplishment—suitable attributes for a woman. Public performance and publication now took over the main role in canon formation, while chamber music’s meaning and function was redefined and split off from the dazzling Salonmusik and the still performance-based but decorous Hausmusik. The public quartet concerts of the 1820s and ’30s (especially those of Schuppanzigh’s quartet), along with reviewers’ endorsements of silent listening, and Beethoven’s increasingly difficult conceptions, changed the status of that genre.

This chapter further explores the ontological status of Beethoven’s symphonies in the early-mid nineteenth century, with particular attention to commentators’ ideas about arrangements of these symphonies, which both supported and undermined the development of the concept of musical works. Reading further in journals and newspapers of this time, one develops a fresh understanding of how symphonies were—and were not—understood as musical works in the early nineteenth century. The arrangers considered here are Ries and especially Hummel, two contemporaries of Beethoven who made numerous well-received arrangements of Beethoven’s music. Their musical arrangements, and others of the time, contributed to the development of the concept of the musical work concept around 1800 by promoting a certain kind of engaged ‘Romantic listening’. Such listening celebrated the creativity and genius of the composer and the unity of the work; by establishing the fixity and untouchability of the composer’s text, so that arrangements were considered ‘derivatives’; and by encouraging the perseverance of works, providing an aide-mémoire for listeners wishing to recall concert performances.

Marie d’Agoult was famous in her own time as the lover of Franz Liszt and the mother of his children, one of whom, Cosima, married Richard Wagner. After her separation from Liszt, she made a career for herself as a femme de lettres and wrote a three-volume History of 1848 which was greatly admired by contemporaries including Flaubert who used it as a key source in the writing of Sentimental Education. Carefully researched, elegantly structured, and impressive for its nuanced judgments, her History communicates brilliantly the perspective of the democratic republicans who led the revolution at the outset. These were people who had devoted themselves for twenty years to the emancipation of the “proletariat” but found themselves supporting the crushing of the June insurrection on the ground that, however justified it may have been, it was an attack on the republic. After December 2 d’Agoult’s salon became for a decade a meeting place for liberals opposed to Napoleon III. Finally, she was willing to settle for a conservative republic, not unlike that imagined by Lamartine and briefly led by Cavaignac.

Program music, a category that applies explicitly to Mahler’s early symphonies and implicitly to all of them, had a long and complicated history by the time he made his first attempts. Purely instrumental works by Froberger, Frescobaldi, Kuhnau (Biblische Historien), Bach (Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo) and François Couperin (Le Parnasse ou l’Apothéose de Lully); Parisian symphonies ca. 1800 by composers such as François Lesueur, Francesco Antonio Rosetti, and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf; and “characteristic” music of early nineteenth-century Austria and Germany formed the backdrop of better-known efforts by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, all of which played in Mahler’s mind when he began to forge his own path. The survey and typology provided by this chapter serve to frame Mahler’s conflicted attitude, which led him ultimately to a public repudiation of programmaticism, but not a private one.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Strauss served at the helm of the oldest and most successful German society dedicated to the performance of new music, the General German Music Society (Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein). The chapter examines Strauss’s contribution to the organization’s revival at a time of decline for the ADMV, as he gazed back at founder Liszt’s legacy and looked to the future through his own music and the work of Mahler, among others. His activity is positioned within the context of affiliated composers and dominant issues throughout the ADMV’s seventy-five-year history, from its establishment by Liszt and Franz Brendel through its dissolution under the Third Reich. This essay lays bare the society’s struggles over German identity, musical modernism, and reactionary politics while recognizing its role in promoting the careers of such important figures as Mahler, Reger, and Schoenberg.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.