Dresden, the capital city of the Kingdom of Saxony since 1806, was intimately connected with Wagner’s childhood and his early professional life as Royal court Kapellmeister from 1843 to 1849. The locale is thus both a key site of early life impressions and the site of the composer’s most critical period of creative development, from the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer up to the first conceptual stages of Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy. The shared post of Hofkapellmeister involved continual negotiations between a musical-theatrical ancien régime and Wagner’s developing vision of a radical new aesthetic-social order manifested in his own operas, writings and utopian ideals. Wagner’s programming of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at key junctures during the later period of his Kapellmeistership and the burning of the ‘old’ (Pöppelmann) court theatre during the May 1849 insurrection are read as symbolic of a key transition in Wagner’s life and artistic career.

Wagner’s early compositional training is seldom examined, perhaps because of his unambiguous claim in 1851 to be an autodidact, taught only by ‘life, art and myself’. Yet Wagner’s work with Christian Müller and particularly with Theodor Weilig on early works and in abstract skills (notably counterpoint) reveal various dependencies. Wanger’s shifting attitude towards this period of training sits alongside his choice of more public mentors, in Beethoven and Weber, whose works he studied and arranged.

This chapter fills in the background to the composition of the string quartet in 1834. First, we look at Hensel’s early musical education, her intimate creative ties with her brother Felix Mendelssohn, their mutual use of music as a form of intimate communication, and the asymmetrical career path that resulted from her being a woman in contemporaneous society. In parallel to this sibling influence runs the Mendelssohns’ reception of late Beethoven in the 1820s, whose influence on their works of the later 1820s is clear and also has a major bearing on Hensel’s quartet. A final case study showcasing both the interaction with her brother and the music of Beethoven is provided by a brief analysis of the ‘Easter’ Sonata of 1828, which points forward to many features of the string quartet.

This chapter introduces the wide range of music bound up with the sublime in the Romantic period. This is a time often associated with the triumph of music – and especially ‘autonomous’ instrumental music – as the most sublime of the arts, and with a canon of overwhelming, ground-breaking, transgressive works by great (mostly German) composers. These associations are important, not least as a way of understanding the unease and sometimes controversy that has surrounded the musical sublime since the later twentieth century. Yet equally important to understanding the sublime in the Romantic period is to look beyond monumental instrumental compositions to see how smaller-scale genres and vocal music, alongside performers, listeners and other agents, shaped and contested the sublimity of music, sound and hearing, and left an indelible mark on the broader aesthetic category of the sublime itself.