Anyone working in the field of nineteenth-century music studies will, sooner or later, be drawn into the world of music criticism. The rapid growth of daily newspapers and the increasing popularity of journals devoted to music in the nineteenth century meant that composers now had new venues to champion their own creations, offer their opinions on the works of their compatriots, and comment on important musical issues of the time. A new breed of journalist – the music critic – arose in cities throughout Europe and the Americas. Catering to their readers’ thirst for information and opinion about the vibrant musical world of the time, these writers sometimes exerted great influence over the musical life of their cities and countries, often directly contributing to the success or failure of the work of composers, performers and impresarios. As a result, scholars enjoy a wealth of information and opinion about nineteenth-century music and musical life that far exceeds that available from earlier times.

Of course, the critical writings of such eminent musical figures as Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner have long been the object of serious investigation, as are those of the most powerful critics, notably such important figures as Eduard Hanslick and Édouard Fétis. Over the past several decades, scholars have begun to delve more ever more deeply and frequently into the pages of the quotidian press and the specialized musical journals, searching for both hard information and opinions about composers, compositions and performances, and exploring new ways to make use of this vast trove of evidence in order to gain new insights into the world of nineteenth-century music.

In 2015, this growing interest in music criticism resulted in an international conference on ‘Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism’ organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini and the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de la musique romantique française, and held in Lucca, Italy. The volume of 22 essays first presented at that gathering speaks to the truly international scope of both the conference participants and to the geographic and topical range of their investigations. The authors hail from five continents and their essays cover musical life in various European centres, the United States, and three countries in South America.

In her introduction, Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco, the book's editor, explains that the various articles are organized into three sections: Music Criticism/Music Journalism; Discourses; and Composers’ Voices. Those included in the first section illustrate the various ways that music criticism can inform us about aspects of musical life in a certain location or cast light on the ways such criticism reflects conditions of the press. The second section includes essays that use critical writings to address more global themes of genre, virtuosity, nationalism, and so forth. Finally, the articles in the third section are based directly on the writings of various composers. Most of the articles in the collection are written in English, but there are two in French, two in Italian, and one in German. A few of them are illustrated with music examples, facsimiles of journal pages or covers, and charts. The volume concludes with English-language abstracts of all the articles and brief biographies of all contributors, as well as an index of proper names.

Katharine Ellis, in the first article of the collection, offers an overview on the challenges resulting from the increasing use and accessibility of music criticism that should be required reading for students in any ‘introduction to musicology’ course. Drawing on her extensive experience working with the musical press in nineteenth-century France, Ellis introduces two concepts that should guide any researcher working with music criticism. The first, borrowed from the field of literary criticism, is that of the ‘speech act’, which is explained as ‘an utterance perceived as containing a performative element that renders it not just a collection of words, but an action wrapped up in a sentence’ (p.5). In other words, the researcher should always ask what the author of a review or other evaluative article is attempting to accomplish with his or her words. The second concept is that of the ‘generic contract’ (p. 8). Contemporary listeners would have assumed that a work in a particular genre would follow certain familiar patterns; likewise, contemporary readers, when confronted with a particular article in a particular source, would have expectations as to what they were about to read. These would be based partly on the editorial policies of the journal or newspaper, as well as the known preferences of the author. But such seemingly pedestrian concerns as form, length, and placement also played a role in the ‘generic contract’. Regarding the latter, Ellis points out that while the easy accessibility provided by databases searchable by keyword certainly has advantages for the modern researcher, viewing an article or review in isolation robs it of important context. Where does it appear within the within the publication or on the page? What material surrounds it? How does it relate to other articles, reviews, etc. in the same source? These are all important considerations that must be taken into account in order to effectively evaluate the information contained within any particular article or review.

The remaining articles in the first section display a wide range of interests. Guillaume Bordry examines Berlioz's comments on the functioning of the musical press, especially its role in forming the opinion of the public and listeners’ behaviour at concerts. Sylvia Kahan points out that critics’ responses to the various musical offerings at the three Parisian World's Fairs of the late nineteenth century (1867, 1878, 1900) can tell us much about the historical, political and cultural landscape of the time. Focusing on one critic's response to the various non-Western musical events associated with the Expositions of 1867 and 1878, she reveals that his attitude towards such music shifted dramatically from a position of condescension and dismissal to one of growing appreciation, and she points out that such a shift reflected broader trends in French political circumstances and cultural attitudes.

Ingeborg Zechner takes the novel approach of examining the reception of Italian opera in early nineteenth-century London through the reporting on the London operatic scene in various press outlets in France, Italy, Germany and Austria, while Jeroen van Gessel uses 30 years of opera reviews in Strasbourg to illustrate the ways music criticism reveals the self-image of the press and its relationship with opera management, performers and audience. José Ignacio Suárez García demonstrates that criticism sometimes appeared in non-traditional formats through his presentation and discussion of various cartoons commenting on Wagner works and performances in Madrid in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Finally, Mónica Vermes and Marita Fornaro Bordolli make use of music criticism to comment on various aspects of musical life in Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, respectively.

The second section of the collection begins with a third article dealing with music criticism in South America. Melanie Plesch concentrates on a short-lived music periodical, the Boletín Musical, which was published in Buenos Aires for only a few months in 1837 and exists today in a single almost-complete copy. Although she devotes some space to the contents of the journal, her interest is primarily focused on the Boletín Musical as a cultural artefact in and of itself, examining the journal's cultural and even political significance at various points in its ‘cultural biography’.

Erin Fulton argues that the critical reception of foreign opera in New York in the years 1825–54 was coloured by suspicion of, and antipathy toward, European culture. Opera was generally seen as representative of aspects of that culture that were reviled by American nativists of the time: autocracy, Catholicism and extravagance. One might expect that newspapers tied to various nativist political movements would have espoused such sentiments, but Fulton demonstrates that the view of opera as an unwelcome foreign import was widespread, finding expression in a wide range of publications, and thus highlighting important strains in American cultural and political attitudes in the mid-nineteenth century.

Marc Ernesti investigates the origins of a uniquely Germanic musical identity through an examination of two German-language publications from the year 1813: the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, published in Leipzig, and the short-lived Wiener allgemeine musikalsiche Zeitung. The transformation of the string quartet from a vehicle for private, amateur enjoyment to one for public performance by professional ensembles in the early nineteenth century is the subject of a chapter by Nancy November. She mines early Viennese reviews for insights into the way ideals of quartet performance practice were changing. Although there was indication that the first violinist still occupied the spotlight for some critics, others emphasized the equality and ‘purity’ of an ensemble's performance, reflected changing notions of musical value as well as the ideals of certain social reformers. The role of the quartet in establishing the emerging concept of a musical canon is another theme that emerges from November's examination of reviews of the period.

Two Italian-language chapters deal extensively with the ideas of individual writers. Maria Teresa Arfini explores theories of musical meaning put forth in the writings of the German critic Adolf Bernhard Marx, using his ideas to compare compositions by Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Giacomo Leopardi was perhaps the most important Italian poet of the nineteenth century, as well as an important philosopher. His writings on music are discussed by Renato Ricco, who compares his ideas to those of other Italian thinkers of the time and examines the similarities of Leopardi's aesthetic positions to those of German Romantic writers.

Although the ‘cult of virtuosity’ was an important feature of nineteenth-century musical life, critics in the early decades of the century were often quite hostile in their reception of the ‘transcendental’ virtuosos who dazzled audiences with their skill and showmanship. Musicologists have offered various explanations for such negative reactions, but Žarko Cvejić, building on the ideas of Andrew Bowie, a British scholar of German classical philosophy, offers a different interpretation, based on the perception of music in early nineteenth-century aesthetics as ‘an aesthetically autonomous art with the unique ability to express what neither language nor any other art or means of communication could express’, coupled with ‘the loss of trust in the free human subject of the Enlightenment in contemporary philosophy’ (p. 307). Whereas Enlightenment philosophers had conceived of music as ‘essentially sound’ and therefore incapable of providing lasting artistic value, the Romantics saw it as an ‘abstract, intellectual, and disembodied art, producing timeless musical works that will live on in perpetuity, entirely independent from their performances as transient, ephemeral events’ (p. 322). Thus, the problem with virtuosity is that it ‘reversed the “natural” order of things … [robbing] composition (that is, music) of its rightful place, diverting the listener's attention from the work onto itself’ (p. 324).

The critical ideas of Eduard Hanslick have been the subject of extensive investigation, but Michael B. Ward argues that they have been considered in the abstract, and that commentators have not taken account of the ‘socio-historical, as well as personal, context from which [Hanslck's formalist ideas] emerged’. In particular, Ward offers an explanation for Hanslick's use of rhetoric that emphasized the ‘masculine idealism’ of German nationalism, opining that he did so ‘at least in part to hide his Jewishness from a generally anti-Semitic Viennese public’ (p. 338).

The last chapter in this section of the collection, by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco, focuses on four articles written by Manuel de Falla in 1916. She contends that these articles demonstrate that Falla's ideas were not necessarily as progressive as has been portrayed, and instead depended on the intellectual legacy of the nineteenth century.

García-Villaraco's chapter easily could have (and perhaps should have) been included in the final section of the volume, which deals with the writings of individual composers and opens with an essay by R.J. Arnold on the writings of André Grétry. Arnold's examination of Grétry's writings is certainly interesting, and as he points out, Grétry was perhaps the first successful composer who sought ‘to convey complex musical ideas in ordinary language to a wide potential audience’ (p. 383). But he readily admits that Grétry was no critic, and thus it would appear that his chapter would fall outside the purview of a volume dedicated to a survey of the various ways nineteenth-century music criticism can inform modern scholarship. Arnold attempts to tie his contribution to this larger theme by arguing that Grétry's writings showed nineteenth-century critics how to apply ‘a flexible, capacious, unprejudiced and above all eclectic intellect to the mysterious workings of music’ (p. 398).

Diau-Long Shen examines E.T.A. Hoffmann's assessment of Mozart's role as the ‘inimitable creator of German Romantic opera’ and the influence that Mozart exerted on his own operatic works. Anja Bunzel discusses the ways in which the composer Johanna Kinkel responded musically to the gender biases exposed in reviews of her first collections of lieder by purposefully upending the traditional expectations for a female composer, writing songs to traditionally ‘masculine’ texts. At the end of 1841, Richard Wagner was living in Paris and supporting himself in part by writing articles for the Revue et Gazette musical de Paris and a newspaper in Dresden. In December of that year, he submitted articles regarding a new grand opera by Fromental Halévy, La Reine de Chypre. Yaël Hêche finds in these two articles, the last Wagner wrote while living in Paris, important insights into Wagner's opinions about grand opéra and his evolving ideas about how to create a musical drama at a crucial juncture in his artistic development. Finally, Rainer Kleinertz casts a critical eye on a well-known letter by Wagner, published in 1857 in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, that offered his thoughts on Franz Liszt's symphonic poems. Kleinertz concludes that this document contains important clues as to a shift in Wagner's aesthetic position concerning instrumental music after his encounter with Liszt's symphonic poems, arguing that this change in attitude had a direct impact on Wagner's decision to abandon his work on the Ring cycle and turn to the composition of Tristan und Isolde.

The range of interests and approaches exhibited in these 22 articles is impressive, but they are not of uniform quality: while many are well-focused, articulate and convincing, others are lacking in various ways. And there are editorial problems as well. As indicated above, most of the articles are written in English, but many of the authors are not native English speakers. This often results in problems, some of which are relatively minor – issues of incorrect punctuation (e.g., missing commas in ‘The French revue Franco-italienne for example reports about the key facts’ on p. 62), slight misspellings or incorrect word forms (e.g., ‘final’ instead of ‘finale’ on p. 66 and ‘Falla thinked that Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were part of the same race’. on p. 363, n. 45), minor stylistic errors (e.g., ‘In general, it has been accepted the idea that he embodied the victory of a progressive tendency’ on p. 356 and ‘Foreign criticism nevertheless focuses and remarks aspects that were different from its own operatic culture’ on p. 67), and incorrect word choices, including some words that are non-existent (e.g., ‘Stravinsky was … the greatest representant of newness in music’ on pp. 366–7). Others are more substantial, involving convoluted or otherwise problematic sentence structure that can lead to confusion: bad enough for a native English reader but even more so for one who is not fluent enough in the language to navigate such obstacle-strewn waters. (See, for example, ‘A representative piece of the concern to offer the readers European materials of outstanding personalities is the article …’ on p. 167.) Many of these errors could have been avoided with more thorough copyediting.

Another, perhaps more serious, concern is the fact that there is no uniformity in the way quotations in foreign languages are handled. For example, Ingeborg Zechner's article on foreign press reporting on the London opera scene includes quotations in German, French and Italian. The German quotations are translated in footnotes, but for some reason, neither the French nor the Italian quotes are translated. Jeroen van Gessel, in his article on the musical press of Strasbourg, likewise translates all the extensive German quotations, but neglects to translate a short French-language quotation. Sylvia Kahan, on the other hand, translates all the original French quotations that appear in her article on critical reaction to the Parisian Expositions of 1867 and 1878. Other articles include translations of quotations in the text but do not provide the original. Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco's chapter on Manuel de Falla's critical writings contains many translated excerpts from his articles, but the original text is not provided. The chapter also contains numerous quotations in the text from French sources that are not translated. A uniform policy regarding quotations and their translations would have been relatively easy to implement and would have been a valuable service to readers.

Such problems perhaps speak to the monumental task of assembling such a collection from so many authors scattered around the world. But they do detract somewhat from the quality and usefulness of the volume. Nevertheless, the project can be viewed as a successful endeavour. Several of the articles constitute important contributions to the study of certain composers, issues and locales. And all of them provide ample evidence that careful examination of music criticism, in all its various forms, can inform and enrich our knowledge of nineteenth-century music and musical life. One hopes that these examples will stimulate further interest in and innovative use of this valuable resource.