From 1810 to 1830, Viennese piano construction evolved in an attempt to combine the special sonority of Viennese instruments with new advances in technology. One important factor was the possibility of varying the sound between full and reduced or dampened action. A particularly striking change of sound could be produced by the soft or una corda pedal, which shifted the hammer rail so that the hammers struck only one rather than the standard three strings of a triple-strung piano. Although detailed knowledge of which composers wrote which works for which instrument is lacking, hypotheses can be advanced regarding the influence of the action of certain instruments on compositional style. A comparison of works by two composers from different generations – one earlier (Beethoven) and another later (Mendelssohn, who had a predilection for Viennese instruments in his youth) – sheds light on several peculiarities of Schubert’s piano music. Beethoven’s late works and Schubert’s works of the 1820s both exploit this potential in order to coordinate sonority and structure. However, the two composers differ in one key respect: Beethoven tended to use the sonic contrasts he exploited (and meticulously notated) to articulate the work’s architecture, whereas Schubert used them to refine atmosphere and mood.

It was an essential dimension of Bernstein’s personality to be actively involved in public engagement with (usually) classical music, bringing it to the masses with an accessible approach. This chapter explores how he used writing and broadcasting to communicate his own passion for music, as well as his insights as a composer, conductor and musician. Talking about ‘what makes music tick’ was as much at the heart of his mission as composition and performance were, and whether talking about Beethoven and Bach on primetime television in Omnibus or publishing his public lectures as bestselling books, Bernstein’s efforts in music appreciation helped to solidify his image as perhaps America’s most recognizable and popular classical musician.

Some of the major influences on Berlioz were the new experiences that he likened to a thunderbolt. Literary influences came from Britain and Ireland (Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, and especially Shakespeare); from Germany (Goethe); and from France (Victor Hugo). The coup de foudre were performances of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, with Harriet Smithson (1827). He was mainly brought up on French music – songs and extracts from operas. Once in Paris, he came to admire the French operas of Gluck, and Weber’s Der Freischütz affected him strongly. However, the musical coup de foudre was Beethoven, whose example led him to cast his ideas in symphonic form. Once completed, the work must be performed; and when Berlioz took to conducting his own music and promoting it outside France, Symphonie fantastique, or selections from it, featured in many of his concerts.

An exploration of Collins’s musical likes and dislikes. He particularly disliked ’German’ music of the nineteenth century, with particular scorn for Schumann and Beethoven, although he admired Mozart

This chapter first walks readers through Kant’s critical theory of the sublime before tracing this Kantian sublime in a selection of German Romantic-period cultural texts. One of Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous paintings, The Monk by the Sea, and Heinrich von Kleist’s equally awesome review of it, are read through a (post-)Kantian lens. The chapter then explains how Kant’s model of the sublime was decisively re-interpreted by Friedrich Schiller, whose idea of the ‘pathetic-sublime’ made the concept amenable to poetics, particularly so with respect to tragedy and questions of free will and fate. The chapter closes with a discussion of the sublime in German Romantic-period music, focusing on Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony, with the words of the final chorus from Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

The introduction outlines the musicological context for the book’s engagement with Schubert’s string quartets. It offers a fresh perspective on the issues surrounding the early reception of Schubert’s instrumental music and considers the lingering tendencies of that history in more recent scholarship. It situates Schubert in relation to Carl Dahlhaus’ concept of the Stildualismus of the nineteenth century, and problematises the frequent setting of Schubert and Beethoven as opposites, exposing the disciplinary remnants of Beethoven’s centrality to the formalisation of music theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.It also lays the foundation for considering the lyric as a category of form, which the later chapters develop, and defines the concept of ’lyric teleology’ which is foundational to the book’s analytical case studies. Finally, the introduction explains and rationalises the book’s specific areas of focus (string-quartet first movements) and situates the book within existing and emerging debates surrounding nineteenth-century musical form and Schubert’s place within them.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the juggernaut of Mozart reception is witnessed in full flow – in momentous biographies, lavish anniversary celebrations, delightful fiction, and laudatory criticism. Musicians and writers had become increasingly invested in Mozart; any questioning of his genius, or collision between legends and realities in the life story, could elicit a torrent of argument and counter-argument.1 His quasi-sacred status is captured in a humorous exchange from The Musical World (1841). Deemed a heretic for questioning Mozart’s instrumentation in the Don Giovanni overture, Henry Tilbury confessed that ‘there is no such wretch living (at least I hope not) that would attempt to tarnish the bright and glorious halo of Mozart’s name’; he was duly admitted – tongue firmly in cheek – by the ‘Lord High Archbishop of the “Musical World” … into the bosom of the “Mother Church” again’.2

Haydn and Mozart’s individual and collective critical reputations in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century were affected above all by the contents and orientations of a diverse range of writings and by Beethoven’s immense musical presence. With the immediacy of Haydn’s death receding and Mozart long gone, biographical work was able to build on foundations laid by distinguished writers such as Schlichtegroll, Niemetschek, Griesinger, and Dies in order both to feed an appetite for information about their lives and music and to demonstrate their continued relevance in a new era. In the process, similar and different perceptions of the two composers emerged, with biographical narratives stimulating explicitly fictional endeavours – where Haydn and Mozart were most readily able ‘to have, experience, exhibit, prove, live and perform … [their] selfhood’ in line with a key tenet of romanticism1 – as well as ostensibly factual endeavours.

Among critics in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Johann Friedrich Reichardt and E. T. A. Hoffmann lay especially strong claims to promoting a Viennese triumvirate of composers. In one of a series of letters from a trip to Vienna in 1808, subsequently published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ) in 1810, Reichardt described a sequence of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven string quartets played by violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s ensemble.

Premiered in Berlin, but composed in Paris, Arthur Honegger’s Mouvement symphonique n° 3 was a commission for the Berlin Philharmonic, and Chapter 5 deals with its reception, bringing the book back to its two major European centres. For reviewers, Swiss-German Honegger’s work, the third in a trio of symphonic movements that began with Pacific 231 and Rugby, was unambiguously neither French nor German, and it reveals mechanisms by which commentators sought either to assimilate the work with, or expel it from, Germanic idealist aesthetic traditions. Despite the work’s ‘sober and unprepossessing’ title, this chapter suggests that Mouvement symphonique n° 3 had a critical political programme – even if programmatic aspects were barely acknowledged in the critical reception. Manipulating the symphonic form, and referencing Beethovenian subjective narratives in particular, the work considers the changing relationship between the individual and the collective within a tumultuous era of political and industrial/technological upheaval, ultimately lamenting over the ruins of both the symphony and the utopian political project it represented.

In this chapter, pianos made by firms such as Broadwood, Érard, Graf, Pleyel, Stein, Streicher, and others owned or used by composers and virtuosi such as Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Schumann, and others are discussed and technically described. Histories of the piano making firms are provided.

This coda considers how music might be put to queer use through a reading of Amy Levy’s poem “Sinfonia Eroica”.

In this chapter, we discuss the existential concerns of the great Maestro Ludwig van Beethoven and how he was able to compose musical masterpieces while confronting severe hearing loss. We also describe age-related changes in vision, smell, taste, skin sensation, proprioception, and balance. Age-related cognitive changes such as attention, processing, learning, and memory are presented. Finally, a resolution is offered as to how Beethoven still composed with hearing loss.

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.

The chapter considers an agreement between Beethoven and his publisher Steiner as a crucial moment in the history of musical publication. In 1816, Beethoven and Steiner had decided to issue Wellington’s Victory and the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in arrangements for various combinations of chamber group simultaneously, and concurrent with the original orchestral edition in parts and score. Important here, and moving well outside publication ‘business as usual’, was the issuing of complete scores. These demonstrate the evolving conception of the musical work: silent score study would gradually replace the hands-on reception and construction of the musical work of the arrangements for chamber ensemble. It is also significant that this new publishing strategy began with Wellington’s Victory, which was thus treated as a significant work for study and performance, although it has tended to be marginalised as mere ‘occasional music’ after Beethoven’s time. In total there were eight different editions released at once for Wellington’s Victory (and the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies). This strategy shows comprehensiveness, musically and socially. But it was also a matter of economic sense.

This chapter provides an overview of the social context in which arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies for various chamber arrangements became extremely popular, representative of arrangement culture more generally. Beethoven described his era as ‘a fruitful age of arrangements’: this chapter considers why. The main arrangers of the era are discussed in overview, including Beethoven, with attention to the reasons why they cultivated musical arrangement. For Beethoven and others, there were aesthetic and artistic grounds. Beethoven made several arrangements of his own works for chamber ensemble, which probably had mostly to do his own development of thinking about chamber music, rather than with marketability or flexibility of performance options

The introduction provides the literary, musical, and critical contexts for the book. It opens with Forster’s contribution to Humphrey Jennings’s documentary A Diary for Timothy, using it to illustrate the intersection of music and politics. It reviews the formalist approaches that have until now dominated the interpretation of music’s influence on Forster. Alluding to the shifting perception of music from a non-referential art to a political discourse in musicology, the introduction demonstrates that inattention to contemporary ideas of and debates about music leads to inadequate, implicitly Eurocentric readings. The Introduction argues that it is necessary to draw attention to the political – political in its broadest sense, be it racial, national, sexual, or social – resonances of Forster’s engagement with and representations of musics. The Introduction proposes Forster’s notion of ‘not listening’ as a way to examine his representations of music and uses Tibby Schlegel’s listening to Brahms in Howards End to illustrate the many extramusical associations that a single reference to music can generate. The Introduction finishes with an outline of the ensuing chapters.

Forster’s Wagnerism is the focus of the fourth chapter. Instead of following previous critical examples to map out the narrative parallel between Wagner's music drama and Forster's fiction, the chapter turns to the way in which Forster negotiates Wagner's cultural and political status through tackling and questioning the heroism of Siegfried. Examining a variety of texts, ranging from his 1907 novel, The Longest Journey, to his political essays in the 1930s and wartime pamphlet Nordic Twilight (1940), and to a postwar radio broadcast for the BBC, ‘Revolution at Bayreuth’ (1954), the chapter considers how Forster was attentive to a complex web of discourses on Wagner’s anti-Semitism, posthumous reception in Britain, and links to the Nazis in the first half of the twentieth century. Forster’s consistent critique of Wagnerian heroism for its apocalyptical vision suggests his opposition to the political extremism and masculine exceptionalism celebrated and advocated by many contemporaries. Analysing Forster’s criticism of the Wagnerian hero, the chapter discusses his contribution to topical debates about fascism, Jewishness, war, violence, and hero-worship.