Pleasure and passion: these two words recur in Kristina Muxfeldt's writing on Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. They reflect her preoccupation with how their music addresses matters of identity and taste, particularly with regard to intimate relationships, broadly conceived. The essays included in this volume range from nineteenth-century marriage conventions to the sexual symbolism of the hyacinth; from how Viennese opera audiences might have understood the political implications of libretti to memory processes in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. What is more, the author's pleasure in and passion for her subject(s) is manifest in every carefully crafted, softly provocative chapter.

In ‘Prologue: The Historian’, Muxfeldt sets out her method and, in so doing, explains her title: Vanishing Sensibilities. Echoing Robert Darnton she declares herself to be intrigued by the way in which ‘puzzling’, even ‘alienating’ moments from history – ‘just what should draw our most intense and sympathetic focus’ – can open a window onto ‘life in another time, or, indeed, to bring to greater awareness the reflexes of our own age’ (p. xv).Footnote ¹ Each of the six essays, Muxfeldt explains, was ‘sparked by something that stood out in recent critical reception’ that contradicted her experience of the music:

Imagine how a historian in the future could radically misread cultural products of our own time, Muxfeldt cautions (citing shows such as the anti-Bush sitcom Whoopie and sixties-set drama Mad Men as potentially problematic specimens). That same future historian, she adds, might wonder why ‘so many academic authors in the long late-twentieth century routinely, even obsessively, demonstrated their disdain for the supposed ignorance of earlier generations by placing scare quotes around their words?’ (p. xvi). Baudelaire's advice to hold no one's sensibility in contempt, for therein lies their genius, is well heeded in the chapters that follow.

In place of those intellectually lazy scare quotes Muxfeldt asks searching questions of her materials, formulated in the abstract as:

In deciding which questions to pursue, Muxfeldt often takes music as her guide; a setting of a text, she explains, ‘may direct our attention to cultural references no longer immediately understood’ (p. xvi). Thus she asks in Chapter One of Schubert's Alfonso und Estrella:

Muxfeldt argues that some of these peculiarities stem not from Schubert's and his librettist Franz von Schober's inexperience (the routine explanation), but because they were expressing frustration with, even raging at, Metternich's regime. By, as she puts it, listening in to conversations across Europe, Muxfeldt suggests that a reading of Schubert's score for Alfonso und Estrella might take into account, among other things, border restrictions enforced by the Carlsbad Treaty, covert admiration for Napoleon among youthful intelligentsia, discussions of liberty and its limits, the fashion for historical drama, theatrical claques, and representations of female freedom, as well as cross-references with other musical works by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Chapter Two is just as rich: it deals with Schubert's unfinished opera Der Graf von Gleichen, investigating why this particular version of the story of the Crusader Count who was granted papal dispensation to take two wives was censored. Failed projects can illuminate the spirit of the age as effectively as successes, Muxfeldt argues, despite their reception history being slimmer and the need for imaginative engagement greater. Few musicologists are as well equipped, in terms of breadth of knowledge, to brave it.

Yet Muxfeldt is sensibly equivocal throughout. Rather than setting down ‘a firm vision of what must have happened’, her concern is ‘to identify the methods of communication involved’ and to illuminate ‘plausible avenues of reception’ (xxi); multiple alternatives are offered by the lengthy footnotes. She describes herself as undertaking ‘historical detective work’ but, as is evident from the topics listed above, her forensic approach is by no means dry (p. xx). In fact the revelations in her essays bring to mind television crime dramas, in which (sometimes improbable) evidence is supplied by (sometimes similarly improbable) technology, but the culprit is invariably caught by a maverick detective's ability to make links and read between the lines.

Indeed, in Chapter Four, Muxfeldt reminds us that well into the nineteenth century ‘the boundary between fictional imagining and empirical science was not as sharply drawn as we are accustomed to imagine it today’ – here a useful foil for the ensuing discussion of what are called ‘postures of memory’ (p. 119). Literary examples from Wordsworth, Goethe, Chamisso and Proust, Tovey's account of the return of music from the scherzo just before the recapitulation in the finale of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and further selections from Beethoven and Schubert are presented as ‘clear[ing] the path for the intense nostalgic effects in Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms’ (p. 147). It might not seem revolutionary to treat Beethoven as part of a historical continuum – as one of a group of composers, rather than a lone genius – but few books do so. And the benefits are clear: by showing how Beethoven paved the way, Muxfeldt provides a stronger basis for discussions of memory process in the music of the Romantic generation (which have proliferated in recent years).Footnote ²

Chapter Five also seeks to correct and refresh our understanding of Beethoven's reception by revisiting the Goethe–Zelter correspondence and, as Muxfeldt describes it, its ‘garbled transmission by Adolf Bernhard Marx’ (p. 149). Zelter's perception of Beethoven is shown to have been transformed by his encounters with Goethe; through letters and, no less importantly, through works. As such, we are offered an account of ‘the mechanisms of changing taste’ and the ways in which resistance to a challenging new style could gradually melt away, in place of the naïve, Marx-influenced view that Beethoven had never been spoken about ‘with anything but reverence’ (pp. 157 and 159). Throughout this excellent book, Muxfeldt's nuanced readings challenge our assumptions, prodding us to look again, listen harder. Think.

Vanishing Sensibilities collects together essays written over the past decade or so, and the third and last chapters will already be familiar: ‘Frauenliebe und Leben Now and Then’, one of the best explications of Schumann's cycle, and ‘Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of Narcissus’, which first appeared as an elegant intervention in the debate over evidence about the composer's sexuality.Footnote ³ Both essays have been slightly updated. The revisions provide some insight into how Muxfeldt reads, and re-reads, materials. They also demonstrate how those generational differences mentioned in the book's preface can already be found between the new musicology of the 1990s and the somewhat more complacent musicology of today.

The chapter on Frauenliebe und Leben, which historicizes Ruth A. Solie's influential response to the cycle, reminds us how times have changed.Footnote ⁴ Muxfeldt now adds a postscript that builds on comments in the earlier version about how a performance ‘stands as a valuable living document of a past ideology and its former sway’ (p. 88) by briefly surveying how singers have approached the cycle in the twentieth century. The rushing tempo of the postlude to ‘Helft mir ihr Schwestern’ in Franz Rupp's and Marian Anderson's 1950 recording prevents it from being heard as a wedding march: perhaps, Muxfeldt suggests, they had another memorable day in mind; perhaps, she continues, Anderson's famous 1939 performance to 75,000 people assembled by Lincoln's memorial. After all, then and now ‘[m]eanings are not fixed; we shape them ourselves’ (p. 116).

The conclusion of the final chapter is worth quoting at length here in part because it demonstrates the sophistication of Muxfeldt's multi-layered interpretations, but also because she adds a telling parenthesis:

The detective is at work again, uncovering what has been concealed since the nineteenth century – at first deliberately but later, perhaps, unconsciously. Resistance to collapsing interest and identity was one of the things that made both this essay and the one on Frauenliebe und Leben (which warns against collapsing a composer's purpose and performance conditions, p. 99) stand out on their first appearance. That anxiety about Schubert's invocation in musicological debates over expressions of same-sex desire may now seem pleasingly quaint is thanks in no small part to the quality of research such as this.Footnote ⁵

Vanishing Sensibilities is dedicated to Charles Rosen. Muxfeldt shares his keen sense of poetic and musical vitality and eye for significant details, as well as the gift of asking probing questions of the material in hand. I can imagine no finer memorial.Footnote ⁶