In 1811, Beethoven opted for ‘Allegretto' for the second movement of his seventh symphony, to which he added the metronome mark crotchet = MM76. Ever since the work's inception, however, this has been mitigated by taking it as ‘Andante'. By investigating the purpose, rationale, and background, this article attempts to clarify why the original tempo made performers, listeners, and commentators uncomfortable. Exploring the tension between what Beethoven prescribed and what is taken to be good musicianship, three historical processes are evaluated: (i) performances of the symphony during Beethoven's lifetime; (ii) the activities by Beethoven’s one-time companion Anton Schindler in the 1830s and 40s; and (iii) a vast landscape of interpretational enterprise from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

Following the historical record, the article inquires into the conundrum of Beethoven's intentions, in pursuit of a broader perspective. The case is made that ‘Allegretto' inhered within it an immediacy of performance and that it expressed a repudiation of romantic aesthetics. It is argued that there are good prudential reasons to do away with ‘Andante', an encrustation of romantic error, and to acknowledge, affirm, and valorize ‘Allegretto’ as a thumbprint of style.

This article examines how popular musical practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prague articulated and shaped Czech nationalist sentiment through intertwined forms of pastoral and urban nostalgia. In a rapidly modernizing city marked by migration, industrialization, and intensifying Czech–German antagonism, pubs, dancehalls and garden restaurants became crucial sites where everyday leisure intersected with the cultural politics of nationalism. These venues, many of which consciously evoked a rural atmosphere through architecture and repertoire, offered urban newcomers a symbolic refuge from the social dislocation of modern life. Here, brass bands and the emergent folk-like genre lidovka, alongside satirical café chantant couplets, became key media through which audiences negotiated the loss of traditional rural worlds and articulated desires for collective belonging.

This article analyses the representation of Spanish history in the operas ‘Fernand Cortez’ (1809) and ‘Pélage’ (1814), along with their ambivalent political uses and economic dynamics at the Paris Opéra during the transition from the First Empire to the Bourbon Restoration. It seeks to complement historiographical interpretations that often view these operas primarily as vehicles of Napoleonic or Bourbon propaganda, by examining the artistic careers of their authors – especially the composer Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851) and librettist Etienne de Jouy (1764–1846). A closer look at their personal and professional paths reveals a multi-layered space of symbolic conflict, shaped by disputes over reputation and competition for positions within the Parisian musical milieu. Drawing on archival and press sources, this paper studies the interplay between official political agendas and individual ambitions, considering how the self-serving staging of Spanish medieval and imperial history was incorporated into French narratives of power.

Starting in the 1830s, French musicians began to fully engage with the concept of nostalgia as an affective category and as a musical trait. The deliberate artistic process of naming music and musical works as ‘nostalgia’ contributed to the demedicalization of the term while transforming its original meaning as homesickness into a spectrum of spatiotemporal emotions. Musical renditions of nostalgia also displaced expressions and discussions of this emotion away from the countryside, where it had originally been rooted, towards the city. Musicians thus directly participated in the transformation of nostalgia into a commodity, a fashionable product that could be purchased in music stores, experienced firsthand in entertainment venues, and tailored to the needs and desires of an urban population.

This article traces the shift in the evocation of nostalgia in music and the musical press during the nineteenth century in Paris, where it became most prevalent in dozens of vocal romances and instrumental pieces. The compositions that I analyse, rather than forming a unified depiction of the city, offer a range of sonorous and thematic ideas that provide a more comprehensive understanding of the place nostalgia played in the imagination of an urban population increasingly conscious of its artistic value and impact. I thus uncover three main stages in this shift, which show how successive generations of musicians, influenced by different attitudes to urbanity, conceived nostalgia. I investigate why composers drawn to nostalgia were attracted to certain types of musical and formal models, what these choices reveal about their understanding of nostalgia and its purpose, and, more importantly, what this musical nostalgia sounded like. This article provides the first overview of works that deliberately use nostalgia as an explicit topic across genres and generations in nineteenth-century Paris.

Though critic Paul Scudo predicted in 1850 that the French romance would be ‘more respected by posterity than many weighty scores’, the once-ubiquitous song genre has all but disappeared from modern recitals and musicological histories. While the reasons for this erasure are undoubtedly multifaceted, I argue that the loss of the vocal performance practices that animated the genre played a significant role. Specifically, French singers in the domestic sphere – commonly labelled ‘romance singers’ and exemplified by figures like the tenor Richelmi – cultivated an entirely different vocal production than the one popularzied by Gilbert Duprez and typically heard in classical singing today. This technique, known as the timbre clair (clear timbre), was produced using a rising larynx and a lowering soft palate, resulting in a bright, thin, delicate, and even slightly nasal sound that became a hallmark of early and mid-nineteenth-century French singing. Moreover, composers and audiences expected singers to adopt a declamatory approach when performing romances, to constantly vary the colour of their voices for expressive effect. By so doing, performers imbued these seemingly simple songs with a sophistication and nuanced meaning not readily apparent in the scores themselves. This study of timbral aesthetics – which, I suggest, ought to be more seriously explored in modern performance contexts – undercuts conceptions of the genre as vacuous or meaningless and sheds light on an essential aspect of the nineteenth-century French sound world.

Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future, Hector Berlioz’s novella from 1844, is a testament to how the composer imagined a perfect city drawing from both the musical past and his autobiography. Euphonia envisions a community of artists striving for musical perfection, which is demonstrated during a recurring festival honouring Gluck, Berlioz’s first musical idol. Composers carefully monitor musical preparation, and only knowledgeable audiences attend concerts. Berlioz’s visionary, futuristic utopia is built on nostalgia for an alternate musical culture and recent musical heritage. This imagined city arose from the composer’s experiences in the urban locales where he lived. Euphonia is Berlioz’s dream to musically revisit La Côte-Saint-André, his native city, while it also expresses a desire to engage with the nostalgic aura of the German mountains. Nostalgia seeks to build alternative realities as a response to the bittersweet memories of times gone by and the perception that the culture of the present is declining. Rather than being solely directed at reminiscing about the past, the power of nostalgia relies on its ability to create the promise of a better future. Despite that Berlioz continued to enrich his artistic outlook in Paris, the composer also faced frustrations with the musical establishment in which he worked and about which he wrote. Berlioz considered that in Paris popular opinions and habits of the musical world had tarnished music’s integrity. As it became clear that his musical ideals were not met in the real world, he imagined a perfect city-conservatory, Euphonia, where Berlioz countered the artistic realities and hardships he faced in Paris and in exchange imagined new spaces where his ideas would flourish. The utopic yet so nostalgic city of Euphonia, like Berlioz’s music, commemorated the musical values of past eras and anticipated a future of creative possibility.

Franz Liszt's symphonic poem Mazeppa (1854) recreates a narrative that portrays Cossack commander Ivan Mazeppa's torturous Ride – bound naked to an unbroken horse – to miraculous survival and triumph. To evoke this legend, Liszt incorporated familiar musical tropes: persistent galloping triplets, fanfares, apotheosis and a march-like finale. These tropes illustrate a consistent story, but they risk sounding merely clichéd and mimetic. To appreciate how Liszt uses these tropes to create depth and compositional creativity in Mazeppa requires consideration of the myth's intertextuality. This article considers the broader sources that informed Liszt's Mazeppa and offers an interpretation that includes the programme's preface and an array of Mazeppa ‘texts’ that have appeared since the mid-eighteenth century. These texts include a quasi-historical narrative, poetry and visual art along with Liszt's original commentary for Mazeppa and his defence of programme music in his Berlioz and His ‘Harold’ Symphony essay. Taking all of this together, my approach in this article is to analyse Mazeppa as if listening for the protagonist and letting the character of his musical subject inform my interpretation. Hearing the musical subject in this work requires attention to voice, expressivity, motives, gestures, themes and extramusical intertexts to construct, layer by layer, an interpretation of Mazeppa's symbolic significance. I argue that connecting these threads of cultural history illuminates the piece's theme of suffering and death as inescapable companions in the life of the creative genius.

In this article, I argue that the musical landscape in Panama during the nineteenth century was much more active, diverse and globally connected than previously observed by authors of traditionally accepted music historiography of the country. Particularly, I discuss the heightened activity in the second half of the century through primary sources concerning violinist Miguel Iturrado (d. 1879). I further argue that the violin culture fostered by Iturrado and his contemporaries became a solid platform for cultural exchange which allowed for the development of early-twentieth-century music production in Panama. I conclude that the flourishing of numerous fin-de-siècle concert violinists, as well as the advent of the violinist-composers of dance music now known as the Azuero School in the first third of twentieth-century Panama, are directly related to Iturrado’s –and his colleagues’– musical and cultural achievements.

Few songs of the British nineteenth century have had the staying power of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. With music by Henry Bishop and words by John Howard Payne, it first appeared in Clari; or, the Maid of Milan (1823) at London’s Covent Garden. The song remained in the repertory well into the twentieth century and is still a point of reference in the twenty-first. In the initial dramatic context, it was a solo vehicle for the titular heroine, a means of expressing Clari’s longing to return to her ‘humble’ home. Once the number became a breakout hit, the opera’s narrative details ceded significance to a vaguer international vogue for nostalgic sentiment. Like the much-discussed Swiss maladie du pays or the contemporary craze for the ranz des vaches, Bishop and Payne’s creation piqued the public interest in imagining a home out of reach. As the decades wore on, however, the song’s invocation of home acquired a distinctive national accent. By the mid-Victorian period ‘Home, Sweet Home’ had come to anchor an ideology of English exceptionalism. To perform or attend to this song in 1871 was to partake in a quasi-ritualistic affirmation of the doctrine of the hearth. This was partly bound up with the specious claim that other languages lacked an adequate word for home, but it was also connected to a shift in the geography of belonging. In lieu of the Romantic yearning for a distant homeland, this new Victorian nostalgia fixated on the heteronormative family home with its promise of shelter from the trials of urban modernity and the vices of foreign politics. Drawing on a range of musical, visual, and literary sources this article explores a key passage in the history of British ambivalence to city living via a song that emerged as a powerful amplifier of anti-urban desire.

Although Adolphe Sax’s serpentine invention hailed from Belgium, and then France, saxophones today are widely perceived as symbols of United States-led popular modernity. This image’s strength occludes a largely unknown antipodean precursor: the instrument debuted in British colonial Australia before being first heard across the Atlantic. This article foregrounds the goldrush-era Australian introduction of an instrument otherwise known as a ‘turkophone’, by enigmatic French musician Charles Jean-Baptiste Soualle, known in his orientalist stage persona as ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’, from December 1852 to July 1855.

This article establishes the European origins of Soualle’s act and examines its effusive Australian reception through a historical musicology lens, before discussing the cultural dynamics key to this episode’s geographic context. While a Saidian, Orientalism-inspired critique sheds some light on the appeal of ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’ to Australian audiences, Soualle’s local success was perhaps most notably underwritten by geopolitical events. For example, the 1853 outbreak of the Crimean War, which pitted the allied imperial French, British, and Ottoman powers against Tsarist Russia, challenged a nascent Australia’s sense of itself and place in the world, and provided Soualle an opportune, sympathetic platform from which to compose and perform. Remarkably, given characterizations the instrument signified in the Jazz Age decades hence, Soualle’s saxophone also embodied notions of freedom for its mid-nineteenth-century Australian audiences.

This episode, and its thematic resonances, offers insights into histories of touring musicians, understandings of music and coloniality, musical globalism, and the saxophone’s symbolic malleability prior to its rise to worldwide prominence.

Edward MacDowell held a liminal position in the late nineteenth century, well-known and active in Europe but also championed as a leading figure of US musical identity. In the first concert of his 1887 American Festival, conductor Frank Van der Stucken programmed MacDowell’s Hamlet, positioning MacDowell and his composition as important components of American music. However, MacDowell’s symphonic poem holds layers of cultural meaning in its various associations with European artistic, dramatic and musical figures.

MacDowell composed Hamlet. Ophelia. Zwei Gedichte für grosses Orchester in Frankfurt in 1884, shortly after he and his wife returned from their honeymoon in London, a city imbued with cultural Wagnerism. The style and motivic material of MacDowell’s symphonic poem are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, suggesting an aesthetic and thematic connection. Furthermore, MacDowell dedicated his composition to the famous Shakespearean actors, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, indicating their impact on his work.

These rich cultural layers of MacDowell’s Hamlet implicate issues of national identity and aesthetic value, issues that clarify the competing positions of the composer: as a nuanced cosmopolitan composer exhibiting English, French and Germanic elements in his work; as a US composer valorized to promote national identity; and as a proponent of aesthetic value transcending national origin. This article explores each cultural layer of MacDowell’s Hamlet and Ophelia to position the symphonic poem as a microcosm of the rich cultural landscape of the United States at the close of the nineteenth century.

Anton Rubinstein’s music has often been portrayed as a conservative, cosmopolitan foil to the progressive, nationalist compositions of the Balakirev circle. This is also how the Balakirev circle viewed it throughout the 1860s, but their opposition suddenly gave way to public adulation in 1869. Ostensibly, the reason for this about-face was musical, since with Ivan IV (1868) and Don Quixote (1870), Rubinstein finally produced two explicitly programmatic symphonic pictures. Yet the difference between Rubinstein’s symphonic pictures and his earlier works was not as radical as the Balakirev circle made it out to be, and at least part of the circle’s motivation for suddenly praising them seems to have originated in extramusical concerns. In 1869, Balakirev was dismissed as the director of the Russian Musical Society and threw himself into organizing the Free Music School concerts, which he intended as a competitive alternative to those of the RMS. In order to attract audiences, he became determined to secure the Saint Petersburg premiere of Ivan IV as well as Rubinstein’s performances as a soloist, and it was in this context that the Balakirev circle bombarded the press with glowing reviews of Rubinstein’s music. In the short run, this rapprochement even grew beyond a marriage of convenience and developed into regular meetings at which Rubinstein and the Balakirev circle presented their compositions for criticism. These meetings were ephemeral, but in later years most of the Balakirev circle maintained a polite relationship with Rubinstein. The exception was Vladimir Stasov, who erased the rapprochement from his memory and reverted to peddling the image of Rubinstein as the archconservative enemy of Russian music that he had already constructed in the 1860s. Alas, it was Stasov who shaped twentieth-century historiography of Russian music, and this is why the events of 1869–71 have remained obscured in modern scholarship.

London’s nineteenth-century sailortown – centred around Ratcliffe Highway and the surrounding docklands – was a vital hub of maritime activity. Yet much of what is known about this space derives from landsmen’s accounts: narratives by Victorian reformers, novelists and journalists who often portrayed the sailortown as a site of crime, vice and moral degeneration. In contrast, sea shanties, rooted in the lived experiences of sailors themselves, offer an alternative perspective, illuminating the values and self-perceptions of the maritime community. This article examines how London’s sailortown is represented in shanty repertoire, analysing the lyrics of shanties associated with the city to reveal recurring themes, such as encounters with women, financial exploitation, alcohol consumption and the dangers of the Highway. These songs provide insight not only into the everyday lives of sailors ashore but also into how they navigated and interpreted urban spaces. Furthermore, by considering the broader soundscapes of the docklands (including the influence of street performers, public houses and the music hall), this study explores how urban auditory culture shaped the content and form of shanties. By highlighting sailors’ voices through their songs, this article reconstructs a more nuanced and culturally embedded understanding of London’s sailortown and its place within the wider maritime world.

Music was important in John Stuart Mill’s life. He was an accomplished pianist and a talented improviser. His works include treatments of various philosophical aspects of music, including its metaphysics, its epistemology, the sources and nature of its value, and its aesthetics. Some of his ideas on musical aesthetics are still of interest. This applies to his distinction between those reactions to music that are based on associations with non-musical experiences and those that are based on properties of the music itself. It also applies to his concepts of poetic and oratorical modes of musical expression. In addition to his other achievements, he should be recognized as a philosopher of music.