In March 1798 the violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti was expelled from Britain, suspected of being a Jacobin sympathizer. He was allowed to return to England in the summer of 1799 under circumstances that have remained vague to this day. In 1811 he was granted British denizenship, but only after petitioning the Crown. To understand the British Government’s determined stance against Viotti it is necessary to examine his life in Paris in the period 1789–92 – his friendship with the Jacobin journalist-diplomat Hugues Bernard Maret, his entrepreneurial activities, and his attempted takeover of the Paris Opera. These activities were remembered by two eccentric characters of the age, both spies for the British government. The first was an unscrupulous French ultraroyalist, the Comte d’Antraigues. The second was the dogmatic and at times irrational Englishman W.A. Miles, who was especially suspicious of Viotti’s pupil Pierre Rode, who made an unexpected landing in Britain in early 1798. In this article I re-examine the question of Viotti’s expulsion from Britain in light of new evidence against the violinist, some of it apparently damning, and attempt to determine once and for all whether the order was justified.

This article highlights the paucity of musicological scholarship on street music in the nineteenth century but examines narratives of noise, music and morality that are situated in studies of street music in related literature. The article argues that a new history of street music in the nineteenth century is overdue and charts ways in which such studies may be undertaken given the substantial primary source material to work with and the proliferation and usefulness of theoretical studies in related disciplines.

Recent investigations into the survival and dissemination of traditional songs have elucidated the intertwining relationship between print and oral song traditions. Musical repertories once considered distinct, namely broadside ballads and traditional songs, now appear to have inhabited a shared space. Much scholarly attention has been focused on the print and oral interface that occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Less attention has been paid, however, to music in Ireland where similar economic, cultural and musical forces prevailed. Yet, Ireland’s engagement in various nationalist activities throughout the nineteenth century added a distinctly political twist to Ireland’s print–oral relationship. Songbooks, a tool for many nineteenth-century nationalist movements, often embodied the confluence of print and oral song traditions. Lacking musical notation, many songbooks were dependent on oral traditions such as communal singing to transmit their contents; success also depended on the large-scale distribution networks of booksellers and ballad hawkers. This article seeks to explore further the print–oral interface within the context of Irish nationalism. Specifically, I will examine how one particular movement, Young Ireland, manifested this interface within their songbook, Spirit of the Nation. By examining the production, contents, and ideology of this songbook, the complex connections between literature, orality and nationalism emerge.

What evidence is there that street music was widespread, problematic and immoral in nineteenth-century London? This article re-examines a substantial literature that has been used to build a case or argument of the pervasive notion that street music was a curse in nineteenth-century London. Looking at a variety of sources afresh the article argues that historical evidence has often been misunderstood, misread or misconstrued in establishing historical narratives about street music in nineteenth-century London.

In the early 1890s Mahler’s attempts to interest the German music publisher, B. Schott’s Söhne, in his large-scale works proved fruitless and the owner, Dr Ludwig Strecker, was content to publish a collection of songs, the 14 Lieder und Gesänge. Even for a major firm, with ample opportunity to use income from popular works to cross-subsidize more costly and risky ventures, the publication of new, innovative symphonies was unattractive. For Mahler one temporary solution emerged unexpectedly thanks to two Hamburg patrons who funded both the performance and publication of his Second Symphony.

However, this was hardly a satisfactory arrangement, as no orchestral parts were printed, and it was only thanks to the intervention of an old friend, Guido Adler, that Mahler finally saw his first four symphonies, Das klagende Lied and the Wunderhorn songs, published in practical and performable editions. The firm that undertook this large-scale project was not primarily a music publisher at all, but a printing company, the Erste Wiener Zeitungs Gesellschaft, and until recently the details of its agreement with Mahler were unknown. With the discovery in 2014 of a manuscript draft of the firm’s contract with Mahler this important step in the dissemination of Mahler’s music can be better understood.

The article presents a transcription and translation of the draft contract, and a commentary, drawing on other published and unpublished primary sources, that seeks to set the document in the wider contexts of the history of music publishing in Vienna and of the Erste Wiener Zeitungs Gesellschaft in particular, Austrian copyright legislation, and the publication of Mahler’s music.

Spanish estudiantina plucked string ensembles achieved immense popularity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and were an important catalyst in the creation of the sonority of a variety of European and American popular musics. Such ensembles had precedents in Spanish student groups dating back to the Renaissance and the rondallas (or groupings of plucked instruments) that were associated with popular outdoor serenades. However, the modern estudiantina movement can be traced back to 1878, and was consciously framed as a modern historical construct. A large grouping of youths and former students, donning Renaissance student dress, decided to form a society to visit Paris during Carnival, on the eve of the 1878 Exposition Universelle. They took Paris by storm, performing in a variety of street settings, reinforcing the exotic stereotypes of serenading musicians associated with Spain, and bringing to life historical notions of the minstrel. In the decade that followed, the European performance contexts of the estudiantinas included theatres, outdoor venues and expositions, garden parties and salons – and they became fixtures of the music hall and the café chantant. This paper explores early English and French constructions of the estudiantina phenomenon, and how the groups were framed in the light of exotic street musics and prevailing tropes of Spain. It also examines how the outdoor performance settings of the estudiantinas were translated onto the theatrical stage.

Shortly after Beethoven’s death, several of his closest associates provided performance indications for editions of his works. Previous discussions of Carl Czerny’s and Ignaz Moscheles’s metronome marks for Beethoven’s piano sonatas have highlighted the importance of these indications for our understanding of the intended performance practice of these works. Nevertheless, the provenance and meaning of these metronome marks have remained unclear, which has led to some confusion in the literature.

By presenting new evidence, including the discovery of what are most likely the metronome marks intended for the missing sonatas from the first ‘complete’ edition by Tobias Haslinger, the article presents a more complete overview of the indications in these editions, as well as their chronology. In addition, it also discusses to what degree the editors seem to have influenced each other, which indications are most likely representative of Beethoven’s intended speeds, as well as why the metronome fell out of favour later in the nineteenth century. Finally, it discusses the meaning of these metronome marks for modern performers, and how these editions give options to disentangle the author from the text.

This article offers a solution to a long-standing mystery surrounding the identity of a melody by Carinthian folkloric composer Thomas Koschat used by Mahler in his Fifth Symphony. It first places such musical reference in the broader scholarly context of Mahler and the volkstümlich. Evidence surrounding the chronology and sketches of the symphony as well as Mahler’s intersection with Koschat and the latter’s reception is assessed. Musical materials are analysed in order to identify the source of borrowing in Koschat’s Liederspiel Am Wörther See (1880), and to understand the key structural and expressive roles it plays in Mahler’s work. The article concludes by reflecting on the possible socio-cultural meaning and significance of this case of Mahlerian allusive practice.

Although largely forgotten today, bands of German musicians (generally from the Westpfalz region) were regular visitors to New Zealand’s shores from the 1850s up until the outbreak of World War I, making them among the earliest professional European musical ensembles to be heard in the country. Plying their trade on the streets and in other public spaces, German bands were also routinely hired to perform for garden parties, school sports days, dances and boat trips, as well as on countless other occasions. Yet despite their apparent popularity, contemporary comment published in newspapers of the day demonstrates that reactions to their performances were decidedly mixed. While some members of the public clearly enjoyed the contribution German bands made to local musical life, others were less than delighted by their (often noisy) presence. In 1893, for example, one Wellington resident complained that ‘a German Band … may be heard braying at every street corner at all hours of the day and night’, while noting also that ‘It is the genuine article, all the performers being wanderers from the “Vaterland”, unmistakeable “sauerkrauts”’ Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, ten members of a German band had been arrested in Auckland and taken to Somes Island in Wellington harbour, where they were interned for the duration of the conflict. This article examines the New Zealand public’s changing perceptions of this particular brand of street musician from colonial times until shortly after the end of the First World War.

A number of Mahler’s symphonies contain climactic accumulations and releases of musical-expressive energy that overspill conventional boundaries between the aesthetic and the sensational, the spiritual and the physical, high art and the popular. These might be said to define something of the ‘problem’ that his music represented for many of his contemporaries. They are still infrequently confronted in terms of their elaborately staged excess, as if mocking the metaphorical language of harmonically contrived ‘tension and resolution’ by revealing, in spite of conventional mockery of ‘programmaticism’, what such notionally formal or ‘theoretical’ language always implies. Even Lawrence Dreyfus’s recent exploration of the ‘erotic impulse’ in Wagner’s music was to some degree hedged by symptomatic analysis of Wagner’s supposed ‘decadence’, although it valuably opened up the field and offered insight into key features of post-Wagnerian, late-romantic music. Mahler himself, in a famous letter to Gisela Tolnay-Witt, situated these in the specific, socio-cultural characteristics of symphonic music in an era of mass consumption by ever larger numbers of people in ever larger spaces. The history and changing implications of these climactic moments in Mahler’s symphonies will be sketched here with reference to their often explicitly transgressive implications.

Gustav Jenner (1865–1920) was Brahms’s only long-term composition student. Jenner, an outspoken proponent of the conservative musical values he shared with Brahms, left numerous songs and pieces for chorus, piano, chamber ensembles and orchestra. Despite his obvious stylistic affinities to Brahms, it is clear from Jenner’s prose writings that he placed high value on artistic independence. Although scholars have noted the circumstances surrounding Jenner’s interactions with Brahms between 1888 and 1895 and Brahms’s general aesthetic influence on the young man, Jenner’s music – and particularly its relationship to that of Brahms – has received scant attention. Deeper comparison of the two composers’ works yields insights into not only how Brahms influenced less prominent composers in his circle and in the generation that followed him, but also the extent and nature of Brahms’s direct influence as a teacher.

This article compares Jenner’s only complete orchestral piece, his Serenade in A major (1911–12), with its most obvious precedents, Brahms’s orchestral serenades. Although correlations in general style are numerous, discrepancies arise naturally. Jenner furthermore avoids Brahms’s most distinctive compositional choices and takes care not to rely too heavily on any one Brahmsian model for his own Serenade, suggesting his desire to distinguish himself and a wariness of the inevitable comparisons with the works of his teacher. Thus we find in Jenner’s work the same dual emphasis on musical tradition and independence emphasized both in Jenner’s prose writings and in the music of Brahms himself.

‘The ‘German band’ as a concept remains integrally associated with German ethnicity in the Australian public mind though such things as the extroverted oom-pah music of present-day Oktoberfest, or the live and recorded oom-pah music in German or ‘Bavarian’-themed venues. However, the costumed ‘German bands’ that were a feature of nineteenth-century British street and seaside resort life also began to appear ubiquitously in various gold-rush era Australian population centres and remained a fixture of Australian street entertainment until the First World War. Gold-rush era chronicler William Kelly described their music as being able to ‘drive swine into anguish’. Yet they had an opposing reputation for excellence in playing Strauss waltzes, polkas and other popular dance music of the era. They were sought after by dance venue, circus and other theatrical entertainment proprietors and were furthermore hired for private balls, picnics, showgrounds and racetrack entertainment. By appearing at German social functions and venues they buttressed pan-German cultural identity and traditions and, for non-Germans, the sight and sound of a disciplined, groomed and costumed German band provided a mildly exciting cultural tourism experience. In blaring street, circus parade or showground mode they, in fact, conformed to the present-day global stereotype of the Bavarian Biergarten oom-pah band. Through foundation research, this article attempts to apply some social, cultural and musicological ‘flesh and bones’ to what has more or less remained the ‘myth’ of the ubiquitous ‘German bands’ (and their not-always-German bandsmen) that sometimes entertained and charmed pedestrians while at other times represented a social and sonic blot on the streetscapes and public spaces of pre-World War I Australia.

The present study has been prepared on the occasion of the publication of the New Anton Bruckner Collected Works Edition’s first volume, Thomas Röder’s score of the Linz version of the First Symphony. The article re-evaluates a fundamental precept of the old Gesamtausgabe of Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak – the supremacy of the readings in Bruckner’s autograph manuscripts over those in his first prints. It begins with a brief history of the “Bruckner-Streit” of the 1930s and 40s and a summary of more recent challenges to the Haas-Nowak policy. An overview of the composer’s relationship with the brothers Franz and Josef Schalk, who were responsible for the production of many of his early editions, demonstrates that they worked closely with him at first, but began to make alterations without consulting him towards the end of the 1880s. Distinguishing Bruckner from his editors in the Third, Fourth and Eighth Symphonies is difficult, if not impossible. From an editorial perspective, it is pointless because, in these scores, the composer accepted their suggestions and made them his own. Later publications are a different matter. The discussion leads inevitably to a re-examination of a clause in Bruckner’s will which exercised a controlling influence over the old Gesamtausgabe and remains a seminal factor in any editorial considerations regarding Bruckner. The article demonstrates that the composer never intended his will to have a bearing on post-mortem editorial issues or to dictate the hierarchy of versions of his pieces.

History has often viewed Brahms as a Janus-faced composer who turned his gaze backward to contemplate the accumulated riches of music history even as he sought late in his career to exploit new means of musical expression. On the one hand, he habitually collected passages from a long line of composers that breached the traditional prohibition against parallel fifths and octaves; he exchanged ideas with musicologists such as Nottebohm, Mandyczewski and Adler, and read early issues of the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft; and he indulged from time to time in a distinctive musical historicism. But on the other hand, his music was embraced for showing a way forward for a number of next-generation composers who would contend with twentieth-century modernism, most notably of course Schoenberg, in his essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, but also Anton von Webern, whose transitional Passacaglia op. 1 was unthinkable without the precedent of Brahms’s op. 90, and whose aphoristic miniatures betrayed the concentrated expression and opening up of register in Brahms’s late Klavierstücke.

This essay considers one still relatively little-explored facet of Brahms’s historical gaze – his use of modes in his later music, and their potential for creating alternative means of musical organization that challenged, and yet were somehow compatible with, tonality. Examples considered include the first movement of the Clarinet Trio op. 114 and slow movement of the String Quintet no. 2 op. 111. Unlike Brahms’s earlier compositions that treat modes as signifiers of a style of folk music or simulated folk music, the later instrumental works seem to juxtapose principles of modal organization within the context of tonal compositions. Thus, in the first movement of the Clarinet Trio, eerie passages in fauxbourdon impress as allusions to a distant, archaic musical other, as if Brahms the historian were searching for the distant roots of his musical aesthetic.

The history of live street music is the history of an endangered species, either suppressed or trivialized as little more than ‘local colour’. Five hundred years ago the streets of Elizabethan London were rich with the sounds of street vendors, ballad-makers and musicians, and in general the worst that might be said of the music was that the same songs were too often repeated – what we would now call ‘on high rotation’. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poet Wordsworth and advocate of the ‘common man’ was describing street music as ‘monstrous’, and throughout that century vigorous measures were being applied to suppress such sounds, which were now categorized as noise. By the twenty-first century, live street music has been virtually silenced but for the occasional licensed busker or sanctioned parade. Paradoxically, this process of decline is intersected by a technologically sustained ‘aural renaissance’ that can be dated from the late nineteenth century. This article explores the reasons for the gradual extinction of live street music and the transformation of the urban soundscape. It argues connections with issues of class, the rise of literacy, the sacralization of private property and the formation of the politics of modernity.