The particular listener-friendliness of later eighteenth-century music is no secret; it has been an article of faith for some more recent writers, but has not that often informed the basic approach to this repertory. Theories of rhetoric, schema or topic are certainly premissed on such an understanding, but do not necessarily address what the author believes to be a central aspect of the musical aesthetics (and indeed of the wider culture) of the time: sociability. Yet music, especially instrumental music, arguably forms the most powerful expression of sociability that has reached us from that time – not merely reflecting wider practices but actively providing models for human behaviour. I discuss some of the common syntactical mechanisms that convey the sociable impulse, in line with Judith Schwartz's definition of an art that ‘communicate[s] by means of pattern rather than momentary passion’, and with particular reference to Pleyel, J. C. Bach and Haydn.

The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death. The notion that Mendelssohn would have written such letters conflicts strikingly with the received view of his character. Nevertheless, the veracity of the material is beyond doubt, and, while it does not include specific evidence that Mendelssohn and Lind began an affair, it points more clearly than has hitherto been possible towards an answer to this question. Thus it necessitates a radical revision of perceptions of these two major musicians. For Otto Goldschmidt, Lind's husband, destroying the letters was crucial in protecting the reputations not only of his wife and Mendelssohn but also of himself and his family.

The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.

This article examines a range of writings on the status of musical interpretation in Austria and Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century, and argues their relevance to current debates. While the division outlined by recent research between popular-critical hermeneutics and analytical ‘energetics’ at this time remains important, hitherto neglected contemporary reflections by Paul Bekker and Kurt Westphal demonstrate that the success of energetics was not due to any straightforward intellectual victory. Rather, the images of force and motion promoted by 1920s analysis were carried by historical currents in the philosophy, educational theory and arts of the time, revealing a culturally situated source for twenty-first-century analysis's preoccupations with motion and embodiment. The cultural relativization of such images may serve as a retrospective counteraction to the analytical rationalizing processes that culminated specifically in Heinrich Schenker's later work, and more generally in the privileging of graphic and notational imagery over poetic paraphrase.