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Due to the prevalence of bells in poetry performed by late-nineteenth-century elocutionists, melodramatic compositions frequently included bell sounds. Elocutionists imitated bell tones vocally, or accompanied texts such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells with character pieces. Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden, Max von Schillings’s Hexenlied, Sumner Salter’s The Madonna at Palos, Stanley Hawley’s Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight, and other works imitated bells through unusual sonorities, chord repetition, or recurring “swinging” figuration. Musical bells were not merely audible representations of natural sounds but also helped to create poetic meanings surrounding the passage of time, religious rituals, and death, sentimentally evoking grief and loss.

Felix Mendelssohn's two mature piano concertos, Op. 25 in G minor (1831–32) and Op. 40 in D minor (1837), were widely performed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the D-minor Concerto fell completely out of favor and came to be regarded as a work the composer had completed hurriedly. However, the numerous extant autograph sources for the second Concerto reveal that Mendelssohn considered it worthy of the meticulous revision customary of his major artistic efforts. The problematic reception of the D-minor Concerto was due to a convergence of factors, not the least of which was the highly favorable reception of its predecessor, Op. 25, deemed historically significant due to its formal innovations. But more subtle forces also shaped the decline of Op. 40, including a perceived seriousness of musical content as opposed to popularizing virtuosic display, as well as a long history of performance by women and amateurs rather than male virtuosi. In addition, the second Piano Concerto's biographi...

It is a familiar scenario. The governing board of an orchestra struggles with programming decisions. Anxious to keep subscribers happy and ward off financial exigencies, it resolutely markets perfo...

The poetic epigrams and vignettes that precede the movements of Fanny Hensel's Das Jahr in the recently discovered autograph allow for a new, enriched interpretation of the work, previously believed to depict the composer's Italian sojourn. Hensel's music is frequently shaped by the poems from which the epigrams were taken: works by Schiller, Uhland, Eichendorff, Tieck, and Goethe. The epigrams, vignettes drawn by Wilhelm Hensel, and references to other compositions combine to evoke the passage of time and the seasons of human life, a narrative of change tinged with a melancholic sense of loss, in a genuinely Romantic musical cycle.

In art, literature, theatre and music, Victorians demonstrated increased interest in the supernatural and nostalgia for a lost mythic time, a response to rapid technological change and increased urbanization. Romanticism generated a new regard for Shakespeare, also fuelled by British nationalism. The immortal bard's plays began to receive theatrical performances that more accurately presented their original texts, partially remedying the mutilations of the previous century. The so-called ‘fairy’ plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, were also popular subjects for fairy paintings, stemming from the establishment of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1789. In such a context, it is no wonder that Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was so overwhelmingly popular in England and that his style became closely associated with the idea of fairies. This article explores how the Victorians’ understanding of fairies and how the depiction of fairies in the theatre and visual arts of the period influenced the reception of Mendelssohn's music, contributing to its construction as ‘feminine’. Victorian fairies, from the nude supernatural creatures cavorting in fairy paintings to the diaphanously gowned dancers treading lightly on the boards of the stage, were typically women. In his study of Chopin reception, Jeffrey Kallberg has interpreted fairies as androgynous, but Victorian fairies were predominantly female, so much so that Lewis Spence's 1948 study, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, includes an entire section on fairy gender intended to refute the long-standing notion that there were no male fairies. Thus, for Mendelssohn to have composed the leading musical work that depicted fairies contributed to his increasingly feminized reputation over the course of the nineteenth century.

Felix Mendelssohn9s Serenade and Allegro giojoso, op. 43, was composed rapidly for his performance in a concert in Leipzig on 2 April 1838. Originally entitled Adagio and Rondo , the concert piece underwent substantial revision before its publication in late February the following year. The autograph sources reveal that Mendelssohn9s Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, op. 40, composed less than a year before in 1837, influenced the Serenade and Allegro giojoso9s musical content. Not only do the two works for piano and orchestra share a key and thematic material, but an extended sketch found in the Mendelssohn Nachlass 19 (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz) was part of the compositional history of the concerto, yet served as the basis for a transition, later rejected, between the Serenade and Allegro giojoso9s two movements. Revisions to the Mendelssohn Nachlass 30 draft of op. 43 show Mendelssohn working to make his new work more like the D minor concerto. Not only were parts of the early stages of op. 43 derived from op. 40 sketches, but the finished work suggests that Mendelssohn, facing the proof sheets for op. 40 while working on the Serenade and Allegro giojoso , had not yet worked the concerto9s musical material out of his artistic consciousness.