This essay takes as its point of departure the so-called ‘Verdi A’, 432Hz. From the late 1860s through to the 1880s, the opera composer was intensely preoccupied with the question of tuning, weighing in several times on the matter of where A should sit. Verdi was concerned for the strain that high tunings should place on singers’ voices. He advocated on multiple occasions for global acceptance of an A well below 440, and sent Arrigo Boito to argue in favour of A=432 at the Congresso dei Musicisti Italiani, held in Milan on 16–21 June 1881. In the 1880s, Italy remained one of the only nations in Europe that had not adopted equal temperament wholesale for fixed-tone instruments; as in the case of its spoken languages during this same period, and the locations of its A, temperament varied by region, with the southern part of the peninsula clinging to meantones. This article argues that ‘Verdi tuning’ represents the end point of a number of longer shifts in the conceptualization of musical sound, particularly in the Italian context: from temperament to tuning (accordatura); from relative conceptions of musical pitch to an absolute one; from local and regional variations towards a standardized system; from an older notion of all-encompassing nature to a presumed separation between nature and culture. Tracing this history through the Italian long nineteenth century will involve concentrating on what this article calls music-adjacent sound: that is, interrogative play with musical pitch; sound experiments from musical materials and operatic voices; instrument tuning by ear; listening for overtones; legislating preferred ratios and (eventually) frequencies for musical use; and constructing a theory of music that draws together these means of sounding. Music-adjacent sound is where the conditions for music-making were and still are established. This article argues that an attention to these sonic and nearly musical moments can demonstrate how listening and the musical imagination were cultivated outside the boundaries of any work or performance.

The Crystal Palace held a key position in London concert life during the 1860s and 70s as one of the few public venues to host high quality orchestral music. Importantly, audience members were able to buy single tickets on the day, as opposed to the prevailing practice of paying for a whole-season subscription, making the Saturday Concerts accessible to a much greater range of people. To cater to this newly-broadened audience, the programme booklets featured lengthy programme notes, a form of writing that was still in its infancy (the earliest examples date from the 1840s). These notes were a crucial part of the institutional context for performances of new or unfamiliar music in the nineteenth century, helping create the idea of ‘classic’ works and composers at the key moment of first impressions.

The Saturday Concerts were especially important for Schubert reception in Britain. The promotional efforts of August Manns, the conductor, and George Grove, then Secretary of the Crystal Palace Company, led to important performances of several early symphonies and the incidental music for Rosamunde. Grove's programme notes were especially influential on an audience that had never heard this music before. A close examination Grove's texts shows how they made ‘classics’ of Schubert and his music, referring to financial status, gender, religion, classical history, and imperial identity. This strategy was common to all composers that Grove and Manns wished to promote, though Schubert required special handling on certain key issues. However, these texts also suggest that ‘classic’ did not necessarily equate to ‘canonic’. After all, the ideological promotion of Schubert often failed to secure his works a permanent place the repertoire of the Saturday Concerts. Overall these programme notes suggest some complexity to the emergence of ‘the classics’, and provide valuable insights many areas of Victorian thinking around music.

This article focuses on the Italian inventor, telephone pioneer and opera house technician Antonio Meucci (1808–1889), exploring the shifting relationships between Meucci’s experiments and his operatic connections across his transatlantic career. Meucci first developed an acoustic telephone while working at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola, before discovering the transmission of sound via electricity during his tenure as chief machinist at Havana’s Teatro Tacón in the 1840s. These experiments were further refined after his relocation to New York, where he continued to be part of a network of Italian musicians, thinkers, journalists and scientific practitioners while seeking to patent his invention. Feted among the Italian diasporic community in the USA – both for his technological innovations and for his close relationship with Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi – at the time of his death Meucci was nonetheless embroiled in a lengthy legal case against Alexander Graham Bell over the primacy of the telephone’s invention, a dispute not fully resolved until the twenty-first century. This article accordingly unfolds in three main parts, focusing in turn on Florence, Havana and New York. Meucci’s experiments – and his complex emigrant environment – collectively highlight the Italian opera house as a global and multidimensional site of technological and sonic innovation, during a period when the telephone gradually moved from conceptual fantasy to material reality. At the same time, Meucci’s career can challenge direct links between Italian sonic environments and Italy itself. Ultimately, I argue, the complex and changing relationships between opera and the telephone invite more nuanced approaches to histories of music and technology, while demonstrating the centrality of the Italian opera house and its sounds – within, across, and beyond the stage – to nineteenth-century auditory cultures more broadly.

A recurrent trope in the reception of Joseph Joachim's performances is the notion that that he magically transformed himself into the composer of the work. In particular, his performances of violin concertos frequently evoked this perception, as documented by Andreas Moser, Otto Gumbrecht, Hans von Bülow, and Johannes Brahms. Building on work by Katharina Uhde and Karen Leistra-Jones, this article will propose that Joachim's cadenzas played a central role in fostering the perceived slippage between the composer and performer. Joachim composed – and performed – cadenzas for many of the concertos in his core repertoire, including works by Giuseppe Tartini, W. A. Mozart, Giovanni Battista Viotti, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Brahms. I will argue that Joachim's cadenzas enact a compositional approach to the thematic material. The depth of this engagement is profound, encompassing not only the soloistic passages but also the ritornello sections as material for developmental reworking and modulatory processes. In fact, he often explores harmonic avenues that are only hinted at in the ‘parent’ concerto, highlighting and fulfilling moments of unrealized potential. Joachim's cadenzas thus create the impression that the composer of the concerto is revising and expanding his own work. I propose that he inhabits the genre of the cadenza as a site of compositional and performative virtuosity, fusing the two personas at a time when they were becoming increasingly polarized in European musical culture.

The four Piano Sonatas by W. A. Mozart with freely composed additional accompaniment for a Second Piano by Edvard Grieg (EG 113) were first published in 1879–80 but were not heard by English concertgoers until 5 March 1890, when both Agathe Backer-Grøndahl and Anton Hartvigson opened separate recitals in London with Grieg's version of the Fantasy in C minor K475, the latter following it with the Sonata in F major K533/494. This coincidence is noteworthy not only because Grieg's additions appeared to flaunt the prevailing expectation of fidelity to classical works, but also because Mozart's solo keyboard music was rarely included in professional recitals. Focusing on Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson's concerts, this article considers Grieg's additions not merely as ‘arrangements’ but also as a performance practice subject to a range of interpretations by recitalists and different sections of the audience. The article begins by placing the transformation of the additions from teaching aids into concert repertoire in the context of similar supplements to classic works and concurrent attitudes to Mozart's piano music. The next section examines the mixed reception of Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson's recitals, situating this within contemporary debates about the role of fidelity in modern performances of historic works and its relationship with dominant conceptions of musical taste. While critics condemned the use of Grieg's additions, several disdainfully noted that they were well received by the rest of the audience. The final section attempts to account for this discrepancy by considering the widespread perception of Grieg's additions as Norwegian ‘national music’, a popular genre of exoticist parlour music that critics disparagingly associated with a mass audience of young, female players and considered inferior to ‘international’ classics. The article concludes by reflecting on how these factors might have informed Backer-Grøndahl's decision to perform Mozart's music with Grieg's additions.

In an enticing article for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Hans von Bülow suggested that Joseph Joachim would be well suited to achieve a reform of violin playing in the 1850s, which would effectively close the door behind Virtuosentum. The Golden Age of virtuosity had been on its way out for several years, impacting also violin performance. And yet, violin programming in the musical metropolises London and Paris was slow to adapt. As recent work on Joachim's virtuoso years has shown, his repertoire during the 1840s encompassed far more than German classics. It accommodated plenty of virtuoso music by H.W. Ernst, de Bériot, Ferdinand David, and Vieuxtemps, as well as his own substantial, virtuoso compositions, composed for his London tours in the 1840s. As this article argues, Joachim's programming did not change overnight: the shift from performing and composing virtuoso pieces to identifying himself with lofty and serious works happened gradually. One vehicle through which Joachim transformed the state of ‘violin playing’ of the 1840s was the violin romance. Joachim, who spent three months in Paris in early 1850, used the aesthetic of the romance to transform not only the state of violin playing but also the violin romance itself. Two simple romances he composed in 1850 were followed by a third romance in 1857. The third was, in effect, a Bravourstück in disguise, exhibiting none of the older virtuoso tricks such as flying bow strokes that had fallen out of favour. Rather, in Joachim's third romance, the conspicuous, ‘1840s’ virtuosity merged into ‘shape-oriented virtuosity’, a term used in a 1854 review of Joachim's playing. Many later nineteenth-century composers of violin romances from Bruch to Sibelius adopted Joachim's romance model, negotiating between melodic simplicity and violinistic demand, resulting in lyrical pieces in which virtuosity was an undercurrent, hidden but present.

Performers have enacted Beethoven in ways that disclose overt similarities in the ways through which they conceptualize both the composer’s music, and their own ambitions in performing it. This article looks at the pianist Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) who became known as ‘Van II’ not for his compositions but rather his performances. The focus the late nineteenth-century demand for autobiographic readings, and their blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, sets the scene for Rubinstein’s role in the creation of a Russian obsession with the performance of Beethoven’s piano works. Rubinstein’s fame for being a ‘son born of Beethoven’ continued well beyond his death, and set a precedent for other pianists to look to his Beethoven legacy to fashion themselves as what Stefaniak has termed ‘revelatory interpreters’ of the composer. The resulting Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis resulted in a counterpart obsession that peaked in the late-Soviet landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The article turns to the case of Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) to give a sense of how this active myth-making reflected itself in the construction of a performance narrative by a pianist who had never seen or heard Rubinstein but who felt compelled to enact the language, metaphors, and physical trope of the Beethoven-Rubinstein synthesis. It suggests how, in Neuhaus’s case, enacting the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis perhaps underpinned aspects of his own pianism (such as the concept of intonirovaniye (a way of intoning sound) as a manifestation of revelatory interpretation) in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat major Opus 110.

Studies of cinema's emergence from nineteenth-century cultural forms have historically privileged its visual attributes over its sonic ones. This article redresses the balance by examining a musical device commonly associated with early film exhibition across Europe: the fairground organ, whose spectacular audiovisual appeal was exploited in public squares and fairgrounds long before the invention of cinema. Drawing on insights from the field of media archaeology, I ask whether we can locate an archaeological layer of cinematic prehistory in the fairground organ itself. In so doing, what emerges is the critical importance of Italy in the cultural history of the mechanical organ. Partly this is because the individual widely acknowledged as the ‘father of the fairground organ’, Ludovico Gavioli, was an Italian. Yet the Italianness of mechanical organs was also rooted in the stereotypical repertoire of such instruments (well-known excerpts from Italian opera), and on discursive tropes that emphasized an affinity between portative barrel organs – said to have been invented in Italy – and the itinerant operators of such instruments, often perceived to be Italian. Ultimately, I suggest that instead of treating fairground organs as the backing-track to early film exhibition, we might profitably conceive of early cinema as the latest visual enhancement to grace the exhibition of the mechanical organ.

This article discusses illusions of ‘three hands’ in the circle of Joachim and the Mendelssohns, arguing that manifestations of ‘three hands’ at play created an aesthetic both in dialogue with the Golden Age of Virtuosity, and going beyond it. Though techniques alluding to three hands or multiple performing bodies diminished sharply in popularity after 1830–50, violin and piano music from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained highly virtuosic and often ‘unplayable’ in other ways. The difference between before and after the half-century mark is that later examples tended not to celebrate so overtly such special effects, because doing so would revive the no-longer-tenable principle of ‘virtuosity as a reward in itself’. Rather, double-stop harmonics, left-hand pizzicato, three-hand techniques and their related sleights of hand were largely escorted off the stage into a pedagogical realm. As this article shows, Joachim helped to exorcise the spectre of Paganini, and to sweep effectively out the door the residual confetti of the Golden Age of Virtuosity. Following in the footsteps of Mendelssohn, Joachim did so with Clara Schumann, viewing himself, Clara Schumann (and, we might add, Brahms) as a cohort of artists seeking to reverse the tawdry display of virtuosity. It was precisely Joachim's acute historicist perception, solidified during the 1850s, that allowed his musical aesthetics to turn so sharply from his openness to, tolerance and acceptance of dazzling violinistic tricks in the 1840s, to their absolute rejection in his later career.

In 1911, Italy invaded the region now known as Libya, then part of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a larger Italian colonizing foray into northern Africa. Many scholars have pointed out in recent years how intense the sonic environments of war can be, and the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 was no exception. Not only was the war itself full of sound and sonic media such as gramophones and telephones, the narration of the war, including most (in)famously that of Futurist author F.T. Marinetti, focused from the outset on the sonic intensities of the conflict. In addition, the war became a site for the cultivation of sonic media: Guglielmo Marconi not only deployed his radio technology for the Italian cause, he personally travelled to Libya to test and refine radio in the unique geographies there. In this article, I consider these Italian-centric narratives of war alongside accounts of the sonic experiences of the Arab and Ottoman Turkish forces in their resistance to the Italian occupation, considering the sonic techniques deployed both for and against Italian colonialism. I focus on three particular sonic techniques of that resistance: first, ‘counterlistening’, or ways of listening that subvert empire’s auralities; second, ululation (mostly by women) on the battlefield and beyond; and third, jihad, especially its sonic articulations as a set of declarations, battle cries, religious chanting, and even poetry. For both sides, sound played a much greater role in the war than just being a by-product of activity; these sonic techniques both shaped the war and were shaped by it, producing new forms of sonic experience that played important roles in constituting the colonial and anticolonial in Libya.

Now mostly derided as a musical vandal, the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher (1832–1903) was seen during his lifetime as a noble and serious artist, highly respected as a performer and sought-after as a teacher. His numerous and heavily annotated performing editions – and in particular his pedagogical editions of older works – represent his attempt to preserve and disseminate a style of playing that was referred to at the time as ‘classical’ (classisch or klassisch). While the concept of classic works, as it developed in the nineteenth century, has been studied in depth by Lydia Goehr, William Weber and others, the related yet distinct concept of classical musicianship is relatively unexplored. This chapter traces the cultural resonances of the term ‘classisch’ as it was used in the German-speaking press over the course of Grützmacher’s lifetime, arguing that it represents a complement or parallel to the idea of classic works, with an independent connection to Romantic Idealism and Hellenism. The chapter then examines the performance practice implications of classical musicianship through the lens of Grützmacher’s editions, with a particular focus on a disciplined sense of tempo, a grand and tranquil physical presence, and a highly nuanced use of the bow in the service of musical character. Viewing classical musicianship in this way clears Grützmacher’s editions of the charge of vandalism by challenging us to reconsider the ideal relationship between composer and performer, as well as the fundamental purpose of an edition.