From Extraordinary Success to No Considerable Results: Victorian Music Entrepreneurialism and the Crystal Palace Brass Band Competition 1860–1863

The July 1860 Crystal Palace Brass Band contest brought brass bands out of their heartlands to London in unprecedented numbers, The Times (12 July 1860, 9), lauding its success as ‘quite extraordinary’. This landmark event was repeated in three successive years, but in 1863 it was abruptly terminated, and no cogent explanation has been established for its failure. The entrepreneur organizing the contests, Enderby Jackson, later wrote in his autobiography that other business dealings prevented him from further involvement in the series. Jackson had made full use of his talents and contacts to bring these remarkable working-class musical ensembles to the emergent national attraction that was the Crystal Palace. However, Jackson's manipulation of publicity and managerial style obstruct easy analysis of the contests. Moreover, Jackson later sought to protect his legacy by conjuring a smokescreen in his memoirs to obscure the real reasons for the failure of the Crystal Palace contests after 1863. The entrepreneurial environment is never a stable one, and it should not be presumed that the accolades accorded to the opening contest would translate into its continuance on an annual basis. However, the fact that the contests were attended by many thousands of visitors each year and Jackson's assertion that they were a financial success stand in stark contrast to what is implied by their sudden end. This article demonstrates how close examination of previously unconsidered letters, surviving documentation, and other sources cast doubt on whether the contest series was ever an extraordinary success.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

Modalities of Assimilation: Subcultural Currents in Felix Mendelssohn's Lieder Ohne Worte

In this article I examine the impact on Felix Mendelssohn's music, as reflected in his Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words), of his affiliation with a German-Jewish subculture. To better understand the interrelationship between musical formations and sociocultural realities, I associate the real and imaginary tensions between the German, the Jewish, and the German-Jewish with stylistic ambiguities in Mendelssohn's piano songs, which often destabilize the lyrical simplicity projected by the lieder framework through formal complexities that exceed the narrow scope of the piano miniature. I establish the connections between Mendelssohn's music and sociocultural disposition by identifying a correlation between his so-called stylistic ‘conservatism’ and the anachronistic devotion of German Jewry to the universal ideals of the Enlightenment during the rise of German nationalism. Against this background, I primarily reveal the generic heterogeneity of the Lieder ohne Worte, which feature ‘progressive’ stylistic frameworks associated with the lied traditions yet concurrently point toward the formal ideals of eighteenth-century classicism. And following this, I position the stylistic duality of Mendelssohn's piano songs within a broader context through Heinrich Heine's essay The Romantic School, which sheds crucial light on the negotiation of Jewishness within German culture as it is reflected in aesthetic movements, historical changes, and political climates.