Encores are hated as much as they are loved, loved as much as they are hated. While a great many concertgoers see these little bonbons as the locus of the performance’s real magic, many others see them as impediments to art. This article seeks to make manifest the social mediation of this antinomy, to explain it as a moment of capitalist society. It does so by moving from the surface of the encore’s commodity character to the fundamental social premise of its celebration and denial. My study begins by elucidating the form of the encore as delimited within a quasi-autonomous appendix to the official proceedings of the concert, before moving on to the market demands that shaped the solo recital in the early twentieth century. I then interpret the encore’s formal attributes in light of contemporaneous disenchantment narratives and Moishe Postone’s interpretation of commodity fetishism. Finally, in response to the inadequacy of Postone’s theory with respect to class domination and freedom, I analyze the encore via Adorno’s exchange principle, revealing in encore-loving and -hating the truth of capitalism’s unrealizable promise of justice. Inspired by Adorno’s critical theory of society, where only “consummate negativity” outlines its mirror opposite, my article endeavors to read the magical encore from the point of view of its redemption, from the point of view of the social transformations that would do justice to the promises that neither affirmation nor rejection of the encore can realize.

Audissino, Emilio—Canonizing John Williams 76Cachopo, João Pedro—Destinies of Manon 29Contributors 111, 198Dreyfus, Emily Allegra—Wagner, Canned 39Fuchs, Maria—Scoring Heimat 53Hoeckner, Berthold—Editor’s Note 115Hoeckner, Berthold—Korngold’s Hollywood Homecomings 5Hoeckner, Berthold and Emily Allegra Dreyfus—Introduction 3Hubbert, Julie—Auteurism in Tár 98Kramer, Lawrence—Viewpoint: Beyond Musicology: Music and Humanistic Knowledge 190Reed, Jacob—Kant, Coleridge, and the “Moonlight” Sonata: Imagination, Fantasy, and Fantasies in Beethoven’s Time 116Sabbatini, Tommaso—Louise: Wagnerism, Realism, Stage, Screen 19Shyr, Emily—Doubled Figures, Doubled Infinities: Der Mönch, “Der Leiermann,” and the Kantian Mathematical Sublime 140Smolkin, Kirill—Swan Lake Horror 66Swanson, Cole D.—Tarantino’s Auteurist Anachronisms 86Wheeldon, Marianne—Class, Courtship, and habitus clivé: Debussy’s mélodies and the Politics of Social Mobility 162

The idea of a nature removed from modern civilization has shaped an enduring sense of Heimat in German culture since the Romantic period and was rendered in the images and sounds of the twentieth-century Heimatfilm. Giuseppe Becce’s symphonic underscoring of Ludwig Ganghofer’s Das Schweigen im Walde (1955) exemplifies (following Tom Gunning) “musical landscapes of attraction,” specifically how musical topoi of Heimat entered into the cultural unconscious of the postwar Heimatfilm. By contrast, Julian Pölsler’s 2012 cinematic adaptation of Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 dystopian novel The Wall uses excerpts from Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin in “landscapes with musical attractions,” which create a distinctly modern and anti-Romantic sense of nature. These two oppositional deployments of music not only epitomize the difference between “unheard” generic underscoring and “heard” masterworks of classical music, but manifest the dialectical relationship between Heimat and anti-Heimat in post–World War II German culture.

When the film Tár premiered in the fall of 2022, it immediately generated both praise and controversy. Critics and viewers were impressed by actress Cate Blanchett’s tour-de-force portrayal of the fictious orchestral conductor Lydia Tár. Just as many, however, found the film’s depiction of the classical music world as a profession rife with sexual misconduct and predatory behavior disturbing. The film’s critique of both the #MeToo movement and the failures and excesses of contemporary cancel culture as well as its inaccurate depiction of gender parity on the podium also generated heated and angry responses. Real women conductors including Marin Alsop spoke out against the film on multiple grounds. “I was offended as a woman, as a lesbian and as a conductor,” Alsop declared. While the film addresses the use and abuse of wealth, privilege, and power in the classical music world, its music and soundtrack choices also point to a uniquely cinematic critique of the long-standing and problematic concept of the film auteur. In Tár, the director Todd Field wielded unprecedented control over the music, selecting and shaping what musical works Tár performs and discusses in the film and what music and dialogue the audiences hear on the film’s official soundtrack. Field used the music of Gustav Mahler in particularly striking ways, to convey the title character’s abilities and ambitions but also to generate intertextual meaning, to establish an unusual hyper-allusive and hyper-self-conscious discursive register. Field appropriates Mahler’s Fifth Symphony not just visually and musically but cinematically to scrutinize the boundaries of the art film and redefine the musical parameters of the contemporary auteur.

Beethoven’s music has often been framed in terms of art religion, immortality, and secular humanism. Building on these studies, this article proposes that certain works by Beethoven enact a fantasy of infinitely postponing death and living forever on earth, something that I call temporal eternity. To develop this concept, it draws on the concept of chronolibido developed by the contemporary philosopher Martin Hägglund, as well as writings by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. The article’s case studies are Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A♭ Major, op. 110 (1821), and String Quartet in A Minor, op. 132 (1825). In both works, the score refers to an increase in strength. Opus 110 concludes with a return of a previously heard fugue, marked “again reviving, gradually returning to life.” Similarly, the third movement of op. 132, “Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Godhead,” revolves around a continually returning B section, titled “feeling new strength.” In both ops. 110 and 132, then, the textual references to strength occur in the context of a double variation form that supports cyclic processes of return. Their structural designs allow for the continual regeneration of each section, as though the evocation of new strength could recur eternally. Such formal processes depict strength as a renewable resource capable of sustaining temporal eternity.

The high level of canonicity enjoyed by Brahms’s chamber music since the final decades of the nineteenth century easily obscures the roles different performance settings, media, and listening practices have played in shaping how individual works are heard and interpreted. In the case of the Trio for Piano, Violin, and Waldhorn (1865), perhaps Brahms’s most singular essay in chamber music, the issue seems particularly acute given the culturally specific associations of the Waldhorn and the unusually important role accorded to timbre in this mid-nineteenth-century chamber work. This article considers the “resonance” of the Waldhorn in the Horn Trio in terms of its symbolic associations and sounding presence. Drawing on early critical assessments of the trio in German-language music periodicals, the investigation explores the Romantic qualities of the work noted by early writers, elucidating the symbolism of the Waldhorn and Brahms’s deployment of the contrasting affects and temporalities associated with this instrument in his multi-movement composition. The later sections of the article discuss performances of the trio in relation to two important contexts: the developing institutional norms for public chamber music performance in Vienna during the 1860s, and the domestic reception of the classical chamber canon through gramophone recordings in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. These episodes illustrate how particular contexts and media might throw into relief different aspects of the Horn Trio’s compositional design, while suggesting ways in which the relatively fragile aesthetic at the heart of this work has been reengaged in the technological reception of Brahms’s music.

Other| March 01 2023 Directions to Contributors 19th-Century Music (2023) 46 (3): 275. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2023.46.3.275 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Directions to Contributors. 19th-Century Music 1 March 2023; 46 (3): 275. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2023.46.3.275 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Content19th-Century Music Search You do not currently have access to this content.

Discussions of promenade concerts, at least in the United Kingdom, tend to run along one of two lines: either the format is emblematic of attempts to popularize classical music or (in the famous case of the Last Night of the BBC Proms) it is symptomatic of a contested cultural nationalism. An alternative line of inquiry is to consider promenade concerts as part of the built environment. Until 2010 the fountain at the Royal Albert Hall was a mainstay of musical promenading; it had been so for over a century and a half. Such fountains, often accompanied by potted plants and Arcadian décor, were said to cool the concert hall and freshen the air, especially when their sprinkles were supplemented with blocks of imported ice. They occupied a prominent place in a concert architecture that encouraged mobility and informality, drawing on a long tradition of outdoor promenading that had gradually moved indoors. The history of concert hall suggests that the promenade phenomenon constituted not only a site of social and political negotiation (as it has typically been described), but also a staging post in the enclosure of hitherto open spaces and an example of the Victorian desire to control the climate of public assembly.

Today, knowledge concerning the relationship between temperature and musical pitch shapes many dimensions of Western musical practice, from the ambient conditions of performance sites to the design of musical instruments, and performers’ routines and techniques. But the history of how temperature came to play such a defining role in musical cultures remains unexamined. This article lays the foundations for such work by approaching musical instruments as sites of negotiation between acousticians, instrument makers, and players on the one hand, and music's variegated environments on the other. First, the article shows that the conceptualization of pitch in relation to temperature was a by-product of nineteenth-century international negotiations over musical standardization. These debates reveal that, while assessing the relation between pitch and temperature may seem like a decisive step toward the regulation of musical frequencies, in fact it was the source of countless epistemological and sociopolitical problems. Next, the article turns to David J. Blaikley, a British maker of wind instruments, whose experiments on the influence of extreme temperature variations on army-band instruments revealed the limits of Western attempts to control sound on a global scale, including in colonial contexts. Finally, I trace the implications of this new awareness of the interplay between sound and the environment to expose the silent ways in which that awareness continued to inform Western musical practice into the 1940s and beyond.