The last thirty years have seen a resurgence in the research of sonata form. One groundbreaking treatise in this renaissance is James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s 2006 monograph Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata. Hepokoski and Darcy devise a set of norms in order to characterize typical happenings in a late 18th-century sonata. Subsequently, many theorists have taken these norms (and their deformations) and extrapolate them to 19th-century sonata forms. My work aims to characterize Antonin Dvořák’s chamber music in the context of Sonata Theory, using the treatise as a jumping off point in order to analyze his music. This dissertation contains three main chapters. The first chapter deals with two of the themes of this dissertation: form and influence. Schubert’s influence on Dvořák’s music was notable, so after comparing some of Dvořák’s writing about Schubert’s music, I examine specific musical elements (sonic, formal, and structural) from Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D. 956 that Dvořák emulates in his string quartet in the same key. Chapters 3 and 4 put Dvořák’s sonata form practices into a 19th-century context, and I examine how he treats the MC and EEC sections of an exposition. In Chapter 3, I contend that Dvořák’s use of energy loss before and after the medial caesura is just as rhetorically successful as 18th-century composer’s use of energy gain in the transition section of a sonata. Additionally, many of Dvořák’s sonata forms feature expositions with vastly elongated S themes, thereby pushing rhetorical closure of the exposition back. This is unlike 18th-century sonatas, whose expositions routinely wrap up with a cadence in the second key after the first phrase. Thus, Chapter 4 displays several sonatas where Dvořák extends S-rhetoric in order to delay the close of the exposition. Even though not originally intended for this music, Hepokoski and Darcy’s treatise provides a fruitful set of norms that can be related to works from the 19th century. Additionally, Dvořák’s music is especially appropriate for this treatment, as his compositional style owes many allegiances to 18th-century techniques.

Clara Wieck Schumann sits at a particularly thorny juncture in musicological scholarship, as her career mirrors a period of nineteenth-century transformative social and musical change. The concept of public and private spaces came to be codified, and women's musical interactions, somewhat unsurprisingly, followed suit. In accordance with the now bourgeois concerns for social cultivation and primacy, concert structures were destabilized, programs moved away from an emphasis on miscellany, virtuosity was soundly rejected, and serious musical efforts came to dominate critical inquiry and commentary. The philosophy of Romantic listening hinged on the primacy of absolute, "serious" musics and, similar to the morals of the public bourgeoisie, privileged "masculine" expression. Within these strictures, a female pianist developed into the preeminent symbol for all that was ideal in the public piano recital. Clara Schumann has, for scholars of nineteenth-century music, come to embody the serious music aesthetic: whether it be through her role as interpreter, more homogeneous recital structuring, or allegiance to the goals of transcendental listening, she remains a figure who performed out of duty to her higher, artistic "calling." Nevertheless, scholars have rarely attempted to consider how, in a restrictive gender society, Clara was able to maintain such a successful and highly respected public career. My dissertation seeks to tease out the dynamics of Clara Schumann's reception, in order to elucidate ways she, as a woman, was able to perform in this preeminent public space, and, in fact, embolden (rather than degrade) the ascendancy of the masculine. With a career spanning some 60 years, Clara's 794 German concerts allow us a window into the complex negotiations that permeated her public performances and celebrated personality. For the first time in English translation, Appendix I gives a complete listing of Clara's programming in Germany and Vienna. By considering a wide range of sources--visual images, concert reviews, and programs--I hope to unearth ways that Clara, while challenging the hegemony of the male pianist, nonetheless continued to entrench the mores of the musical masculine to an even greater degree. / text

This thesis studies the structural transformation of public musical life in Stockholm during the period 1840–1890, with focus primarily on the classical musical sphere. The study is based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of a number of different sources such as newspapers, music magazines, offprints, and other archival material. Using Jürgen Habermas’s theory of structural transformation of the public sphere as a starting point, the thesis aims to elucidate the processes within the structural transformation of Stockholm’s public musical life. In particular, this study examines processes of institutionalisation and professionalisation within four main areas of public musical life: the music press market, concert life, performers, and audiences. The actions of individuals and institutions are also studied in order to highlight the priorities and proclivities underlying the identified changes to public musical life. The period in question saw the transition of concert life from representational culture to the bourgeois public sphere, as well as the gradual division between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ musical spheres. The study shows that public musical life emerged and expanded within the bourgeois public sphere. Therefore, the ideas and demands of the bourgeoisie were crucial to structural transformation of Stockholm’s public musical life. The old Royal institutions still constituted the core of the public musical life but were adapted to the new bourgeois society. The process of institutionalisation within the musical life was characterized by organisational functions, but also by social institutionalisation of practices within the four main areas mentioned above. The bourgeois ideas of musical Bildung played a significant role in the processes of institutionalisation and professionalization, as it illuminates the priorities and proclivities underlying this process. Several aspects of this development are related to influences from early nineteenth-century musical idealism. The structural transformation of public musical life in Stockholm during the period 1840–1890 laid the foundation for the further developments in the 20th century, and its impact is in some respects evident still today.

189 p. / Church music has been given relatively little scholarly attention in the study of nineteenth-century music. While there is an array of mass settings that were composed by Romantic-era composers, current musicological research marginalizes them. Paris was one location where a tradition of composing new masses continued well into the nineteenth century. While best known for his works for the stage, Charles Gounod (1818-1893) was a leading French composer of sacred music and one of the most prolific sacred composers of his time. His most important liturgical composition is the Messe solennelle de Sainte-Cecile, which once enjoyed considerable international success. This thesis focuses on the history of this mass in biographical and historical context. I discuss the topics of music and religion in France from the Revolution to Gounod's time, the composer's long musical relationship with the church, the music of the Messe de Sainte-Cecile, and its reception.

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Existing studies of popular culture and popular politics in the long eighteenth century over-favour either the ‘culture’ or the ‘politics’. This thesis contributes to debates on the making of both national and class identity in Britain via intensive analysis of popular song culture, in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. Portrayals of Napoleon himself are used to shape the thesis’ source material and the forms of discussion. It argues for the necessity of sympathetic, informed contextualisation of political issues within contemporary cultural processes: that an understanding of the composition/production and performance/ consumption of song is a prerequisite of determining songs’ relevance and reception. In so doing, it uncovers a nuanced array of attitudes towards both Napoleon and British patriotism, of unsuspected breadth, assertiveness, and idiosyncrasy. The thesis is divided into two stages of argument. Part I consists of a close and contextualised reading of songs as literary and musical objects. Chapter One, after close historiographical engagement that moves to a focus on Colley’s Britons and revisionist arguments about British society, discusses those songs originating after Waterloo. Chapter Two considers songs from 1797-1805. Chapter Three considers songs from 1806-15. Part II builds upon the themes and conclusions of Part I by situating these songs within a lived context. Chapter Four looks at the role of songwriters and printers; Chapter Five at singers; Chapter Six at audiences and reception. Chapter Seven elaborates the overall argument in a synoptic case study of Newcastle. The conclusion is followed by an appendix, listing the songs most pertinent to the thesis, giving additional bibliographical information. A hard copy (USB) of recordings of a representative selection of these songs is also included. These appendices reinforce the thesis’ methodology: to consider songs, not as passive evidence of expression, but as active, dynamic objects.

‘Poetry’ insisted Ezra Pound, ‘is a composition of words set to music’: his Cantos remembered ‘Uncle Willie’ downstairs composing, singing poetry to himself. This study examines the nature and effects of W.B.Yeats’s idiosyncratic but profound sense of music. For his poems were compositions set to music. They were saturated with musical themes; syntactically he professed to write for the ear rather than the eye; and he flung himself repeatedly into the breach between music and words, composing ballads, songs, and plays with music, and performing poetry with musical instruments. My thesis is that nature of poetry, spoken, read or sung, obsessed Yeats, and I hold it self evident that such an acutely self-conscious poetry will articulate this obsession: to use his own imagery, will bear the scars of its own birth. What follows is a study of meaning, obsession, and influence, beginning with what Yeats knew and how he came to poetry: his father’s and his own vocalizations of the musical preoccupations of Scott and Shelley, viewed through the annotations of ‘the first book [he] knew Shelley in’ and the solipsistic singers and instrumentalists of his early verse. The theme of chapter two is Ireland: the musical resonances of Anglo Irish ballads and Irish verse are viewed through Yeats’s aurally-oriented canon-formation, as we examine his instinctual recitations and deliberate approach to Irish folksong through the mediation of Douglas Hyde. The aesthetics of Wagner, Pater, and the French symbolistes frame the third chapter, which describes how poetry might approach the condition of music in the motivic organization of The Wind Among the Reeds. In chapter four the impact of Nietzsche’s profoundly musical philosophy is correlated for the first time with the exact moments of Yeats’s discovery of his texts, as Yeats’s plays and poetry move from ‘Apollonian’ languor to ‘Dionysian’ energy, from dream to song and dance. My final chapter uncovers the long history of the practical experiments Yeats made to perform poetry with a ‘psaltery’, and their resonating afterlife in subsequent poetry and poets. No musician himself, Yeats’s musical sense has until now been entirely dismissed: this study shows how central it is to his art and to an understanding of the dominant aesthetic of the age.

Writing in 2001, musicologist Axel Klein concluded that Stanford’s reception history has been significantly impacted by the complicated national identities surrounding both the composer and his music. A lifelong devotee of the nineteenth-century Austro-Germanic tradition, Stanford’s status as an Irish-born leading figure of the ‘English’ Musical Renaissance has compromised the place that the composer and his musical output occupy within the history of Western music. Stanford is well-known for being an outspoken critic on matters musical and Irish. Although his views seldom appear ambiguous, there is still a sense that the real Stanford remains partially obscured by his opinions. Through an examination of his symphonic works, this thesis seeks to readdress our understanding of Stanford and his relationship with Ireland and the musical community of his time. Although A. Peter Brown has stated that the symphony was not a central genre for the composer, it is my argument that, on the contrary, the symphony was a pivotal form for him. Considering these works within the broader history of the symphony in Europe in the nineteenth century, and through a critical examination of Stanford’s relationship with Ireland, this thesis seeks to demonstrate that these seven works can be read as an allegory for the composer’s relationship both with his homeland and with the musical community of his time. His struggle to combine the universality of symphonic expression with a need to articulate his Irish identity parallels Stanford’s own attempts to integrate himself within both British and European musical communities, and further demonstrates, in his eventual rejection of it, that it was only when he attempted to forge a more individualistic path through his music that he found a way of expressing his individual Irish identity.

Erik Satie (1866-1925) lived, worked, walked, and died in Paris. The key locations of his career – all within a single urban region – are well known and well researched. Yet he has often been presented as an eccentric individualist far removed from any social or geographical context. This thesis seeks to address – and redress – the decontextualisation of Satie’s career by re-imagining his music and biography in terms of the places and mobilities of turn-of-the-century Paris. To that end, it draws on a range of documentary and fictional material, including journalistic and scholarly reception texts, illustrated musical scores, chanson collections, contemporary visual culture, and cinematic representations of the people, place(s), and period(s) in question. These diverse primary and secondary sources are discussed and interpreted via a set of on-going debates at the intersection of historical musicology, cultural history, and urban geography. Some of these debates can be traced through existing research on the geography of music. Others are more local to this project and derive their value from suggesting alternative approaches to familiar problems in the study of French musical modernism. The main aim throughout is to develop a better understanding of the relations existing between Satie’s musical life, his compositional strategies, and the changing urban environment in which he plied his trade. Chapters One and Two focus on the working-class suburb of Arcueil and the ‘bohemian’ enclave of Montmartre. Chapters Three and Four are organised thematically around issues of musical humour and everyday life. By using the particular example of Satie’s Paris, the thesis proposes that more general avenues of enquiry are opened up into music and the city, thus demonstrating the potential benefits of incorporating the urban-geographic imagination into historical musicology more broadly, and bringing musicological thinking to bear on inter-disciplinary discussions about space, place, and mobility.