At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Saint-Simonian ‘materialism’, though sharing its rhetoric of progress, was Hegelian Idealism. It influenced not only critics such as Franz Brendel and A. B. Marx, but also the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner. Though Hegel opposed Romanticism, applications of his aesthetics to music by Marx and Liszt remained closer to it, noting the convergence of music and literature on Romantic subjectivity and responding with the new genre of ‘programme music’. Another Romantic project, the ‘new mythology’, was realized in Wagner’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its more ‘realist’ approach to feeling was derived from Feuerbach’s post-Hegelian philosophy and little changed by Wagner’s later enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. Though overshadowed by his universalizing and exclusionary goal of a ‘purely human’ art (one that had no space for Jewish artists), Wagner’s aesthetic technique remained faithful to the idea of theatrical illusion inaugurated a century earlier by Rousseau and Diderot.

Vaughan Williams was an eclectic composer and he required a period of twenty years to find his individual voice. Much emphasis has, in the past, been placed on the ‘breakthrough’ of folk song and on the composer’s supposed admittance of technical inferiority during this lengthy period of stylistic discovery. It is argued here, however, that this supposed affliction was due as much to a public-school self-modesty and that, in truth, he was no less advanced than his major peers. Moreover, this chapter attempts to accentuate the importance of his compositional ‘training’, under Parry, Charles Wood, Alan Gray, Stanford, Max Bruch, and Ravel, and, more particularly, the numerous continental and home-grown influences (notably Wagner and Parry), over and above the revelation of folk song in 1903, which played a dominant role in shaping his later style.

This chapter focuses on the reception of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. It begins with a discussion of the definition of the term ‘reception’ and moves on to describe the beginnings of medievalism in Europe and its roots in social and political change. The relationship between nationalism and a ‘Nordic’ or ‘Germanic’ racial identity is explored, and the role of Old Norse myth in politics, ideology and propaganda is analysed. Following a survey of early modern and eighteenth-century European responses to Old Norse literature, including the work of Paul-Henri Mallet, and nineteenth-century translations of Old Norse literature and the work of Jacob Grimm, the discussion moves on to German nationalism and Old Norse, culminating in the National Socialist appropriation of Old Norse mythology and motifs. The use of medieval Icelandic literature to reconstruct a supposed pre-Christian Germanic religion is outlined, and the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish attitudes of so-called völkisch thought explained. The subsequent rise of Neopaganism throughout the world is the subject of the rest of the chapter, with special attention to the racist ideology evident in various Neopagan groups.

As titles referring to compositional genres, Nocturne, Notturno and Nachtsmusik had a particular resonance for nineteenth-century composers sensitive to romantic traditions extending from Schubert and Schumann to reach an apogee in Wagner’s celebration of the ‘fabled realm of night’ in Tristan und Isolde. Though placed there in explicit opposition to the mundane reality of daylight, Wagner (notably in Siegfried) also made much of the glorious effects of the rising sun. The tension between darkness and light as reflecting radically different states of mind as well as different effects of nature, was also a favoured topic for late romantic poets and painters active in the Viennese culture in which Schoenberg came to maturity. Nevertheless, the aspect of romantic sensibility that offset nocturnal unease with a heightened sense of the sublime and the supernatural ensured that examples of Night Music could have a special ambivalence in keeping with their exploratory technical resources.

This chapter starts by describing key findings from the late 1960s - blocking, contingency effects, and relative cue validity - that were obtained by Leon Kamin, Bob Rescorla, and Allan Wagner from experiments on discrimination learning and fear conditioning. These led to a major shift in the way learning by animals was studied. Instead of concentrating on how their behavior changed, it took such changes as an index of what associations the animals had formed. An important example of this shift was the body of experiments on second-order conditioning and related topics carried out by Rescorla and his students. A number of theories of associative learning that were developed in the 1970s, notably the Rescorla-Wagner theory and Wagners subsequent SOP model, have remained influential for over 50 years. In the early 1980s an important distinction was drawn between actions, which are sensitive to their consequences, and automatic habits.

This chapter examines Puccini’s relationship with the international musical scene of his day and considers the influence of contemporary progressive musical developments on his own musical style. The author considers Puccini’s attitude towards the music of Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Georges Bizet, Jules Massenet, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, and others. He pinpoints where techniques borrowed from these figures can be found at specific moments in Puccini’s scores. In some cases, Puccini imitated aspects of plot or characterisation; in others he borrowed specific musical devices. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which Puccini drew inspiration for his operas from a variety of different national musical styles: Japanese music for Madama Butterfly, Chinese for Turandot, and American music of various types for La fanciulla del West.

This chapter shows how, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Norse gods and the Scandinavian Viking were reimagined and refashioned in poetry, visual art, and music drama in accordance with Burke’s ideas of the sublime. Coinciding temporally with Burke’s Enquiry, the revival of interest in Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian poetry furnished poets and artists with a new mythology as an alternative to classical Greek and Roman mythology. This chapter argues that the aesthetics of the sublime, as a challenge to neoclassical standards, encouraged an expansion of the poetical canon, allowing for the inclusion of ancient Scandinavian poetry, which the previous generation had scorned as rough and barbaric, and furthermore provided a new verbal and visual idiom in which this poetry could be recreated for a contemporary audience.

A summary of the early career of Johann Strauss (Father), the wider dance culture in Vienna and the role of music publishers.

Following the death of Johann Strauss (Father) in 1849, Johann Strauss (Son) assumed the leading role in the dance culture in Vienna. His success was accompanied by ill health, which led to his two brothers, Josef and Eduard, joining him as directors and composers. At first, Johann was ignored by the Habsburg court; his popularity in Prussian and Russian environments led to a gradual thaw and an imperial appointment. Many dances were now composed as concert items and took their place alongside music by other composers, notably Schubert and Wagner.

The chapter discusses three aspects of the stage works of Johann Strauss (Son): the advantages of setting operettas in the past in order to comment on the present; the international distribution of many operettas (including America, Australia and India); and the notable failure of his only comic opera, written for the Court Opera House.

The modern period (1800–1500) saw important innovations as philosophy of music moved in dramatically different directions. The first innovation was the incorporation of philosophy of music into philosophical systems, either absolute idealist or Marxist. These philosophers also held that music provides important insights into reality. In this stream of philosophy of music are found the seeds of Continental philosophy of music. The other, diametrically opposed, development was the rapid rise of formalist approaches to philosophy of music. These writers stressed the autonomy of musical beauty. A third stream within modern philosophy of music is continuous with earlier thinking about music. It opposed formalism without adopting a grand weltanschauung. Ontology of musical works emerges as a topic for philosophical discussion. Thinkers discussed include Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Nicolai Hartmann, Carroll C. Pratt, Susanne Langer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Hanslick, Edmund Gurney, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), R. G. Collingwood and Roman Ingarden.

In her “Étude comparée des langages harmoniques de Fauré et de Debussy,” Françoise Gervais contends that “melody does not have an independent existence in Fauré’s music. It is born of the harmony and remains inseparable from it.”1 Moreover, not a single chapter of this book, which has stood now for more than forty years as a musicological summa on Fauréan harmony, is dedicated to melody.

Mahler’s innate spirituality, which we might read in modern terms as a tendency to be “spiritual but not religious” – has a long pedigree. Richard Wagner’s Religion und Kunst (1880) makes a distinction between inward faith, living and authentic, and outward religion, rigid and dogmatic. This contrast finds an important nexus in Austro-German lands in the latter half of the nineteenth century in three distinct areas that figured centrally in Mahler’s life: Jewish assimilation (including secularization and conversion); tendencies in Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism; and the transference or sublimation of religious experience to the arts and particularly music (Kunstreligion). A born Jew, a converted Roman Catholic, and a lifelong Wagnerian, Mahler deemphasized the role of organized religion in his personal worldview, replacing it with the religious sensibility that is captured by the Wagnerian ideal of Kunstreligion.

This chapter considers Mahler’s operatic and orchestral repertoire choices in light of norms for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Particular questions addressed include: What are the characteristics of his preferred repertoire? Which composers did he favor, and whom did he neglect? What new music did he perform, besides his own? When did his choices match the norm, and when did they deviate from it? The personal qualities of Mahler’s repertoire emerge with new clarity when his decisions are situated within the broader context of Austro-German operatic and concert traditions. The contrast between Hamburg (1891–95) and Vienna (1897–1907) is particularly instructive; at the Hamburg City Theater, Mahler took orders from the intendant, Bernhard Pollini, whereas in Vienna he had free rein, at least until circumstances became unbearable and he departed for New York.

In spite of Mahler’s tyrannical bearing as an orchestral conductor, and his preference for composing in complete isolation, collaboration was in fact central to his success as a performing musician. In the realm of opera, it was collaboration that eventually enabled him to realize, in living form, his artistic aspirations and to create what we commonly think of today as the role of the modern opera director. The contributions of his collaborators in Vienna, above all the innovative graphic artist Alfred Roller (1864–1935), illustrate the areas in which Mahler relinquished his dictatorial control of operatic production, and the reasons that pushed him to this personally difficult step. Roller’s modernist reading of Wagnerian theory, informed by a belief that scenery and costumes should not fool the eye but rather “create the atmosphere of the drama,” made fundamental contributions to the style of production that became Mahler’s signature in Vienna.

This chapter surveys the wide range of spiritual and philosophical ideas that influenced Strauss during the emergence of his famously idiosyncratic worldview. Already a “freethinker” in his youth, and a product of an “alt-katholisch” household that rejected central Catholic doctrine, Strauss settled into a comfortable atheism while still in his teens. This skeptical disposition provided the backdrop for his encounters with 1) the fundamentalist Wagnerian metaphysics of his mentor, Alexander Ritter, and Wagner’s powerful and cultured widow Cosima; 2) Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844), which he studied carefully on his own; 3) the later, anti-Wagnerian writings of Nietzsche (most famously Also sprach Zarathustra), which had a powerful effect on Strauss’s tone poems beginning with Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895); and 4) the artistic and intellectual legacy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his lodestar, whose devotion to classical culture, and break from Romanticism, were paralleled by Strauss’s own.

Composers have long engaged with texts, but the extent to which they have consciously constructed a literary cosmos around their work and private lives has radically changed over the last two centuries. For modern composers, it has been increasingly common to read not merely to enrich intellectual horizons or scour for musically settable material, but as a means to tap into a reservoir through which the reception of their music can add a layer of cultural legitimation. Viewed against this wider context, the extensive library that Strauss collected, read, and selectively presented to audiences in various musical formats symbolizes neither the physical legacy of a lifelong bibliophile (Brahms) nor the quiet spiritual refuge of a well-heeled bourgeois (Elgar). Rather, it constitutes the material footprint of an intellectual disposition toward the world that stems from a deeper-held set of beliefs about the cultural mission of literature in Western European history.