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<jats:p>Franz Schubert's "Du liebst mich nicht" (D. 756) has often been discussed as an extreme example of chromatic harmony, but one important possible motivator of the song's extravagance--its representation of one of the most exotic of the Orientalizing texts that Schubert set--has largely been overlooked. By considering the song and its interpretation by several recent critics, this essay suggests that the exotic is here represented not by overtly Orientalistic stylistic features, but rather by a pervasive ambiguity, which parallels the features ascribed to the Oriental in a variety of contemporary sources, including a review by Schubert's acquaintance Matthaus von Collin. Unlike such public evaluative texts, however, Schubert's song directly evokes the patterns of emotion and experience associated with the Orient rather than describing and critiquing from a critical distance. A brief consideration of the other songs of op. 59, "Dass sie hier gewesen" (D. 775), "Du bist die Ruh" (D. 776), and "Lachen und Weinen" (D. 777), reveals that "Du liebst mich nicht" opens the collection with an extreme representation of otherness from which the remaining songs gradually retreat.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article explores changing attitudes toward actors' bodies at the Paris Opera through the performance history of D. F. E. Auber's opera La Muette de Portici from 1828 to 1879. Because a mime performed the role of Fenella and the chorus played an active role in the mise en scene, the opera placed unusual emphasis on the physical. Over this period, however, emphasis shifted from appreciation of acting to emphasis on singing. For example, during the tenor Adolphe Nourrit's tenure at the Opera critics admired his skill as an actor in the role of Masaniello. When replaced by Gilbert Duprez in 1837, critics praised the tenor's vocal power and lack of emphasis on the histrionic. During this same time, critics began to interpret the gestures of the mime playing Fenella as semantically empty, and her body as filling a space that a singer should occupy. The important role that the barcarolle plays in the opera allows in part for these transitions. Viewed as a chanson napolitaine, it accentuates the rocking of a boat and the physical body at work; however, interpreted as the song of a Venetian gondolier, the song emphasizes the enunciation of a singing voice at the expense of the body. Reviews of La Muette reflect this ambivalence toward performance styles that call attention to the body, particularly those that might be interpreted as belonging to the working classes.</jats:p>

<jats:p>During the late twentieth century, the veracity of a particular aspect of Johannes Brahms's boyhood came under challenge. Had he played the piano in Hamburg's dockside bars as many of his biographers had recorded, or had he not? The two sides of the story were debated in the spring 2001 issue of 19th-Century Music. Jan Swafford, Brahms's definitive biographer in English, provided the case for the status quo, citing all the known instances of times when Brahms himself had mentioned the story to friends and biographers. Styra Avins, a translator of many of Brahms's heretofore untranslated letters into English, provided evidence to the contrary by saying all the friends and biographers were mistaken. Swafford's inventory of sources is complete, but there remained more to be said. In "The Boy Brahms" I have attempted to show how Avins's evidence is strictly circumstantial and speculative. At this remove from the incidents in question it can be nothing more. I have attempted to refute the conclusions she has drawn from the young Brahms's handwriting, the testimony of neighbors, and the laws governing attendance in the bars, among other things. I have also attempted to show inconsistencies in Avins's arguments that throw into question her thesis and support the veracity of the original story.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The Columbian Exposition (the World's Fair in Chicago, 1893) was intended to represent the entire progress of human history, with American civilization as its culminating triumph. The Exposition celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World; it restaged that discovery in myriad ways: from the display of “savage races” on the Midway to the construction of an emergent American middle class as civilization's newest noble savages, hungry for education. Music was an integral part of the Exposition. America's musical elite took an active role in the fair's promotion and design. The Exposition also stimulated a flood of writing on the nature and future of “truly American” music. This article examines American musical culture at the Exposition, with attention to music as art, science, and commerce three categories at the heart of the Exposition's formal definition of music. The network of mutual reinforcements, contradictions and the related concepts of nation, race, and evolution has powerful implications for the ensuing history of music in America. Analysis of the educational agenda of music at the Exposition suggests it taught its visitors--5 to 10 percent of the American population--a great deal about race, class, nationhood, and their identity as consumers. Reading the musical criticism, speculative philosophy, and patriotic grandstanding that accompanied the fair shows how musical thought of the day relied on evolutionary theory.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In recent years, the analytical concept of structural depth has been subjected to intense critical scrutiny. But amid debates over the relative merit of depth- and surface-oriented modes of listening and analysis, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the history of the two terms in music journalism. Focusing on the period around 1800, this article examines the entry of the term "depth" into German literature on music and explores the metaphorÕs diverse, even contradictory, meanings. Writers like Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and E. T. A. Hoffmann endorsed the idea, prominent in German Pietism and the criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder, that sound was uniquely able to access the deepest regions of subjectivity. At the same time, such writers began to imagine a musical inner space uncannily similar to the inner space of the listening subject. Unlike earlier aestheticians of a poetic bent, Hoffmann thought that the "deepest" works--works that stirred the soul with special force--required the critic to "penetrate" their "inner structure." Given that earlier technical discourse had treated music essentially as a linear sequence of periods, HoffmannÕs writings exhibit a momentous shift in perspective from the sequential to the vertical. By adding a new dimension to music complementing its axis of horizontal or temporal unfolding, Hoffmann imported the full spectrum of depthÕs meanings, ranging from the scientific to the spiritual, the rational to the irrational, into the modern notion of the masterwork.</jats:p>