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<jats:p>Beyond its glossy surface of virtuosity and lyricism, a violin concerto is replete with a vocabulary of hidden and (on second glance) not so hidden gestures. From Beethoven's timpani strokes to Paganini's marches and fanfares, the genre employs a host of "heroic" elements and gestures borrowed from military band music. In the period 1789-1830 these borrowings were hardly restricted to a purely musical level. Rather, I argue, military themes and ideas permeated virtually every aspect of a violin concerto's composition, performance, and reception. In the famous concertos as with countless now-forgotten works (of Viotti, Kreutzer, Rode, Baillot, Spohr, Alday, De Beriot, Lipinski, and Prume), the combination of military topoi with the soloist's leading role characterized the violinist as a military hero. Simultaneously, the tendency to compare violinists to mythological or historical figures became increasingly focused on the image of military leaders (Scipio, Alexander, and Napoleon). All the while, the act of performance exuded masculine codes of power, partly through the symbolism of the bow as a weapon. Taken together, it is these codes of military heroism and gendered power that shaped the culture of violin virtuosity, itself an outgrowth of a larger cultural trend stemming from Napol&amp;#x8e;onÕs own military heroism.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Felix Mendelssohn's establishment of the concert overture as a domain of lively compositional innovation represents one of the most important achievements of orchestral music from the period immediately following Beethoven's death. In their remarkable ability to evoke lofty extramusical subjects through a purely instrumental medium, Mendelssohn's overtures were christened as vessels of musical progress in a manner that anticipated significantly the claims of the midcentury Lisztian symphonic poem. To grasp more fully the overtures' progressivism, though, we must attend closely to the relationship within them between formal particularity and programmatic implication. This endeavor is especially appropriate to Mendelssohn's Meeresstille und gluckliche Fahrt, whose idiosyncratic formal dimension raises pressing hermeneutical questions. Mendelssohn based this work on two poems by Goethe that trace a liberating progression from the deathly immobility of a becalmed sea to the redemptive vitality of a rising wind and the promise of homecoming. While commentators have often noted the overtly pictorial moments of Mendelssohn's overture, only recently has programmatic inquiry turned toward the unfolding of the considerably broad musical voyage itself. But here the analytical privileging of the work's thematic process has supported the image of a journey with little risk. By contrast, a more thoroughly genre-based look at the overture's Gluckliche Fahrt portion reveals a voyage laden with perils as well as possibilities.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This essay sets the late sacred works of Giuseppe Verdi in the context of the late-nineteenth-century fascination for the revival, performance, and festive celebration of historical cultural figures and artworks. From the 1870s onward, certain artistic trends became prevalent in post-unification Italy: anxiety to instill a sense of nation into art and everyday life, nostalgia for a vanished golden age of Italian artistic history, and an ever more energetic revival of historical artistic forms and styles. These currents were stimulated by a nationalistic Catholic revivalism that, I argue, was the strongest influence on Verdi's late career. I outline Verdi's reception in and his personal association with the Catholic revivalist movement, developing a view of Verdi's late life and works as articulating shifting trends in the Church and conservatory. As well as revealing the impact of revivalist aesthetics on the style of works such as Verdi's Pater noster, this inquiry suggests that revivalism contributed to a "canonization" of his image that intertwined civic and religious history.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In "What the Sorcerer Said," Carolyn Abbate proposed a reading of Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897) focused on the possibility of musical narration. The present essay shifts that focus to the question of the work's uncanniness and excess. In particular, where Abbate finds that the slow part of the epilogue resonates with her understanding of the work as an instance of narration, I begin with the final two measures of the work, which suddenly revert to the fast tempo of the central scherzo. These final measures, which Abbate does not mention, produce a disturbing regression that suggests another reanimation of the broom. This "third beginning" (thus heard in relation to the two preceding moments of animation) marks the broom as an agent of the uncanny (heimlich and unheimlich) in the sense identified by Freud in his essay "Das Unheimliche" (1919). Indeed, Dukas's work as a whole is haunted by motives Freud later identified as uncanny: magic, the omnipotence of thought, animism, and involuntary repetition. The essay works backward from the final noise of the piece into a re-reading founded on musical details such as the representation of the brooms through minor- and major-third dyads, the role of the pitch-class Ab, the structure of the central "reanimation scene," and the dismal interplay of motives associated with the broom and the Apprentice. Close attention is given to Dukas's immediate literary source, Goethe's ballad "Der Zauberlehrling," whose use of assonance and repeating rhymes provides subtle structural cues echoed in Dukas's music; I argue that the relationship between the ballad and Dukas's score is more homologous than Abbate was willing to allow. A number of revisions to Abbate's account also emerge through reference to a descriptive note on The Sorcerer's Apprentice left by Dukas in manuscript (Paris B.N.F. Musique MS 1037). Finally, I suggest that this "symphonic scherzo after Goethe" conflates literary and musical logics into a peculiar kind of fiction that points to the uncanny nature of narrative itself. Dukas's work ultimately engages the issue of mastery by focusing the listener's attention on the failure of authority and the contingency of animation or de-animation. In this Lacanian "overflow" into the unknown, the musical work goes beyond its literary sources, for the broom, not the human figure of the Apprentice, becomes the true protagonist of Dukas's work.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Brahms's familiar "Wiegenlied" op. 49, no. 4 (1868) is emblematic of numerous nineteenth-century compositions that sonorously enact idealized images of the mother and child. Its back and forth harmonic movement imitates the phenomenal sensation of rocking, and its interlocking syncopations support and interact with the emotive declamation of the singer's voice. Because its musical features are so easily accessible, the "Wiegenlied" has escaped music-analytical attention, its deceptive simplicity seemingly transparent to our music-theoretical gaze. Yet, certain aspects of this music render our familiar analytical or critical strategies inadequate for explaining the intuitions we have about it, aspects that suggest tracing their connections within a broader cultural and musical context. My discussion of the lullaby draws from a number of cultural theorists--among them Friedrich Kittler, Michel Chion, Gilles DeLeuze, F&amp;#x8f;lix Guattari, and Theodor W. Adorno--to theorize the power of the mother's voice (la voix maternelle) in forming lifelong vocal and musical connections. I provide a close reading of Alexander Baumann's "S'is Anderscht" (1842), the Austrian vocal duet that inspired Brahms's composition of the lullaby, and a critical comparison of it with the lullaby. Finally, after uncovering latent etymological sources of several key words in the lullaby's text, I offer a hermeneutic re-reading of the poem, one that ultimately undermines our casual assumptions of this simple childhood song.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article sets out to examine what Debussy wrote about music in the light of the discourse on music, literature, and nature that Debussy knew from contemporary literature. It becomes apparent that Debussy shares with, for example, Mallarm&amp;#x8e; a refusal to consider that his work renders natural scenes present. Indeed, he rejects entirely the notion that music can or should represent anything (when it appears to represent, it is, precisely, not music). Debussy accordingly despises programs and critics who look in his music for images or ideas that they expect him to have put there. Why, then, does he give his pieces programmatic titles? And how is one to understand the relationship between words and music, for example, in Pell&amp;#x8e;as et M&amp;#x8e;lisande? The answer emerges from an analysis of the special relationship that Debussy constructs between music and nature. On the one hand, Debussy tells us that "art is the most beautiful of lies"; accordingly, music never tells us any specific articulated truth about nature. On the other hand, the dynamics of our perception of nature, in which we see through specific features, as poetry might articulate them, to an inexpressible totality, a "mouvement total de la nature," is the best analogue for the process of musical creation, which traverses sense toward an ideal unity beyond the articulation of meaning. Our duty, then, would be to look past the expression of the words associated with Debussy's music, not to find in the music an extension or repetition of the words' meaning, but to sense, between as well as beyond them, an echo of that ideal unity.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Falstaff, Elgar's tragic symphonic study, is at once program music, a minor piece of Shakespearean criticism, early modernist tonal and structural experiment, and a cynical musical commentary on humankind's "failings and sorrows." A satisfactory analysis of the work calls for a discussion of the program, the Shakespearean literary criticism that Elgar based his interpretation on and cited in his own published analysis of the work, and a structural analysis that can make sense both of a variety of generic implications (sonata, rondo, and multimovement deformations) as well as the complex associations between keys, motives, persons, and ideas in the work, together with its overall tonal structure. As this multilayered piece is examined from these different angles, Elgar's interpretation of the character of Sir John Falstaff (as presented by or inferable from Shakespeare) is revealed as an idiosyncratically gloomy view of human relationships and existential possibilities. It is also an intensely personal exploration of late-tonal musical language, its symbolic potential, its structural logic, and its relation to the musical tradition--Elgar's most complex, adventurous, and rewarding.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The subject of chivalry is a recurring theme in Elgar's works. This reflects both the composer's tastes in Romantic literature and his knowledge of and admiration for Wagner, particularly Parsifal. Parsifal's narrative of regeneration provided Elgar with a dramatic model for more than one early choral work, but its impact was perhaps greatest in a purely instrumental work: the First Symphony (1908). Not only do the Ab-major motto theme of the Symphony and the first theme of the D-major slow movement resemble respectively the Liebesmahl and "Good Friday" motifs of Parsifal (as well as passages from The Apostles and The Dream of Gerontius), but their respective dramatic functions in the Symphony are very similar to their Parsifalian antecedents: in the case of the motto, an ideal with which the music begins and to which it returns; in the case of the slow movement, a passage of transfiguration without which a return is impossible. Consequently, the Symphony can be viewed as a critical response to Parsifal within the supposedly "absolute" genre of the nonprogrammatic symphony. A more problematic discourse on chivalry can be found in Elgar's symphonic study, Falstaff (1913), a work whose subject matter perhaps inevitably prompts comparisons with Richard Strauss's Don Quixote. Whereas one can regard Strauss's work as an ironic critique of the metaphysical, Wagnerian world with which the composer had parted company during the completion of Guntram, Elgar's work reaffirms chivalry and the (objective) value system for which it is a metaphor. The thematically fragmentary death scene reflects the moral incoherence of Falstaff's corrupted version of chivalry as much as it does his passing; by contrast, it is in Prince Hal and the music associated with him that objective morality--albeit laced with pragmatism--survives.</jats:p>