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<jats:p>Both the literary program of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and his personal letters dating from the year of the work's composition are suffused with the rhetoric of illness, detailing a maladie morale characterized by melancholy, nervous "exultation," black presentiments, and a malignant idee fixe.. Often mistakenly identified as a term new to the 1830s, the idee fixe has a considerably longer history, dating from the first decade of the nineteenth century when it appeared in the writings of French psychiatrists Etienne Esquirol and Jean-Etienne Georget. Both Esquirol's early writings on insanity and his seminal 1838 treatise identify mental "fixation" as the primary symptom of monomania, the most contentious and well-known mental disease of the period, and one with far-reaching implications not only for medicine but for Romantic literature, philosophy, and autobiography. Examination of the disease's early reception reveals that, well before Berlioz, the psychiatric terminology surrounding monomania had been absorbed into popular discourse. Malignant and humorous idee fixes appeared in cartoons, diaries, and newspaper articles from the 1810s onward, and in fictional works by Hoffmann, Duras, Scribe, Balzac, and others. Here, and in essays published in musical and literary journals of the period, monomania emerged as an increasingly aestheticized malady, and the idee fixe itself as a signal, not of mental debilitation, but of creative absorption and artistic inspiration. When Berlioz figured himself as a monomaniac, both in his personal writing and his symphonic program, he was responding to a discourse of "creative aberration" permeating Romantic literary and medical culture, and to a fashionable fascination with mental pathology. Berlioz was by no means the only artist of the period to diagnose himself with the symptoms of mental fixation. Musset, Janin, and Georges Sand also described themselves in monomaniacal terms in autobiographical "confessions" permeated with references to hallucination, fixation, and emotional pathology. Indeed, we can draw clear parallels between the veiled self-referentiality of the Fantastique and the autobiographical strategies of the Romantic Confession. Berlioz's "self-sounding" resonates with a host of other confessional autobiographies of the period and reflects the collapse between inspiration and insanity, between anatomy and aesthetics, underpinning early-nineteenth-century theories of genius.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Several of Mendelssohn's minor-mode songs, duets, and choral songs feature a peculiar tonal move: a sudden shift takes us to the relative major (without a "modulation" proper), but the opening minor key soon returns equally abruptly (via its V). Closer examination of these pieces suggests that the composer used the major-mode excursus as a topos, whose associations include the ideas of farewell, wandering, and distance (the latter both in the geographical and chronological sense, in accordance with the shift's quasi-modal--thus equally exotic and archaic--character). I suggest that this topos may have influenced the tonal structure of at least three large-scale Mendelssohn compositions, all of which are closely related to the same exotic and historical ideas. In the Hebrides Overture the relationship between the primary B minor and the secondary D major is (for a sonata-form movement) exceptionally equal: rather than acting as sharply contrasting tonal areas, they almost appear as two sides of the same key. The first-act finale of the unfinished opera, Die Lorelei, elaborates the original topos in another way: the E-minor-G-major kernel is extended in both directions, resulting in a chain of third-related keys, which eventually takes us back to the opening E level (now turned into major). In the light of this example, the (less complete) third-layered tonal structure of the "Scottish" Symphony may also be understood as growing out from the same miniature song topos.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Brahms's Fest- und Gedenkspruche have long been discussed and sometimes dismissed as an occasional work. But although many scholars have debunked this designation, pointing out that Brahms wrote the motets with no particular occasion in mind, a more salient description of the composition deserves further investigation: the motets are a work for occasions, rather than an occasional work. This article looks at the repercussions of this distinction by focusing on the motets' orientation around the world of plurals (in Benedict Anderson's words) that was both presupposed and fostered by a national culture of festivity in late-nineteenth-century Germany. For one, the title of Brahms's motets--Spruche--references the contemporary collections of sayings that sought to capture and disseminate the multiplicity of the Volk in the new German Kaiserreich. This emphasis on national identity as a localized, participatory act was well suited to the flurry of commemorative festivities taking place throughout the newly unified Germany; it also finds musical expression in the motets. In particular, Brahms makes programmatic use of the double chorus to illustrate processes of unification, narration, and historical continuity, all of which were crucial strategies in the attempt to buttress Germany's new political identity with mnemonic supports. And by setting biblical texts that promote a contractual memory between fathers and sons, Brahms depicts a community in which collective participation in remembering the national past serves as an optimistic bulwark against the centrifugal antagonisms that would soon beset the young German nation.</jats:p>

<jats:p>"Polemic in the Concert Hall": the title of Richard Heuberger's article in the Neue freie Presse refers in no uncertain terms to the uproar surrounding Mahler's performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Vienna. The two performances, on 18 and 22 February 1900, used Mahler's own orchestral re-touchings of Beethoven's work, and Mahler's biographers have often identified these concerts as the first sustained attacks by the press, attacks that would, over time, only continue to increase in severity and frequency. When these concerts are placed into the context of reactions to Mahler's other Philharmonic concerts, however, this narrative of a "fall from grace" proves impossible to sustain. Not only was Mahler denounced for reorchestrating other works from his very first concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, but the language used to do so remained consistent throughout Mahler's tenure. Mahler, as a Jew, was not perceived as having the "right" to "improve" Beethoven--or any other composer for that matter. Although not overtly anti-Semitic, the language of the reviews resembles that found in Wagner's essay "Das Judentum in der Musik," where he outlines the Jewish composer's supposed handicaps: an emphasis on detail to the detriment of the whole, the prevalence of intellect over feeling, and an understanding of culture as merely "learnt" but never "mother tongue." An examination of the critical reactions points out these similarities while also suggesting that, particularly given Wagner's own suggestions (in 1873) for the reorchestration of Beethoven's symphony, the uproar had very little to do with what anyone heard.</jats:p>