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<jats:p>Schubert finished only the first two movements of his B-Minor Symphony (D. 759), and they remained unseen and unheard for the last six years of his life, indeed until 1865. The best available evidence indicates that he sent his only score to the Music Society in Graz sometime after September 1823, and that from that point on, at the latest, he had given up any plans to complete the two remaining movements. But why?</jats:p> <jats:p>At least part of the answer is to be found in several consistent patterns Schubert followed in the conduct of his career. He did not return to unfinished works after he had laid them aside for a period of several months; the only exception to this pattern is the Mass in Ab. And not until early 1824 did Schubert begin to seek publication or public performance for newly composed works in the large multi-movement instrumental genres--in Beethoven's genres. Finally, in October 1822, the date on the score of the B-Minor Symphony, Schubert could have had no reasonable expectation of a full performance of a four-movement symphony, in Vienna or anywhere else, by an orchestra of adequate quality. His subsequent hopes and exertions for a performance of a symphony, for his "Great" C-Major Symphony, proved illusory and unavailing, even after he had become much better established.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article introduces twelve new Verdi letters and other operatic and musical theater sources in the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings. The materials hail from the French baritone Victor Maurel (1848-1923), Verdi's first Iago and first Falstaff, and from his second wife, the musical theater librettist and screenwriter Frederique Rosine de Gresac (1866/7-1943). The letters and other sources constitute an important resource for not only nineteenth-century opera and operatic performance but also the early American musical, film studies, the history of women, even the history of celebrity. The Verdi letters concern Maurel's creation of the role of Falstaff and include a intriguing debate about preparing for the role and singing generally.</jats:p>

<jats:p>During the last decades of the nineteenth century, women figured prominently in a marketing campaign by banjo manufacturers who sought to make the banjo a respectable instrument for ladies. Their overarching aim was to "elevate" the banjo's status from its African-American and minstrel-show associations, thereby making the instrument acceptable in white bourgeois society. At the same time, stereoview cards, three-dimensional photographs produced by the millions, were a popular parlor entertainment featuring a variety of contemporary images, including women playing the banjo. Yet, instead of depicting a genteel lady in the parlor playing her beribboned banjo, the stereoviews presented humorous and sometimes risque scenes of banjo-playing women. Further, virtually no stereoviews exist that show the banjo played by a lady in a parlor setting. Through a study of stereoscopic depictions of women in a variety of scenes, I place these unexpected images of women's music-making in a context that explains their significance. In particular I examine the way stereoviews provide insights about the tensions regarding the position and status of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture as revealed in the figure of the New Woman.</jats:p> <jats:p>Typical of constructions of this threatening figure, stereographic images picture the New Woman wearing bloomers, riding bicycles, attending college, smoking, neglecting her wifely duties and children, and even indulging in lesbian eroticism. Yet, stereoviews are distinctive in that they also show the New Woman playing the banjo, and I argue that the link between the banjo and the New Woman had a decisive and negative impact on the effectiveness of the banjo elevation project. Through an examination of these three-dimensional views, and drawing on late-nineteenth-century writing and poetry about the banjo, I show how the banjo in the hands of the New Woman became a cautionary cultural icon for middle- and upper-class women, subverting the respectable image of the parlor banjo and the bourgeois women who played it. I place this new evidence in the context of Karen Linn's paradigm describing the banjo elevation project as one that sought to shift the banjo from the realm of sentimental values to official values. The figure of the New Woman does not fit within Linn's dichotomy; rather, she falls outside both sets of values. Often viewed as a third sex herself, in a sense mirroring the gender tensions surrounding the banjo, the New Woman helped to shift the banjo into a third realm, that of revolutionary and perhaps even decadent values. This study enhances what we know about the way musical instruments have been used to reconfigure attitudes toward gender roles in the popular imagination and furthers our understanding of the complex role women have played in the history of the banjo. Moreover, this evidence demonstrates how gender and sexuality can affect the reception of music, and musical instruments, through powerful iconographic images.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Perhaps more than any other opera by Strauss, Elektra is a drama about the sense of hearing. It belongs to the phantasmagoric realm of listening, and it affirms, like few other operas, the power of music alone to fire up the listener's imagination. In this sense, it renders the transitions between its own different layers of reality, between the here and now of Elektra's agony and her reliving of her father's murder at the hands of her mother and her mother's lover, in a way that obscures the borderline between that terrible past and the soon to be horrible present. The article investigates these transitions in the opera.</jats:p> <jats:p>The crime against her father, Agamemnon, has burned itself into her soul, and it directs all her experience afterward. Elektra's retribution of the past injustice is no more than an imagined restoration. Her revenge remains a private matter; it does not resurrect any moral order and does not re-create the basis for a new community. The radicalism of this lack of morality is overwhelming, especially if we consider that Hofmannsthal's libretto departs from Sophocles only on this main point.</jats:p> <jats:p>A different notion of time, articulated through Strauss's music, strikes through the ongoing present, takes hold of it, and becomes predominant. This is the time in which Elektra lives. We witness a strange battle between remembrance and forgetting as Elektra's present actions are driven wholly by the effort to forget the present in order to restore the past. All is in vain, of course, because it is impossible to reverse time. Everything is too late. This belatedness becomes Elektra's destiny.</jats:p> <jats:p>Directors often lean heavily on Elektra's resolution of her predicament in the fulfillment of full-blown revenge, which ends with a going out of time at the very moment when the border between lived real time and fantasy time collapses. Yet what if emphasis were placed elsewhere? The article raises this question as a pressing one, in connection with Peter Konwitschny's staging of Elektra in the new theater of the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, February 2005. In Konwitschny's staging, the decisive event, the precipitating trauma, is no longer, as in Strauss and Hofmannsthal, something that has long since happened when the curtain rises and that rules every succeeding event from an inaccessible point in past time. Instead, the precipitating trauma is drawn into the opera itself. The article tries to show how this interpretation has consequences that change the work. Elektra's destiny does not become less shocking, but rather shocks us in a different manner.</jats:p>