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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This piece was written as a keynote to a conference, Music and Identity, held in Bergen, Norway, in September 2007 to commemorate the centennial of Edvard Grieg's death. Its author, Susan McClary, both reflects on issues of identity politics then and now—including the ways in which ethnicity and gender have operated in her own career—and explores how Grieg himself theorized his fusions between the German school of composition and Norwegian folk music. It concludes with an analysis of Grieg's “Røtnams-Knut,” from his late collection Slåtter.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article offers a new interpretation of the operatic phenomenon known as verismo, and of the relationship of Puccini's Tosca with that movement. In contrast to previous scholarship on verismo, which often treats the relationship between literature and music as transparent, I stress that marrying empiricist aesthetics to traditional operatic values was a highly unnatural process. I suggest that Italian opera in the 1890s was pushed to a sort of crisis point, and that the very act of singing could no longer be taken as self-evident. Composers developed a set of new techniques—offstage song, performer-characters, an extreme reliance on bells—to deal with this sudden untenability of operatic convention. All of these techniques were elaborated most fully in Tosca, and the opera might be read as an allegory of the verismo moment, embodying the conflict between hard-nosed realism and unapologetic singing in its two antagonists: Baron Scarpia and Floria Tosca. The plot clearly endorses Tosca's position, but a close reading of the opera's music suggests a rather different interpretation. By focusing on the role of bells in the opera, I argue that realistic sound often overwhelms the autonomy of the characters, at times seeming to collapse them into the scenery itself. Early critics were disturbed by this aspect of the music. Listening to the opera with their ears may help us realize that—despite its overt celebration of individual freedom, and its much-lauded critique of state-sanctioned violence—Tosca exhibits an antisubjective impulse that has much in common with other “Fascist” and “proto-Fascist” texts.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In two of Rachmaninov's last works, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini of 1934 and the first of the Symphonic Dances of 1940, a stylistic contrast between an opulently scored lyrical theme and the more angular, dissonant music that surrounds that theme throws into relief the extent that Rachmaninov's musical language had changed and developed since his first great successes thirty years earlier with the Second Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. The words that motivate a similar stylistic contrast in the song Son (Sleep), composed in 1917, near the end of his most compositionally productive years, suggest an interpretive reading of such a stylistic contrast: the earlier, lusher style is associated here with dreams, and hence with memories; while the later, sparer, more tonally ambiguous style accompanies an evocation of something more impersonal, in the case of the song the stillness of a dreamless sleep. Some of the developing aspects of Rachmaninov's style revealed in these later examples are already evident even in the more traditional-sounding pieces of the last decade (1907–17) of his Russian period, which is shown in an analysis of the piano Prelude in G# Minor of 1910. Even this seemingly traditional Prelude, but more and more in his later music, Rachmaninov emerges as an indisputably twentieth-century composer.</jats:p>