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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The preponderance of gothic themes in Italian operas of the early nineteenth century is often cited as one of the few ways essentially conservative Italian composers flirted with the Romantic revolution sweeping the rest of Europe. By 1838, the very ubiquity of these tropes led the Venetian reviewer of Donizetti's gory Maria de Rudenz to plead “exhaustion” with the ever-present “daggers, poisons, and tombs” of the contemporary stage. Based on the French melodrama La Nonne sanglante, Donizetti's sensational opera is almost a litany of gothic tropes. The most disturbing of these is the female body that refuses to die: Maria herself, who rises from the dead to murder her innocent rival. This fleshy specter is musically rendered as a body that is too receptive to emotion, particularly to (imaginary) cries of longing or grief. Significantly, Donizetti's foray into the gothic was also distinguished by a spate of self-borrowing; his 1838 revision of the earlier Gabriella di Vergy borrows material from Maria de Rudenz. Exploring the connections between the trope of gothic resurrection and Donizetti's borrowings highlights how the two works represent a characteristic approach to the gothic, one that mingles a corporeal orientation with more familiar themes of ghostly immateriality.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article argues for a number of hitherto unrecognized continuities—stylistic, aesthetic, and ideological—between Beethoven's marginalized “political music” from the period of the Congress of Vienna and his canonical symphonic works. It rereads his œuvre against the background of the popularity and ubiquity of the “Handelian sublime” in early-nineteenth-century Viennese public life—that is, the aesthetics and social practice of grand choral singing, associated primarily with some of Handel's oratorios, but also with the late choral works of Haydn. Presenting new archival research into Vienna's politicized choral culture, the article argues that contemporary theorizing about the power of the musical sublime became the theoretical wing of music's changing social status, as it was mobilized by the state during the Napoleonic Wars more than ever before. These new, Handelian contexts for Beethoven's music lead to three conclusions. First, the choral aesthetic background to Beethoven's symphonies has been largely overlooked. With reference to original performance contexts as well as the topical character of Beethoven's symphonies, the article argues that the symphonies are often best understood as orchestral transmutations of the grand Handelian chorus. Against this background, the appearance of an actual chorus in the Ninth might be reconceived as a moment when the genre's aesthetic debt is most apparent, rather than a shocking generic transgression. Second, the distinction, commonly elaborated by Beethoven scholars, between the mere bombast of Beethoven's political compositions and the “authentic,” Kantian sublime of human freedom supposedly articulated in his symphonies cannot easily be sustained. Third, the cultural entanglement of choral and symphonic music in Beethoven's Vienna reveals something not only of the political origins but also of the continuing political potency of Beethoven's symphonies. With reference to Althusserian theories of power and subjectivity, the article speculates that the compelling sense of listener subjectivity created by Beethoven's most vaunted symphonic compositions (noted by Scott Burnham) comes about in part through the music's and the listener's transformation of external, choral reflections of political power into internal, symphonic ones—a transformation that leaves its mark on the topical character of the symphonies, which, especially in their most intense moments of subjective engagement, are replete with official topics and gestures: marches, hymns, and fugues. This might explain why the music has so often been heard as simultaneously browbeating and uplifting, authoritarian and liberating.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>“Aura”—configured as an interplay of preservation and loss or—to quote the first version of Walter Benjamin's famous artwork essay—as an “interweaving of space and time”—is central not only to sound recording, but also to the musical dramaturgy of Wagner's final work. This article examines ways in which this unusual alignment affected early (pre-1948) recordings of Parsifal. The potential contradictions implicit in the concept of aura are nowhere more strikingly revealed than in these early recordings. On one hand, they foreground the problems of reducing complex and lengthy works to easily recorded excerpts or arrangements. In this quasi-Adornian reading, early sound recordings of Parsifal manifest the inexorable power of the culture industry to undermine the authentic work of art. And yet sound recording can also be seen as the fruit of a different impulse, the impulse toward a fully transcendent work of art, the realization of the “invisible theater” for which Wagner himself supposedly yearned. Indeed, Parsifal (even more than Wagner's other works) was recorded primarily as a symphonic work, divested of what Adorno so tellingly called the “phony hoopla” of operatic production. Early sound recording of Parsifal thus amplifies the conflict between materialism and transcendence that forms the ideological substratum of the plot. This conflict manifests itself in the “resistance” that Parsifal offers up to the process of recording, a resistance that is ironically most audible precisely during the age in which the recordings themselves are most “imperfect.” It is in these traces of resistance, I will argue, that we may imagine the aura of Wagner's final work.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Perhaps the most influential abandoned woman to surface in the musical history of the nineteenth century was that conceived by Biedermeier poet Eduard Mörike. Since its initial publication in 1832, his “Das verlassene Mägdlein” has engaged the sustained attention of composers, performers, and even music analysts and critics. Not only did his Mägdlein prompt the creation of numerous nineteenth-century volkstümliche varianten throughout Germany and Austria, but she also inspired 130 musical settings dating between 1832 and 1985. Yet, although Mörike is just one of many figures within a long tradition of male poets writing on female abandonment, there seems to be something to this particular poem, that is, to Mörike's Mägdlein, that has compelled composers to retell her tale again and again in song. My discussion begins by first revisiting the poem's original novelistic context, Maler Nolten: Novelle in zwei Theilen (1832). Thereafter I follow Mörike's Mägdlein from her poetic beginnings to two of her best-known musical reappearances: Robert Schumann's “Das verlassne Mägdelein” (op. 64, no. 2) of 1847 and the work it inspired forty years later, Hugo Wolf's 1888 “Das verlassene Mägdlein” (also op. 64, no. 2), perhaps the most renowned setting of them all. Through the juxtaposition of these two settings we may not only uncover their potential textual and musical interconnections, but also gain insight into the tacit cultural understandings and ideologies surrounding those who take up the voice of the abandoned.</jats:p>