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<jats:p>Music shorthand systems devised by Michel Woldemar, Hippolyte Prévost, and August Baumgartner adapted the quill strokes of speech stenography to the seemingly analogous domain of music. Eschewing conventional staff notation in favor of cursive lines that indicated pitch, register, interval, and duration, music stenographers endeavored to record in real time instrumental improvisations and fleeting inspirations that would otherwise have been lost forever due to a lack of recording technology. To advocates of such methods, more efficient technologies of musical writing were indispensable for capturing fugitive musical thoughts and acts: music stenography aided Hector Berlioz, for example, in the composition of his Requiem. For others, including Rossini, Fétis, and contributors to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the claims and merits of stenography were a source of controversy as well as fascination.</jats:p> <jats:p>Grounded in a corpus of seventy music stenographies that have been largely ignored by musicologists and historians of technology alike, this article asks how musical intuitions became musical texts, thereby entering print-based networks of circulation. Although the importance of “genius” and “work” as historical concepts regulating the production, ontology, and reception of nineteenth-century music has long been acknowledged, the material basis of these concepts has been overlooked until recently. The efforts of musical stenographers demonstrate that the inscription and circulation of material texts provided the means by which musical inspiration could be registered and stored, constituting a material substrate on which such idealist concepts depended. Whereas historians of sound recording have focused on seismic historical and cultural shifts wrought by the introduction of the phonograph in 1877, the preoccupation with capturing music in the decades preceding and following this date suggests an alternate conception of text-based sound recording.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Relying on knowledge of Karl Engel's edition of the Volksschauspiel, Karl Simrock's version of the puppet play, Gotthold Lessing's Faust fragments, and versions of the Faust legend by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others, Ferruccio Busoni crafted his own hybrid libretto that depicts a mystical and broadminded Faust. Busoni's music reflects the richness of Faust's mind, combining heterogeneous timbres, forms, and styles. Busoni juxtaposes a Gregorian Credo, Palestrina-style choral settings, a reformation hymn, a Baroque instrumental dance suite, an organ fantasia, recitatives, a lyrical ballad, and orchestral variations, with impressionistic symphonic writing, and experimental passages. While stylistic heterogeneity can be heard throughout many of his mature instrumental and vocal works, Busoni also used this heterogeneity in a descriptive way in Doktor Faust to characterize Faust.</jats:p> <jats:p>At the same time, Busoni sought to write “a history of man and his desire” rather than of a man and the devil. It is Faust's own dark side, rather than the devil, that distracts him and prevents him from completing his greatest work. With Kaspar removed from the plot, Mephistopheles, who as spirit is not always distinct from Faust the man, becomes Faust's alter ego. This duality is expressed musically when Faust assumes Mephistopheles's characteristic intervals.</jats:p> <jats:p>Although Busoni's incomplete Doktor Faust, BV 303, has already been studied by several scholars, including Antony Beaumont, Nancy Chamness, and Susan Fontaine, there is still no detailed analysis of Busoni's treatment of Faust. Through analyses of autobiographical connections, Busoni's early settings of Faustian characters, and the text and music in Doktor Faust, with special attention on the Wittenberg Tavern Scene that has no precedent among the versions of the Faust legend, this article reveals Busoni's vision of Faust as a broadminded, and yet conflicted character, shaped idiosyncratically to convey Busoni's personal artistic ideals. In so doing, the article not only contributes to ongoing discourse about Doktor Faust, but also expands knowledge about ways the Faust legend was interpreted and set musically in the early twentieth century through intertextual comparisons.</jats:p>

<jats:p>After the enormous success of Le nozze di Figaro at Prague's Nostitz Theater in 1786 and the world premiere of Don Giovanni there in 1787, Mozart's operas became canonic works in the Bohemian capital, with numerous performances every season throughout the nineteenth century. These nineteenth-century Prague Mozart productions are particularly well documented in the previously overlooked collection of theater posters from the Czech National Museum and the mid-nineteenth-century manuscript scores of Le nozze di Figaro. Much sooner than elsewhere in Europe, Prague's critics, audiences, and opera institutions aimed at historically informed, “authentic” productions of these operas. This article shows that the attempts to transform Mozart's operas into autonomous artworks, artworks that would faithfully reflect the unique vision of their creator and not succumb to changing audience tastes, were closely linked to national politics in nineteenth-century Prague. As the city's population became more and more divided into ethnic Czechs and Germans, both groups appropriated Mozart for their own narratives of cultural uniqueness and cultivation. The attempts at historic authenticity originated already in the 1820s, when Czech opera performers and critics wanted to perform Don Giovanni in a form that was as close as possible to that created by Mozart in 1787 but distorted in various German singspiel adaptations. Similar attempts at historical authenticity are also prominent in Bedřich Smetana's approach to Le nozze di Figaro, during his tenure as the music director of the Czech Provisional Theater in the late 1860s. German-speaking performers and critics used claims of historical authenticity in the 1830s and 40s to stress Prague's importance as a prominent center of German culture. During the celebrations of the 1887 Don Giovanni centennial, furthermore, both the Czech and German communities in Prague appropriated Mozart's operas into their intensely nationalistic debates.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Franz Schubert's song cycle Die schöne Müllerin makes enormous demands not only on the performers but also on its audience, a factor that shaped the early performance history of the work. In this article, the pioneering complete performances of Die schöne Müllerin by the baritone Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) will be explored, as well as the responses of his audiences, collaborators, and critics. The circumstances surrounding the first complete performance in Vienna's Musikverein on 4 May 1856, more than three decades after the cycle was composed in 1823, will be traced. A survey of subsequent performances reveal two things: within Stockhausen's concert career at least, it was no foregone conclusion that the complete cycle should always be performed; and a performance of the “complete cycle” meant many different things in his day. Stockhausen's artistic idealism jostled against the practical forces that necessarily influenced his approach to recital programming, leading to a multifaceted, untidy performance history for this cycle.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In 1943 Allied bombs destroyed the archives of Leoncavallo's publisher, Sonzogno, and of the Teatro Dal Verme, where Pagliacci was first performed. As a result, many sources pertaining to the opera's compositional history were lost, and scholarship has relied almost exclusively on Leoncavallo's unpublished autobiographical manuscript, “Appunti.” Contextual sources such as notifications in the press, eyewitness accounts, and a large body of mostly unpublished correspondence now suggest that Leoncavallo cloaked the opera's genesis to protect its legacy.</jats:p> <jats:p>Leoncavallo was twice charged with having imitated an existing play. In his protracted defense, he took every opportunity to distinguish his libretto from the literary tradition to which it belongs and tie it instead to the verismo movement (with which critics had associated it since the premiere). He began to claim, for instance, that the libretto was based on a crime of passion he had witnessed in Montalto and invented a version of that crime that matched the libretto. Furthermore, in preparation of the first performance in Paris, he actively contributed to a staging faithfully depicting Montalto in an attempt to highlight the originality of the story. And as he was tightening the opera's connection to verismo, he was concealing aspects that would have reflected poorly on the opera's reception, including Sonzogno's initial concerns regarding the music and the presence of substantial musical self-borrowings.</jats:p>