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<jats:p>The ambiguity of Chopin's music and its amenability to reinvention help account for its enduring appeal to pianists, composers, and critics. This article examines the conditions under which such ambiguity has taken shape on the page and at the piano. Just as curves become jagged—or “aliased”—when represented by the grid of discrete pixels that form digital displays, so have the contours of Chopin's music been both veiled and disclosed by the straight lines that define the staff and the keyboard. Despite the term's contemporary ring, the issues raised and reflected by aliasing are rooted in a set of nineteenth-century dichotomies concerning the discrete and the continuous, artifice and nature, instruments and bodies, virtuosity and poetry, machines and voices, and constraints and liberties, all of which Chopin's music was heard both to invoke and to elude. By way of recordings and transcriptions by Leopold Godowsky, Marc-André Hamelin, Josef Lhévinne, Vladimir de Pachmann, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and Arthur Rubinstein, the article presents various instances of aliasing and attempts to mitigate it via a range of compositional, pianistic, and cultural techniques that reveal how aliases can produce ambiguity by calling the very distinction between identity and difference into question.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article considers the problem of narration in a collection of works gathered around Chopin's Ballade in G Minor, op. 23: Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, Poe's “The Raven,” Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod, Dickens's The Chimes, and Władysław Szpilman's The Pianist along with its cinematic adaptation by Roman Polanski. Chopin's Ballade is featured prominently in the two movies under consideration, while the remaining works are either influential for the composer (Konrad Wallenrod) or develop themes common to the Ballade. Study of narration in these works reveals that the narrator can be just as unstable in literary texts as in musical ones. The problems of narration that have been imputed to music are problems of narration itself. Regarding the era of Chopin's Ballade, these problems also point to unstable models of subjectivity, which the logic of narrative glosses over.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Much has been written about the importance of music and music making to Nietzsche's life and works as a whole, and the relevance of his philosophy for particular composers, repertoires, and works. Meanwhile, music historians and philosophers have approached Nietzsche's musical aesthetics by way of larger nineteenth-century paradigms such as “absolute” music or the history of “metaphysics.” This article explores Nietzsche's philosophical writings on music from the 1870s as they reveal the emergence of his critical outlook on Romantic aesthetics and the musical culture of his time. Against the backdrop of more recent debates about material culture and aesthetics in current musicology, it traces the development of his critical ideas about musical expression and listening as presented in his published and unpublished texts, concentrating on the period from Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872) to the first volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human, 1878). Rather than foreground Nietzsche's relationship with particular composers or works, it illuminates his double relationship with music as actual compositional practice in society and as an idealist metaphor for philosophy.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article foregrounds discrepancies between vernacular singing in England and the work of London’s Folk-Song Society during the 1890s. Figures such as Lucy Broadwood, Kate Lee, and Hubert Parry acted as gatekeepers through whom folk culture had to pass in order to be understood as such. Informed by colonialist epistemology, socialist radicalism, and literary Romanticism, what may be termed the “folkloric imagination” concealed the very thing it claimed to identify. Folk song, thus produced, represents the popular voice under erasure. Situated as the antidote to degeneration, burgeoning mass consumer culture, and escalating urbanization, the folk proved to be the perfect tabula rasa upon which the historiographical, political, and ethnological fantasies of the fin de siècle could be inscribed. Positioned as a restorative bulwark against the shifting tides of modernity, the talismanic folk and their songs were temporal anachronisms conjured up via the discursive strategies that attempted to describe them. Increased attention should hence be paid to singers such as Henry Burstow and the Copper brothers of Rottingdean in order to rescue their histories from the conceptual apparatus of folk song.</jats:p>

<jats:p>At the time of the 1889 world premiere of Massenet’s Esclarmonde, Emmanuel Chabrier copiously annotated a copy of the piano-vocal score of this opera, which is considered, despite its unique features, one of the most Wagnerian works of the author. This remarkable and little-known document allows us once again to investigate the challenges of musical creation in a period when all dramatic composers were obliged to position themselves in relation to Wagner, particularly in France where lively debates were taking place between supporters and detractors of the master of Bayreuth. This new source also enriches our knowledge of two composers who, each in his own way, sought to respond to Wagnerian theater, all the while being inspired by it: from Wagner’s example both composers drew subjects based on legends, used reminiscence motifs or enriched their orchestral and harmonic palettes with Wagnerian techniques; but Massenet remained faithful to closed vocal forms, which Chabrier rejected in favor of more continuous composition. Chabrier, however, shows himself captivated by Esclarmonde, for Massenet’s score attests to the desire, very clear in both composers, to avoid blind submission to Wagner’s influence, especially to the point of losing one’s own identity.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Joseph Joachim’s role in nineteenth-century English concert life is long celebrated. As yet unexamined, however, is how his performances and reception informed critical debates on sentimentalism. Joachim was a prominent celebrity in the domestic salons of mid-century, for example the Holland Park Circle, where his performances were described as perfect echoes of beautiful interior designs and his status confirmed by G. F. Watts’s famous portrait. This article builds on the relationship between “sublime sentimentality” and “domestic aestheticism” in the writings of John Ruskin, a prominent member of these salons. It explores how Ruskin’s idea of moving from domestic “sites,” through “patterns” to “states” in which the heartfelt is expressed in coded, synecdochal or allusive evocation, even in abstract design, can offer insight into the sentimental dimensions of Joachim’s salon performances.</jats:p> <jats:p>Crucially, Ruskin considered both domesticity and sentimentalism as designs and expressions of feeling which are capable of expansion into large forms and contexts, of moving from the intimate to the public. The second part of this article explores sentimentalism in works composed for the concert hall, provoking critical debate at the turn of the century. Tovey’s Victorian tastes were strongly influenced by both Joachim and Ruskin, but Tovey’s assessments of Joachim as the violinist reached the end of his career exemplify the wide critical turn against mid-century sentimentalism. In 1902 Tovey praised Joachim for making no concession to public sentimentalism, in particular through demonstrating a “Classical” grasp of form, by contrast with those who seek sentimental effect through slowing down the performance of “beautiful” passages. In a late echo of Ruskin, Tovey desired that one must be susceptible to the beauty of “design.” The article ends by comparing Sargent’s late portrait of Joachim, presented at the Jubilee celebrations of 1904, with that of Watts.</jats:p>