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<jats:p>In his symphony “Il maníatico” (1780), Gaetano Brunetti gave a musical portrayal of monomania decades before it became a staple of nineteenth-century alienism (psychiatry), as well as of Romantic music and art. A detailed analysis of his symphony shows both the presenting features of what he called manía as well as the stages of the “maniac's” interaction with the surrounding “normal” world. These stages respond to widely known mental peculiarities of several generations of Spanish royalty, whom Brunetti served as court composer. Though its court audience would likely have compared this portrayal of obsession to Cervantes's Don Quixote, Brunetti's symphony may also have sent a coded message of sympathy to his patron, the crown prince who would later reign as Carlos IV and who struggled with his obsessional father, then reigning as Carlos III. At the same time, Brunetti mocked Luigi Boccherini, his rival as court composer. By presenting a subversive reimagining of the “normal” symphonic world, Brunetti characterized the mannerisms of classical style as monomania writ large. In the following decades, the term fixe Idee emerged in German literature and usage considerably before the French idée fixe. Both concepts emerged from literary, rather than medical, sources. Though Don Quixote remained a touchstone for reflections on “madness,” Brunetti's symphony anatomized obsession decades before medical discourse gave its clinical description.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Quadrilles were a popular genre of group dancing in the nineteenth century. Existing melodies were normally used to accompany the dancing sessions, but the monotony of their repetition and the cost of a professional piano player capable of improvising were an issue. Thus, the idea of a “machine” that would be able to endlessly produce quadrille music at no cost was suggesting itself. The Quadrille Melodist, a paper-based system for the generation of piano pieces, was published in nineteenth-century Victorian London by John Clinton, a “professor in the Royal Academy of Music.” Already in 1650, Athanasius Kircher proposed in his Musurgia Universalis a device consisting of stripes with short snippets of music that could be used to create combinatorial pieces and variations. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a whole genre of quasi-algorithmic compositions was emerging, spurred by the popularity of such works as the Musikalisches Würfelspiel, a piece attributed to Mozart. In this article, I analyze the Quadrille Melodist against the background of the history of combinatorial music. I contrast its unique features with other predigital, as well as later digital, music systems and discuss its design with respect to the phenomenon of predictability in dance music. Additionally, I discuss reasons for the circumstance that the historically advertised number of possible quadrilles, 428 million, is much smaller than the real number of combinations.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In 1878, at the height of his fame, Helmholtz asked what was objective in perception, declaring that—in contrast to empirical science—it is the “artist [who] has beheld the real.” His lecture sought to show how sensory perception can be law-like, and how the effects of art are ultimately grounded in such law-likeness. Such a claim for an objective measure of perception was not unprecedented, yet it failed to distinguish cleanly between what is objective and what is real, opening up a discursive space regarding what sound “is,” and what its objective perception may be. Its arguments followed calls for “a science of beauty” based on number, and was motivated, in part, by Helmholtz's attempt to distance himself from the “weaknesses of Romanticism.” This articles argues that Helmholtz's bold claims were only possible on the basis of the writings of German materialists during the 1840s and 50s, and because sound had been figured for decades as an ambiguous object.</jats:p> <jats:p>On this basis, the article considers the role of sound within epistemological debates over sense perception and concepts of the real during the later nineteenth century. It examines the ways in which sound's abstract character became co-opted within Anglo-German discourse concerning objective perception and the scientifically real, initially through the lens of Helmholtz's 1878 lecture, but later broadening this focus to include the mid-century architects of a philosophical materialism, as well as their detractors. A closing case study, a closely documented wager between a geologist and a philosopher about the “real” of sound ca. 1850, demonstrates the imaginative uses of sound as a metonym for philosophical debate. This raises questions about the relation of sensation and number, the contested affinity between sound and concepts of the absolute, and the underlying desire to possess objects of sensory experience.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article investigates the work of philosopher and experimental psychologist Carl Stumpf with a focus on embedding his scientific perspective in a practice of musicianship. Stumpf wrote in an autobiographical essay from 1924 that he had considered becoming a professional violin player before taking up the study of philosophy. I claim that the practice of learning and playing this instrument sheds light on his concept of music, and at the same time signals its relevance for nineteenth-century musical aesthetics. To carve out the role of Stumpf's musicianship, I propose a “psychoanalytic” approach of tone psychology in the sense of Gaston Bachelard. For this I read through Stumpf's writings to trace the function and role of practices like analyzing tones and tunes, memorizing and notating pitch and melody, and using related tools and techniques like phonography. This is held against a reconstruction of his mentioning of the violin and of the context of violin pedagogy in the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing, I hope eventually to sharpen the notion of tone in Stumpf and thereby to contribute to a better understanding of his concept of complex qualities as opposed to the notion of Gestalt in the generation of his students.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article shows how discourse on Beethoven's late works has been underpinned by material fascination with the composer's body, most apparent in the cult veneration of his dying face, which was commodified in the form of his mask. From 1890 to 1920 in Germany and Austria, Beethoven's mask became a ubiquitous item of decor for the music room, a devotional object linked with the face of Christ in the popular imagination. This mislabeled “death” mask was cast during Beethoven's lifetime, a stoic visage that put a face to the legend: that is, to the legendary 1868 account by Anselm Hüttenbrenner that recounted Beethoven's death as a heroic battle with the storm clouds. Two conflicting physiognomies—the stubborn Napoleonic commander and the suffering Christ-like redeemer—led to a critical divide that saw late works as either transcendent of, or marred by, suffering. When we unmask a prehistory of late style, we see how modern discourse on lateness still orbits around this tension between the spiritual and material, between transcendence and decay, and how this critical tradition crystallized around Theodor W. Adorno's stark resistance to the transcendent deathbed that was epitomized by the writings of Ludwig Nohl. Lateness, then, has a hidden backbone in a popular fascination with the artist's body. This same fascination led many to imagine Beethoven's final compositions as almost tangible traces of his person, hearing his late Adagios as “grave-songs,” as the composer's dying voice.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The theoretic model of the “unreliable narrative” in fiction took flight in the early 1960s; it has since become a key concept in narratology, and an indispensable one. Simply put, first-person unreliable narrators are ones about whom we as readers, in collusion with the author, learn more than they know about themselves. Romantic precursors of modernist experiments in fiction—incipient cases of narrative unreliability—arise in the works of, among others, Jean Paul Richter and Heinrich Heine, two of Robert Schumann's favorite writers. In his early solo piano cycle, Papillons, op. 2, Schumann draws inspiration from Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre, surely capturing something of the author's unreliably quirky literary style, in part through the strategy of tonal pairing. Whereas Schumann ultimately played down the programmatic elements of Papillons that trace back to the unpredictable Jean Paul, a genuine instance of the unreliable narrator is Heine's troubled poet-persona in Schumann's Dichterliebe. Here the composer invites us to perceive a second persona through the voice of the piano—one that understands the poet better than he does, and whose music reveals from the outset that rejection in love lies ahead. The emergence of narrative unreliability in fiction may have served as an influence that drove experimentation not only for Schumann but also for some of his contemporaries and successors. Debates about musical narrativity might profit from considering the recent literary concept of a “feedback loop,” in which the author, the narrator (text), and the narratee (reader)—in our case, the composer, the performer, and the listener (including analysts, performers, and composers, who are also intensive listeners)—continually and recursively interact.</jats:p>