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<jats:p>During the American Civil War, women in the parlor imagined life at the front through music, playing pieces and singing songs on topics related to the conflict. Among the genres that they performed were battle pieces for the piano, episodic works that depict incidents of battle and their outcome in victory. These pieces constituted a genre that had long been a favorite of female amateur performers, their lineage beginning with Frantisek Kotzwara's 1788 Battle of Prague, which remained steadily popular throughout the nineteenth century.</jats:p> <jats:p>This article examines Civil War battle pieces by tracing their roots to Kotzwara's famous piece. By constructing a reception history of that work as it appears in nineteenth-century literary sources, the article retrieves some alternatives to the abundant satirical readings of the Battle of Prague in period fiction. It suggests that Civil War battle music played several important roles in the lives of its players. The music invited women to imagine and embody the conflicts on the battlefield, to challenge society's expectations of women as both pianists and as contributors to the war effort in public capacities, and to reflect on the costs of the war. The article goes on to examine a battle piece by a female composer and to consider amateur women's performances of battle repertoire during the war years. Finally, drawing inspiration from the accounts in fiction of Kotzwara's Battle of Prague, it concludes by imagining a woman's performance of a battle piece on the heels of the Battle of Gettysburg.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The American Civil War (1861–65) produced staggering numbers of casualties, including from what to this day remains the bloodiest one-day battle (Antietam) in the country's history. Most combatants were young, many still teenagers, or at most in their early twenties, a fact repeatedly and poignantly acknowledged in the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman. The Civil War was the first to be extensively photographed, which brought the realities of its extreme violence into sharp relief throughout the country on both sides of the conflict. Battlefield photographers often focused their cameras on the wounded and dead; some shot close-up corpse studies of young and often notably handsome men, whose physical beauty—likewise acknowledged by Whitman—increased the affective impact of the tragedy. The youth of Civil War soldiers was likewise reflected in thousands of popular ballads produced by Union and Confederate composers and marketed for home-front consumption. Ballads evoking the bond between a mother and her soldier son are especially common. Two such songs, lamentations, by the highly successful northern composer George W. Root are typical: “Just before the Battle, Mother” (1863) and “The Vacant Chair” (1861), the former voiced by a young soldier fearing that he will shortly be killed, and the latter remembering a boy who has fallen. Songs of this sort, explicitly sentimental and folklike, were sometimes critically disparaged even during the war years, though their general popularity (and the popularity of many other songs of this sort)—even to this day—remains considerable. The apparent, guileless sincerity of lamentation ballads develops from a resemblance to the lullaby, a genre evoking the tightest of all human bonds, that between the mother and child. These songs, too easily dismissed as mawkish and cliché-ridden, stay with us for deep-seated social and cultural reasons.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Civil War bands, indispensable to both Union and Confederate troops, were employed by officers to keep morale high during times of rest and relaxation, and to instill regional pride during times of battle. I engage in an inquiry into the functions of the Civil War band in order to highlight the nature of music as it offers at one moment the emotional integration of camaraderie and at another moment the impetus to spur soldiers to combat. As a means of investigating such cases, I start with the poem “Union Camp Music,” included in my recent book of poems, Cyclorama, and conclude with a discussion of the receptive functions activated by both poetry and music in the listeners of each art form. Both poetry and music depend upon bodily reactions, the former relying more upon a referentiality inherent to meaning, the latter upon a nonreferentiality that can turn intention obscure. Both art forms, nonetheless, retain as a primary effect, the performer-to-listener synchrony that derives from somatic response.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Two musical trends of the 1930s—the development of a practice for scoring sound films, and the increasing concertization of the spiritual in both solo and choral form—help shape the soundscape of films based in the South and/or on Civil War themes in early sound-era Hollywood. The tremendous success of the Broadway musical Show Boat (1927), which was made into films twice within seven years (1929, 1936), provided a model of chorus and solo singing, and films like the 1929 Mary Pickford vehicle Coquette and the 1930 musical Dixiana blend this theatrical practice with a nuanced syntax that logically carries the voices from outdoors to indoors to the interior life of a character, usually a white woman. Director D. W. Griffith expands this use of diegetic singing in ways that will later be the province of nondiegetic underscore in his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930).</jats:p> <jats:p>Shirley Temple's Civil War–set films (The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel [both 1935] and Dimples [1936]) strongly replicate the use of the voices of enslaved characters—most of whom are onscreen only to provide justification for the source of the music—to mourn for white women. Jezebel, the 1938 antebellum melodrama, expands musicodramatic syntax that had been developed in single scenes or sequences over the entire second act and a white woman's fall and attempted redemption. Gone with the Wind (1939) both plays on convention and offers a moment of transgression for Prissy, who takes her voice for her own pleasure in defiance of Scarlett O'Hara.</jats:p> <jats:p>The detachment of the spiritual from the everyday experience of African Americans led to a recognition of the artistry of the music and the singers on the concert stage. In film, however, the bodies of black singers are marginalized and set in service of white characters and white audiences.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is a theatrical figure, the protagonist of the one-act burlesque parody Sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do torrador (Sr. José of the Cloak attends a performance of The Roaster, 1855), but also an idea that expresses in abbreviated form the urban environment of nineteenth-century Lisbon, the theatrical and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-century Portugal.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Edvard Grieg's prelude to the fourth act of Henrik Ibsen's “dramatic poem” Peer Gynt (1867/76), “Morning Mood,” is among the best-loved passages in the repertoire. Commonly assumed to invoke Norway's iconic western fjords, the prelude in fact sets the stage for Ibsen's eponymous wanderer, washed up on the Moroccan coast. Commentators have recently argued for a more nuanced and multilayered response to the sense of place in Grieg's score, but the idea of “mood,” and its relationship with landscape, is central to Grieg's work in other ways and extends well beyond his famous collaboration with Ibsen. This article examines the significance of mood in one of Grieg's last works, the piano collection Stemninger (“Moods”), op. 73, and assesses the term's significance and its association with notions of landscape, absence, agency, and displacement.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Critical response to Tchaikovsky's Casse-Noisette (The Nutcracker), the ballet-féerie premiered in December 1892 in St. Petersburg, has historically been mixed. An aesthetic mongrel, the original production joined the highbrow expectations of Romantic ballet with the popular conventions of the féerie and challenged its first audience just as much as its immediate predecessor, The Sleeping Beauty. To this day, writers object to the original libretto's uneven distribution of pantomime and dance and its lack of a coherent story, of continuous development, and of a satisfying conclusion. This article offers an alternative reading that reconstructs the dramatic disruptions and turnabouts and relates them to the first production's aesthetics and politics. The ballet's composer and choreographers, using music, action, and dance, repeatedly placed the audience in a position of wonder and awe similar to that of the young heroine Clara. This aesthetic captured Alexander III's particular “scenario of power” (Richard Wortman) in late-nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia, projecting imperial court culture and sovereign power onto a fantastic canvas.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Standard histories of Anton\u00edn Dvo\u0159\u00e1k's life have largely ignored his output in the field of the symphonic poem, especially his final work in the genre, P\u00edse\u0148 bohat\u00fdrsk\u00e1 (Heroic Song). Composed in 1897 after four other tone poems explicitly based on poems by the Czech writer and ethnographer Karel Jarom\u00edr Erben, this piece features a much more abstract program and depicts the life, travails, and ultimate victory of a Slavonic bardic hero, assumed by many to be the composer himself. It premiered in late 1898 and early 1899 in Vienna and Prague, respectively, inviting mostly favorable reviews and performances in many other European cities before sliding into obscurity after the turn of the twentieth century. I situate P\u00edse\u0148 bohat\u00fdrsk\u00e1 in both the context of Dvo\u0159\u00e1k's larger output and the critical discourses of the late nineteenth century, using it as a focal point to examine not only Dvo\u0159\u00e1k's mythologized image as a composer at the fin de si\u00e8cle, but the history of the symphonic poem, the politics of the Vienna-Prague critical axis, and the hardening of critical orthodoxy in the twentieth century. Through an in-depth study of P\u00edse\u0148 bohat\u00fdrsk\u00e1's reception, I reveal a picture of Dvo\u0159\u00e1k at once familiar and unfamiliar: as the naive, spontaneously creative absolute musician at odds, in the eyes of the critics, with the unfamiliar territory of the symphonic poem, and as a specifically Czech musician who was nevertheless placed in the same masculinized, Germanocentric composer-hero lineage of genius as Beethoven and Liszt. Nevertheless, the understanding of Dvo\u0159\u00e1k as absolute Czech musician par excellence ultimately triumphed, weathering the assaults of his program music to survive into the present. This article provides a new understanding of the complexity of Dvo\u0159\u00e1k's image near the end of his life, inviting a reconsideration of the composer.<\/jats:p>