Few songs of the British nineteenth century have had the staying power of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. With music by Henry Bishop and words by John Howard Payne, it first appeared in Clari; or, the Maid of Milan (1823) at London’s Covent Garden. The song remained in the repertory well into the twentieth century and is still a point of reference in the twenty-first. In the initial dramatic context, it was a solo vehicle for the titular heroine, a means of expressing Clari’s longing to return to her ‘humble’ home. Once the number became a breakout hit, the opera’s narrative details ceded significance to a vaguer international vogue for nostalgic sentiment. Like the much-discussed Swiss maladie du pays or the contemporary craze for the ranz des vaches, Bishop and Payne’s creation piqued the public interest in imagining a home out of reach. As the decades wore on, however, the song’s invocation of home acquired a distinctive national accent. By the mid-Victorian period ‘Home, Sweet Home’ had come to anchor an ideology of English exceptionalism. To perform or attend to this song in 1871 was to partake in a quasi-ritualistic affirmation of the doctrine of the hearth. This was partly bound up with the specious claim that other languages lacked an adequate word for home, but it was also connected to a shift in the geography of belonging. In lieu of the Romantic yearning for a distant homeland, this new Victorian nostalgia fixated on the heteronormative family home with its promise of shelter from the trials of urban modernity and the vices of foreign politics. Drawing on a range of musical, visual, and literary sources this article explores a key passage in the history of British ambivalence to city living via a song that emerged as a powerful amplifier of anti-urban desire.

At the outbreak of the First World War the Hallé Orchestra was entering a new phase. The retirement of Hans Richter as its Principal Conductor in 1911 had led to the appointment the following year of Michael Balling, a German who, like Richter, was associated with the Bayreuth circle. Although Balling had clear ideas as to the direction in which he wished to take the orchestra, the declaration of war against Germany in 1914 made his continued tenure impractical. Although the outbreak of war in 1914 initially appeared a major blow to the orchestra’s fortunes, the engagement during the war years of a number of interim conductors, not least Sir Thomas Beecham, ultimately enabled the Hallé’s programming to expand beyond its hitherto rather German-heavy repertoire. It also provided openings for women, previously unrepresented in the orchestra, to take the places of absent male players, thereby setting a precedent would ultimately to lead to women being offered permanent contracts. Sources in the Hallé Orchestra’s own archives and those at Manchester Central Library shed light on the issues faced by the Hallé Concerts Society in maintaining the orchestra’s important contribution to the musical life of Manchester during the war years.

This article analyses the representation of Spanish history in the operas ‘Fernand Cortez’ (1809) and ‘Pélage’ (1814), along with their ambivalent political uses and economic dynamics at the Paris Opéra during the transition from the First Empire to the Bourbon Restoration. It seeks to complement historiographical interpretations that often view these operas primarily as vehicles of Napoleonic or Bourbon propaganda, by examining the artistic careers of their authors – especially the composer Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851) and librettist Etienne de Jouy (1764–1846). A closer look at their personal and professional paths reveals a multi-layered space of symbolic conflict, shaped by disputes over reputation and competition for positions within the Parisian musical milieu. Drawing on archival and press sources, this paper studies the interplay between official political agendas and individual ambitions, considering how the self-serving staging of Spanish medieval and imperial history was incorporated into French narratives of power.

Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future, Hector Berlioz’s novella from 1844, is a testament to how the composer imagined a perfect city drawing from both the musical past and his autobiography. Euphonia envisions a community of artists striving for musical perfection, which is demonstrated during a recurring festival honouring Gluck, Berlioz’s first musical idol. Composers carefully monitor musical preparation, and only knowledgeable audiences attend concerts. Berlioz’s visionary, futuristic utopia is built on nostalgia for an alternate musical culture and recent musical heritage. This imagined city arose from the composer’s experiences in the urban locales where he lived. Euphonia is Berlioz’s dream to musically revisit La Côte-Saint-André, his native city, while it also expresses a desire to engage with the nostalgic aura of the German mountains. Nostalgia seeks to build alternative realities as a response to the bittersweet memories of times gone by and the perception that the culture of the present is declining. Rather than being solely directed at reminiscing about the past, the power of nostalgia relies on its ability to create the promise of a better future. Despite that Berlioz continued to enrich his artistic outlook in Paris, the composer also faced frustrations with the musical establishment in which he worked and about which he wrote. Berlioz considered that in Paris popular opinions and habits of the musical world had tarnished music’s integrity. As it became clear that his musical ideals were not met in the real world, he imagined a perfect city-conservatory, Euphonia, where Berlioz countered the artistic realities and hardships he faced in Paris and in exchange imagined new spaces where his ideas would flourish. The utopic yet so nostalgic city of Euphonia, like Berlioz’s music, commemorated the musical values of past eras and anticipated a future of creative possibility.

Anton Rubinstein’s music has often been portrayed as a conservative, cosmopolitan foil to the progressive, nationalist compositions of the Balakirev circle. This is also how the Balakirev circle viewed it throughout the 1860s, but their opposition suddenly gave way to public adulation in 1869. Ostensibly, the reason for this about-face was musical, since with Ivan IV (1868) and Don Quixote (1870), Rubinstein finally produced two explicitly programmatic symphonic pictures. Yet the difference between Rubinstein’s symphonic pictures and his earlier works was not as radical as the Balakirev circle made it out to be, and at least part of the circle’s motivation for suddenly praising them seems to have originated in extramusical concerns. In 1869, Balakirev was dismissed as the director of the Russian Musical Society and threw himself into organizing the Free Music School concerts, which he intended as a competitive alternative to those of the RMS. In order to attract audiences, he became determined to secure the Saint Petersburg premiere of Ivan IV as well as Rubinstein’s performances as a soloist, and it was in this context that the Balakirev circle bombarded the press with glowing reviews of Rubinstein’s music. In the short run, this rapprochement even grew beyond a marriage of convenience and developed into regular meetings at which Rubinstein and the Balakirev circle presented their compositions for criticism. These meetings were ephemeral, but in later years most of the Balakirev circle maintained a polite relationship with Rubinstein. The exception was Vladimir Stasov, who erased the rapprochement from his memory and reverted to peddling the image of Rubinstein as the archconservative enemy of Russian music that he had already constructed in the 1860s. Alas, it was Stasov who shaped twentieth-century historiography of Russian music, and this is why the events of 1869–71 have remained obscured in modern scholarship.

Music was important in John Stuart Mill’s life. He was an accomplished pianist and a talented improviser. His works include treatments of various philosophical aspects of music, including its metaphysics, its epistemology, the sources and nature of its value, and its aesthetics. Some of his ideas on musical aesthetics are still of interest. This applies to his distinction between those reactions to music that are based on associations with non-musical experiences and those that are based on properties of the music itself. It also applies to his concepts of poetic and oratorical modes of musical expression. In addition to his other achievements, he should be recognized as a philosopher of music.

London’s nineteenth-century sailortown – centred around Ratcliffe Highway and the surrounding docklands – was a vital hub of maritime activity. Yet much of what is known about this space derives from landsmen’s accounts: narratives by Victorian reformers, novelists and journalists who often portrayed the sailortown as a site of crime, vice and moral degeneration. In contrast, sea shanties, rooted in the lived experiences of sailors themselves, offer an alternative perspective, illuminating the values and self-perceptions of the maritime community. This article examines how London’s sailortown is represented in shanty repertoire, analysing the lyrics of shanties associated with the city to reveal recurring themes, such as encounters with women, financial exploitation, alcohol consumption and the dangers of the Highway. These songs provide insight not only into the everyday lives of sailors ashore but also into how they navigated and interpreted urban spaces. Furthermore, by considering the broader soundscapes of the docklands (including the influence of street performers, public houses and the music hall), this study explores how urban auditory culture shaped the content and form of shanties. By highlighting sailors’ voices through their songs, this article reconstructs a more nuanced and culturally embedded understanding of London’s sailortown and its place within the wider maritime world.