I begin this essay epigrammatically with song, with a single song that came to tell an historical tale of the nineteenth century (Fig. 1, p. 3). We know this single song in many versions, though it is perhaps the second version that most musicians and scholars of the nineteenth century, more accustomed to playing or hearing the keyboard music of Johannes Brahms than singing Child ballads, know best (Ex. 1). In the Brahms setting, the first of his op. 10 Balladen for solo piano, it may perhaps no longer be a song at all, for its narrative has been stripped of words.

In the early 1960s a PhD candidate at Princeton University informed his professors that he wished to write a dissertation on the operas of Gioachino Rossini. He was pointedly discouraged from doing so and told that, if he wished to be taken seriously in musicology, he should focus on worthwhile repertory such as Renaissance music or works by nineteenth-century German composers. The student persisted in his purpose and, with his groundbreaking dissertation, set the study of ottocento opera on a solid trajectory. That student was Philip Gossett. Recently, at a gala event celebrating Philip's ‘retirement’, many of us who have focused our scholarship on this repertory were reminded about the evolution of the study of nineteenth-century Italian opera during the past 50 years.

‘Invasion from the Orient’; ‘Young Violinists from Asia Gain Major Place on American Musical Scene’; ‘Suzuki's Pupils Learn Music First’: in the 1960s, headlines such as these drew attention to how successfully Asians had made Western art music their own; violinists from Japan were among the first. Observers have speculated on the reasons, but few know enough about Japanese history to realize that the phenomenon had its roots in developments during the Meiji period (1868–1912).

In 1946, W.H. Auden began a series of weekly lectures on Shakespeare's plays at New York's New School for Social Research. Arriving at The Merry Wives of Windsor, he pronounced it ‘a very dull play indeed’. Nevertheless, he allowed, ‘We can be grateful for its having been written, because it provided the occasion of Verdi's Falstaff, a very great operatic masterpiece’. Having nothing to say about The Merry Wives, he played a recording of the opera for the duration of the class.

At the crux of Byron's epic poem The Corsair lies a moral dilemma for its imprisoned hero, Conrad. Should he kill his sleeping enemy, Seyd, and thus evade impending torture and execution the next morning? Or should he accept death as the just recompense for his crimes? His decision is swift. He resolutely refuses the path of the ‘secret knife’; in contrast, Seyd's favorite slave and concubine, Gulnare, declares her readiness to do the deed instead. When Conrad, pursuing her through the winding passages of the high tower, sees her again, he at first thinks that her ‘softening heart’ had spared Seyd's life.

February 1912: The curtain of the Opéra-Comique rises to reveal medieval Brittany. Washerwomen gossip about lepers who walk among the healthy, in defiance of the law. The women hint to Maria that her son, Ervoanik, is in love with the beautiful Aliette, who, it is rumoured, is one of these freely roaming lepers. Ervoanik does love Aliette, and when he informs his parents of his decision to marry her, his father explodes in rage. Doesn't he know that she is the daughter of a leper? Ervoanik refuses to believe it. The hideous appearance of Aliette's mother, Old Tili, betrays her own leprosy as she attempts to lure young children with her singing to eat her infected breads. When Aliette and Ervoanik stop at Old Tili's cottage to rest before making a holy pilgrimage, Tili assumes that Aliette intends to infect him, just as she has infected so many others. When she realizes that Aliette truly loves Ervoanik and plans to live with him chastely, Tili lies, telling her that he already has a wife and children. Aliette confronts Ervoanik, and he claims it is true, as a joke. She immediately touches her lips to a cup of wine and offers it to him. He drinks. In the third act, Ervoanik, now a leper, awaits the procession of the dead, which leads him to his house of exile. Aliette joins him.

A certain Filippo Nardoni, upon completing his review of the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Alvaro (the Roman version of La forza del destino), wrote to the director of the police: ‘I have marked in pencil the proposed corrections, which I have thought advisable for the wretched subject of the opera. If you don't like them, they can be easily erased with sandarac’. It seems strange that an ostensible censor would correct a libretto and then not mind seeing his corrections erased; censors were, after all, gatekeepers of morality and political propriety, and no libretto was supposed to be permitted without their approval. As it turns out, Nardoni was not an official Roman censor, and yet, he and other prominent personalities were more important in censoring Verdi's operas than their official colleagues. They were not only more rigorous when it came to identifying potentially dangerous passages but also worked as a team, passing the libretto around among themselves until an acceptable alternative was found.

Congregational song occupies a central place in the history of Methodism and offers an insight into the theological, doctrinal, cultural and educational principles and practices of the movement. The repertoire, performance styles and musical preferences in evidence across Methodism at different points in its history reflect the historical influences that shaped it, the frequent tensions that emerged between local practices and the movement's hierarchy and the disputes that led to a proliferation of breakaway groups during the nineteenth century. The focus of this article will be the implicit tension between the evidence of local practice contained within the Illingworth Moor Singers' Book, which forms part of the archives at Mount Zion Methodist Church and Heritage Centre, near Halifax, UK, and the repertoire and performance practice advocated by John Wesley in the latter part of the eighteenth century. While the study of a single, locally produced collection cannot be regarded as representative of wider practices, it is nonetheless useful in highlighting the need for a more nuanced approach to the history of Methodist music, which takes account of local circumstances and practices.

Much ink was spilled on the subject of music in fin-de-siècle Italy. With the rapid expansion of the bourgeoisie during the last decades of the nineteenth century, opera-going in Italy was at its apogee, and as opera attendance surged so too did the demand for gossip about singers, titbits about the lives of composers and reviews of the latest works. This was a moment at which the booming Italian opera and journalism industries converged, particularly in the large northern cities, to produce an explosion of periodicals devoted to opera, encompassing a range of critical methods. The 1890s, however, also saw the development in Italy of a new branch of criticism devoted to more ‘serious’ types of music, penned by writers explicitly hostile to opera's domination of Italian musical life, who looked to the north as their cultural spiritual home.

To begin with two observations: (1) of the nine songs that eventually came to comprise Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, two – Nos 4 (‘Youth and Love’) and 9 (‘I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope’) – quote material from earlier songs; and (2) in an article published in 1897, Vaughan Williams criticized some of his predecessors for lacking a ‘nice sense of proportion’ in their music, surely implying, therefore, that he valued it in his own music. And it is with the interaction of those recollections and that ‘nice sense of proportion’ in songs 4 and 9 that we will be concerned.