Until late in the twentieth century, formal analysis of Mozart’s operatic ensembles (chiefly those of the Da Ponte operas) was heavily skewed towards the invocation of instrumental models, and pre-eminently sonata form. Additionally, the pursuit of “absolute correspondence between the unfolding of music, text and stage-action” (Abbate and Parker) came to seem increasingly suspect. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel, rather than an opera buffa, and its ensembles are complicated by the existence of “ensemble characters” (the Three Ladies and Three Boys) who generally function collectively rather than individually. This chapter offers analyses of the Act 1 and 2 quintets and the Three Boys’ Act 2 terzetto, seeking to destabilize readings that appeal to models such as sonata rondo and reading tonal structures closely against libretto structure. Evidence from Mozart’s autograph informs the concluding discussion of vocal scoring in the Act 2 choruses and the final moments of the work.

This chapter explores register in the outer movements of the Eroica Symphony. Engaging closely with Schenker’s 1930 analysis, in which the two-line register is understood as the obligate Lage ‘obligatory register’ while the three-line octave is treated as essentially decorative or reinforcing, it argues to the contrary, asserting the structural significance of the latter. By paying particular attention to Beethoven’s scoring for the flute, it develops a narrative of registral ‘failure’ in the finale that is in stark contrast to the standard ‘heroic’ readings of this work.

As a largely self-taught composer who for the first part of his career was equally if not more active as a critic, Schumann was intensely aware of his own and his contemporaries' historical moment. Studying Wilhelm Christian Müller's Aesthetisch-historische Einleitung in die Wissenschaft der Tonkunst around 1834, he would have encountered the view that the period 1800–30 marked the highpoint – indeed, the perfection (Vollendung) – of musical history. But for Schumann the past mattered above all to the extent that it paved the way for a future music that it was the duty of his generation to cultivate. In his editorial for the first 1835 issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZfM) he set out his critical position as being ‘to keep emphatically in mind the former age and its works, to draw attention to the fact that only at such a pure source can new artistic beauties be invigorated – and thereby to resist the immediate past as inartistic, bent only on the enhancement of superficial virtuosity – and finally to prepare and hasten the coming of a new poetic age’.

Why does a piece of music end? Or rather, why does it end where it does? Webern, during the composition of his Six Bagatelles for string quartet op. 9, felt driven to a particularly uncompromising answer: “Here I had the feeling, ‘When all twelve notes have gone by, the piece is over.’” He was, admittedly, recalling his path to twelve-note composition; yet Heinrich Schenker, concerned exclusively with the structure of tonal music – to him, Webern's was a “path” that led away from music altogether – was equally clear about endings. In Free Composition he claimed that “with the arrival of Î the work is at an end. Whatever follows this can only be a reinforcement of the close – a coda – no matter what its extent or purpose may be.” There will be more to say about codas in due course; but we need immediately to distinguish Schenker's construal of “coda” from the conventional one whereby, for example, the section of music that follows the end of a sonata-form recapitulation is denominated the “coda.” A particularly clear Beethoven example is the coda to the finale of the “Appassionata” Sonata, beginning at m. 308: the double bar and new tempo indication articulate this coda especially strongly.

Between 10 and 13 August 1845 the town of Bonn was en fête. The reason for the festivities was the unveiling of the Beethoven monument or Denkmal on the Miinsterplatz. Among those present were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and the King and Queen of Prussia. Before the unveiling took place, around midday on 12 August, Beethoven's Mass in C, Op. 86 was sung at a service in the Munsterkirche. At four o'clock there was the second of two concerts directed by Liszt and Spohr, both of whom had played a major role in the monument project. Among the works performed were the ‘Emperor’ Concerto, conducted by Spohr with Liszt as soloist; the Fifth Symphony; the ‘Harp’ Quartet; and numerous other pieces, including excerpts from Christus am Oelberge and Fidelio. One reviewer estimated that the audience numbered some three thousand people, all crammed into a concert hall about two hundred feet in length. Quite apart from the considerable discomfort which the audience must have suffered, they also forfeited the opportunity to witness one of the more visually imposing events of this Beethoven-Fest, the illumination of the Rhine at Cologne.

Robert and Clara Schumann planned to attend the celebrations. Schumann's diary records that they left their home in Dresden on 31 July and reached Leipzig that evening. Early the following morning Schumann wrote to Liszt telling him that he would be present in Bonn. But he suddenly became ill, and on 2 August he decided to alter his plans.