The Italian violinist and composer Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824) is considered today to have been one of the most significant forces in the history of violin playing. In 1792 he met Margaret and William Chinnery, a wealthy English couple with strong connections in the world of arts and letters. From that point onwards Viotti's life became inextricably bound up with theirs; he moved into their home and became a second father to their children, forming a remarkably successful menage A trois. Henceforth, all Viotti's career decisions were taken with this family's welfare in mind. The...

In a word, I shall endeavour to show how our music, having been originally a shell-fish, with its restrictive skeleton on the outside and no soul within, has been developed by the inevitable laws of evolution, through natural selection and the survival of the fittest, into something human, even divine, with the strong, logical skeleton of its science inside, the fair flesh of God-given beauty outside, and the whole, like man himself, animated by a celestial, eternal spirit.... W.J. Henderson, The Story of Music (1889) Critical writing about music and music history in nineteenth-century...

How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to understand better music's place and its significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analysing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary, and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Like its companion volume, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) edited by Sophie Fuller and...

Filling a significant gap in current scholarship, the fourteen original essays that make up this volume individually and collectively reflect on the relationship between music and Orientalism in the British Empire over the course of the long nineteenth century. The book is in four themed sections. 'Portrayal of the East' traces the routes from encounter to representation and restores the Orient to its rightful place in histories of Orientalism. 'Interpreting Concert Music' looks at one of the principal forms in which Orientalism could be brought to an eager and largely receptive - yet...

Charles Halle was one of the leading musicians of the nineteenth century and intimate with almost all of the great composers and performers of his time, as well as a friend of the Royal Family and known as much as a pianist and chamber musician as a conductor, in London, throughout the country and abroad, in addition to Manchester. Robert Beale presents a new perspective on Halle's life and achievement, constructed mainly from primary sources, which serves to dispel many of the inaccuracies and omissions that have stemmed, to a great extent, from Halle's own autobiographical account of 1896....

Selected from papers given at the third biennial conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, this volume, in common with its two predecessors, reflects the interdisciplinary character of the topic. The introductory essay by Julian Rushton foregrounds some of the questions that are key to this area of study: what is the nineteenth century? what is British music? and did London influence the continent? The essays which follow are divided into broad thematic groups covering aspects of gender, church music, national identity, and local and national institutions. This collection illustrates...

The English Bach Awakening concerns the introduction into England of J.S. Bach's music and information about him. Hitherto this subject has been called 'the English Bach revival', but that is a misnomer. 'Revival' implies prior life, yet no reference to Bach or to his music is known to have been made in England during his lifetime (1685-1750). The book begins with a comprehensive chronology of the English Bach Awakening. Eight chapters follow, written by Dr Philip Olleson, Dr Yo Tomita and the editor, Michael Kassler, which treat particular parts of the Awakening and show how they developed....