In April 1880, one of the most intriguing lost opportunities in musical-literary history took place. Henry James and Richard Wagner were staying in Posilippo, near Naples. James was beginning a two-month visit to Italy, whilst Wagner was living in the Italian town with his family, working on essays including ‘Religion und Kunst’ (1880) and preparing the staging for Parsifal (1882). A mutual friend, Paul von Joukowsky, suggested to James that he and Wagner meet but the offer provoked an emphatic rejection from the American novelist. It would have taken place amid the heady bohemianism, homosexuality and obsessive aestheticism of Wagner's Italian circle of which Joukowsky was a part. No doubt their meeting would have been stilted and strained, suffused with various forms of social awkwardness, yet, as we shall see, James's explanation of his refusal has the overtones of a justification. Despite – or because of – the aborted meeting, James repeatedly returned to this unrealized encounter in his writing. He referred to the composer or his works in more than a dozen of his novels and short stories from the 1880s to the early twentieth century; these muted but resonant references suggest an informed and engaged response to Wagner and his works. It is as if, though these allusions, James re-imagined this event, composer and novelist encountering each other in numerous texts over a period of 20 years

When, in 1838, the University of Edinburgh received General John Reid's bequest founding a Chair of Music, members of the Senatus were baffled by their duty to establish a Professorship in a subject previously absent from university curricula, at an institution with no apparent call, or desire, for musical instruction. There was, furthermore, no obvious precedent for such a post elsewhere. Oxford and Cambridge's music professorships dated back to the seventeenth century, but both had been virtual sinecures since not long after their foundation. The institution of the Royal Academy of Music in the previous decade provided no model for a university subject, as it catered primarily for young ladies and aspiring professional performers, with no obviously ‘academic’ form of study. German universities included musical study but were primarily concerned with history in terms of stylistic development, with compositional ends in mind. The trustees appointed to manage the Reid bequest faced the daunting task of creating an entirely new academic subject, which needed to be divorced from current musical study and practice in order to render it suitable for the university environment.

On 1 October 1842, Robert Schumann sent Hans Christian Andersen a copy of his recently published Fünf Lieder op. 40, a song collection consisting of settings of four poems by Andersen as well as an anonymous ‘Neugriechisch’ poem, all translated into German by Adelbert von Chamisso. Although Clara Schumann had become acquainted with the poet earlier that year during a concert tour that took her through Copenhagen, Robert had yet to meet him, and the letter included with op. 40 was the first time that he addressed Andersen directly.

The annals of music history are filled with minor musicians whose fame was ephemeral or whose influence was negligible. Among those who have rated barely a line in the standard reference works is the pianist and composer Anton Strelezki (1858–1906). Like Anton Schindler, who made his reputation as the ‘Ami de Beethoven’, Strelezki attempted to burnish his reputation through association with a famous musical contemporary. His 21-page pamphlet entitled Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt, published after the death of its subject, purports to chronicle a close relationship with Franz Liszt over a period of decades, recounting lengthy conversations and reproducing extensive quotations from his famous contemporary. Because the book contains anecdotes not documented elsewhere in the Liszt literature, it demands close scrutiny for what it tells us about Liszt. It will be shown that Strelezki's story is suspect at best and probably completely fallacious, making the source unreliable for scholars of Liszt and related nineteenth-century musicians.

It is certainly true that Satie, in his later years, did not tire of repeating that there is ‘no Truth in Art’; and in saying so, he was doubtless very much in tune with the spirit of his artistic milieu, which included, after all, such aesthetic anarchists as Picabia and Tzara, as well as the great artistic revolutionaries of the time, Picasso and Stravinsky, for whom he had unbounded admiration. And every time he did so, he was careful to attribute the erroneous belief that there is a Truth in Art to that class of writers whom he variously called ‘critiques’, ‘pédagogues’, ‘Pontifes’, ‘pions’: people of the serious persuasion, who think it is possible to teach or describe what makes a piece of art good or bad. Attacks against this tribe are, in fact, the staple of Satie's writings. It might appear sensible to infer from this that it would be foolish for a critic to look for Truth in Erik Satie's writings about art. Nonetheless, that is what I shall be doing in this article. I shall argue that, while there may, for Satie, be no truth in art, there are truths about art, susceptible of at least indirect expression, which Satie himself maintained with remarkable adroitness. Whether those truths are peculiar to the aesthetics of Satie's writings; whether they are relevant to the way we might appreciate his music; and whether they have echoes in the thought of his artistic companions (especially those mentioned above) – these are questions that will remain open; but I would like at least to suggest that they are worth asking.