The history of music in nineteenth-century America, and the place of music within American culture of the period, is an area of scholarly inquiry that recently has received increased attention. It is also, as the varied articles collected in this issue illustrate, a complex topic and an area ripe for much additional research. The four articles deal with different aspects of nineteenth-century American music history and culture; in each, however, there are also areas of overlap and intersection. All four authors use as a starting point issues that have already been the subject of some scholarly attention, and examine these topics either more thoroughly or from a new theoretical or contextual point of view. The resulting aggregate should help readers to understand better a complicated and under-explored world, for all four articles highlight the complexity of musical life in America and explore some of the many ways that cultural life in the United States reflected and resonated with that of Europe. All four authors, furthermore, either hint at or explicitly mention areas that are ripe for further research.

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 7 June 1845, the New York Herald published a letter by an ‘occasional correspondent’ from Philadelphia concerning William Henry Fry's first grand opera, Leonora, which premiered three days before at the Chestnut Street Theatre. The letter contained the following remark:

All were delighted with the music, it was so much like an old acquaintance in a new coat; indeed some of ‘the cognoscenti’ said that it was a warm ‘hash’ of Bellini, with a cold shoulder of ‘Rossini,’ and a handful of ‘Auber’ salt – whilst others congratulated Mr. Fry upon his opera being so much like Norma ….

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.

From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, the breadth of John Philip Sousa's career seems remarkable and unprecedented. His marches, of course, continue to dominate concert band programmes around the world. But Sousa was also a notably profitable composer of dances, songs and descriptive works that were once performed not only by bands, but also by orchestras, soloists and parlour musicians. His successful run as a theatre violinist, operetta composer, novelist and commentator made the Sousa name omnipresent in late nineteenth-century American cultural life. Given his considerable breadth and remarkable fame, it is hardly surprising that Sousa's name is found in seven of the 20 chapters that comprise the recent Cambridge History of American Music (second only to Charles Ives).

In August of 1846, Margaret Fuller – one of the most influential feminist intellectuals in American history – sailed from New York City to Europe prepared to continue her work as the lead columnist for the New-York Tribune. As it was planned by Fuller and Horace Greeley – the Tribune's editor – while abroad, Fuller would work as an international correspondent and send to the Tribune letters of her travels that recorded her thoughts about Europe, which she did from late 1846 until late 1849, with her final piece appearing in the 6 January 1850 edition of the paper. In ‘Letter No. XI’ (1847) of Fuller's more than 30 European dispatches to the Tribune, she recounted for her readers several of the operas that she attended while in Paris. After first reviewing Robert le Diable, Guillaume Tell, L'Elisire d'Amore and Semiramide in this 31 March letter, Fuller turned her attention to a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Fuller assessed Don Giovanni differently from the other operas in her letter. Rather than highlight the merits of the singers or staging, she prefaced her review with an account of her decision to take ether in an attempt to alleviate the pain she had been suffering as a result of toothache. In some depth, Fuller described the pleasurable sensations that she had experienced because of the ether. As she noted, however, the treatment had not stopped her discomfort. This troubled her on more than one level. For one, she was in acute pain; but Fuller was also worried that her suffering might make it difficult for her to sit through the entirety of Don Giovanni. Fuller had long wanted to attend this opera, so despite her concern she went. Her choice to go would delight her, for as Fuller wrote in her letter, once Don Giovanni began, ‘the music soothed the nerves’ of her toothache ‘at once’. But even more wonderful than this, she explained, was that, after hearing Mozart's music, the pain from her toothache ‘left [her] from that time’ on.

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.

In the spring of 1856, the critic Émile Girac published a review of George Frederick Bristow's Symphony No. 2, the Jullien Symphony, in The Albion. What he wrote is revealing; it reads in part:

But do you know how much is expressed by those two little words the Jullien Symphony? They mean simply that Jullien did more for Concert music in three months, than the Philharmonic Society has accomplished since Mr. U.C. Hill created it and brought it before the world. [Jullien] gave us Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, as we have never heard them interpreted in New York. He taught us the art of shades and effects in music …. He [also] revealed to us the powers of Bristow, Fry, and Eisfeld, and did far more for their reputation than was ever done by the Society, which owed so much at least to the first and last of these noble and courageous musicians. … [T]his is the true meaning of Bristow's symphony.