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The finale of Brahms’s Violin Sonata, Op. 78, famously incorporates material from his own Regenlied and Nachklang, Op. 59 Nos. 3 and 4. These songs, however, also carried private connotations for Clara Schumann, who first played them during a depressive turn and persistently associated them with melancholy and insomnia. Moreover, months before completing the sonata, Brahms sent her the first 24 measures of its slow movement, along with a letter presenting the excerpt as a self-standing response to news of Felix Schumann’s terminal illness. Chapter 7 reconstructs the shifting contours of Clara’s interrupted encounter—first, with Brahms’s offering of musical reassurance; next, after Felix’s death, with the sunny first movement of an apparently unrelated sonata; then, with a slow movement that reanimated Brahms’s original musical offering; and, finally, with a finale in which that offering returned once more to temper and transform the allusions to songs she had once feared.

Developing the problematisation of a unitary understanding of historical temporality, this chapter addresses a philosophical problem in our understanding of time, namely its topology or structure. Music is in a particularly privileged position to express the sense of the subjective flux of time, the thickness of the past and its constitution through memory, and in no musical repertoire are these points more pertinent than for the cyclic instrumental works of late nineteenth-century French composers long associated with Marcel Proust and his fictional composer Vinteuil. To this end, the chapter investigates pieces by three composers bound up with Proust’s world—Saint-Saëns’s First Violin Sonata, Franck’s String Quartet, and d’Indy’s Symphony No. 2. Each work suggests a subtly different relationship with time, whether suggesting the dissociation between past, present, and future, the disordering of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’, states of tenselessness, or the paradoxical simultaneity of incompatible tenses.

Colloredo summoned Mozart to Vienna as a Konzertmeister, composer, and keyboard player, to entertain his guests. Colloredo surely noticed Mozart's interest in exploiting Vienna for his own benefit: for Mozart it was “the land of the Clavier”. Mozart was plotting his escape almost from the moment of arrival. He reviewed the chances of gaining a foothold at court, such as might have satisfied even Leopold, but there were no vacancies. Mozart's insubordinate attitude led the archbishop to fire him in May, but only orally, and his release took a month's negotiation. He worked extremely hard to realise his intention to support himself on a freelance basis. He finished the six violin sonatas published by Artaria in 1781 as Op.2, dedicating them to Josepha Auernhammer. A less homogeneous selection followed, published by Torricella in 1784, containing two B flat sonatas (K. 330=31SC of 1783 for piano, and K. 454 for piano and violin) and the earlier piano sonata in D (K. 284–205b, of 1775). He composed variation sets for violin and piano and for piano alone.

After the musical canon became established in the Gilded Age, the status quo in American music persisted well into the second decade of the twentieth century. George Chadwick, Amy Beach, Horatio Parker, and many other late romantic composers remained active and maintained much of their styles. Before 1915 two American composers, Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein, were writing unusual and original music. Despite their completely different backgrounds, career tracks, and historical reputations, both men arrived at musical positions that were remarkably similar and endured comparable problems. Both also wrote programmatic music in the broadest sense. In January and February 1915, Ornstein gave a series of four concerts at the Bandbox Theatre in New York City, by far the most significant event in his American performing career. His most uncompromising foray into modernism was the Violin Sonata, Op. 31. For Ives, his Concord Sonata was a bold move that established his name before the musical world. This chapter focuses on the lives and musical careers of Ornstein and Ives.

This chapter describes Barber’s first few trips to Europe, with a fellow student, cellist David Freed, where his romance for European culture began and greatly influenced his work. He sought the most brilliant European artists, musicians, and music professors during that time, immersing himself in their works and teachings. These trips left him with a greater passion for composition as he returned to the Curtis Institute, where he proceeded to write with an utmost intensity. But his writing at this time was not without the usual peaks and troughs, as is the case with any artist. There were compositions wherein Barber doubted his talent. However, his perseverance and determination earned him his first prize in music—the Joseph Bearns Prize for a violin sonata that was lost for many years. It was also at this time that the Serenade of 1928 was born, one of the earliest orchestra pieces that launched Barber’s career. The promotion of his work by Mary Curtis Bok, the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music, was substantial.

Chapter 3 draws on unpublished correspondence and archival documents to offer a fuller accounting of the sources and development of Alfred Schnittke’s evolving concept of polystylism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It explores the first expressions of polystylism in his film scores for Elem Klimov and Andrey Khrzhanovsky. It also offers a close reading of Schnittke’s seminal 1971 polystylism manifesto, “Polystylistic Tendencies of Modern Music.” This analysis is based on a contextualization and comparison of all known existing sources of the essay. It considers Schnittke’s influences from the contemporary soundscape as well as the essay’s larger implications for understanding his goals for writing music, music that balanced innovation with familiar socialist realist demands for accessibility and “democratization.” It also returns to Schnittke’s Violin Sonata no. 2, “Quasi una Sonata,” further discussing it as an example of his early polystylistic practice.

Chapter 1 discusses the precursors for polystylism in the film, visual arts, and musicking of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s. It begins by considering two compositions that encapsulate the initial motivations and method for polystylism: Schnittke’s Violin Sonata no. 2, “Quasi una Sonata,” from 1968, and Silvestrov’s Drama for violin, cello, and piano, composed between 1970 and 1971. Both works juxtapose different techniques and approaches, shifting, often quite radically, from extremely dissonant, sonoristic gestures to quotations or pastiche. This chapter also presents a genealogy of polystylism, looking first at polystylistic antecedents in the music of Dmitriy Shostakovich, Gavriil Popov, Boris Asafyev, and other composers, as well as the general trend toward collage and montage in the Russian visual arts and film from the teens to the 1930s. It concludes by exploring the collage works that took hold in the 1960s in the USSR, starting with Arvo Pärt’s Collage on the Theme B-A-C-H, before spreading more widely, ultimately providing the fuel for Schnittke’s early polystylistic compositions and his theorizing of polystylism by the end of the decade.

An exposition’s punctuation sequence may be demarcated in such a way as to suggest the presence of presence of a distinct theme zone. As an analytic strategy for dealing with Galant expositions, it is often best not to presuppose the presence of these theme zones, but to understand them as arising as a possible by-product of the articulation of the punctuation form. Two clear examples of Galant expositions that suggest distinct theme zones are examined in this chapter: from the finale of Leopold Mozart’s Sonata for Keyboard in F and from the first movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Church Sonata in D, K. 144.