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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.