Playing the Classics in the Nineteenth Century

It is a truism that since the eighteenth century the labels classics and classical have been applied to various musical repertoires, performance styles, and their reception.A witness to the latter term's widening significance and usage is found in its expanding definition in George Grove's original Dictionary of Music and Musicians.In the first edition (1879), Hubert Parry determined that classical is used for 'works which have held their place in general estimation for a considerable time, and of new works which are generally considered of the same type and style'. 1 The current definition in the New Grove Online delineates four overlapping possible understandings: '(i) formal discipline; (ii) model of excellence, supplemented by (iii) that which has to do with Greek or Latin antiquity [ ], and (iv) that which is opposed to "romantic"'. 2 These definitions imply that these terms are tied up in debates that go a long way in defining the underlying aesthetic value in musical cultures.This notion is not new.Already some 40 years ago, in a text defining classics in literature, Italo Calvino emphasized that calling something a classic is a means of creating and emphasizing one's own (national) identity. 3 This special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review interrogates Calvino's point by studying the role of classics and the classical in processes of musical identity formation.It does so through four contrasting nineteenth-century case studies, covering discourses and their impact on performance practices in tsarist Russia, the German-speaking regions, and Victorian England.The goal of this collection is twofold.First, to show that these 'works that have held their place in general estimation for a considerable time' and have become 'models of excellence' were not just adopted based on their musical qualities, but that they affected and were affected by claims of societal value in different nations.In doing so, this issue underlines classics and classical as historically and geographically situated terms and entwined with notions of (musical) identity formation, showing how differentiated the conceptions and their aims could be.Second, this issue will show