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The aims of George Newnes's Strand Musical Magazine were largely practical in nature.1 Though the periodical ran only briefly—appearing in six installments from January 1895 to December 1897—its few volumes were staggeringly rich, each with over 500 pages of material about musical life in nineteenth-century Britain.2 Edited by the French-born music publisher Emile Hatzfeld, it printed articles about the lives of composers, accounts of the history of English musical institutions, notifications of upcoming concerts, portraits and photographs of eminent musical figures, sheet music for dozens of original compositions, and illustrated fictional works by a variety of relatively unknown or anonymous writers.3
As Hatzfeld wrote in his introductory essay for the first volume, the magazine's primary aim was to communicate information about concerts, lectures, and other musical events to the British public—material that Hatzfeld expected would "prove highly interesting to the general as well as to the musical reader."4 The magazine would also disseminate sheet music at a relatively low price: "The Editor desires to point out that, apart from the literary matter and illustrations, the public will be able to secure, for sixpence, through the medium of the magazine, twelve songs and pieces of music which, in sheet form, would cost about a guinea."5 Indeed, the Strand Magazine advertised that the Strand Musical Magazine could be purchased for sixpence at "any Newsagent, Bookseller, or at the Railway Bookstalls" or for ninepence "by post."6 Readers of the magazine would thus have relatively easy and affordable access to a collection of popular and classical scores by a variety of composers, such as Maude White, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and Franz Behr, that they could play at home.
As Hatzfeld's introduction indicates, the Strand Musical Magazine also had a nationalistic aim—to highlight British prowess in the field of classical music. Many thought of nineteenth-century Britain as a "land without music," as the German critic Oscar A. H. Schmitz wrote in 1914.7 Many in the English musical world were perturbed by Britain's perceived backwardness in classical music, especially compared to continental musical powerhouses like Germany and Austria.8 Hatzfeld, however, insisted that the "British are a music-loving people."9 The opening article of the magazine's first volume was a history of the...