Few aspects of Berlioz's style are more idiosyncratic than his handling of musical form. This book, the first devoted solely to the topic, explores how his formal strategies are related to the poetic and dramatic sentiments that were his very reason for being. Rodgers draws upon Berlioz's ideas about musical representation and on the ideas that would have influenced him, arguing that the relationship between musical and extra-musical narrative in Berlioz's music is best construed as metaphorical rather than literal - 'intimate' but 'indirect' in Berlioz's words. Focusing on a type of varied-repetitive form that Berlioz used to evoke poetic ideas such as mania, obsession, and meditation, the book shows how, far from disregarding form when pushing the limits of musical evocation, Berlioz harnessed its powers to convey these ideas even more vividly.

We discuss the construction and factorization pattern of several resolvent polynomials that are useful for computing Galois groups of degree 15 polynomials. As an application, we develop an algorithm for computing the Galois group of a degree 15 polynomial defined over the 5-adic numbers. This algorithm is of interest since it uses substantially fewer resolvents than the traditional method for computing Galois groups.

The past few years have seen an outpouring of research into the ways that Romantic composers distort the conventions of their Classical predecessors. One particular distortion involves the use of genuine plagal cadences that provide formal closure rather than follow a moment of formal closure; according to William Caplin, genuine plagal cadences are almost nonexistent in music written before 1850, and after that they are hardly commonplace. Fanny Hensel is an exception to this rule. Bona fide plagal cadences are common enough in her songs to emerge as a standard category of closure. This chapter examines three Hensel songs that close with plagal cadences—“Zu deines Lagers Füßen,” “Bitte,” and “Erwache Knab’ ”—arguing that they deserve to grouped among the most inventive songs of the early Romantic era, and that Hensel deserves to be seen as one of the era’s true tonal innovators.

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