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Poised at the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the worldly and the otherworldly, fantasy defies neat categorization. It is, as memorably depicted in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, an aesthetic mode that transgresses the borders of all that is familiar, probing the strange, irrational side of human psychology. While studies in the fields of literary criticism and the visual arts have grappled with the ontological slipperiness of fantasy, 1 its aural dimensions, particularly in the context of nineteenth-century culture, have evaded sustained exegesis. Music, in Francesca Brittan's words, 'is the final hurdle, the most difficult medium to capture and theorize. But in the case of fantasy it isquite obviouslycrucial' (p. 4). In this thought-provoking and eloquently written book, Brittan more than rises to the challenge, capturing with imaginative flair the sound of fantasy in contexts that range from the magical and the oneiric to the demonic and the grotesque. In the Introduction, which maps out the book's critical terrain, Brittan notes that her study is 'concerned with the ways in which music interfaced with literary and visual fantasy and, more pointedly, with fantasy's emergence as a compositional category' (p. 5). 2 To address these avenues of enquiry, she pursues a multisensory and multidisciplinary approach, inviting the reader to enter the 'interstitial space between reading, hearing, seeing, and sensing' (p. 5), a space from which one will emerge with a deepened understanding of the pervasive yet complex status of fantasy in the nineteenth century. Brittan encapsulates her methodology thus: To discover where fantasy resides and how it works, we must be willing to … slip from visual and musical discourses through literary, medical, philosophical, and technological ones, often occupying between-spaces. This kind of intermediality and disciplinary blurring can feel precarious, compromising our status as experts, forcing us into foreign or uncertain territory. But it is also emancipatory, allowing musicological questions to become broader inquiries about the nature of intellectual (poetic, magical, made-up) history (p. 13).

A search for pair production of the supersymmetric partner of the top quark, the top squark, in proton-proton collisions at $$ \sqrt{s} $$ s = 13 TeV is presented in final states containing at least one hadronically decaying tau lepton and large missing transverse momentum. This final state is highly sensitive to scenarios of supersymmetry in which the decay of the top squark to tau leptons is enhanced. The search uses a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb−1, which was recorded with the CMS detector during 2016–2018. No significant excess is observed with respect to the standard model predictions. Exclusion limits at 95% confidence level on the masses of the top squark and the lightest neutralino are presented under the assumptions of simplified models. The results probe top squark masses up to 1150 GeV for a nearly massless neutralino. This search covers a relatively less explored parameter space in the context of supersymmetry, and the exclusion limit is the most stringent to date for the model considered here.

In the course of the last two hundred years, different facets of Clara Schumann's artistic, creative and performative persona have been highlighted and different narratives have been produced. As the articles to follow demonstrate, these facets include Clara Schumann as a performer, an improviser, a virtuoso, a priestess, a prophetess, a celebrity, a composer and a curator of flowers and photographs. The Introduction and four research articles in this issue devoted to Schumann suggest in multifaceted ways that her creative identities and legacies are open to new ways of being contextualized in both historical and contemporary contexts. This journal issue initiates important conversations and provides some constructive starting points for considering the nature of Clara Schumann's identities and their legacies, and for pondering how Clara Schumann can help us to think afresh about identity and legacy as concepts. Grappling with a range of sources in both German and English, this Introduction to the issue embraces the fluid intersections in Clara Schumann's creative world between the visual and the tactile, the sonic and the corporeal. It explores the changing images of Schumann from her lifetime to the present day and reconsiders her creativity from our current perspective.

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