bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Martin Kitchen , The View Of A Western Marxist
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

Although the regimes ofNazi Germany and fascist Italy provide the best examples of fascism in action it would be a serious mistake to limit a definition of fascism to these two forms, or even to the period between the two World Wars. Such a definition would make it impossible to analyse fascist dangers in the present day. The fact that changing circumstances are liable to produce differences in fascist movements, at least at the phenomenological leveL has led many writeIS to talk of ‘neo-fascism’.[... ] A new fascism is bound to adapt itself to a new situation. This is already apparent in the fascistic movements such as the N_P,O.9 in Germany, the M.S.l.’0 in Italy or the National Front” in Britain_ Their style is not as rowdy and violent as that of theirpredecessors.
Klaus Theweleit, Raising The Dead
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

We may at last arrive at an understanding of fascism’s triumph in Germany. What the texts cited have most clearly demonstrated is a refusal by fascism to relinquish desire-desire in the form of a demand that ‘blood must flow’, desire in its most profound distortion. In the German Communist Party (KPD) desire was never seen as the producer of a better reality: that party never so much as intimated that there might be pleasure in liberation, pleasure in new connections, pleasure in the unleashing of new streams. Instead, desire was channelled into plotting and scheming tactics and strategies-literary ones included-while fascism screamed, ‘Germany awaken!’ What was ‘sleeping’ had ears to hear its call as a bell-peal of immediate resurrection: ‘the dead’ could now return from the entrails.
Henry a. Turner jun. Utopian anti-modernism
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

A good many widely-held beliefs about who was a fascist and who was not might thus be overturned if utopian anti-modernism should prove to be a central and common characteristic of the Italian and German movements. The implications for traditional thinking about fascism as a generic phenomenon would, however, be far more dire if, as also seems possible, such a definition were inapplicable to Italy. For if Italian Fascism should, upon closer examination, turn out to have been predominantly pro-modernist then the two paradigmatic manifestations offascism would stand opposed to one another on what many now hold to be the fundamental issues of modem times. One, that is, would have been committed to furthering the process of modernization by repressive, authoritarian methods, the other to employing similar methods but as a means of reversing that same process through a fanatical and ultimately suicidal pursuit of an unattainable, archaic utopia.
Emilio Gentile,Fascist Modemity
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

The first really important and fundamental change has been to place back on the agenda the image of an international fascism, so as not to relapse into a view of Fascism assomething wholly Italian, domestic, home-grown. The tendency of new historiography is to probe more deeply into the specific reality of phenomena considered fascist so as to establish alongside the similarities the differences as well, some of which were substantial.

The other aspect of this change has been for scholars to start considering fascism as a phenomenon which had its own ideology and its own culture, if only-as it is prudent to emphasise-in an anthropological sense, not in an academic sense, a culture whose motivations, matrices, values have to be uncovered or highlighted even if they are negative values, alien and opposed to our world of values.
Stanley payne, a. New nationalist authoritarian state
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

The descriptive typology in table 1 is suggested merely as an analytic device of limited scope for purposes of comparative definition. It does not propose to establish a rigidly reified category, but a loose wide-spectrum description that can identify a variety of differing allegedly fascist movements while still setting them apart from other kinds of revolutionary or nationalist movements. Individual movements might then be understood to have possessed further beliefs, characteristics, and goals of major importance to them that did not contradict the common features but were simply added to them or went far beyond them.
Zeev Sternhell, A New Civilization
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

Zeev Sternhell is an Israeli scholar who has written extensively on French and Italian fascism. He is particularly keen to demonstrate how fascism represented a synthesis of ultra-right and ultra-left aspirations towards a post-liberal society rooted in the late nineteenth-century revolt against positivism and liberalism, and going ‘beyond right and left’. One peculiarity of his approach is that he regards the biological racism of Nazism as too exceptional and extreme to qualify it as a form of fascism.

FASCISM Of all the major ideologies of the twentieth century, fascism was the only one to come into being together with the century itself. It was a synthesis of organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism, a revolutionary movement based on a rejection of liberalism, democracy and Marxism. In its essential character, fascist ideology was a rejection of materialism-liberalism, democracy and Marxism being regarded simply as different aspects of the same materialist evil. It was this revolt against materialism which, from the beginning of the century, allowed a convergence of anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois nationalism and a variety of socialism which, while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary.
Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, The Lunacy Of Fascism And Nazism
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

After the war A. K. Chesterton (1899-1973) maintained his distance from Mosley’s attempts to revive fascism. His own analysis of the crisis of history was based on a conspiracy theory of the pernicious influence of Jewish finance (expounded in The New Unhappy Lords published in 1965), and focused not on a regenerated Europe but a revitalized imperial Britain. This led to the formation in 1954 of the ultra-conservative League of Empire Loyalists with its own organ, Candour. In 1967 he became the first chairman of the National Front, formed from the merger of the LEL with some smaller fascist groups. He resigned in 1971, alienated by the shift towards neo-Nazism promoted by John Tyndall and Martin Webster, but also in response to his growing unpopularity within the party.

Now it is curious that while the Press pretends to take Mosley seriously, in truth it takes his policies so little seriously that nobody to date has thought worthy of comment the fact that he makes his new bid for public attention, not by preaching Fascism, but by advocating its direct opposite-internationalism.
Leon Degrelle, The Miracle Of The Telephone Box
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

Here we find Degrelle still invoking his Catholic roots while seizing on the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz to deliver a piece of vulgar Holocaust denial which deploys two classic techniques: first he uses mathematical calculations to pour ridicule on the logistical feasibility of mass extermination; secondly he seeks to relativize the Nazi atrocities which he has minimized by referring to the Allied ‘terror bombing’ of Germany, the crimes against humanity committed in the history of the United States, and the horrors ofStalinism. There would not even have been any need for gas.[... ]

And what about Britain, with its bombardments of unfortified cities like Copenhagen, its execution of Sepoys tied to the mouths of cannons, its crushing of the Boers, and its Transvaal concentration camps, where thousands of women and children perished in indescribable misery? And what of Churchill unleashing his abominable terror bombings on the civilian population of the Reich, which burnt them in their cellars with phosphorous, and annihilated about two hundred thousand women and children.
David Irving , Laying It On The Line
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

The true position of Irving on the Final Solution can be gleaned from this item in Focal Point, the organ of the Focus Policy Group, which he formed as an abortive attempt to create a broad-based international network of ultra-nationalists in the early 1980s. The cover of this issue featured a bronze head of Hitler and bore the headline ‘The Voice from beyond Valhalla’. This passage is taken from the transcript, ‘never before published’, of a stenographer’s record of the clarification ofhis long-term policy which Hitler made in private to ‘one ofhis financial backers’ on 21 December 1922 at the Hotel Regina Palace in Munich. The piece is entitled ‘Hitler l.Ays it on the Line’ with the heading ‘In talk with German financier Hitler revealed his Secret Plans twenty years before he implemented them: Dictatorship, War, Conquest, theJews’. Here we reproduce only the section concerning theJews.
Hartwig Huber, The Immortal Principle
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

When two hundred years ago the rights of man were solemnly declared, anthropology as a natural science was still in its infancy. Human rights are the creation of jurists and philosophers. The premiss of their thinking was an isolating and speculative one: Man was abstractly conceived as an individual; not as a man, or a woman, or a child, or as someone with ties to a family, an ethnic group [Stamm], a people [Volk]. The heterogeneous world which had grown up over centuries, and which even in the age of absolutism had started to become rationally organized, was now radically simplified.

An abstractly conceived being, Man, was recognized to have fundamental freedoms in 1789, but not to be a communal being. In those days nothing was known of genetics and the like. They were building on speculations about a noble savage, who was contrasted with the European who had been corrupted by his society.[ ]
John Tyndall, Spiritual Aids
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

We live under a state that is terminally sick, in the manner of a political, economic, social and spiritual AIDS. Lacking the built-in natural immunity that is to be found in all healthy body organisms, it is vulnerable to every germ and shock that the world climate may blow its way. For this, state, every week is a crisis, as it wriggles vainly to cope with some fresh problem arising from out of its own insoluble internal tensions and contradictions. Its death is certain; the only remaining uncertainty is that of the precise moment when it expires.[ ]

In every aspect of contemporary British politics the habit is to try to ‘square the circle’, to make work that which will not work. The present form of parliamentarydemocracy’ as a method for the translation of the popular will into political action has become a stale joke.
L’gsuvre Franaise, Blood, Soil, And Faith
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

In government, in the Church, in parliament, in political parties, in the media and art, in the judicial system, in the street, the insolence and maliciousness of those who claim to be ‘anti-racist’ seem no longer to have any limit.

Their aim is to ensure the victory of cosmopolitanism through the use of all intellectual and material forms of subversion.

Their plan involves the negation of the Christian essence of our national existence and the denial of the European source of our French identity.

Their tactic consists in systematically accusing French people of good stock, and who are prepared to defend themselves, of’fascism’ and ‘nazism’. It is what they call ‘the struggle against racism’, ‘anti-racism’.[ ]
British National Party, Saving The Nation
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

The British National Party caused a brief’moral panic’ in the media when in September 1993 its candidate Derek Beacleon was one of the town councillors elected to represent Tower Hamlets, a particularly run-down part of the East End of London. It was formed by the veteran fascist agitator John Tyndall in 1982 as a result of schisms which occurred within the National Front in the wake of its eclipse after the 1979 general election, and has effectively replaced it as Britain’s most important fascist movement. The party’s ‘esoteric’ ideology emanating.from the top is a virulent neo-Nazism adapted to the British situation (see Text 202). However, in its pronouncements for more public consumption (as in this regular insert in the party organ British Nationalist: BNP) the vision of a white supremacist post-liberal corporate state under an authoritarian leader is translated into as ‘democratic’ a discourse as possible, though it is not difficult to decode its ‘subtext’.
Movimento Sociale Italiano, For A New Italy
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

The present situation is the result of the total failure of the absurd and suicidal race for the paradise of possessions and appearances instead of pursuing the only world which gives quality and substance to a person, namely the world of ‘being’. This is the difference which has always distinguished the Youth Front [Fronte della Gioventu] from other youth organizations.[... ] It is because ofits way ofbeing, its history, its tradition, its presence in the country, that today the Youth Front must form the nucleus of a youth alliance (like the MSI-DN,6 in the National Alliance), a broad based movement which enables different souls to identify with a political project in which values such as national identity, freedom, right to life, the family, and solidarity provide the base for the reconstruction of the nation.[...]
An Inheritance Reaffirmed: Marx
Authors: Wood Ellen Meiksins
Published: November 2023

Both the historical record and the structural antagonism between capital and labour tell a story very different from the one we are offered by the NTS.’ One cannot, then, help wondering what exactly we are being told when the NTS deny the connection between the working class and socialism, or even between economic conditions and political forces in general. Again, we are reminded that the NTS has come to fruition not at a time when the opposition between labour and capital has receded into the background, but rather when the antagonisms of class have been especially urgent and visible.
Arguments The End of the Social
Authors: Baudrillard Jean
Published: November 2023

The social is not a clear and unequivocal process. Do modem societies correspond to a process of socialisation or to one of progressive desocialisation? Everything depends on one’s understanding of the term and none of these is fixed; all are reversible. Thus the institutions which have sign-posted the ‘advance of the social’ (urbanisation, concentration, production, work, medicine, education, social security, insurance, etc.) including capital, which was undoubtedly the most effective socialisation medium of all, could be said to produce and destroy the social in one and the same movement.
The Class Structure of the ‘Classic Slum’
Authors: Roberts Robert
Published: November 2023

No view of the English working class in the first quarter of this century would be accurate if that class were shown merely as a great amalgam of artisan and labouring groups united by a common aim and culture. Life in reality was much more complex. Socially the unskilled workers and their families, who made up about 50 per cent of the population in our industrial cities, varied as much from the manual elite as did people in middle station from the aristocracy.
Symbols, Codes, and Cultures
Authors: Martin Bernice
Published: November 2023

The work of two contemporary anthropologists, Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, has been especially valuable in offering concepts through which these central tensions might be charted. Both have been particularly concerned with religious, ritual and symbolic behaviour, and both have explicitly, though very much in passing, related their conceptual schema to certain facets of the counter-culture.
Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression
Authors: Hooks Bell
Published: November 2023

A central problem within feminist discourse has been our inability to either arrive at a consensus of opinion about what feminism is or accept definition(s) that could serve as points of unification. Witham agreed upon definition(s), we lack a sound foundation on whid1 to construct theory or engage in overall meaningful praxis. Expressing her frustrations with the absence of clear lifestyle. It could serve as a way women who are concerned about diminish as well as other political movements could express their support while avoiding linguistic structures that give primacy to one particular group. It would also encourage greater exploration in feminist theory.
In a Different Voice
Authors: Gilligan Carol
Published: November 2023

Over the past ten years, I have been listening to people talking about morality and about themselves. Halfway through that time, I began to hear a distinction in these voices. two ways of speaking about moral problems, two modes of describing the relationship between ocher and self. Differences repressed in the psychological literature as steps in a developmental progression suddenly appeared instead as a contrapuntal theme, women imp the cycle of life and recurring in varying forms in people’s judgments, fantasies, and thoughts. The occasion for this observation was the selection of a sample of women for a study of the relation between judgment and action in a situation of moral conflict and choice. Against the background of the psychological descriptions of identity and moral development which I had read and taught for a number of years, the women’s voices sounded distinct. It was then that I began to notice the recurrent problems in interpreting women’s development and to connect these problems to the repeated exclusion of women from the critical theory-building studies of Physiology research.
Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory
Authors: Chodorow Nancy
Published: November 2023

In the early period of the contemporary feminist movement, feminists searched for a grand theory. This single cause, or dominant factor, theory would e1.l)lain a se1.7.lal inequality, hierarchy, and domination that were omnipresent and that defined and circumscribed merely the experience and organization of gender and senility. For some theorists, gender oppression inhered in capitalist relations of work and exploitation, in the state or the family, in divisions among women or alliances among men, or in male violence and control of women’s reproductive and sexual capacities. For others. women were entrapped through their own reproductive anatomy, the objectification of their bodies, the mothering relation or the marriage relation, compulsory heteroseA7.lality, the cultural or ideological construction of’ woman’, location in the domestic sphere, or association with nature.
Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology
Authors: Jaggar Alison
Published: November 2023

within the western philosophical tradition, emotions have usually been considered potentially or actually subversive of knowledge. From Plato until the present. with a few notable exceptions, reason rather than emotion has been regarded as the indispensable faculty for acquiring knowledge.” Typically, although again not invariably, the rational has been contrasted with the emotional, and this contrasted pair then often linked with other dichotomies. Not only has reason been contrasted will emotion, but it has also been associated with ilia mental. the cultural. the universal, the public and the male, whereas emotion has been associated with the irrational. the physical, the natural. the particular, the private and, of course, the female.
Introduction
Authors: Kemp Sandra , Squires Judith
Published: November 2023

The following debate between social constructivist and essentialist theorists highlights the issues at stake in lie invocation of the category of ‘woman. How do we represent sternal, or social difference, without rearming to dual hierarchized oppositions? Do new subject positions impact on form-are we dealing here with metaphor, representation, or some kind of ‘rear?
Woman: The One and the Many
Authors: Spelman Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Women of color have been distrustful of white women who point to similarities between them when it seems politically expedient to do so and to dissimilarities when it does not. They have wanted to know just why and when white women become interested in similarities and differences among women. At issue is not so much whether there are or are not similarities or differences, but about how white middleclass feminists try to use claims about similarity and differences among v,10men in different directions, depending on what they believe such similarity or dissimilarity implies. For example, as we have seen, sometimes feminists have insisted on the similarity between the treatment of’ women’ and that of ‘slaves’; other times they have insisted that the situation of free women and slave women is different enough that the situation of slave women cannot be a useful guide to that of free women. The issue is thus not so much a metaphysical one as a political one.
Authenticity and the Writing: Cure: Reading: Some Migrant Women’s Writing:
Authors: Gunbw Sneja
Published: November 2023

The title of this essay expresses a contradiction which has been haunting me for some time. It was prompted initially by such questions as: when does one start, or stop. writing as a migrant (an immigrant to Australia from a non· Anglo·Celtic culture). or ‘as’ anything) A related version was: what makes a text migrant writing, or women’s writing? After Derrida, this seems an impossible question because how can one still argue for writing in conjunction with any notion of authenticity? Authenticity has additionally been located in speech and in the self purportedly fully present behind the utterance.
Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History
Authors: Riley Denise
Published: November 2023

The black abolitionist and freed slave, Sojourner Truth, spoke out at the Akron convention in 1851, and named her own toughness in a famous peroration against the notion of woman’s disqualifying frailty. She rested her case on her refrain Aint I a woman?’ It’s my hope to persuade readers that a new Sojourner Truth might well-except for the catastrophic.
Recovering: Women in History from Feminist Deconstructionism
Authors: Stanley Liz
Published: November 2023

Denise Riley’s (1988) speculative deliberation on the category of women in history raises a major epistemological debate mat confronts cotemporary feminism and, although in a somewhat different form, also confronts con· temporary mainstream history and sociology too. Her thesis is that the category women (as well as me more obviously contentious Woman) is ‘historically. discursively constructed, and always relatively to other categories which themselves change’. This argument is more man an emphasis on conditioning or socialization, for what it disputes is the existence of any reality beneath or within me constructions (and terms it parallels or rather repeats Michel Foucault’s (1976) argument about ‘the homosexual’).
Queer Notions
Authors: Smyth Cherry
Published: November 2023

Each time the word ‘queer’ is used it defines a strategy, an attitude, a reference to other identities and a new self-understanding. And queer can be qualified as ‘more queer’, ‘queerer’ or ‘queerest’ as the naming develops into a more complex process of identification.) For many, the term marks a grov,1ing lack of faith in the institutions of the state, in political procedures, in the press. the education system, policing and the law. Both in culture and politics, queer articulates a radical questioning of social and cultural norms, notions of gender. reproductive sexuality and the family. we are beginning to realize how much of our history and ideologies operate on a homo-hetero opposition, constantly privileging the hetero perspective as normative, positing the homo perspective as bad and annihilating the spectrum of sexualities that exists.
Bisexual Feminism: Challenging the Splits
Authors: Sturgis Susan
Published: November 2023

Bisexual-conscious feminist theory and feminist-conscious bisexual theory have me potential to challenge western ways of thinking: and these western models form the basis not only of the oppression of bisexuals, lesbians and gay men. not only of women. but of the very construction of oppression. western philosophy conceptualizes the world along deep splits. Fragmenting human from animal, man from woman, mind from body, self from other, reason from emotion, culture from nature, enquirer from object of enquiry, and black from white, metaphysical dualism imposes polarities on what is in reality interconnected and interdepended.
Whose imaginary? The Televisual Apparatus, the Female Body and Textual Strategies in Select Rock Videos on MTV
Authors: kaplan E Ann
Published: November 2023

The social Imaginary that I shall explore in fustic Television (MTV)’ has been constructed through the contradictory post•196os historical moment in which rock videos arise as a mass popular culture form. It is the mapping in the 1980s of the new 1960s discourses about politics, sex and romance on to the increasingly high-tech stage of an already advanced capitalism that partly produces the extraordinary MTV Imaginary.
Reproductive Technologies: Tampering with Nature?
Authors: Stanworth Michelle
Published: November 2023

Technologies designed to intervene in the process of human reproduction fall, roughly speaking. into four groups. The first and most familiar group includes those concerned with fertility control-with preventing conception, frustrating implantation of an embryo, or terminating pregnancy. [... ] A second group of reproductive technologies is concerned with the ‘man- agreement’ of labour and childbirth.[... ]
Belief and Culture
Authors: Briggs Robin
Published: November 2023

Poised between the great ages of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the seventeenth century has never acquired its own equivalent label. This is not surprising, for the period was pre-eminently one of confusion and transition, representing a major watershed in the development of European civilization. The exploratory and uncertain character of much thought of the time stimulated great literary and theatrical achievements, while working against the establishment of grand syntheses.
Other early poetry
Authors: West M L
Published: November 2023

The rest of early Greek poetry down to about 500 B.C. is sometimes loosely lumped together as ‘lyric’. This is unfortunate, because it implies that that poetry had a unity which it did not have, and because the word ‘lyric’ has associations which are largely inappropriate. In an ancient context it properly refers to poetry sung or recited to the accompaniment of the lyre. But the rhapsodes who recited epic poetry at least sometimes accompanied themselves on the lyre; while much of the smaller-scale poetry to be reviewed in this chapter was accompanied by the pipes, or not at all. Often we do not know how it was performed. It is better (though still not completely satisfactory) to divide it into melic poetry, iambic poetry, elegy, and epigram.
The classical historians
Authors: Dover K J
Published: November 2023

In ancient Egypt and other civilizations of the Near East it was the immemorial practice of kings to set up inscriptions giving detailed and systematic narratives of their own achievements in war, administration, and public works: boastful in tone and no doubt often false, but none the less a frame of reference for the historical consciousness of those who could read, and admitting of transcription and circulation on papyrus or baked clay. By contrast, if a Greek in (say) 500 B.C. wanted to learn about the past history of his own city-state, he could not look it up. No historical writings were available to him, no archives, no chronicles; only (in some states) a bare list of the holders of annual magistracies or priesthoods and texts of laws, usually undated.
Classical science and philosophy
Authors: Dover K J
Published: November 2023

In the last few centuries the province of philosophy has been substantially reduced, since science has increasingly offered means, founded upon observation, calculation, and experiment, of answering questions to which at one time only a variety of purely speculative answers could be offered. We do not now ask a philosopher how the solar system originated or why certain plants do better in sandy soil, though we might invite his criticism of the reasoning and conceptual relations involved in scientific answers to those questions. Greeks of the archaic and classical periods whose curiosity was aroused by questions about the origin, constituents, and working of the universe did not have at their disposal, and could not readily envisage, those technical means of satisfying curiosity which our own civilization has developed. They inherited poetry (Hesiod’s, for example) which narrated the origins of the universe in terms of personified entities, such as Earth, Sky, and Night, who mated and pro created, and they explained its mechanical regularities, notably the course of the Sun and the chain of phenomena dependent upon it, in terms of laws made by Zeus and obeyed by subordin ate deities. The essential first step which was to lead both to scientific and to philosophical thought was taken when certain Greeks in the first half of the sixth century B.c. devised economic al and comprehensive theories intended to explain the origin and the working of the universe by reference not to the actions of deities but to the properties of supposed ‘basic elements’ such as air, fire, water, and earth. The earliest thinkers known to have put written work into circulation are Anaximander and Anaximenes, both natives of Miletus; they wrote in prose, but the very scanty surviving quotations do not tell us anything about its literary quality.
Introduction
Authors: Robertson Anne Walters
Published: November 2023

In April 1981 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City mounted a major exhibition at The Cloisters, ‘The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis in the Time of Abbot Suger (1122–1151)’.1 In conjunction with this, an international symposium on Saint-Denis and Abbot Suger was held at Columbia University. The papers presented there focused upon this brilliant period in the history of the abbey from the vantage points of monastic life, political and social history, art, architecture, and literature.2
The Idea of a ‘Faust’ Theatre
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

Wagner’s first fascinated encounter with Goethe’s Faust was one of the most fundamental aesthetic experiences of his life. It was an experience, moreover, which was to be repeated in different circumstances at various stages from early youth to ripe old age.1 Countless remarks in his letters and conversations, together with frequent allusions to, or quotations from, the play in his theoretical writings, are eloquent testimony to a fascination which was not merely literary but musical, too: as early as 1831—in other words, while Goethe was still alive—he wrote a series of Sieben Kompositionen zu Goethes ‘Faust’, inspired by part I of Goethe’s drama. They are immature and unimpressive pieces. On a wholly different level, by contrast, was his planned ‘Faust’ Symphony, of which, however, only the first movement was completed (1839–40). When revising the piece in 1855, he retitled it A Faust Overture, the indefinite article apparently indicating that the work—arguably Wagner’s most important purely instrumental piece—lays no claims to being regarded as the definitive accompaniment to Goethe’s incommensurable poem.
Oedipus and Der Ring des Nibelungen
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

One of Germany’s leading Greek scholars, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, has described Wagner’s music dramas as ‘mythic palimpsests’1 in which the underlying script of Greek myth is constantly decipherable beneath the surface layer of Germanic and Christian legend.2 Wagner himself gave frequent emphasis to the importance of Greek myth and Attic tragedy whenever he was discussing the type of subject-matter he felt appropriate to the musical drama. Nowhere is this truer than in his self-apologia, A Communication to my Friends, although it must be added that if, in this essay, he claims to derive the themes of even his Romantic operas from classical archetypes, it is because of his palpable wish to reconcile his earlier ideas with his present beliefs as influenced by Feuerbach and revolutionary ideology.
The World in a Dying Light: Tristan und Isolde and the Myth of Night
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

Tristan und Isolde was ‘the end of all Romanticism’, Richard Strauss wrote to Joseph Gregor on 8 January 1935: ‘the yearning desire of the whole of the nineteenth century’ was ‘captured here in a single focus’.1 For Thomas Mann, too, Tristan und Isolde was ‘a Romantic work, deeply rooted in Romantic thought and sensibility’, since night was ‘the true domain and dwelling place of all Romanticism, its real discovery’.2 It was the early Romantics in Germany who had created the myth of night, contrasting the raven down of darkness with that light of reason which they associated with the Enlightenment. This latter, after all, was a movement which saw itself, as no other, as being transfigured by light. The very term ‘Enlightenment’ says it all: light must be shed on things, all things must be progressively illumined. (In German the term is Aufklärung, deriving from the Latin clarus, while the French refer to this rationalistic age as ‘le Siècle des lumières’.) The metaphysical metaphor of light on which this concept is based is expressed with particular potency by Leibniz’s Monadologie, first published in German in 1720. Monads are simple, windowless entities which, by a process of entelechy, strive to achieve a state of greater and greater brightness until they are united with the brightest, and most enlightened, monad, God.
Stylistic Layers in Eleventh-Century Polyphony
Authors: Arlt Wulf
Published: November 2023

The more we learn of the Winchester organa the more clearly does the special position of this earliest polyphonic collection emerge. The main corpus as well as most of the additions clearly belong to the first quarter of the eleventh century.The collection is remarkable not only for its size—a total of 174 organa—but also for its systematic arrangement in fascicles, according to genre and the structure of the church year. In both respects it stands in sharp contrast to all of the other sources of polyphonic music copied before the middle of the twelfth century. From the ninth century on different kinds of organum had been dealt with in theoretical texts; however, polyphonic singing evidently belonged to a realm of ad hoc practice which required no written record. And the continental sources imply that, in every sense, the organized collection from Winchester constitutes an exception.
The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy From The Tenth To The Eighteenth Century
Authors: Harper John
Published: November 2023

This book is an introduction to the principal forms and orders of Western liturgy between about 900 and 1700. It explains their nature and basic historical origin, and presents in detail the contents and orders of principal services as well as additional and special forms of worship. The book emphasizes the mainstream of Western liturgy derived from the medieval Roman Rite as found in secular and monastic churches. After the Reformation it concentrates on the rites of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. There is consideration of the nature of liturgy, a historical summary, and individual chapters on medieval churches and their communities, the Christian calendar, medieval liturgical books, the Psalms, the Office, the Mass, Processions and Additional Observances, Holy Week and Easter, the Tridentine Rite, and the English Book of Common Prayer. There are two further chapters which raise the problems of establishing the order of a liturgical service, and introduce selected medieval sources accessible in facsimile or edition. A select, annotated bibliography and a glossary of ecclesiastical and liturgical terms are included.
French Polyphony of the Thirteenth Century
Authors: Crocker Richard
Published: November 2023

Up to the stage at which the discant clausula was provided with a Latin text in the duplum, the development of polyphony at Notre Dame in Paris could be traced in relative isolation from other music of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Chapter XII describes the features that set Notre-Dame organa style apart-consistent use of a cantus firmus from the Gregorian repertory of the archetype, very extended melismatic writing for two, three, or four voices, modal rhythm, and eventually overlapping phrases between tenor and upper parts. All of that development seemed to have a logic and momentum of its own, and the kind of music it produced in the organa and independent clausulas in Perotin's style were distinctly different from any other music we know of that time. Then, with the Latin texting of the clausula duplum, more similarities with other kinds of music appear; and from then on, in fact, the Notre-Dame style merged with other music, eventually losing its individuality.
Interlude: Some Aspects of Technique
Authors: Smallan Basil
Published: November 2023

During its lengthy evolution the piano trio has come to be regarded, not altogether unjustly, as a taxing medium to control for both composers and performers. According to one commen¬tator, it is ‘one of the most difficult forms to manipulate’ and one which is ‘seldom satisfactory in balance’.1 It will, therefore, be appropriate, before proceeding further with our survey, to consider briefly some of the basic technical problems which surround trio composition, especially those related to the nature of the instruments involved, and the methods of scoring for them. Despite its intimacy of style and expression the trio genre has tended, throughout its development, to reflect microcosmically major aspects of other forms of music: initially, as we have seen, the classical sonata, the symphony, the concerto, the string quartet, and opera; and subsequently, after about 1830, the keyboard miniature, the solo song, the grand romantic concerto, and a variety of other instrumental forms of a dramatic, lyrical, or virtuosic character. Thus, it is hardly possible to identify a single set of techniques which is uniformly applicable to the genre. Before 1830, during the high days of Viennese classicism, tech¬nique functioned principally in support of structural logic, tex¬tural integrity, and the attainment of a democratic spread of interest among the parts, as much in the piano trio as in all other forms of chamber composition. But later stylistic changes brought about a weakening of the traditional aims, and the former technical criteria were gradually modified. One obvious source of difficulty was the inescapably fixed nature of the classical chamber media.
1869–1870
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

When the curtain rose on the 1869-70 season, the guns of the Civil War, that great watershed in American history, had been silent for more than four years. The victorious North’s main goals-the preservation of national unity and the abolition of slavery-seemingly had been attained. How truly unified the nation was remained moot. Secession was now out of the question for the foreseeable future, but the South could and did pounce quickly on the issue of states’ rights to constantly chip away at Washington’s ever greedier grasp. And beyond the legalities and technicalities of a sometimes enforced unity, frustration and rancor festered. Similarly, while by any common definition slavery had become illegal, the South lost little time devising ways to keep down its often feared and detested blacks. In this, surprisingly, southerners found tacit and occasionally open support from onetime foes, the former abolitionists, many of whom had railed against the idea and practice of slavery while harboring no love or respect for the slaves themselves.
1871–1872
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

The 1871-72 theatrical season was a weird one, at least in New York. By 1871 the city finally could claim a population of more than one million, yet there was many a night when only three playhouses offered those carefully varnished dramas and comedies guaranteed to please most sophisticated playgoers. A curious potpourri of events and trends conspired to create this pinched situation. Except for a few weeks at the very end of the season, the Olympic was given over entirely to a hugely popular revival of the musical pantomime Humpty Dumpty, with G. L. Fox cavorting in the leading role. Opera bouffe and minstrelsy usurped most of the season at Lina Edwin’s. The Black Crook and other musicals, or prototypical musicals, occupied Niblo’s stage for much of the time, until the theatre burned to the ground in May.
1872–1873
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Although contemporary observers might not have agreed with the conclusion, the 1872-73 season seems one of transition. Of course, the view comes from the vantage of more than one hundred years, and the transition was quiet if steady. Yet change was everywhere. That ever present terror of the era, fire, which had destroyed Niblo’s late in the preceding season, blazed anew this year, removing forever the failing Lina Edwin’s Theatre (recently converted to minstrelsy) and gutting Daly’s Fifth Avenue (scarcely daunting the intrepid Daly and his determined band). The other side of the coin was the opening of a major new home for drama. And for several seasons to come, much of that drama would be of French origin. The floodgates that Daly had unlocked earlier with Frou-Frou were now to be opened wide. Of course, English drama continued to be a mainstay at all the firstclass theatres, and its allure would be potent for seasons ahead.
1876–1877
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

It was certainly not the best of times. Nationally the outgoing Grant administration had reeled from one damning exposure of corruption after another. Now, in the new year, the next president, Rutherford B. Hayes, would enter the White House already under a cloud, for he had lost the popular ballot to Samuel J. Tilden by a sizable 250,000 votes only to win in an electoral count many felt was tainted. New York City, still wrestling with the debris left by Tweed’s skullduggery, seemed awash in a miasma of unsteady idealism, incompetence, and continuing chicanery. And, of course, effects of the 1873 panic continued to haunt the nation.
1878–1879
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Allowing the 1878-79 season to bring down the curtain on “Act I” may be giving it an undeserved importance. By theatrical standards of the late 1870s, and indeed by those of virtually all later good theatre except for what Max Beerbohm called the most “adramatic,” such a curtain is weakly anticlimactic. Historians taking a long view of our stage’s history might justify it by citing the Bowery Theatre, which at season’s end left the lists of New York playhouses offering drama in English. By that time, however, the fifty-three-year-old theatre long had ceased being a first-class house, sinking ever lower in appearance and in the caliber of its audiences and of its plays. When its name was changed in the summer of 1879 and it began catering to the immigrants whose tenements surrounded it, it was truly venerable only in memory.
1879–1880
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

In 1877 the last Federal troops had been removed from the South, and carpetbaggers, deprived of their protection, scurried northward in their wake. As much as was politically possible, the Civil War had been relegated to history books. During the decade and a half since the shooting had ended, America had begun to flex its industrial muscle and had prospered accordingly. The 1880s and the very earliest years of the 1890s, then, were times of a steady if somewhat stolid consolidation. These years were certainly not uninteresting-politically, socially, or in the field of technological invention-but one would be hard put to refute a charge that they were colorless and undramatic compared to some previous or later epochs.
1880–1881
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Stars illuminated Broadway’s nights all during the season. One blazing-red ball of fire held theatrical stargazers in particular thrall, kindling an excitement rare in American stage annals. She was, of course, Sarah Bernhardt. But she was not alone, even if for a time she threatened to dim all other stars’ glow. As a result, dramaturgy took a back seat to histrionics for much of the season. But then contemporary playwrights were of little help; so many of their plays that did succeed were written expressly as vehicles for leading actors and actresses. A performer’s theatre held sway on Broadway.
1881–1882
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

The last months of 1881 and the first of 1882 found most of the fine and lively arts just that. Distinguished American writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Henry James were issuing works still admired more than a century later. Proper Bostonians were sitting back to soak in the sounds of their new symphony orchestra. Tony Pastor was reshaping and sanitizing vaudeville with remarkable swiftness; although not everyone would consider vaudeville a fine art, it was a lively one.
1884–1885
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Denied the gift of hindsight, contemporary playgoers could well have set down the new season as another passable theatrical year, illuminated occasionally by the acting of some veteran performers or by the restoration of an older play. Certainly this season, like the entire first half of the 1880s, was not generously forthcoming with exciting new plays. And even many of the better novelties trafficked unthinkingly in timeworn cliches. Seemingly nothing could loosen the grip of the false accusation on playwrights’ fancies, while all season long the unequal marriage provided the frame for plot after plot. Just as the preceding season had resurrected the Civil War as a popular theme, so for a time at the season’s beginning another motif threatened to dominate plays, one that matched the inevitable lack of hindsight in an oddball way: no sight at all. Not even Kate Claxton, groping her way across the stage in the enormously successful The Two Orphans ten years before (and she was still playing it in combination houses), had triggered such a rash of blind heroes and heroines.
1886–1887
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

The happy theatrical turnabout ignited during the preceding season continued apace in the new term. If none of the season’s novelties proved to have the staying power of The Magistrate, no fewer than three received often excited critical attention, enjoyed prosperous runs, and subsequently held prime stages for years on end. The biggest hit of all was an English play, Jim, the Penman, but the other two were incontestably American-Held by the Enemy and The Old Homestead. All three plays Jong since have disappeared from the boards, but in their day they were hailed as exemplars of modern dramatic art offering new approaches to playwriting, and all retain an honorable niche in theatrical history. Several other American plays, whether successes or failures, also had enough merit to elicit growing hopes for a more native theatre.
1898–1899
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Prosperity, in no small measure war-bred, kept box offices humming. By spring one trade sheet was cheering on “the most successful season the American theatre has ever known.” Of course, the paper was speaking largely of the financial situation. In the excitement of roping in huge profits, even badgering of the hated Trust became muted for a time. And more American plays were coming to the fore. Yet such was still the quality of most native works that the only two plays still revived a century later were both importations-and both took a highly romanticized view of bygone days.