bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mast seeding, predator satiation, and temperature cues in Chionochloa (Poaceae)
Authors: Kelly Dave , Turnbull Matthew H. , Pharis Richard P. , Sarfati Michal S.
Published: August 2008

Snow tussocks (Chionochloa spp.) in New Zealand exhibit extreme mast seeding which is synchronised within and among populations and species over large spatial scales. This masting behaviour satiates three endemic insect seed predators, and the weather cue that triggers heavy flowering has been reported as a very warm austral summer in the year before flowering. Here we elucidate the details of flowering, predator satiation, and temperature cues for Chionochloa. A 22‐year observational data set for Chionochloa pallens from 1,070 m elevation on Mt Hutt, Canterbury, indicates that flowering was highly variable (CV = 1.79) which was effective in predator satiation, and the key cue for heavy flowering was warm temperatures between 1 January and 7 February the year before flowering. Both the number of inflorescences per tussock (the most variable component of reproductive output) and the number of florets per inflorescence were increased. Surprisingly, there were also same‐season effects of temperatures between October and December on the number of inflorescences per tussock produced in late December through February. Experimental warming of tussocks using open‐topped clear plastic enclosure tubes verified the same‐season observations by significantly increasing flowering in the current season, but much less often increased flowering in the subsequent season. A comparison of masting patterns 1990–2008 with altitude in two tussock species, C. pallens and C. macra, indicates that at higher altitudes (ca. 1,580 m vs. 1,070 m) the temperature thresholds for a given flowering effort were lowered. The lowering of thresholds (2.1°C in C. pallens and 1.5°C in C. macra) was similar to the reduction in mean growing‐season air temperatures (2.0°C) found between the sites. Thus, despite different local temperatures at high and low altitude sites, the different populations flowered with a similar intensity each year. The primary benefit of mast seeding in Chionochloa appears to be predator satiation, and the key predator (the cecidomyiid Eucalyptodiplosis chionochloae) has extended diapause. If diapause can be influenced by climate cues, the exact nature of the climate cues will be important to the evolutionary interaction between the plant and its seed predators.
Identification of Novel Gene Expression in Healing Fracture Callus Tissue by DNA Microarray
Authors: Khan Safdar N. , Solaris Jorge , Ramsey Keri E. , Yang Xu , Bostrom Mathias P. G. , Stephan Dietrich , Daluiski Aaron
Published: August 2008

Fracture healing requires controlled expression of thousands of genes. Only a small fraction of these genes have been isolated and fewer yet have been shown to play a direct role in fracture healing. The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to develop a reproducible open femur model of fracture healing that produces consistent fracture calluses for subsequent RNA extraction, (2) to use this model to determine temporal expression patterns of known and unknown genes using DNA microarray expression profiling, and (3) to identify and validate novel gene expression in fracture healing. In the initial arm of the study, a total of 56 wild-type C57BL/6 mice were used. An open, stabilized diaphyseal femur fracture was created. Animals were killed at 1, 5, 7, 10, 14, 21, and 35 days after surgery and the femurs were harvested for analysis. At each time point, fractures were radiographed and sectioned for histologic analyses. Tissue from fracture callus at all stages following fracture yielded reproducibly large amounts of mRNA. Expression profiling revealed that genes cluster by function in a manner similar to the histologic stages of fracture healing. Based on the expression profiling of fracture tissue, temporal expression patterns of several genes known to be involved in fracture healing were verified. Novel expression of multiple genes in fracture callous tissue was also revealed including leptin and leptin receptor. In order to test whether leptin signaling is required for fracture repair, mice deficient in leptin or its receptor were fractured using the same model. Fracture calluses of mice deficient in both leptin or leptin receptor are larger than wild-type mice fractures, likely due to a delay in mineralization, revealing a previously unrecognized role of leptin signaling in fracture healing. This novel model of murine fracture repair is useful in examining both global changes in gene expression as well as individual signaling pathways, which can be used to identify specific molecular mechanisms of fracture healing.
Evaluating the Validity of the Serologic Test for Detecting Helicobacter pylori Infection in Mongolian Gerbils
Authors: Kuo Chao‐Hung , Yu Fang‐Jung , Tsai Pei‐Yun , Yang Sheau‐Fang , Chang Lin‐Li , Jan Chang‐Ming , Wang Wen‐Ming , Wu Deng‐Chyang
Published: August 2008

A strong correlation between Helicobacter pylori infection and gastric cancer has been reported. Mongolian gerbils are regarded as the most suitable animal model in which to study carcinogen‐esis associated with H. pylori. The aim of our study was to evaluate the accuracy of the serologic test for detecting H. pylori infection in Mongolian gerbils. The model was developed as follows: the H. pylori colony (vacuolating cytotoxin A (+)/cytotoxin‐associated gene A (+)) was cultured from the mucosas of previously H. pylori‐fed gerbils. These colonies were cultured in broth. Then, we fed the gerbils with 0.5–1 mL of broth (about 109 CFU/mL) (intragastric administration) twice within a 3‐day period. After inoculation for 6 or 26 weeks, the gerbils were sacrificed and their gastric mucosas were sampled for a series of examinations. Blood samples for serologic testing (STAT‐PAK) were collected. H. pylori infection was confirmed. Statistical analysis was performed using the χ2 test. Differences were regarded as significant when the p value was less than 0.05. A total of 50 gerbils were inoculated with H. pylori and the success rate reached 88%. All 10 gerbils in the control group showed a negative result. Damage to the mucosas was more obvious following increasing periods of inoculation. The rates of sensitivity and specificity, as determined by the STAT‐PAK test, were 90.9% and 100%, respectively. The positive and negative predictive values were 100% and 60%, respectively. The STAT‐PAK test seemed to be more sensitive and accurate (p<0.05) in high H. pylori densities. In conclusion, the STAT‐PAK test (blood‐sampling) showed acceptable results and was suitable for long‐term observation of H. pylori infection.
Pre‐hospital and In‐hospital Delays After Onset of Acute Ischemic Stroke—A Hospital‐based Study in Southern Taiwan
Authors: Chen Chun‐Hung , Huang Poyin , Yang Yuan‐Han , Liu Ching‐Kuan , Lin Tzeng‐Jih , Lin Ruey‐Tay
Published: August 2008

The biggest hurdle for early hospital presentation is the narrow therapeutic window after stroke. The aims of our study were to investigate the time lags and the factors causing pre‐hospital and emergency department (ED) delay during acute ischemic stroke attack. Between June 2004 and October 2005, we prospectively studied 129 acute ischemic stroke patients who presented to the ED of the study hospital within 4 hours after symptom onset. Chi‐square testing for trend, uni‐variate and multiple logistic regression analyses was performed to evaluate the factors influencing delays in the ED presentation of acute ischemic stroke patients. The median time from symptom onset to ED arrival was 71 (mean ± SD, 82.7 ± 57.7) minutes. The median times from ED arrival to neurologic consultation, computed tomography scan, electrocardiogram, and laboratory data completion were 10 (11.3±9.9) minutes, 17 (9.6±11.3) minutes, 14 (23.3±55) minutes, and 39 (44.4±24.5) minutes, respectively. Univariate and multiple logistic regression models revealed that age < 65 years, illiteracy and awakening with symptoms were the most significant factors related to a delay in ED presentation. This study indicates that 2 hours of pre‐hospital delay is the cutoff point for thrombolytic therapy. Organization of a stroke team and standardized stroke pathways may help to shorten in‐hospital time consumption. Educational efforts should not only focus on the public, but also on the training of ED physicians and other medical personnel.
ON FIXED POINTS OF DOUBLY SYMMETRIC RIEMANN SURFACES
Authors: GROMADZKI GRZEGORZ , KOZŁOWSKA-WALANIA EWA
Published: August 2008

In this paper, we study ovals of symmetries and the fixed points of their products on Riemann surfaces of genus g ≥ 2. We show how the number of these points affects the total number of ovals of symmetries. We give a generalisation of Bujalance, Costa and Singerman's theorems in which we show upper bounds for the total number of ovals of two symmetries in terms of g, the order n and the number m of the fixed points of their product, and we show their attainments for n holding some divisibility conditions. Finally, we give an upper bound for m in terms of n and g, and we study conditions under which it has given parity.
A NOTE ON L2-SUMMAND VECTORS IN DUAL SPACES
Authors: AIZPURU ANTONIO , GARCÍA-PACHECO FRANCISCO J
Published: August 2008

It is shown that every L2-summand vector of a dual real Banach space is a norm-attaining functional. As consequences, the L2-summand vectors of a dual real Banach space can be determined by the L2-summand vectors of its predual; for every n ∈ , every real Banach space can be equivalently renormed so that the set of norm-attaining functionals is n-lineable; and it is easy to find equivalent norms on non-reflexive dual real Banach spaces that are not dual norms.
CROSS-CONSTRAINED VARIATIONAL PROBLEM AND THE NON-LINEAR KLEIN–GORDON EQUATIONS
Authors: GAN ZAIHUI , ZHANG JIAN
Published: August 2008

In this paper, we put forward a cross-constrained variational method to study the non-linear Klein–Gordon equations with an inverse square potential in three space dimensions. By constructing a type of cross-constrained variational problem and establishing so-called cross-invariant manifolds of the evolution flow, we establish some new types of invariant sets for the equation and derive a sharp threshold of blowup and global existence for its solution. Finally, we give an answer to the question how small the initial data are for the global solution to exist.
DIMENSION ESTIMATE OF THE EXPONENTIAL ATTRACTOR FOR THE CHEMOTAXIS–GROWTH SYSTEM
Authors: EFENDIEV MESSOUD , NAKAGUCHI ETSUSHI , OSAKI KOICHI
Published: August 2008

In this paper, we study an upper bound of the fractal dimension of the exponential attractor for the chemotaxis–growth system in a two-dimensional domain. We apply the technique given by Eden, Foias, Nicolaenko and Temam. Our results show that the bound is estimated by polynomial order with respect to the chemotactic coefficient in the equation similar to our preceding papers.
A CLASS OF EXCHANGE RINGS
Authors: LEE TSIU-KWEN , ZHOU YIQIANG
Published: August 2008

It is well known that a ring R is an exchange ring iff, for any a ∈ R, a−e ∈ (a2−a)R for some e2 = e ∈ R iff, for any a ∈ R, a−e ∈ R(a2−a) for some e2 = e ∈ R. The paper is devoted to a study of the rings R satisfying the condition that for each a ∈ R, a−e ∈ (a2−a)R for a unique e2 = e ∈ R. This condition is not left–right symmetric. The uniquely clean rings discussed in (W. K. Nicholson and Y. Zhou, Rings in which elements are uniquely the sum of an idempotent and a unit, Glasgow Math. J. 46 (2004), 227–236) satisfy this condition. These rings are characterized as the semi-boolean rings with a restricted commutativity for idempotents, where a ring R is semi-boolean iff R/J(R) is boolean and idempotents lift modulo J(R) (or equivalently, R is an exchange ring for which any non-zero idempotent is not the sum of two units). Various basic properties of these rings are developed, and a number of illustrative examples are given.
ULTRAPOWERS OF BANACH ALGEBRAS AND MODULES
Authors: DAWS MATTHEW
Published: August 2008

The Arens products are the standard way of extending the product from a Banach algebrato its bidual″. Ultrapowers provide another method which is more symmetric, but one that in general will only give a bilinear map, which may not be associative. We show that ifis Arens regular, then there is at least one way to use an ultrapower to recover the Arens product, a result previously known for C*-algebras. Our main tool is a principle of local reflexivity result for modules and algebras.
Wagner, ‘On Modulation’, andTristan
Authors: Abbate Carolyn
Published: August 2008

So says Othello, confronting Iago for the last time in Shakespeare's play. He looks down to seek for the cloven hoof of a demon, for only if lago is satanic can Othello understand what has come to pass. Looking down – the physical gesture – represents an impulse to interpret, to find clues, codes, signs there in the darkness. But Iago is no supernatural being: ‘that's a fable’. What remains is an enigmatic lago more frightening than any demon – the attempt to interpret undermined by the sign not given.
Back to the future: Shostakovich's revision of Leskov's ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District’
Authors: Emerson Caryl
Published: August 2008

‘Librettology’ has begun to acquire a working vocabulary. Critics now investigate the relationship between a libretto and its literary source in terms other than fidelity; a text adapted for musical setting no longer disappears from the realm of the ‘literary’. Historians and musicologists are considering the role of opera librettos in cultural history, with special attention to librettos that rework historical, national or mythic themes. How operatic texts transpose and thus ‘re-accent’ a nation's literary classics is emerging as a fruitful and still unexplored field.
The genesis and literary source of Giacomo Puccini's first opera
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: August 2008

All Puccini's biographers tell the story of how the eighteen-year-old composer, in the company of two friends, walked the nineteen miles from Lucca to Pisa to hear Verdi's latest opera, Aida; and how the impact of that opera – the first that he had ever seen performed – was such that he determined from that moment on to make a career as a composer for the theatre.
Lully and the ironic convention
Authors: Howard Patricia
Published: August 2008

Three hundred years after his death in 1687 Jean-Baptiste Lully's reputation is entering a new phase. Only a minority of opera-goers today have had the opportunity of seeing one of Lully's operas performed in the theatre. French music, always a degree less accessible to a non-French public than the music of its Italian and Austro-German neighbours, remains the last corner of the seventeenth-century repertory to make a popular appeal to twentieth-century audiences. There are indications, however, in the appearance of a new collected edition, in the small output of new recordings, and in the greater volume of scholarly investigation associated with the tercentenary, that the distinctive sound of Lully's music will soon become at least as familiar as that of his contemporaries Purcell and Cavalli. And familiarity will surely engender popularity: the music needs no special pleading.
Genre and content in mid-century Verdi: ‘Addio, del passato’ (La traviata, Act III)
Authors: Hepokoski James A.
Published: August 2008

In the attempt to construct the ‘story’ of post-Rossinian Italian opera it has been standard practice to identify as the central plot the dissolution of traditional structural types and genres. The charting of those musical ‘facts’ that illustrate this dissolution is a familiar musicological endeavour, and there remains a persistent temptation not merely to notice the ever-weakening pull of convention but also to identify it with the notion of ‘historical progress’: a move towards the mature virtues of dramatic complexity, idiosyncrasy and flexibility. Considerations of established conventions and their modifications tend to encourage anti-generic evaluative positions, judgements which are then bolstered by appealing to influential aesthetic systems. Thus Benedetto Croce: ‘Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics’. Or Theodor Adorno: ‘Actually, there may never have been an important work that corresponded to its genre in all respects’. Or Hans Robert Jauss: ‘The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity […]. A masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching’? So bewitching is this image of genre dissolution that artistic production is often assessed by the degree to which it rebels against theidées reçuesof tradition or encourages the momentum of the ‘historically inevitable’.
A Royal Opera House in Leicester Square (1790)
Authors: Price Curtis , Milhous Judith , Hume Robert D.
Published: August 2008

The King's Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Shortly thereafter some wealthy and powerful patrons – notably the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury – launched an ambitious scheme to build a fabulously expensive Royal Opera House in Leicester Square. The venture was designed to re-establish London as a major centre for Italian opera and ballet, to reform the wayward financial and artistic management of the King's Theatre and to give the capital city a grand opera house of modern design that would rival any in Europe. Because the royal patent promised for Leicester Square was blocked, the scheme had to be dropped, and the sponsors wound up establishing the ill-fated and short-lived Pantheon Opera instead – but that is another story. Our concern here is with the Leicester Square project which, though never realised, did set in motion many of the changes desired by its backers and helped to return London to the mainstream of opera.
‘Stage music’ in early nineteenth-century Italian opera
Authors: Zoppelli Luca
Published: August 2008

It has become commonplace to assume that language and style in Italian opera are not a unified phenomenon, easily comparable with the language and style of a purely musical work. Rather they constitute the various elements of a plurilinguistic interplay in which the opposite pole from ‘the author’ is the characters: those figures whose personality, function and social condition command an individual musical language. Musical expression is determined by an interaction of the author's discourse with the fictive discourse of characters; even when one or the other seems to dominate, there remains an important, implicitly dialogic element, one that can sometimes be inferred solely from a sense of discordant context. In many instances, therefore, operatic discourse suggests analogies with the ‘dialogic’ nature of the modern novel posited by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin.
Popular success, the critics and fame: The early careers of Lucia di Lammermoor and Belisario
Authors: Ashbrook William
Published: August 2008

We have long been accustomed to think in terms of opera ‘stars’, and thus it should not overstrain the imagination to extend the astronomical analogy when dealing with operatic history: to speak of comparisons in magnitude, of orbits, or of suns and their satellites. A particularly useful notion in interpreting with reasonable accuracy evidence surviving more than a century and a half is that of parallax: the apparent displacement of an object caused by an actual change in point of view. A shift caused by the passing of years can intro-duce comparable distortions. My case in point involves the early Italian careers of two operas: Lucia di Lammermoor, making its way much more slowly at first than Belisario, which took off auspiciously but soon fell behind in terms of number of productions and performances. I select these two operas because, in spite of individual differences, they share the same composer and librettist, the same impresario commissioned them and only a little more than four months separates their first performances. Lucia's premiére took place at the San Carlo, Naples, on 26 September 1835; Belisario's the following 4 February at La Fenice in Venice. They emerged, therefore, into much the same climate of sensibility.
‘Twisted relations’: Method and meaning in Britten's Billy Budd
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: August 2008

In Herman Melville's story, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the potentially mutinous reaction of the Bellipotent's crew to Billy's execution is quelled by a call to order:

For suddenly the drum beat to quarters, which familiar sound happening at least twice every day, had upon the present occasion a signal peremptoriness in it. True martial discipline long continued superinduces in average man a sort of impulse whose operation at the official word of command much resembles in its promptitude the effect of an instinct.
Listening as a Letter of Uriah: A note on Berio's Un re in ascolto (1984) on the occasion of the opera's first performance in London (9 February 1989)
Authors: Vogt Matthias Theodor
Published: August 2008

Imagine what would have happened if Prospero had come out in front of the curtain at the end of the first performance of Shakespeare's Tempest on 1 November 1611 and if, at his words

Now, 'tis true,

I must be here confin'd by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands.

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please […],

the audience had not applauded. In accordance with Jacobean theatrical practice, the sound of applause breaks the theatrical illusion.
Vincent d'Indy's ‘Drame Anti-Juif’ and its meaning in Paris, 1920
Authors: Fulcher Jane
Published: August 2008

On 6 June 1920, a work premièred at the Paris Opéra and, unlike others preceding it that season, met with general approbation in the press. Despite reservations, newspapers as well as political and musical journals pronounced the opera sincere, deeply religious, an ‘oeuvre de foi’. The composer–librettist, Vincent d'Indy, must have been both pleased and perplexed by such praise, for he had originally conceived the work as a trenchant political critique. As planned in 1903, the opera was to show, in d'Indy's words, ‘the nauseating Judeo-Dreyfusard influence’ within a legend that accommodated this message.
Fidelio and the French Revolution
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: August 2008

Fidelio has always posed difficulties for operatic interpreters. On the literal level it is straight-forward enough, much more so, certainly, than its great Mozartian predecessor, The Magic Flute. All three of its versions tell the unproblematical story of a wife, Leonore, who disguises herself as a boy in order to rescue her unjustly imprisoned husband. In the prison she obtains a job with the jailor, Rocco, whose daughter proceeds to fall in love with her (in spite of being promised to the prison gatekeeper). The central action is triggered when the governor of the prison, Don Pizarro, learns that the Minister (representing the central monarchy) has set out to visit the prison, suspecting that it harbours several ‘victims of arbitrary force’. Pizarro is terrified that the Minister will discover one particular inmate, Florestan, who had threatened to expose his crimes and whom the Minister believes to be dead (we, of course, have no difficulty recognising him as Leonore's husband). Pizarro thus resolves to murder Florestan. In the second act Rocco and Leonore precede Pizarro into the dungeon to dig the victim's grave, and there Leonore ascertains that the condemned prisoner is indeed her husband. When Pizarro descends for the kill, he is confronted by Leonore, who tells him he will have to kill Florestan's wife first, and pulls a gun on him. At exactly this moment, a trumpet call announces the Minister, whose arrival dissolves the dramatic situation with breathtaking suddenness: Florestan is rescued, husband and wife are reunited, and Pizarro's tyranny is broken. In the final scene all the prisoners are liberated, Pizarro is banished (presumably to face imprisonment himself), and the Minister, learning that his friend Florestan has been saved by his wife's courage, invites her to unlock his chains. The opera ends with a choral tribute to wifely devotion.
‘The Blue Note’ and ‘The objectified voice and the vocal object’
Authors: Poizat Michel
Published: August 2008

We publish here, by permission of Cornell University Press, two excerpts from Michel Poizat's L'Opéra, ou le cri de l'ange, a book that first appeared with the Parisian publisher A. M. Métailié in 1986. The extracts are taken from Arthur Denner's translation, which is due out with Cornell University Press in the spring of 1992 under the title The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Poizat's book is an ‘essay on the jouissance of the opera lover’ – an exploration of the experience of being an opera ‘fan’. It begins with interviews that the author conducted on the steps of the Paris Opéra in 1985. On the night before the première of Marek Janowski's production of Tristan und Isolde, Poizat spoke to some fans devoted enough to wait all night for a standing-room ticket, and asked them what motivated their dedication. In both our extracts, we hear more from these fans – Claude, an art history student, and Renaud, a twenty-one-year-old judo instructor.
Wagner's Nuremberg
Authors: Spencer Stewart
Published: August 2008

As far as we know, Wagner paid eight visits to Nuremberg, although I shall be concerned here only with the first four of them. The first was the longest – a week-long stay with his sister Clara and her husband Heinrich Wolfram in January 1834, when he was twenty. According to the much later account in Mein Leben, Wagner's only memory of this visit was ‘the sociable house’ of his brother-in-law and the gemütlich goings-on in Nuremberg's taverns. In July 1835, when talent-spotting for Heinrich Bethmann's near-insolvent opera company, he passed through Nuremberg towards the end of the month. It was on this occasion that he witnessed that ‘extraordinary nocturnal adventure’ which, according to Mein Leben, was to leave its mark on the final scene of Act II of Die Meistersinger. (What, to my own mind, is even more ‘extraordinary’ about this account is that it is confirmed neither by Die rothe Brieftasche – the aide-mémoire that Wagner began in August 1835 – nor by any of Wagner's letters of the time. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this is a case of life imitating art, a suspicion increased when we recall that the passage in Mein Leben was dictated between March and May 1866, just before Wagner embarked on the first complete draft of Act II of Die Meistersinger.)
Billy Budd and the fear of words
Authors: Emslie Barry
Published: August 2008

Three thematic clusters can be inferred from the libretto of Billy Budd: the sexual, the spiritual and the social. Each exists dialectically with the other two, creating a characteristic apparent synthesis of their respective internal and relational contra-dictions. Indeed, Billy Budd's status as a masterpiece traditionally depends on an assumed successful and harmonious resolution of its thematic material within the overall musical context. However, this article will argue that no such resolution takes place and that this ‘failure’ is the opera's most striking and interesting characteristic. I do not wish to argue that exposing these contradictions, along with the failed strategies designed to effect customary artistic reconciliations, lessen the opera's status: they are better regarded as evidence of its most challenging and worthwhile aspects.
The silencing of Lucia
Authors: Smart Mary Ann
Published: August 2008

In Act III of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the chaplain Raimondo appears at the wedding celebrations to tell the assembled guests that Lucia has murdered her husband Arturo. While the chorus expresses shock, Lucia enters, dishevelled and deranged; the crowd turns towards her, murmuring ‘Par dalla tomba uscita!’ This image of a figure emerging from the grave, certainly apt by nineteenth-century poetic standards, also suggests itself as a contemporary metaphor: a shift in critical reception. Traditionally, a noisy chorus of operatic critics has regarded Lucia with a mixture of fascination and horror, emphasising the sepulchral aspects of her madness. Recently, however, a rather surprising resurrection has been effected through the notion, popular among some feminist critics, that Lucia's mental decline could be interpreted as positive, even liberatory. This view has been expressed most flamboyantly by Catherine Clément, for whom madness is one of the few ways an operatic heroine can escape the near-inevitable plot process of seduction and death. Her effusions on Lucia's mad scene illustrate this position vividly: ‘Lucia dances with her desires: listen how joyful, airy and peaceful it is. Who says anything about unhappiness? Madwomen's voices sing the most perfect happiness’
Composers and ‘composers’: A response to David Rosen
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: August 2008

David Rosen has written a detailed critique of my essay, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, which appeared in a recent issue of this journal. I am grateful to him for his interest in what I had to say there. But at the same time I fear that he has misconstrued it. The result is that he has set up a parade of straw men which (not surprisingly) he has knocked – indeed bludgeoned – to the turf. There are a lot of straw men standing in for a lot of real ones, some of the real ones more important than others. It would be a bore for me as well as for my readers were I to run through them all (and if I tried, the vigilant editors of the journal would, quite rightly, put a stop to my profligacy). So I am going to concentrate on a very few of what I take to be the most important ones, and ones that cluster around the same basic issue. In the process, I hope not only to perform the negative task of refuting Rosen's ‘refutation’, but the positive one of pushing my project forward, at least to the extent of clarifying it.
‘In Love's harmonious consort’? Penelope and the interpretation ofIl ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
Authors: Carter Tim
Published: August 2008

Recent Monteverdi scholarship has set great store by the composer's last work for the new ‘public’ opera houses of Venice,L'incoronazione di Poppea(1643). The problematic status of the sources forPoppea– at least some of its music is not by Monteverdi – and a rather prurient fascination with its supposed amoral excess have provided ample scope for scholars to play their textual and critical games, often with impressive results. But this has deflected attention from Monteverdi's first Venetian opera,Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria(1640), written to a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro. Once a cause of some debate – Wolfgang Osthoff carried the torch in the 1950s –Il ritorno d'Ulisse isnow seen as a much less complicated work. We have only one manuscript of the score –A-WnMS 18763 – the uncertain provenance of which has caused scant musicological anxiety; nor have the surviving copies of the libretto, with their divergent readings, excited much recent comment from scholars. Thus the text is seemingly secure. Moreover, the supposed ‘moral’ ofIl ritorno d'Ulisse– ‘the rewards of patience, the power of love over time and fortune’ — seems unproblematic, nay predictable, perhaps tedious. Even Ellen Rosand's noble attempt to inject a fly in the ointment by focusing on the seemingly minor character of Iro, the social parasite, has scarcely troubled complacent critical comment on an essentially straightforward opera with an essentially straightforward message.
Is Aida an orientalist opera?
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: August 2008

Among the more remarkable events of recent intellectual history is that Edward Said, famous avant-garde literary critic, passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, has begun to write about music. Moreover, not just about any kind of music, but about classical music in the élite (and canonical) European tradition – the symphonies of Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the chamber music of Schubert and Brahms. Several years ago Said took over the music column in The Nation magazine, and more recently he has published a book, Musical Elaborations, based on a series of invited lectures at the University of California at Irvine.
Fin-de-sièclefantasies:Elektra, degeneration and sexual science
Authors: Kramer Lawrence
Published: August 2008

In 1903, Otto Weininger, twenty-three, Viennese, Jewish, and an imminent suicide, published his misogynist manifestoSex and Characterand created an international sensation. ‘One began’, reported a contemporary, ‘to hear in the men's clubs of England and in the cafés of France and Germany – one began to hear singular mutterings among men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared.’ Weininger's new gospel tied the spiritual progress of the human race to the repudiation of its female half. Women, said Weininger, are purely material beings, mindless, sensuous, animalistic and amoral; lacking individuality, they act only at the behest of a ‘universalised, generalised, impersonal’ sexual instinct. For humanity to achieve its spiritual destiny, men – particularly ‘Aryan’ men, who had not suffered a racial degeneracy that made the task impossible – must achieve the individualistic supremacy first revealed by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In order to do this, they must both rid themselves of the femininity within them and reject their sexual desires for the women around them.
Reminiscences of a scandal – reminiscences of La Scala: Liszt's fantasy on Mercadante's Il giuramento
Authors: Hamilton Kenneth
Published: August 2008

[Liszt] was not only a musical genius, but could probably have achieved the heights in another profession too. When a diplomat at the Berlin court once asked him, ‘What would become of you if you suddenly lost your hands?’ he replied composedly: I could still be the world's greatest diplomat’.
New sources forStiffelio: A preliminary report
Authors: Gossett Philip
Published: August 2008

Although there have been a few revivals of Verdi'sStiffeliosince its first modern performance in 1968, including an important 1985 production at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the opera has received until now only limited attention. With two stagings by major theatres in 1993 (London's Covent Garden in January and New York's Metropolitan Opera in October), the situation has changed markedly. Those of us who knowStiffeliowell have tried to temper our enthusiasm, avoiding excessive claims and acknowledging some of the work's dramaturgical problems. But it should come as no surprise that an opera exquisitely poised betweenLuisa MillerandRigoletto islikely to be worth rehearing, particularly when the work was withdrawn from circulation by its author for reasons having to do primarily with censorship of its libretto (in which the wife of a Protestant minister commits adultery) rather than with intrinsic artistic merit.
Rameau reading Lully: Meaning and system in Rameau's recitative tradition
Authors: Dill Charles
Published: August 2008

While Jean-Philippe Rameau left behind copious evidence of his changing beliefs as a music theorist, he remained silent about his most deeply held beliefs as a composer of opera. His occasional protestations of admiration for Lully, and his petulant responses to criticism, have formed a small basis for the large amount of commentary on his compositional career. The possibility remains, however, that Rameau's theoretical writings could offer some clues about his compositions and, more generally, about his career as a composer. I am thinking of a brief, but well-known moment in his career when theoretical remarks and compositional attitudes worked together in the performance of what we today would consider an analytical act: his commentary on Lolly's monologue, ‘Enfin it est en ma puissance’, from Act II scene 5 of Armide.Rameau published this commentary in 1754 in his Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, as a response to Rousseau's criticism of Lolly's monologue in the Lettre sur la musique française of 1753. The commentary is well known in modern scholarship and has been the subject of a number of studies, the most thorough being Cynthia Verba's work on the evolution of implied chromaticism in Rameau's theories. Here we will be concerned less with its purely theoretical content than with how Rameau's discourse can be said to betray his compositional beliefs about setting texts to music.
The lost voice of Rosine Stoltz
Authors: Smart Mary Ann
Published: August 2008

Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life

Until recently, women's biography and feminist interpretation of texts have travelled along separate paths, the exhaustive documentation required by biography often seeming to overwhelm efforts at interpretation, dictating that the genre remain essentially conservative and anti-theoretical. This is unfortunate, if only because it is in the writing of women's lives that biography and theory may need each other most. The women we examine are sometimes minor figures, ordinary people most interesting when seen as emblematic of a broader context; and of course they rarely lived according to modern feminist principles: what does one make of a talented woman who devoted her life more to caring for men than for herself? Such situations present conundrums that simultaneously resist and require the solace of theory.
Hermann Levi's shame and Parsifal's guilt: A critique of essentialism in biography and criticism
Authors: Dreyfus Laurence
Published: August 2008

Two dissimilar subjects – Hermann Levi (1839–1900), a Jewish Wagnerian who conducted the Bayreuth première of Parsifal, and Parsifal itself – can be seen in a critical discourse that binds them together in a paradoxical relationship. In accounts of both Levi and the opera he conducted, certain historians and critics have made a point of stripping away a supposed veneer of aesthetic deception in order to expose the raw underbelly of historical truth. In these revisionist readings, Levi's enthusiasm for Wagner and his music amounts to a shameful form of Jewish ‘self-hatred’, while Parsifal, far from espousing a message of compassion and redemption, propagates ideas of an solidarity and racial supremacy. To advance these arguments is tantamount to claiming that moral and psychological categories such as shame and guilt are appropriate ways to describe a musician's life or the historical legacy of an opera; and these are views I find difficult to share. The slogan in my title should thus be understood as an ironic commentary, as well as a call to formulate the questions in a new way. Although I can only sketch the outlines of an alternative approach, I will suggest that critical accounts shaming Hermann Levi for his Wagnerism, and damning Parsifal for its anti-Semitism, are cut from the same cloth; they need to be revalued by a musicology that traffics in both an aesthetic understanding of art works and a critical assessment of the cultural framework in which this understanding is produced.
Richard Wagner'sParsifaland the theory of late style
Authors: Barone Anthony
Published: August 2008

Theodor Adorno thoughtParsifalunique, in many respects incongruous when compared with Wagner's earlier operas and music dramas. In a 1956 essay, ‘Zur Partitur desParsifal’ (‘Concerning the Score ofParsifal’), he noted the ‘continually strange newness’ of Wagner's last work, concluding: ‘From out of the waning of his original inventive powers, Wagner's force produces the virtue of a late style; a style that, according to Goethe's dictum, withdraws from appearance’. More recently, Werner Breig paused appreciatively over Adorno's remark about the ‘continually strange newness’, but pursued a different argument. Breig claims thatParsifalwas recapitulatory, stylistically homogeneous with the earlier works, and he is supported by Wagner's assertion to Cosima that he had written ‘nothing new’ sinceTristan(CWDII, 26 March 1879), a conviction redolent of one the composer had earlier expressed (albeit in entirely different circumstances) in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 2 May 1860: ‘I can now only repeat myself … I have no other significant characteristics to offer’. Breig summarises his position in theWagner Handbook: ‘The musical structure ofParsifalcontains no fundamentally new elements, but rather follows directly upon the achievements of theRingandTristan’, thus nodding to the Wagner who cheerfully confessed having ‘take[n] up the old paint pot’ of theTristanstyle for Act II ofParsifal(CWDII, 5 April 1878).
‘TB sheets’: Love and disease in La traviata
Authors: Groos Arthur
Published: August 2008

One of the central events of the film Moonstruck (1987) takes place in a performance of La bohéme at the Metropolitan Opera. Loretta (Cher) is puzzled by what seems to be Mimì's unexpected death, which takes her by surprise, even though the explanation by her friend Ronny (Nicholas Cage) reveals that she suspects its cause. Most of us will smile indulgently at a first-time opera-goer's ingenuous conflation of character (‘coughing her brains out’) and voice (‘keep singing’). But we might pause for a moment on a more intriguing twist in Loretta's surprise at Mimì's death – the fact that our antibiotic age has largely forgotten the devastating epidemic formerly known as phthisis or consumption.
FromNinatoNina: Psychodrama, absorption and sentiment in the 1780s
Authors: Castelvecchi Stefano
Published: August 2008

Paisiello'sNina‘is sentimental comedy at its worst…. Its sentimentality is to modern ears perfectly unbearable, and we cannot understand how the whole of Europe was reduced to tears by these infantile melodies.’ Edward Dent's opinion might well be shared, though perhaps less frankly expressed, by more than one musicologist of following generations. Yet the fact remains that eighteenth-century Europe was indeed reduced to tears by operas on the story of Nina: an attempt to ‘thicken’ our understanding of that cultural phenomenon is the aim of the present essay. In its first part – focusing on Marsollier's and Dalayrac'sNina, the source for Paisiello's opera – I try to reconstruct a web of relationships between the practices of psychiatry emerging in the late eighteenth century and the theatrical and aesthetic cultures of the time. In the second part, aspects of Paisiello's setting are read as a composer's effort to create an operatic language responsive to the culture of ‘sensibility’ shared by eighteenth-century humanists and physicians.
Gilbert-Louis Duprez and Gustave Roger in the composition of Meyerbeer's Le Prophète
Authors: Armstrong Alan
Published: August 2008

It is well known that mounting large-scale productions at the Paris Opéra during the 1830s and 1840s was a highly collaborative effort. The nature of so-called ‘grand opera’ demanded that composer, librettist and stage designer work closely together for the sake of a creation larger than the sum of its parts. Above them loomed the directeur, who laboured to ensure that his creative team had the means to produce their æuvres both in materials and human resources, and to guarantee that the Opéra made a profit from the finished products. A fifth collaborator, the singer, is not often cited as such in the literature, but in many ways wielded the greatest power in the creation of Parisian operatic works. By the 1830s, European singers had achieved professional status, and a singing artist of high calibre could find the Opéra a perfect venue in which to flex muscle. During the Opera's ‘golden age’, a bourgeois public, tired of political upheaval and economic uncertainty, found escape in the new ‘romanticè fare of the Opéra, and elevated the singers who strode its boards to what today is called ‘star status’. The Opéra became a temple and its singers, adored gods and goddesses. A beloved singer could – and did – ensure an opera's success simply by appearing in it, or doom it to failure by refusing to appear. With such power a singer could easily hold a new opera for ransom, forcing the composer and librettist to revise, excise or otherwise alter the work to some self-serving end. To secure a place for their stage works at the Opéra and to guarantee a public triumph, therefore, it is not surprising that composers such as Donizetti, and especially Meyerbeer, the leading composer of French grand opera, composed or revised their operas for particular singers.
Il divino Claudio: Monteverdi and lyric nostalgia in fascist Italy
Authors: Dell'Antonio Andrew
Published: August 2008

In the early part of this century Italian musical critics were bemoaning the decadence of the national lyric stage. No inspired figure had come forth to claim the mande of Verdi; new Italian opera was becoming artistically irrelevant. In an effort to reclaim a ‘lyric spirit’ from Wagnerian Germany, Gabriele D'Annunzio ‘rediscovered’ the early seventeenth century as the birthplace of opera. Specifically, he fashioned Monteverdi – ‘il divino Claudio’ – as visionary proto-lyricist, a nostalgic move seconded by many other Italian authors through the 1920s and 30s.
‘The phantom of the Opera’: the lost voice of opera in silent film
Authors: Grover-Friedlander Michal
Published: August 2008

Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In theNew York Timesof 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that.I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?
Dejanira, Omphale, and the emasculation of Hercules: allusion and ambiguity in Handel
Authors: Hurley David Ross
Published: August 2008

The indebtedness of Handel's English librettos to their sources is increasingly well understood, but much remains to be said concerning the function of those sources in their new context. In other words, scholars have devoted too little attention to literary allusiveness – intentional references to earlier works and their intended ‘messages’ to the audience. That such allusions can be found in these librettos by British authors almost goes without saying, for the British poetry of Handel's day is saturated with allusions. Reuben Brower, in fact, has called the Augustan poets the writers of ‘the poetry of allusion’.
Death drive: Eros and Thanatos in Wagner'sTristan und Isolde
Authors: Hutcheon Linda , Hutcheon Michael
Published: August 2008

In their different ways, a series of Germanic artists and thinkers – the poet Novalis, the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and, most powerfully, composer Richard Wagner – all espoused at one point in their lives the view that death should not only be welcomed but ardently desired, even sought after as the final rest after a life of striving and suffering.
‘An infinity of factions’: Opera in eighteenth-century Britain and the undoing of society
Authors: Aspden Suzanne
Published: August 2008

It seems fair to say that we are enmeshed in an Age of Reconstruction. Whatever groans the shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ may elicit from musicians and musicologists, the film industry's leap for the bandwagon is proof of the principle that Period Pieces Pay. Of the recent spate of feature films set in the eighteenth century, one in particular has marketed itself through its reconstructive credentials. The technologies that allow us to remodel our bodies, and revive old recordings on compact disc, also allowed the makers ofFarinelli, Il Castratoto reach back and breathe new life into the voice of the long-dead castrati.