bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sexual Liberation and Feminist Politics
Authors: Segal Lynne
Published: November 2023

‘There is feminism and then there’s fucking’, declares the bulimic and alcoholic ex-feminist literary critic Maryse, in the Canadian film A Winter Tan (1987). based on the published letters of maries Holder. Give Sorrow Wirds. maryse tells her audience that she is taking a holiday from feminism to indulge herself and her ‘natural loutishness’ with young Mexican men-one of whom eventually murders her.
Introduction
Authors: Kemp Sandra , Squires Judith
Published: November 2023

‘[T]o expose the fixed nature of se1.7.lal identity as a fantasy and, in the same gesture, to trouble, break up, or rupture the visual field before our eyes.’ This, claims Jacqueline Rose, is one of the central tasks of an art which explores the ‘presence of the sexual in representation’ (p. 388). Such feminist explorations of sexuality in the image entail both political and aesthetic approaches. For scrutinizing the image involves not only holding ‘the image accountable for the reproduction of norms’.
The Acoustic Mirror
Authors: Silvermann Kaja
Published: November 2023

Feminist film theory and criticism have manifested only an intermittent and fleeting interest in the status of authorship with.in the classic text. One of the earliest essays to approach auiliorship through a critique of sexual difference, was, of course, Laura always ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975).
The Dialectic of ‘Feminism’ and ‘Aesthetics’
Authors: Felski Rita
Published: November 2023

One of the most important achievements of the women’s movement has been to depoliticize art on the level of both production and reception, and to question ruling ideologies of the text as a self-contained artifact whid1 recur in boll modernist aesilietics and formalist criticism. This politicization of the aesthetic sphere does not imply, in my view, that aesthetic categories are to be interpreted as a direct reflection of the interests of a political ideology, or that literary meaning is limited to its current political use-value for the women’s movement, assumptions iliat lay themselves open to the obvious charge of reductionism.
Just Like a Woman
Authors: Godeau Abigail Solomon
Published: November 2023

Running throughout the body of woodman’s work are three central and overarching themes. First, and perhaps most compelling, is woodman’s staging of herself as the model for herself, the artist. In this alternating movement between active, creative subject-a producer of meaning-and passive object-a receiver of meaning-are metaphorically enacted the difficult;, and paradox that attend the activity;, of the woman artist. Moreover, this seesaw of subject/ object positions involves another set of relations: those of the artist and the model to the camera. Accordingly, Wood mans work reckons with the camera as a third term in the construction of an elaborately coded femininity.
A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s
Authors: Haraway Donna
Published: November 2023

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism. and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular religious, evangelical traditions of U.S. politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy prefects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes. even dialectically.
Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology
Authors: Penley Constance
Published: November 2023

women have been writing Star Trek pornography since at least 1976, mostly in the United States. but also in Britain, Canada, and Australia. The idea did not begin with one person who then spread it to others, but seems to have arisen spontaneously in various places beginning in the mid-seventies, as fans recognized, through seeing the episodes countless times in syndication and on their own taped copies, that there was an erotic homosexual subtext there, or at least one that could easily be we to be there. Most of the writers and readers started off in ‘regular’ Star Trek fandom. and many are still involved in it, even while they pursue their myriad activities in what is called ‘K/S’ or ‘slash’ fandom.
The Fellow-Travellers’ Factory
Authors: Niethammer Lutz
Published: November 2023

Lutz Niethammer’s pioneering study of denazification in Bavaria, which originally appeared in 1972, showed how the Americans’ under¬ standing of Nazism as a personal quality led them to privilege a person-centred approach over structural reform; once in the control of German authorities, the emphasis quickly shifted from punishment to rehabilitation, with the bulk of the ‘ordinary party comrades’ being acquitted as fellow-travellers (Mitläufer).In retrospect denazification is regarded by many West Germans as that process by which any share of responsibility on their part for fascism in Germany and for its consequences was more than dealt with, and namely in a discriminatory and corrupt fashion.
Denazificatlon
Authors: Vollnhals Clemens
Published: November 2023

Clemens Vollnhals’ assessment of the impact of denazification is representative of a generally critical attitude of most German scholars to the process.If the judicial settling of accounts-beginning with the main trial before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg’-was by its nature focused on the past, then in the case of denazification the motive of general retribution and that of general prevention were directly linked. Did the change of political system and the removal from power of the old leadership caste make for an adequate break with the National Socialist past? Or was it not far more the case that the eradication of Nazism would falter halfway as long as the millions of former party members remained in high office and honour? If denazification was primarily to facilitate the replacement of elites as part of a limited political purge, then the main focus had to be on the occupation of a broadly defined set of key positions in politics, administration, economy, and cultural life with reliable democrats.
Bitburg History
Authors: Maier Charles S
Published: November 2023

Reflecting on the debates surrounding the Bitburg controversy, Charles Maier suggests that they reflected a broader agenda which was seeking to shift the boundaries of acceptability in public discussion of and attitudes to the National Socialist past. The misrepresentation of the past articulated in the alleged service of reconciliation was thus linked to an intellectual culture in which the Historikerstreit itself occurred a year or so later.Begin, where historical memory so often starts, with the dead. In this case just a handful of dead, whose honoring at the German military cemetery at Bitburg raised questions about the millions of dead left by the most recent German Reich and, finally, by the adversaries who combined to defeat it. At Bitburg, it will be recalled, Ronald Reagan was scheduled to lay a wreath as part of the fortieth-anniversary celebrations of V-E Day. The visit was intended as a ritual of reconciliation; it ended as catharsis manque. It failed as ceremonial because it mobilized contrary impulses about history.
Bltburg as Symbol
Authors: Hilberg Raul
Published: November 2023

The nature of the controversy over Bitburg was itself replete with ironies which revealed the problematic and distorted memory of National Socialism. Amidst all the controversy over the Waffen-SS graves, for example, no one questioned the appropriateness of a visit to the military cemetery itself, despite the deep complicity of the regular Wehrmacht in the worst atrocities of the regime. As Hilberg argues here, this itself was symptomatic of the extent to which the Second World War was being remembered as a ‘normal’ war, a war qualitatively little different from the First World War, and the extent to which the peculiar atrocities associated with it were being filtered out of public memory.
Germany: The Ambiguity of Memory
Authors: Young James E
Published: November 2023

Even the need to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and National Socialist brutality has been, and still is, disputed in Germany. The difficult search for an adequate medium to articulate memories reflects the ambivalence of German memory itself. Memorials, and monuments even more, traditionally act as legitimizing devices celebrating national achievements; as James E. Young discusses here, this creates particular problems for a nation seeking to commemorate the millions of victims of its own acts in the past.[N]o one takes their memorials more seriously than the Germans. Competitions are held almost monthly across the ‘Fatherland’ for new memorials against war and fascism, or for peace; or to mark a site of destruction, deportation, or a missing synagogue; or to remember a lost Jewish community. Students devote their summers to concentration camp archaeology at Neuengamme, excavating artifacts from another, crueler age.
Jews and Russians in the Memory of the Germans
Authors: Niethammer Lutz
Published: November 2023

Lutz Niethammer draws on the experience of collecting and interpreting self-narrated biographies through the practice of oral history to compare German memories of National Socialist anti-Semitism in the post-war Federal Republic and in the former Democratic Republic. He emphasizes how narrative of private testimony is structured in accordance with the dominant ideological frameworks and cultural responses of each post-war state respectively; with private memories being written and rewritten under the influence of public and state-sanctioned discourses in each case.Overall, in the self-narrated life stories of older Germans, Jews rarely appear in the period before the war, and discrimination against them before the autumn of 1938 is almost never mentioned. If Jews are mentioned, it is usually as employers, as traders, or as providers of services (e.g. doctors). In West Germany a Jewish employer, doctor, or neighbour seems to me to have remained in the active memory or to be recallable through prompting more often; overall, the social distance to the Jews appears to have been less in parts of the middle class than in the rest of society.
The Meaning of Fascism
Authors: Laski Harold
Published: November 2023

Harold Laski, a Jewish socialist intellectual closely associated with the British Labour Party, argued that there was a strong relationship between big business interests and the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, and saw that business derived great benefit, initially at least, from the Nazi seizure of power. However, he argued against seeing the regime as a puppet of big business, recognizing that the regime enjoyed far more autonomy on the political plane than most Marxist contemporaries believed. Characterizing Fascism as a movement of ‘doctrineless nihilism·, he argues in this passage that the nature of the Nazi system itself contained contradictions which could only be resolved by recourse to war; while recognizing that the militaristic side of Nazism was one of innate destructiveness, his dismissal of the significance of ideology led Laski himself to understate the importance of anti-Semitism to the Nazi regime.
The Causes of National Socialism
Authors: Kocka Jurgen
Published: November 2023

Whilst accepting the significance of the short-term crisis of capitalism in bringing National Socialism to power, Kocka argues that the real peculiarity of German development is still to be found in the survival of pre-industrial and pre-modern traditions and structures‘Whoever is unwilling to talk about capitalism should also keep silent about fascism.’’ Max Horkheimer’s dictum of 1939 has—in many different variations—played a major part in the discussions of recent years. This hypothesis, that German fascism too was a fruit of the crisis of the capitalist economic and bourgeois social system and emerged from this with a certain necessity, has been supported in many relevant publications, particularly from the Marxist side.
The Rise of German Fascism
Authors: Griffin Roger
Published: November 2023

In one of the key works of the renewed wave of interest in the concept of’fascism’ in the 1990s, Griffin argues that Nazism, like other forms of fascism, represented a revolutionary ultra-nationalist force driven by a vision of national renewal and rebirth after a period of decay or decline associated with liberalism and democracy: This passage emphasizes the extent to which the ability of Nazism to portray itself as something radically new and different was bound up with its new style of politics and activism. As with much other recent work, Griffin stresses the diffuse nature of Nazism’s mass support; arguably, as with much other recent work too, he understates the middle-class nature of Nazism’s core support.
The Growth of National Socialism in the Countryside
Authors: Zofka Zdenek
Published: November 2023

As with many relatively early studies of the rise to power on a regional basis, Zdenek Zofka’s study of the predominantly Catholic rural community of Giinzberg placed emphasis on statistical evidence of electoral behaviour and party membership; however, in addition, Zofka offered thoughtful discussion of the ways in and extent to which Nazism was able to penetrate the local public sphere and co-opt local elites which prefigured much more recent research.
Protestant Rural Milieu and National Socialism prior to 1933
Authors: Pyta Wolfram
Published: November 2023

Analysing the success of the National Socialists in mobilizing support within the Protestant rural milieu, Wolfram Pyta notes the success with which the Nazis were able to co-opt the support of local village elites, who played an important role in giving political leads to the community. The relatively closed and homogeneous community lent itself to rapid penetration once this co-option had occurred, especially given the conditions of agrarian crisis prevailing at this time.
State Formation and Political Representation in Nazi Germany
Authors: Caplan Jane
Published: November 2023

In this extract from one of the most perceptive studies of the evolution of the internal structures of the state under National Socialism, Jane Caplan questions the extent to which the language used by various institutions within the polity to describe the system —and particularly their representations of each other —can be taken at face value, suggesting that the rhetorical strategies being deployed were themselves reflections of the process of conflict within the system.
Split Consciousness
Authors: Schäfer Hans Dieter
Published: November 2023

Hans Dieter Schafer argued that the experience of everyday life in the Third Reich, and the memory of that daily experience, was and is characterized by split consciousness. While propaganda, indoctrination, and terror formed an important part of the equation, they existed co-terminously with the integrative experience of the regime’s stimulation of consumerism, a consumerism which did not necessarily have to be matched by a growth in actual consumption. The ability of the regime to create the illusion that it could satisfy the demands of an increasingly consumerist culture played an important role, according to Schafer, in the stabilization of the regime in the eyes of workers and the middle classes alike.
National Socialism and Modernization
Authors: Alber Jens
Published: November 2023

However, the destructive dynamism of National Socialism and, in particular, its tendency to cloak the social and political inadequacies of its notions of Volksgemeinschaft by seeking out ever larger numbers of external enemies, reveals a long-term pathological dimension within modern industrial society itself: a dimension which was transfigured into the utopian vision of a racialist reconstitution of society and which found its apocalyptic fulfilment in the extermination camps.
The Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany
Authors: Stümke Hans-Georg
Published: November 2023

The Gestapo began collecting information on known or suspected homosexuals in 1934; in 1936 the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion was formed. The suffering of homosexual men was a product of ideological belief reinforced by widespread and deeply rooted social prejudice; the prevalence and durability of homophobic attitudes is shown by the fact that, after the war, the persecution of homosexuals during the ‘Third Reich’ was not deemed by the courts to have been a specifically ‘Nazi’ crime. Indeed, it took until 1969 for discriminatory legislation formulated during the National Socialist era to be removed from the West German statute books.
Economy and Society
Authors: Briggs Robin
Published: November 2023

If the rise in both population and prices during the sixteenth century had advantaged the few at the expense of the many, the full impact of this process was only to be felt in the next century. In broad terms historians seem agreed that a great upward movement of economic activity and production, which had begun in the aftermath of the Hundred Years War, was faltering by the later decades of the sixteenth century. In many ways the situation resembled that of the century before the Black Death, with population having risen more rapidly than agricultural productivity, to create pressures which actually threatened to reduce yields from the land in the long run. The combined effects of plague and prolonged war had provided a brutal solution to the earlier period of crisis, but it had been merely a matter of time before the fundamental problem reappeared, with the old rural economy apparently coming up against some kind of ceiling.
The Government of France 1598–1715
Authors: Briggs Robin
Published: November 2023

While the peace settlements of 1598 must have come as an enormous relief to a country exhausted by decades of war, it was always obvious that they were far from secure. In many respects the Edict of Nantes was a prescription for continuing trouble; limited religious toleration was accepted only as a last resort, and enforcement at the local level was always difficult. The partisans of both creeds were quick to take any opportunity of advancing their position, by opening a new place of worship, packing the municipal governments, and generally exploiting any loophole in the provisions of the Edict. Their alacrity in pushing their own cause was equalled only by the ferocity with which they denounced similar practices by their opponents. This situation was probably inevitable, given the attitudes of the time; the Huguenots in particular needed to maintain their cohesion and morale by this kind of limited aggression, even if in the long run they were damaged by it. The dominance of the Catholic viewpoint at court was especially dangerous in this context, since the royal attitude was bound to be influenced by the way local incidents were represented, and here the cards were stacked in favour of the Catholics. This placed the Huguenots in something of a dilemma; they could not afford to let their position go by default, yet since what they saw as legitimate self defence often appeared to the government as wilful trouble-making, each incident tended to worsen their image. Relations between Henri IV and his onetime supporters soon became difficult, and would have been worse without the mediating role played by Sully, whose high position in the government reassured the Protestants, while giving him enough authority to restrain them from their more dangerous enterprises.
Homeric and Hesiodic poetry
Authors: West M L
Published: November 2023

If Greek literature first appears in the eighth century B.c., the reason is simply that that was when the Greeks learned alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians. They had not by any means been without literature during the preceding centuries of illiteracy. All peoples at all times have poetry, song, and storytelling, whether or not they have writing, and it may safely be asserted, on more than one ground, that the earliest Greek poetry we have is the matured product of many hundreds of years of evolution. We must not think of Greek literature as beginning in the eighth century but as coming into view.
Tragedy
Authors: Dover K J
Published: November 2023

we may compliment him by calling his performance ‘dramatic’, if he utters it with pathos and conviction, but he is none the less a narrator of a story. If, on the other hand, he comes before us and begins straightway ‘Prophet of woe, never yet have you foretold me weal ... ‘ he is an actor, and this is drama. He is, so to speak, being Agamemnon, no longer simply telling us what Agamemnon said, and it is still drama even if he is wearing everyday clothes and even if Calchas is invisible to us. Exactly when and in what circumstances a Greek poet took the crucial step of composing for an actor, we do not know. It may well be that humorous performances, in which individuals or a chorus dressed up as if they were satyrs or foreigners or old women, are of immemorial antiquity, and the birth of tragedy was simply the application of this technique to serious matter. Tragedy was an Athenian invention, and by 500 B.c. its presentation was established as a part of one of the annual festivals in honour of the god Dionysus, the City Dionysia, celebrated in spring.
Classical oratory
Authors: Dover K J
Published: November 2023

Of all the genres of Greek literature, oratory is the least appreciated in our own time; many of us who have read a great deal of Greek epic, drama, history, and philosophy have yet to read a Greek speech. Yet we cannot expect to understand the Greeks’ view of their own literature and culture unless we come to terms with their respect for the good orator. Some societies in which the art of writing is unknown develop a very sensitive ear for the spoken word, enjoying the inventiveness, ingenuity, colourful imagery, pathos, and histrionic skill of a man pleading for justice or exhorting an assembly, and there is little doubt that the Greeks of the archaic period were such a society.
Official appointment—first productions—conflicts with Leoncavallo (September 1897–February 1898)
Authors: Grange Henry-Louis De La
Published: November 2023

WITHOUT waiting for his appointment as director to be officially confirmed, Mahler began a thorough revision of several of the productions in the Opera’s repertoire. The first he chose was Lortzing’s Zar und Zimmermann, of which he was p1J-rticularly fond and which had not been performed at the Hofoper for almost ten years. It opened to a full house on 11 September and was a great success. The applause was exceptionally warm, and the press enthusiastic. Heuberger praised the purity and quality of the orchestral sound1 and the improved role of the chorus, which displayed a liveliness and participation in the action never before achieved. What impressed him above all was the way the various elements in the performance had been welded into a unified whole. ‘We were expecting a carpenter (Zimmermann) and a czar (Zar) arrived,’ he concluded. The Neues Wiener Tagblatt congratulated Mahler both for selecting an unjustly neglected opera and for doing so much to make it a success. It described as exemplary the discreet handling of the accompaniments, and praised Mahler’s ‘incomparable artistry as a miniaturist, a fine engraver’. This was particularly noticeable in the ensembles, ‘which are among the best passages in Lortzing’s score’.2
First Philharmonic Concerts—first battles at the Opera—the Ring and Der Freischutz (March–December 1898)
Authors: Grange Henry-Louis De La
Published: November 2023

LATE in 1897, as we have seen, Guido Adler obtained a grant from the Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Literatur in Bohmen (Society for the Encouragement of German Science, Art, and Literature in Bohemia) for the publication of Mahler’s symphonies. In applying for it he submitted an official report to the Society, and also a detailed account (Referat) of Mahler’s life and career, with special reference to performances and publications of his works.1 ‘I personally value him greatly—as a good friend and as an artist. He always keeps the artistic ideal in view,’ Adler added as a postscript: ‘Mahler and Strauss are in the first rank and also, to speak frankly, in the vanguard of the most modern movement in music.’ Adler analysed the Symphonies and their general structure enthusiastically, wisely making a few reservations about the ‘unerhörten Kakophonien’ (preposterous cacophonies) of the third movement of the Third Symphony,2 where, he admitted, Mahler ‘frequently transgresses the conventional limits assigned to pure beauty in our time’. He went on to ask whether posterity might not judge otherwise.3
Premiére of Das klagende Lied—illness and operation—resignation from the Philharmonic—the Fifth Symphony and the Rückert-Lieder (January–August 1901)
Authors: Grange Henry-Louis De La
Published: November 2023

DURING the Christmas holidays, Mahler worked two hours every morning and evening to revise the score of the Fourth Symphony, which Doblinger planned to publish, together with ‘Revelge’, before the première in Munich in November.
Correspondence with Strauss—arrival of Bruno Walter—Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor and Les Contes d’Hoffmann—première of the Fourth Symphony (September–December 1901)
Authors: Grange Henry-Louis De La
Published: November 2023

SINCE the performance of the First Symphony at the Weimar Festival in 1894,1 Mahler had been in touch with Strauss mostly by mail. Meanwhile, the young lion of German music had risen to the height of fame. This was the time of his last great symphonic poems, Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and Ein Heldenleben (1898), which had caused a furore at each new hearing and had confirmed Strauss as head of the neudeutsch school and the greatest German composer since Wagner.
Triumph in Basel—contract with Peters—the Sixth Symphony completed—first trip to Holland (April–December 1903)
Authors: Grange Henry-Louis De La
Published: November 2023

ALETTER Mahler wrote to the impresario Norbert Salter early in 1903 shows how much Mahler’s Krefeld triumph had transformed his career as composer-conductor. He declared himself ready to conduct anywhere so long as one of his own works was included in the programme: his fee would be 1,000 marks in Germany, and 1,000 florins (2,000 kronen) elsewhere.1 Instead of having to solicit engagements, he now considered himself able to set his own terms. He would in any case have to be very selective in his acceptance of offers because of the onerous nature of his post, which compelled him to restrict his absences to a minimum.
Interaction of Ritual and Music with Art, Architecture, and Politics
Authors: Robertson Anne Walters
Published: November 2023

The Divine Ritual at Saint-Denis was performed in a church that had enviably close ties with the Crown, a sumptuously decorated building which was reconstructed no fewer than three times. This unique setting cannot be overlooked in the study of the liturgy of Saint-Denis, for it deeply affected the ceremony of the monastery.
Liturgical Sources of Questionable Attribution
Authors: Robertson Anne Walters
Published: November 2023

From the first years of modern manuscript research, scholars have from time to time ascribed sources to Saint-Denis, only to have their views later called into question. Both the political importance of the abbey and the approximate periods of flowering of the scriptorium were recognized early on, and these prompted numerous attributions. More recent refinements in Sandionysian scholarship have brought about some adjustments in our thinking about these liturgical codices. The manuscripts that were actually used in the daily celebration of the Divine Office in the abbey can now be identified with greater precision.
Richard Wagner
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

Richard Wagner has come to be seen as the quintessential artist of the nineteenth century, whose work embraces all the arts of the period. Dieter Borchmeyer here provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of Wagner’s aesthetic theory, examining his hitherto neglected prose writings and his ideas on music drama from the various standpoints of literature, the linking of ideas, and the sociology of art. The pre-eminent importance for Wagner of classical Greek art and mythology emerges with particular clarity, while his links with the great figures and forms of world theatre – Shakespeare, the commedia dell’arte, the popular theatre, and the puppet theatre – are traced in detail. The influence on Wagner of the historical and social novel is also discussed. The author provides the first comprehensive analysis of Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, and throws unexpected sidelights on Wagner’s relationship with Nietzsche, in particular his important contribution to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Central to the present study are Wagner’s music dramas from Die Feen to Parsifal. These are examined in their literary, ideological, and socio-political contexts (including the problem of anti-Semitism). First published in German in 1982, this book has become established as a standard work of Wagner scholarship, and now appears for the first time in English in a completely revised edition incorporating a number of new chapters on the music dramas.
The Fascination of Punch and Judy: Wagner and the Popular Theatre
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

One of Wagner’s chief aesthetic dogmas was that every major type of theatre developed out of the Volksgeist or popular spirit. For him, the prototypical stage was a platform or structure erected in the midst of the Volk and surrounded by spectators on at least three sides. Readers familiar with the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, with its strict separation of stage and auditorium, will regard such a claim as far-fetched, if not downright perverse. In fact, there are as many passages in Wagner’s writings to refute this claim as there are to support it. It cannot be denied that his thinking was made up of two fundamental, and incompatible, views of the theatre, which were, however, to influence one another.
In Search of a Lost Style: Wagner’s Ideal of ‘Classical Form’
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

In his open letter to Nietzsche of 12 June 1872 (a letter prompted by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorffs critique of Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie) Wagner voices his enthusiasm for ‘classical antiquity’, dating his interest in the language, mythology, poetry, and history of ancient Greece from his childhood years. Although he had been denied a thorough philological training, he had, he goes on, gradually distilled ‘an ideal perception of art’ (ix. 296) from his study of antiquity—by which he invariably meant Greek antiquity. (In general he held a low opinion of Roman antiquity, which he was even led, on occasion, to dismiss altogether.) In Mein Leben he traces in detail the Greek influences on his view of the world and on his aesthetic thinking, and it is significant that, as with Hölderlin, whose Hyperion he naturally held in low esteem (CT, 24 December 1873 and passim), these influences were mixed with contemporary impressions gained during childhood, notably his enthusiasm for the Greek War of lndependence.
The Birth of Opera from ‘Absolute Melody’: The Origins of Wagnerian Music Theatre
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

Wagner’s most detailed critique of traditional music theatre comes in the first part of his chief theoretical work, Opera and Drama, and is entitled ‘Opera and the Essence of Music’. The titles of the other two parts (‘Spoken Theatre and the Essence of Dramatic Poetry’ and ‘Poetry and Music in the Drama of the Future’) make it clear that the train of thought in Opera and Drama follows the popular dialectical model of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: opera and spoken drama are to be ‘superseded’ by the ‘drama’ which alone deserves that name.
‘Absolute Music’ as a Covert or Overt Ideal: Nietzsche, Hanslick, and the Aesthetic Outlook of the Later Wagner
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

The idea of ‘absolute music’ is older than the term. As Carl Dahlhaus has convincingly shown,1 its natural home is the Romantic aesthetic of music. The term itself is not found, of course, until around the middle of the nineteenth century, when it appears to have been introduced by Wagner. It was then taken up by his antagonist Eduard Hanslick, who turned it into the corner-stone of his own aesthetic theory, speaking of ‘pure, absolute music’,2 and subjecting the adjective ‘absolute’ (which for Wagner had had exclusively negative associations) to a radical revaluation. (We also see here the distance Wagner himself had travelled between his early Paris essays, influenced as they were by Tieck, Wackenroder, and, above all, by E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the reform essays of around 1850.)
The ‘Redemption’ of the Romance in the Musical Drama
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

The history of opera makes us aware of ‘the inability of music itself to become genuine drama, in other words, to allow genuine drama (i.e., drama that is not merely tailored to meet the requirements of the music) to be assimilated into it, whereas it is the music which ought reasonably to merge with this genuine drama’ (iii. 263). Here, in a nutshell, is the quintessential idea behind the first part of Opera and Drama. In Wagner’s view, the predominance of ‘absolute music’ has led to a fragmentation of the dramatic form of opera, the unity of which had been demanded by the poetics of the spoken theatre ever since the time of Aristotle. But the absolute musician who ostensibly sets the tone in opera ‘has never for a moment striven to impose a unified form upon the art-work as a whole: each individual vocal number was a self-contained and self-sufficient form, similar to the remaining pieces in the opera in terms of its superficial structure but certainly not connected with them through any formally determinative content. Thus, disconnectedness became very much a characteristic feature of operatic music’ (iv. 201).
Summation and Consummation: Parsifal
Authors: Borchmeyer Dieter
Published: November 2023

One of the earliest Wagnerians was Hans Christian Andersen. An ardent admirer of the composer’s, he visited the latter in Zurich in 1855 on Liszt’s recommendation, and left an enthusiastic account of the meeting in the second part of his autobiography.1
A Brazilian In Paris: The Synthesis (1923-1929)
Authors: Wright Simon
Published: November 2023

Villa-Lobos’s Nonet is one of the most extraordinary pieces of chamber music ever written. Its scoring, founded on ideas from the Sexteto mistico and the Quarteto simb6lico, pushes the definition of ‘chamber’ to absurd limits: flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, celesta, harp, piano, a large percussion section using 18 instruments and requiring at least two players, and a mixed chorus dividing into, at most, 12 parts. All the disparate strands which lay together in the Canfiies tipicas were, in the Nonet, at last reconciled.
Post-Pentecost Alleluias in Medieval British Liturgies
Authors: Hiley David
Published: November 2023

It may well have been Walter Howard Frere who first pointed out how useful post-Pentecost alleluias were in determining the derivation of a missal or gradual. At least, I am aware of no earlier reference. In the introduction to Graduate Sarisburiense he wrote: ‘ a synoptic table of Alleluias is by far the best test by which to discriminate between varying uses ’.Frere himself never followed through this recommendation with any systematic published survey of alleluia series. Nor did his colleague John Wickham Legg in the extensive commentary for his edition of the ‘Lytlington Missal ’ of Westminster Abbey. In fact, the alleluia series of that manuscript is one of the most important clues as to its derivation, since it is a highly characteristic one used at F é camp, Jumi è ges, Saint-Evroult, and Mont-Saint-Michel. Since then the existence of the method has become widely known.
Processions and Other Additional Observances
Authors: Harper John
Published: November 2023

In addition to the main celebration of the daily round of Office and Mass there were a number of additional observances. Some, like processions, were limited to specific days; others, like memorials, the Marian antiphon, the Little Office of the Virgin, and the Lady Mass, were observed daily.
New Tendencies In Orchestral Music: 1830–1850
Authors: Abraham Gerald
Published: November 2023

THE composers of the 1830s inherited a magnificent instrument from Beethoven and Weber: the Classical orchestra brought to its highest development in the hands of the former and already subtilized, its colour effects extended, its sensuous gloss heightened, by the latter. One cannot add Schubert’s name to these two, for his scores were practically unknown in the 1830s, but we should certainly add the names of several other opera composers, such as Spontini, with his muted woodwind-their bells in leather bags1-in Fernand Cortez (1809), his divided strings, some with mutes, some without, in Olimpie (1819), and the rest of his colour devices. The fertilization of instrumental music by expressive and descriptive resources first employed in dramatic music, though a fairly constant process, was never more noticeable than during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Opera even supplied Romantic orchestral music with what is perhaps its most characteristic form: the independent descriptive overture. For once, history literally repeated itself.
Romantic Piano Music: 1830–1850
Authors: Kahl Willi
Published: November 2023

WHEN in February 1837 Ignaz Moscheles gave three piano recitals in London, his programmes included not only recent piano music but works by Domenico Scarlatti and his contemporaries, which he performed on a 1771 harpsichord from the Schudi workshops placed at his disposal especially for these concerts by the firm of Broadwood. This was probably the first time in the nineteenth century that the harpsichord was introduced into the concert hall in the role of ‘historical’ instrument. In the course of the preceding decades the Hammerflugel had undergone structural improvements which naturally influenced performing technique and composition. One of these was the repetition mechanism invented by Sebastien Erard and patented in London in 1808, followed in 1821 by his double escapement which permitted the same note to be struck several times in rapid succession. A most important step towards strengthening the structure of the Hammer.fiugel, and one which opened up many new possibilities in the field of dynamics, was the introduction, from America where it was patented in 1825, of the iron frame cast in a single piece which gradually superseded the older wooden frame, and the overstringing of the bass strings. Of far-reaching effect on the styles of piano music in these decades were the opposing influences on the one hand of the so-called Viennese school and on the other of English technical progress which played an increasingly incisive role in piano manufacture after 1800.
Major Instrumental Forms: 1850–1890
Authors: Pascall Robert
Published: November 2023

BEETHOVEN continued to dominate musical creativity for many years after his death-in choice of genres and instrumental forms, in the preservation of stylistic essentials based on thematic drama in a tonal context, and in increased emphasis on originality and significance (rather than technique and entertainment). Wagner, in one of the greatest public tributes by any composer to another, wrote in 1870 that Beethoven had lifted music ‘far above the aesthetically beautiful into the sphere of the totally sublime’ by the emancipation of melody ‘from the influence of fashion and changing taste’ and its elevation into an ‘eternally valid type for all humanity’.
Byzantine Chant
Authors: Velimirovic Milos
Published: November 2023

The term ‘Byzantine chant’ is applied to the monophonic settings of melodies, vocally performed, in use in the Greek Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages, contemporary with the Eastern Roman Empire, better known as the Byzantine Empire. As with all other musical traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean, the earliest stages of the melodies and their evolution are unknown; all assumptions are made on the basis of later practice, with inferences of logical development of the liturgical as well as complementary musical actions.
Chants of the Roman Office
Authors: Crocker Richard
Published: November 2023

Chant for the Roman Office consists mostly of antiphons and responsories, in roughly equal proportions. Of these two types, antiphons are the simpler in musical structure, and can well be considered first; they are not, however, necessarily older than responsories. Around the middle of the ninth century, close to the time of the archetype, Gregorian antiphons seem to number around 1,600. It has yet to be determined how many of these came from Rome, and how many are due to Frankish cantors, either as new melodies or as adaptations of Roman ones-or of pre-Carolingian Gallican melodies.
Medieval Song
Authors: Stevens John
Published: November 2023

Medieval monophony sprang from abundant creative inspiration and took on a great variety of forms, techniques, and styles. Many of these have been described in the chapters on Roman, non-Roman, and medieval chant, associated more or less closely with the liturgy of Mass and Divine Office. Many more, those of secular song in particular, remain to be described here. But the distinction between ‘liturgical’ and ‘non-liturgical’ (a modern rather than a medieval distinction) cannot be made hard and fast; the inclusion or exclusion of repertories or single items in those chapters was to some extent arbitrary. The present chapter will gather in some of the materials not covered earlier because-for one reason or another-they were not sufficiently connected to Mass or Office.
Early Polyphony
Authors: Fuller Sarah
Published: November 2023

The first epoch of Western polyphony may be said to end with the emergence of a distinctive, highly artificial, and influential polyphonic style in the environs of Paris toward the end of the twelfth century. Its inception is less easily fixed in time, for the earliest texts to speak directly and unambiguously of singing in two or more parts treat such singing as familiar practice, while venturing no comment as to its antiquity or origins. These texts stem from approximately the last half of the ninth century-even their dating lacks precision-and establish the recognition of polyphony as a discrete phenomenon during the 800s at the latest.
Polyphony at Notre Dame of Paris
Authors: Knapp Janet
Published: November 2023

The first book of the Policraticus by John of Salisbury is devoted to a discussion of courtly frivolities, which include, among others, gaming, music, miming, and magic. There is no intent to slander music by placing it in this company, we are told. It is, after all, a liberal art; its use in the divine service is sanctioned by the Scriptures and by the Church Fathers; and it is shown by Plato, the prince of all philosophers, to be governed by the very ratios which govern the harmony of the soul. But music has been corrupted:
Townscape–Soundscape
Authors: Strohm Reinhard
Published: November 2023

LATE medieval Bruges is known to us through the stillness of pictures. Motion and sound are contained in them, but in a frozen form: reduced to an infinitely small fraction of time. Given time, the pictures would start to move, and the music would be heard.

In the Ghent panels by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, an angel is seen playing the organ: she is about to press the keys F, c and a.— The time lapse between her action and the perception of the chord is extended to eternity. Next to the organ-player another angel, holding a harp, counts the time with her fingers on the shoulder of the partner in front of her, who holds a viol and is ready to play, but is resting. In the opposite wing of the picture, eight angels are singing mensural polyphony. Musical measure determines the precise moment in time in which the whole picture is set.
The Piano Trio
Authors: Smallan Basil
Published: November 2023

Over the centuries of its history the Piano Trio has gained a repertoire of exceptional size and richness, one which includes some of the greatest and most widely admired of all chamber works. This book, the first to be devoted solely to a study of the genre, reviews the development of the trio in different countries, against the background of general musical history, showing how it has reflected changes in style and technique from Mozart and Haydn in the late eighteenth century to the avant-garde composers of the present day. The author's survey focuses on the principal works in the trio repertoire, and his clear analytical descriptions are illustrated by a number of musical examples. In parallel with this he gives particular consideration to the problems involved in scoring for the ensemble, and to the way in which the participating instruments were gradually developed in range and power from the earliest times of the genre.
1873–1874
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

If the new season offered playgoers a few exceptionally exciting evenings, it brought with it far more disappointments. Only the most incorrigible Pangloss would have given the theatrical year a good rating. Most commentators pegged it as somewhere between drab and disastrous. Acceptable new plays seemed especially scarce, so once again revivals proliferated. This in itself would not have bothered playgoers, who welcomed fresh writing but who also embraced, far more than later audiences ever would, a repetitive repertory of old pieces. Yet all too many of these resurrections during the season seemed jerry-built or dispirited. One unhappy observer, Henry Dickinson Stone, called special attention to the proliferation of musicals featuring the buxom beauties of the time in revealing costumes when he lamented in his curious 1873 Theatrical Reminiscences, “There appears in these latter days so much of the il-leg-itimate drama, so much of the flashy, trashy, sensational afloat and tolerated, that the true, solid, intellectual old tragedies, comedies and sterling melodramas are wholly ignored, and made to ‘take a back seat.’ “ Such qualitative letdowns led to increasing turnovers, pushing up slightly the number of productions. But another, external matter exacerbated the situation.
1874–1875
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

The 1874-75 season proved to be an exceedingly rewarding one, brimming over with an enlivening variety of superior plays and productions. If fewer dramas and comedies appeared before the footlights than in preceding seasons, that mattered little and was easily explained. First of all, with hard times persisting a demand for totally escapist entertainments grew, so many stages were turned over to less intellectually exhausting musicals and vaudevilles. Second, the season enjoyed more long runs than any previous theatrical year. The result was that playhouses had less need for rapid turnovers. Indeed, for all practical purposes New York had only five firstclass auditoriums devoted to nonmusicals, although such lesser houses as the Bowery and Wood’s Museum continued to offer patrons a steady program of works that would have instant appeal to less particular playgoers.
1877–1878
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Two hugely successful foreign plays and a cadre of luminous stars provided the happiest theatrical news in this largely lackluster season, although several American plays were not without merit or interest. But the good news was interwoven with bad. Just as the effects of the 1873 panic finally seemed to be disappearing, newly organized labor decided to flex its muscles, and railroad strikes spread across the country. If New York City theatres were not as dependent on tourists as they would be in later years, business nonetheless had to be hurt. More important, railroads carried scenery and actors from place to place in days when every city and town of any real size had one or more legitimate theatres.