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Tosca is an opera caught between truth and lies. Set in real places, at real times, it is probably the opera Puccini researched most scrupulously in order to ensure historical accuracy. Yet insincerity is its main theme: the opera's principal events are structured around a series of deceptions that intensify in dramatic power and consequence over the course of the work. Act I: Cavaradossi lies to Tosca in order to conceal the fact that he is sheltering Angelotti, the political prisoner. Act II: Tosca makes a false bargain with Scarpia, agreeing to succumb to his lustful advances and then stabbing him as he is about to claim his prize. Act III: Scarpia's deceit is revealed when the ‘fake’ execution he has arranged for Cavaradossi turns out to be for real. Furthermore, Tosca is a performance about performance, with its fictional characters constantly donning masks: Tosca is a singer and actress by profession; Cavaradossi prepares to feign his own death; Scarpia conceals his malevolent nature behind a clerical façade. With its strains of verismo and Grand Guignol, Tosca is arguably Puccini's most self-consciously ‘theatrical’ opera, its high drama epitomised most vividly at the moment when Tosca places a crucifix on Scarpia's chest and floodlights his corpse by surrounding it with candles. Beyond the basic level of plot, contemporary spectators perceived yet further layers of insincerity in Tosca that, as we shall see, permeated through the libretto and into the music itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La bohème is nowadays one of the best-loved and most frequently performed of all Puccini's operas. After its première in February 1896 it was swiftly adopted into the repertory of all the major theatres across Italy, and performances soon followed in such diverse cities as Buenos Aires, Alexandria, Moscow, Lisbon, Manchester, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, London, Vienna, Los Angeles and The Hague. However, the response of the audience that listened to its first performance at Turin's Teatro Regio was subdued, and that in Rome a short time later little more enthusiastic. Critical responses were polarised (one commentator referred to them as either di cotte or di crude – burnt or raw) and coloured by a significant event that had taken place in Turin a little over a month earlier – the first Italian production of Götterdämmerung. In a city where many critics were relatively tolerant of forward-looking musical tendencies, La bohème was not judged on its own terms but became caught up in heated arguments about the merits of Wagner's music and ideas. Two key themes emerged from the comparison with Wagner: the issue of organic wholeness in music and the separate but related issue of organic growth, or how Italian music ought to progress. Thus, despite the subsequent popular success of La bohème, its initial critical reception was dominated by anxieties about the vitality of contemporary Italian music and its ability to keep pace with musical developments elsewhere in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DOCILITY, ORIGINALITY AND GENIUS Jane Eyre's recapitulation of the education of young Adèle – just under twenty years old at the ending of the narrative – has aroused some disapproval among Brontë critics. Part of that disapproval is associated with a word in the sentence that was already quoted once in this book, at the opening of Section III: As she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled. A present-day reader will naturally read the word ‘docile’ as meaning ‘submissive’ and may take it to imply that Jane assumes power over, even oppresses, Adèle; but that is not how 1847 readers would have understood it. Quite apart from the fact that the lady of the house would be in a position of some authority in relation to any junior member, especially a girl dependant, the primary meaning of ‘docile’ is not ‘submissive’ but ‘teachable’, and that is what it usually means in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, as in much mid-nineteenth-century writing. One example of ‘docility’ used in this sense occurs in The Complete Governess: ‘Every one who has had occasion to attend to [females] must have perceived, that in capacity they are no ways behind the other sex, and that they far exceed that sex both in diligence and in docility’ (p. 2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If religion was to be ‘the groundwork of [all] education’, and ‘the usual accomplishments’ were regarded as the second pillar of girls' education from the middle class upwards, a religious dimension should have been present in that part of the female curriculum as well. Some commentators on education certainly attempted to remind their readers that any human effort ought to harmonise with, even uphold, Christian values and principles. Priscilla Wakefield's observations on the merits of artistic pursuits supply a typical example: Drawing, not merely for the purpose of making pleasing pictures, and obtaining applause, but for that capacity it gives to a proficient, of representing any object with ease and accuracy, is both a useful and an amusing qualification: nor are its good effects confined to the exercise of the art alone; it strengthens the habit of observation, and facilitates the acquisition of natural history, which is a study at once delightful and valuable; and it promotes a reverential admiration of the wisdom and goodness of the Great First Cause. Even so, the continuous maintenance of a religious element in the accomplishments curriculum was an uncongenial, not to say hopeless, task. To begin with, the Bible could not serve as a universal teaching aid in a skills-orientated context. Of course, musical practice could comprise hymns as well as secular songs; drawings could feature ecclesiastical buildings and Biblical images; and works in foreign languages might be chosen partly for their devotional content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

the clock ticked on and on, happy about being apprenticed to eternity … Die Uhren stimmen nicht überein [The clocks are not in unison] Introduction Schoenberg's generation inherits its fascination with things uncanny from the Romantics. One need not look far to find examples in German literature from the nineteenth century: the poetry of Goethe, Hölderlin, and Heine, and the prose of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Grimm brothers provide the most conspicuous and celebrated examples, as do August Schlegel's German translations of Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest all feed into Romantic visions of the uncanny). Within Schoenberg's generation, Freud becomes the supreme analyst of the uncanny, while Kafka invents its most profound examples, so much so that his name becomes synonymous with the uncanny. Schubert and Wagner must top the list of musical precursors to Schoenberg's depictions of things uncanny, but examples also can be found in Mozart, Don Giovanni in particular, Beethoven, and others. The principal focus of this chapter will be on one particular development of Schoenberg's rhythmic practice. It involves the use of a steady pulse-stream, set in contrast to its immediate musical environment, and expressing a sense of altered, “uncanny” time. The practice has antecedents in Schoenberg's tonal music, in Wagner before him, and even earlier, in the music of Schubert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

while we hunger for a clear and beaming truth to settle our perspectives down (a foundation upon which to base a way of life, religion, or musical theory) we need even more the muddled doubts of our seeking: for to know is to be at an end … No composer was more responsible for changes in the landscape of twentieth-century music than Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), and no other composer's music inspired a commensurate quantity and quality of technical description in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet the correlations between Schoenberg's musical thought and larger questions of cultural significance in and since his time have not been well addressed by musical scholarship: formalistic descriptions of music theory do not generally engage larger questions in the history of ideas, while scholars without an understanding of the formidable musical technique are ill-equipped to understand the music with any profundity of thought. To cite a case in point, the authors of Wittgenstein's Vienna claim “Schönberg, unlike Hanslick, considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance.” The reader's ability to hear Schoenberg's music with any comprehension correlates directly to the perceived absurdity of that claim. I cannot imagine anything parallel being said about a major philosopher – X discovered that ideas have no importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wir wurden aus dem Paradies vertrieben, aber zerstört wurde es nicht. Die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies war in einem Sinne ein Glück, denn wären wir nicht vertrieben worden, hätte das Paradies zerstört werden müssen. [We were expelled from Paradise, but Paradise was not destroyed. In a sense our expulsion from Paradise was a stroke of luck, for had we not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.] This chapter will function as an extension to the Introduction; rather than a study of Gurrelieder in its own right, the chapter functions as prelude to what follows. Schoenberg famously said that Gurrelieder was the key to his entire evolution. It is in that spirit that we approach the work. Even a passing acquaintance will reveal that Schoenberg's Gurrelieder is a work of enormous energy and imagination, a composition of majestic power and scope. Its realization was an incredible act of will by a composer only twenty-six and twenty-seven years old during its original conception and composition, an accomplishment made even more extraordinary in that the work was laid aside for a decade, a time during which its composer had undergone perhaps the most radical sea change in the history of music. In the course of Schoenberg's life's work, there were other major compositions that were put aside in the hope of being completed later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moral backbone of literature is about the whole question of memory … Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and shape your life. Without memories there wouldn't be any writing. Time past Grows no more real Through sufferings endured. Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds. …if I see before me the nervature of past life in one image, I always think that this has something to do with truth. Our brains, after all, are always at work on some quivers of self-organization. W. G. Sebald disliked his first name, Winfried, both because it would have had to be on the approved list published by an edict of the Third Reich and because, in England, it was close to a girl's name, Winifred; he disliked his second because it had been his father's and he had a problematic relation to him. He was born in Wertach im Allgäu, a village three thousand feet up in the Bavarian Alps in 1944, the only son of Rosa, the daughter of a country policeman. His father, Georg, came from a family of glass makers and was himself a locksmith. There were three daughters. The village, which had some one thousand inhabitants, was isolated. There was snow for five months of the year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bacewicz and Szabelski Apart from the comic radio opera The Adventure of King Arthur (1959), Bacewicz was silent for two years before the premiere of her Sixth String Quartet at the 1960 ‘Warsaw Autumn’. In it, she made a belated attempt to come to terms with dodecaphony. She was far from convinced, however, that the move would prove fruitful, as she observed on at least two occasions that year: In writing [my] Sixth String Quartet, I want to sustain certain sections with serial technique, but at the same time I want to give it a different character than usual. Present-day pointillism does not interest me very much – it is perhaps a rather narrow path, a trend without a great future. On the other hand I am struck by electronic music: it invents new sound colours and new rhythms … I am less curious about experiments that combine creativity and its execution, such as aleatoricism, etc. My Sixth Quartet was played at the Festival; it irritated some of the oldies (e.g., Sikorski) but surprised the youngsters. These latter thought that I am already incapable of moving forward, so they have begun to acknowledge me anew … The young are perhaps too surprised (that's their right !), but the middle [generation] endeavours to make music from this ‘strangeness’, not just experiments. In any case, there's no progress without freedom of experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans would increasingly come to see the Orient as divided into two distinct units: a “Near East” comprising southeastern Europe, the Levant (as I mentioned in Chapter 2, the lands along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and their hinterlands) and other parts of western Asia nearer to Europe, and a “Far East” encompassing India, southeast Asia, China and Japan. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the term “Oriental” had in popular usage in the United States come to refer largely to people from East Asia, especially the Chinese whose arrival as immigrants was often met by considerable hostility. Nonetheless, the Orient remained a powerful category in nineteenth century European popular and scholarly culture. It was in this period that the term Orientalism actually entered French, English and other European languages as (among other things) the special name for the scholarly field which focused on the Orient, including the predominantly Muslim lands of Asia, reflecting the dramatic expansion and institutionalization of scholarship in the field over the course of the nineteenth century. Over the previous century or two the study in Europe of the languages, histories, religions and cultures of the Orient had been sustained by a scattered handful of scholars. But a revival took place in the nineteenth century which would for a time feed into what a French scholar called “the Oriental renaissance,” with a powerful impact on several arenas of European thought and culture. However, the nineteenth century also witnessed a new stage in the lengthy and uneven process of extending European hegemony over most of the planet that had begun three centuries earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is virtually a commonplace to observe that the confrontation between Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft over the morality of the French Revolution concerns manners as much as politics or morals. Neither Burke nor Wollstonecraft believes that manners can be considered in isolation, and for both writers, the term “manners” works as shorthand for a larger system of power. In the end, manners reflect moral objectives: just as the construct of female modesty is designed to secure female virtue, so manners more generally secure moral or political ideals. Responding to the revolutionary call for complete sincerity and openness, Burke and other conservative British writers deliberately reclaim certain kinds of insincerity, re-establishing the merits of terms that had come under suspicion in the preceding decades, including modesty, chivalry and politeness. Yet even as the ideal of sincerity falls into disrepute with conservative writers because of its revolutionary associations, some radical writers on manners hold on to and further strengthen the evangelical call for sincerity that can be heard throughout the criticism of Chesterfield's letters. The contours of this debate form the main subject of this chapter, which will compare and contrast arguments about manners and insincerity made by Burke, Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, considering the consequences of each position for subsequent arguments about virtue and politeness, particularly as they affect women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1884 “The Art of Fiction” was not what it was in 1819, or what it would become in the late twentieth-century aftermath of Henry James's celebrated Modernist manifesto. For James the art of fiction is unam, sanctam, catholicam, as is clear in his dismissal of the distinction, authoritative since Scott, between novel and romance. “I can think of no obligation,” James writes, “to which the romancer would not be held equally with the novelist.” And why? Because the issue is a craft issue: “the standard of execution is equally high for each [and] it is of execution we are talking” (“The Art of Fiction,” 56). Fair enough, one thinks. But when we recall what James says about Trollope in the same essay, we realize there are many rooms in the house of fiction, not all of them to James's fastidious taste: Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and his trusting friend are only “making believe.” He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime [and] it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth … than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing room. To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer, and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence … [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being defined as an Enlightenment only in 1900 by W.R. Scott, no geography of the Enlightenment could now ignore Scotland's contribution. As Alasdair MacIntyre framed it in After Virtue, The French themselves often avowedly looked to English models, but England in turn was overshadowed by the achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment. The greatest figures of all were certainly German: Kant and Mozart. But for intellectual variety as well as intellectual range not even the Germans can outmatch David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, Lord Kames and Lord Monboddo. Not so, however, with Romanticism. In accounts of the Romantic movement over the last twenty years, Scotland and Scottish writers can be singularly absent. Cynthia Chase's Romanticism (1993), a typical collection of critical essays from both sides of the Atlantic, mentions Macpherson and Scott only in footnotes to essays on Wordsworth and Byron, and Burns, Baillie, and Hogg make no appearance at all. Chase's introduction acknowledges Jerome McGann's argument about the extent to which modern criticism has operated with conceptions of literary form and value that themselves derive from Romantic writing: as McGann put it in 1992, using Rene Wellek as the symptomatic critic of Romanticism, “Wellek's position fails to map the phenomena comprehensively because it is a specialized theoretical view derived from the Kantian/Coleridgean line of thought.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just before Ernst Haeckel's death in 1919, historians began piling on the faggots for a splendid auto-da-fé. Though more people prior to the Great War learned of Darwin's theory through his efforts than through any other source, including Darwin himself, Haeckel has been accused of not preaching orthodox Darwinian doctrine. In 1916, E. S. Russell judged Haeckel's principal theoretical work, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, as “representative not so much of Darwinian as of pre-Darwinian thought.” Both Stephen Jay Gould and Peter Bowler endorse this evaluation, seeing as an index of Haeckel's heterodox deviation his use of the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Michael Ruse, without much analysis, simply proclaims that “Haeckel and friends were not true Darwinians.” These historians locate the problem in Haeckel's inclinations toward Naturphilosophie and in his adoption of the kind of Romantic attitudes characterizing the earlier biology of Goethe. These charges of heresy assume, of course, that Darwin's own theory harbors no taint of Romanticism and that it consequently remains innocent of the doctrine of recapitulation. I think both assumptions quite mistaken, and have so argued. But against the charge of heresy, one can bring a more direct and authoritative voice – Darwin himself. In 1863, Haeckel made bold to send Darwin his recently published two-volume monograph on radiolarians – one-celled aquatic animals that secrete a skeleton of silica. The first volume examined in minute detail the biology of these creatures and argued that Darwin's theory made their relationships comprehensible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the new musical developments in the years following the First World War, none has been entangled in more controversy than the claim made by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg that their music, and ‘the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another’ on which much of it was based (otherwise known as serialism), represented the culmination of the mainstream of the Austro-German tradition and thus, by implication, of the mainstream of music in general. All three composers maintained that theirs was the one true path, and drew on historical, national, and even metaphysical arguments to justify their claims. Schoenberg's ‘National Music’ (1931) traced his lineage from Bach and Mozart, through Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms, concluding, ‘I venture to credit myself with having written truly new music, which being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition’. In a series of lectures from 1932–3, Webern pushed the origins of ‘The Path to Twelve-Tone Composition’ back past the Netherlanders all the way to Gregorian chant; insisting on the historical inevitability and necessity of twelve-tone composition, he charted a progression from the breakdown of the system of the church modes, through to Wagner's chromatic harmony, the end of tonality, and finally to twelve-tone composition, writing, ‘It's my belief that ever since music has been written, all the great composers have instinctively had this before them as a goal.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘You'd think that people would have had enough’ – wrote Paul McCartney, and more to the point he sang with his group Wings on record, in 1976, becoming an overnight world success – ‘of silly love songs’. Enough of love songs; it's quite a thought. Whether one should be quoting a popular singer on the subject is open to question, scholarly question that is, in a study centring on Brahms; while on the other hand one imagines that if anyone is qualified to comment on song at least in the later twentieth century, it ought to be someone like McCartney who was the era's most globalized writer and performer of song. ‘Classical’ his song world may not be, but representative of the most widespread and highly valued form of vocality it certainly was. Admittedly there is something painfully overindulgent in taking too forensic a view of popular culture – not that it fails to be as significant as any other kind of art, and from many points of view it is among the most important expressions of human sentiment, if important means sincere and, in the age of technology, truly widely shared, art of the people if ever there was one. It is always difficult to wonder how to evaluate the fleetingly memorable (deeply though popular art penetrates into our psyche) in comparison with art designed to be lasting; all too easy to give in to some form of cultural imperialism when we compare a work of supposedly ‘high’ art with something perceived to be its opposite – popular, improvisatory perhaps, laden with reference so contemporaneous that it is dated almost the moment it is produced, and in short therefore, dare one even write it, ‘low’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A CURIOUS EARTH Those who know something about the story of Emily Dickinson's life – and there is rather little to know in terms of adventure, life events and the like – tend to invest their natural reverence in place, time, themes. Amherst is the supposedly idyllic American town that through Dickinson became a shrine to poetry and to biographical mystery. The mid nineteenth century knew of trains and kangaroos, that is, of technology beyond the imagination of any one person and of lands beyond the possibility of normal, individual travel, but not, say, of penicillin or of world war. Looking back at the Romantic world, from which emerged art that has subsequently been as enduringly adored as it was urgently nurtured at the time, we need to sense its smaller frames and gentler reference points despite its disquietingly lurking contemporary trends of displacement and ‘chronosis’. And themes – ‘topoi’ as they have sometimes come to be called in recent musicological discourse – are usually indexed as such in the many books of secondary literature on Dickinson's thus rather self-evidently ‘thematic’ poetry, themes that are archetypal, recurrent and arch-Romantic preoccupations of this effulgent poet – love, death, journeys and, not least, heaven itself. ‘Place’ in thinking about Dickinson means not only Amherst but America, and enfolds ideas that have touched the many dozens of composers – mostly ones who in all fairness must be called the minor artists – stimulated creatively by her eerily rhyming (when it does rhyme) ‘verse’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schoenberg appears again now as bridge into the future, to vocal music of the later twentieth century, in order to keep alive a narrative thread from the preceding chapters, and to do so there will be one break in the ‘rule’ of the narrative. Self-evidently this book is concentrating on the song of the solo voice. Song is also, though, at least in my hearing of how Western music ticks, an entity that presents in many forms. One has only to think of the aesthetics of piano playing from Mozart to Chopin and beyond, where making the instrument ‘sing’ is the highest perceived good, and this serves as a reminder of our starting point at the ‘Song without Words’ and a consideration of some of the twists and turns in what that idea did and could mean. Song can certainly be for vocal ensemble, of which Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden is an astonishing representative, choral music at the cutting edge of its compositional time, and raising issues of analytical interpretation not wholly dissimilar from those raised by song in its purest form, solo song. Yet although the ‘solo’ is plain enough in Cathy Berberian's Stripsody, which we shall be visiting as the end-stop of this chapter, it in turn raises the rather more gritty question of what is and what is not ‘song’ in the vocal sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on words and music is vast. This was already the case even before the proliferation of writing about Western classical music that was evident in books, journals, encyclopaedias, and more ephemeral sources during the 1980s and 1990s, not only in English, and not only restricted to ‘pure’ studies but also in the realm of intra- and intercultural research. So why is yet another book needed? If it is difficult to pinpoint a conclusive answer to that question, the direction of thought leading to Making Words Sing is clear enough. Firstly, musicological thinking moves on from one short period to the next as each new wave of writers brings fresh insight and knowledge, and in particular as taste changes. For example, in the specialized field of music analysis – on which I draw throughout these pages intermittently, although without importing too much of its fascinating and necessary jargon and technical routines, or, all being well, its tendency to redescribe the known and even to state the obvious – a sense of the appropriate repertoire has changed beyond recognition in recent years. There was a time, say twenty years ago, when those interested directly or vicariously in music theory and analysis would rightly joke that ‘analysis’ could be defined roughly as: the detailed study of the music of Anton Webern. And if that pleasantry is nowadays wearing very thin, this is a sign of the broadening of technical engagement with music that some would say has led to dilution and lack of focus, but that others welcome as a way forward from the perceived tyrannies of high modernism in its ascetic intellectualism, and of structuralism in its obsession with the apparent mechanisms of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machines, competition, empire and progress fascinated the Victorians. One of the most famous scientific theories of the era, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, tells of machine-like organisms that compete, colonise and improve. To notice resemblances such as these, between the context of Darwin's theory and its content, is nothing new. In 1862, Karl Marx, in a letter to his collaborator Friedrich Engels, wrote: 'It is remarkable how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions”, and the Malthusian “struggle for existence”. It is Hobbes' “bellum omnium contra omnes” [“the war of all against all”].' In our own day, debates over the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge have made this old insight newly problematic. This chapter attempts to clarify these new problems. Drawing on recent thinking about culture and science, it looks at how Darwin's social, material and intellectual culture conditioned the form and content of his theory of natural selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the beginning of his theorising about species, Darwin had human beings in view. In the initial pages of his first transmutation notebook (Notebook B), he observed that 'even mind & instinct become influenced' as the result of adaptation to new circumstances. Considering matters as a Lyellian geologist, he supposed that such adaptations would require many generations of young, pliable minds being exposed to a changing environment. After all, Captain FitzRoy had attempted to 'civilise' the Fuegian Jemmy Button by bringing him to London and instructing him in the Christian religion; but back in South America, Button reverted to his old habits, demonstrating, in Darwin's words, that the 'child of savage not civilized man' - transmutation of mind was not the work of a day. Darwin had nonetheless quickly become convinced that over long periods of time human mind, morals and emotions had progressively developed out of animal origins. As he bluntly expressed it in his first transmutation notebook: 'If all men were dead, monkeys make men. - Men make angels.' Presumably the transmutation of human beings into those higher creatures remained far in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the metaphor of musical logic, as discussed in the previous chapter, the metaphor of a syntax of music was prominently employed by Riemann to describe his idea of how music works. Again, its precise meaning and the interrelation between the two metaphors are anything but clear. It is noticeable that Riemann's early works are oriented by various aspects of language: after his dissertation, Musikalische Logik, he embarked on two projects entitled Musikalische Syntaxis (1877) and Musikalische Grammatik, though the latter manuscript remained unpublished and was destroyed when he could not find a publisher. In some ways, the early works would have appeared like a kind of ‘musicological trivium’, in which linguistic aspects of music are determined. The relation between logic and syntax is addressed in Musikalische Syntaxis: If one insists on drawing analogies, one could roughly compare the … simple [cadential] thesis with the sentence of the simple judgement in language. The subject would be the tonic and the predicate the confirmation through Quint-klänge, Terzklänge, etc. The relationship between language and logic that Riemann presents here is marked by a certain uneasiness: although he seems to be talking about language, the ‘simple judgement’ that he mentioned would suggest that he is primarily thinking about logic. Under this ambivalent notion it becomes impossible to tell whether the ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ which he defined in the sentence that follows are supposed to be logical or linguistic terms – or rather, Riemann appeared to underline that he considered the two to be indistinguishable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among Riemann's analyses of Beethoven's piano sonatas, one has come under particular criticism, and often serves as an example of the musicologist's insensitivity to music: the Sonata ‘quasi una fantasia’ in Eb major, Op. 27, no. 1. In this analysis, Riemann decided to rebar the first movement, almost in its entirety. On the face of it, there is of course something very blunt about this single-handed intrusion into the score. In fact, however, his decision to change the score is nothing but an expression of his ‘psychological turn’, and the changes that this initiated in Riemann's later musical thought. Riemann's meddling with the score may have roused the critics, since most analysts have traditionally taken the score as the starting point for their analytical observations, on the assumption that it forms the most manifest link to the composer's thought. Witness, for instance, Heinrich Schenker's deep involvement with manuscripts, which is also expressed in his meticulous editions (which are in stark contrast to Riemann's own Phrasierungsausgaben, his edition with phrasing annotations, where editorial fidelity became subservient to pedagogical concerns). In Five Graphic Analyses, for instance, Schenker noted that in the autograph of Bach's C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, the stems of the bass line in one bar point up rather than down. He interpreted that as justification – derived from no less a figure than Bach himself – for his decision to omit this bar from his analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a silent night in 1875, the young musicologist Hugo Riemann struck a key on his grand piano. He was listening for undertones, which he believed to exist in the sound wave. His nocturnal experiment seemed successful – his aural experience confirmed his experimental hypothesis. These undertones, he would explain later, relate to one sounded tone exactly in the manner of the harmonic or overtone series but extending in the opposite direction. As Example 1.1 shows, where the overtone series extends above a given note (in this case, C two octaves below middle C), the undertone series extends below it (in this case, C two octaves above middle C), in the same integer ratios, to form its exact complement. In hearing these undertones, Riemann believed he had found the natural basis for the minor triad. Since he discovered the works of the physicist-cum-music theorist Arthur von Oettingen in 1869, the young researcher had felt an affinity to the music-theoretical approach that became known as harmonic dualism, which explained the minor triad as the polar opposite of the major triad. Starting from the observation that both major and minor triads contain a perfect fifth and a major third, the dualists explained the major triad upwards from the bottom, and the minor down from the top. In this way, the minor triad is conceptualised as the exact inversion of the major. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Hugo Riemann died on 10 July 1919, only one week before his seventieth birthday, it was evident that the young discipline of musicology had lost one of its cornerstones. A special issue of the recently founded journal Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, which had been planned as a congratulatory volume for him, now had to double as his obituary. Its editor Alfred Einstein appraised Riemann's achievement, with what appears like uncanny prescience, in terms of its historic significance: In Hugo Riemann, a piece of the history of musicological research of the past half-century is embodied. Of all the great names, if his is ignored, it becomes virtually impossible to conceive of this history. It goes without saying that the celebratory-commemorative occasion for which this eulogy was written called for a certain degree of honey-mouthed exaggeration. But even if we treat Einstein's superlative assessment with some caution, what remains nonetheless is that even during his lifetime, Riemann's work was considered a milestone in the history of musicology. His prodigious output encompassed over fifty books, and countless articles and editions. His music dictionary – compiled entirely by himself – became the standard reference work for generations. And his theories of harmony and metre suggested that the basic codes of music had finally been cracked. In short, Riemann was a key player in what is easily stylised into a heroic pioneering age of the history of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byron is customarily thought of as an English poet and not infrequently claimed as a Scottish poet but, despite Matthew Arnold's insistence that the ‘Celtic passion of revolt’ is titanically embodied in Byron, he is not normally thought of as a Celtic poet. This volume prompts us to ask if there is any useful sense in which he might be thought to be one, and whether Byron himself entertained this possibility? A passage in Byron's last major poem, The Island (1823), seems to give a wholly positive answer to our second query: And Loch-na-gar with Ida looked o'er Troy, Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount, And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount. Byron recalls in these lines the first ten years of his life in Aberdeen where he wore the Gordon tartan of his mother's clan and felt ‘at home with the people lowland & Gael’. Especially he recalled his summer holidays, from the ages of eight to ten, at the farmhouse of Ballaterich on Deeside. Here he rambled on hill and mountains, such as Loch na Garr, swam, and heard Gaelic spoken. When he was at Cambridge, he wrote a poem, ‘The Adieu. written under the impression that the author would soon die’. This poem identified the sources of his personality and Muse as Harrow, Cambridge, the Highlands, Newstead Abbey and Southwell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Poems of Ossian were published between 1760 and 1763, to great acclaim and great controversy. The supposed remains of the third-century Gaelic warrior and poet Ossian, son of Fingal (or Fionn as he is more usually known in Gaelic), Ossian stands as a nexus between a variety of cultural and literary idioms and value systems. Of particular interest in the present context is the position of the poems as one of the first works of European Romanticism and as a major source for ideas of the Celtic within modern literary and wider cultural consciousness. This essay is particularly interested in the ways in which Ossian's influence upon the literary world has been portrayed within conventional scholarship. I am going to argue that for a variety of reasons, some sinister, some not, the true nature of Macpherson's importance has been obscured. I want to suggest that there is a tendency to marginalise Macpherson, even in the act of mentioning him, and indeed that such references frequently seem specifically designed to obscure, not reveal, Ossian's place in the Romantic pantheon. A cursory consideration may lead to the conclusion that this is an unwarranted claim. After all, Samuel Monk, in his still classic examination of eighteenth-century ideas of the Sublime observes that ‘everyone who read, read Ossian, nothing could have been more on a level with the taste of the age’ while more recently as notable a Romantic scholar as Jerome MacGann has suggested that ‘Ossian's influence on the literary scene of the late eighteenth century eclipsed all others’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without much doubt, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is the one philosopher of art with the largest influence on artists, on their understanding of themselves, and on their artistic production. The list of those who acknowledge debts to Schopenhauer is long: the writers Friedrich Hebbel, August Strindberg, Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, Jorge L. Borges, Thomas Bernhard, and Arno Schmidt; the painter Eugene Delacroix; the composers Richard Wagner, Arnold Schönberg, Sergey Prokofiev, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakoff, as well as numerous others. Yet as pronounced as Schopenhauer's influence on the artistic community itself is, his effect on significant philosophers in general and on philosophical aesthetics in particular is negligible. With the exception of Friedrich Nietzsche, who is less a disciple than an idiosyncratic commentator with his own agenda, Schopenhauer's thought on art remained isolated in the history of ideas. Hence, his writings do not mark the beginning of a new productive approach to the riddle of art as much as they signal the beginning of the dismantling of the idealist tradition. Historically, the importance of Schopenhauer does not result so much from his effect on future thinkers; it lies in the fact that with him, the skeptical reaction against the achievements of idealism sets in and is clearly visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Kant's Critique of Judgment marks the low point of classical German philosophy in respect to the philosophical significance attributed to the work of art, the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) mark the peak in the estimation of art's role for philosophy. In Schelling's early writings, art is not merely one of many possible objects of philosophy but, rather, an integral part of it. Moreover, art is considered indispensable insofar as it is seen as the only means of completing the philosophical system that Schelling proposes. It might go too far, though, to advance the thesis, as Dieter Jähnig does, that only in Schelling's work, even more precisely, only in the sixth chapter of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus (System of transcendental idealism) of 1800, did Western philosophy envision an intimate mutual dependency of art and philosophy. The fact is that romantic philosophy in general esteemed art as the necessary completion of philosophical investigation. Schelling is probably the one who thought through this position with the most philosophical rigor and who contributed the most coherent investigation, but this is due to the fact that Schelling remained committed to the idea of the philosophical system, whereas most romantics took a much more ambivalent stance toward systematic philosophy and the demands it places on the form of argumentation. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) declared: “It is equally deadly for the spirit to have and not to have a system. Thus, one will have to decide to combine both.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) takes Kant's Critique of Judgment as the starting point for his philosophical investigations of beauty and art. As he writes in the first letter of Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters, 1795): “I will, to be sure, not conceal from you the fact that it is Kantian principles upon which the propositions that follow will for the most part be based.” And yet, from early on, the Kantian aesthetic paradigm does not satisfy Schiller. More and more Kant's division of nature and freedom comes to be seen as part of the problem of modernity in which man's faculties are pitched against each other and never come to a full development and a harmonious unification. As much as Kant served as the inspiration for Schiller's turn toward philosophical aesthetics, his subjective and ahistorical stance was soon considered by Schiller to be one of the main obstacles not only to a productive aesthetics but also to ethical thought as an investigation of the duties of man toward himself, as well as to his polity. Before Schiller's encounter with Kant's aesthetic theory – this fact is often forgotten in the reception of Schiller's thought on art and beauty – he went through a Baumgartenian phase characterized by the association of sensuality and beauty with inferior cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Baumgarten Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) towering presence at the end of the eighteenth century tends to throw a shadow backward in history, eclipsing many of the less forceful and original thinkers. The situation is no different in philosophical aesthetics. Although Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment – unlike the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason that received little friendly attention until Reinhold's Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on the Kantian philosophy) of 1786–7 – created a fanfare on the philosophical scene (some slight delay in reception notwithstanding), it did not emerge from out of the blue. Kant had already reacted against previous, albeit more modest attempts to ground a philosophical aesthetics – attempts, however, that ultimately failed to establish an aesthetic paradigm to serve as a starting point for productive elaborations or dissent for future generations. The pre-Kantian philosophical aesthetics were not meant to be a break with the dominant philosophical system, namely, that of Leibniz and Wolff. Instead, they should be considered elaborations of it that nolens, volens helped to undermine the foundations that they labored to strengthen. When Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) introduced the plan for aesthetics as a new philosophical discipline with its own name, he did so in order to prop up the traditional rationalist metaphysics by making it more encompassing. Yet Baumgarten's attempt to consolidate rationalism turned, under his hands, into a critical endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Things are getting worse and worse in France. A lady of quality, the other day in Paris, rung her bell, and desired the footman to send up her maid Jeannotte. In vain she rung and rung: the man told her, Jeannotte refused to come, or be any longer under any body. At last Jeannotte walked into the room with a pamphlet open in her hand, and sat down. The lady astonished, asked her what she meant. ‘I' reading’, said Jeannotte, without taking her eyes off the book. The lady insisted on an explanation of this impertinence. The maid replied with great sang froid, ‘Madame, we are all going to become equals, and I am preparing for equality’. In this letter to her sister in 1790, Hannah More deplored the disorder in France after the fall of the Bastille. The More sisters were pioneers in the movement to educate the poor: yet here a servant's reading provides a readily decipherable symbol of anarchy, still sharper because the servant is a woman. More's anecdote extends its theme of the class specificity of good reading from the rebellious servant to possible readers of the letter. Although I have translated the maidservant's words, More gives them in French. Her, and her sister's, knowledge of that language demonstrates genteel education and status, and no lowerclass person who saw the letter could emulate the maid's transgressive reading act because the account of it is coded in a form only accessible to the genteel reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was not enough to read the right books: they had to be read in the right manner, the right company and the right places. In this chapter I deal with two revealing side-issues. First I examine libraries as gendered spaces and library-use as a gendered practice, for libraries offer a clear example of the consequences of perceived gender-differences in literacy and culture. The private library tended to be seen as a masculine space, even a symbol of male power and rationality, while the commercial library (the ‘circulating library’ which the literature so often denounces) was perceived, apparently in defiance of historical reality, as a femaledominated space representing both second-rate literature and transgressive sexuality. Libraries became a contested space. Secondly I explore the different significances for women of reading silently and reading aloud. Roger Chartier finds this distinction one of the ‘fundamental oppositions’ of our culture, with the movement from reading aloud to reading silently a ‘macroscopic’ historical change. ‘[S]olitary’ and ‘silent’ reading was potentially rebellious or self-indulgent, while reading aloud formed the ‘bond and expression of social ties’ and was especially appropriate for women within domestic ideology. THE REALM OF THE FATHER: PRIVATE LIBRARIES, GENDER AND POWER By the mid eighteenth century the private library had become a ‘major feature of the rebuilding projects of noble families’. Darcy feels it a duty to future generations to maintain the fine library at Pemberley, and Sir Charles Grandison also has a remarkable library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evidence for the reading-histories of real women in this period is both dauntingly rich and disappointingly meagre. Some left detailed records, but all are white, most from aristocratic, literary or professional families. Nonetheless, despite what seems a limitation, the readers studied in this chapter embody central contemporary themes. Laetitia Pilkington represents a late-Restoration identification of women's reading (and writing) with transgressive sexuality, which she simultaneously protests and uses to her own advantage; reading also serves her as a rhetorical means of claiming middle-class status as she struggled to survive as an impoverished divorced Irishwoman in London. Frances Burney's anxieties about self-assertion, authority, sexuality and a public role are typical of the new conservatism after 1750, and often focus around writing and reading. Elizabeth Carter demonstrates the problems faced by female intellectuals, and both she and Jane Austen demonstrate in different ways how tactics of vigorously resisting reading could be accommodated within apparently traditional modes of femininity. I cover the full chronological range of this study, from Pilkington who died in 1750 to Burney who survived until 1840: their different attitudes will therefore chart changing opinion as well as idiosyncratic differences or those conditioned by different social and family circumstances. LAETITIA PILKINGTON (1712–50) Laetitia Pilkington was born in 1712, and her treatment of reading strongly resembles that of women of the previous generation, like Aphra Behn whose transvestite adventuress Sylvia takes a ‘little novel’ to read in bed with her new lover, or Delarivier Manley who persistently identifies women's reading with seduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many women enjoyed reading as ‘pure pleasure’, ‘cheap’, but ‘an unspeakable benefit’, capable of ‘softening the cruellest Accidents … there is no Remedy so easy as Books’, but pleasure itself could also be a problematic area. Anne Grant loved books, but felt guilty about literary pleasure: she enjoyed Byron's poems but worried about their morality, and was ‘fully convinced of the bad tendency’ of the works of Peter Pindar exactly because of ‘the amusement I derive from them’. Reading might corrupt the woman reader or distract her from household concerns, but the very pleasure which was its major advantage might be equally its chief moral problem. One reason for this lies in the period's constant elision of textuality and sexuality, especially in the case of women, whose reading is repeatedly figured as a sexual act or seen to reveal their sexual nature. In Mary Hays’ clandestine courtship with John Eccles, her coded signal to him that she was alone was to ‘lay a book against the window’. Reading could, in fiction and real life, figure and facilitate a virtuous relationship: Maria Josepha Holroyd was drawn to her soldier-husband by shared literary tastes, with ‘Madame Roland's works’ representing ‘classical ground in our history’, and in Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796) the virtuous relationship of Rebecca and Henry is cemented by shared reading, for Henry ‘never read a book from which he received improvement, that he did not carry … to Rebecca's, in contrast with William's seduction of the ‘illiterate’ Hannah (1, pp. 132, 180). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Dr Johnson visited Frances Sheridan and found her daughter ‘attentively employed in reading his “Ramblers”’, Sheridan was more anxious than proud, and ‘hastened to assure’ him that the girl was allowed only ‘unexceptionable’ books, and that she was ‘very careful to keep from her all such books as are not calculated, by their moral tendency, for the perusal of youth’. Johnson disagreed: ‘“Then you are a fool, madam! … Turn your daughter loose into your library; if she is well inclined, she will choose only nutritious food; if otherwise, all your precautions will avail nothing to prevent her following the natural bent of her inclinations.”’ Sheridan is more typical of the age than Johnson, and this was even more marked by 1824, when her granddaughter Alicia Lefanu described Johnson's opinion as ‘injudicious and dangerous’, for ‘the practice of indiscriminate reading’ would obviously teach the child ‘immoral precepts’. Although this narrative does not seem to be gendered – age, not gender, seems the criterion of suitability – gender was surely a significant unspoken element. Contemporary comments are always more anxious about female than male reading, and accounts of girls’ reading, including the family history of the Sheridans and Lefanus, repeatedly emphasise the need for restriction. However much commentators differed in detail, virtually all thought women's reading mattered, for society as well as individuals. In 1814 Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins denied ‘that books produce no effects’, certain that reading ‘censurable’ books ‘can do … harm’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is observed by Bacon, that ‘reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exact man’. So Samuel Johnson (mis)quoted in 1753. But what kind of woman did reading make? From the 1750s to the 1830s culture, elite and popular, was preoccupied with such questions to an extraordinary degree. The reading woman became not only historical reality but also sign, with a bewildering range of significations. The period's most important debates, about authority, gender and sexuality, the economics and morality of consumption, national identity and stability, class and revolution, use the sign of the reading woman: and she might function as either positive or negative term. In British accounts of the French Revolution, conservatives registered support for traditional values by hagiographical accounts of Marie Antoinette reading with her children, or anxieties about social change through the image of a maidservant who dares to sit reading in the presence of her mistress. Those sympathetic to its aims depicted the importance of books for the emancipation of women ‘bastilled … for life’ in unjust social institutions, or used the difficulty of access to literature to symbolise the oppression of labouring-class women. Women's reading became ‘a site on which one may see a variety of cultural and sexual anxieties displayed’, even anxieties which do not seem primarily concerned with either gender or literacy. ‘Literacy was a part of the agenda for modernity, the city, and the Enlightenment’, and reading became ‘politicized as never before’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oh that I had the art of easy writing What should be easy reading! could I scale Parnassus, where the Muses sit inditing Those pretty poems never known to fail, How quickly would I print (the world delighting) A Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian tale; And sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism, Some samples of the finest Orientalism! Taking their cue from self-mockery such as this, critics wanting to debunk the romantic image of the poet who gave his life for the Greek revolution of 1824 have often portrayed Byron as a selfpromoting purveyor of fashionable Orientalist fantasy, who cynically stuck to the East as ‘the only poetical policy’. Of course, Byron's self-conscious deconstruction of his own Romantic Orientalism prefigured modern scepticism like Edward Said's famous definition of Orientalism as ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ operating as a Western style for ‘dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’. But as Byron also consistently denounced imperialism throughout his verse, he has proved a trickier writer to fit into the binary model of Said's thesis than government polemicists like Byron's bête noire, Robert Southey. The Poet Laureate expressed a low opinion of both western Orientalists and the Indian and the middle-eastern literature which they studied in notes to his verse romances on the Eastern mythology and stylistic motifs he had utilized. The Utilitarians of the next generation would go much further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EARLY PROVINCIAL STAGE EXPRESSIONISM: BACKGROUND The term “Schrei” has a rather narrow semantic range including: “cry, shout, yell, howl, wail, scream, shriek.” As applied to Expressionist performance specifically, the significance of the Schrei varied according to the type of script and production it served, but all types appear to have found a use for it. In the première of Ernst Toller's Die Wandlung, for example, it occurred thematically as a scripted expression of the horror of war. In Leopold Jessner's staging of Richard III, it was a means of summarizing Jessner's demonic idea of Richard's character. In Lothar Schreyer's Kampfbühne productions, it seems to have served primarily a tonal function – as one element in a complex orchestration of sounds. More than any other performance feature, consequently, the Schrei became the hallmark of that breadth of vocal and physical performance capability – and endurance – which was the first standard of excellence in Expressionist acting. However, it seems to have assumed its most comprehensive meaning in certain of the earliest Expressionist dramas, where emotional expression itself was both the subject, and the chief agency, of dramatic action. Hasenclever's Der Sohn, along with Kornfeld's Die Verführung (The Seduction), and Sorge's Der Bettler (The Beggar), were all written during 1912–13 and first produced in 1916–17. They were the initial “Expressionist” performance vehicles. Hence, as it initially appears in the present study, the phrase “Schrei Expressionism” is meant to signify early stage Expressionism, the development of which occurs first not in Berlin or Vienna but in various progressive provincial theatres, chiefly located in the south-German cities of the Rhein–Main area, as well as Dresden, and Munich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SPIRITUAL THEATRICALITY: THE DISTINGTIVENESS OF GEIST EXPRESSIONISM Even as the Schrei productions I have just discussed were being mounted, another kind of “Expressionist” performance was developing under the auspices of Herwarth Walden's Sturm circle in Berlin. Directed by Lothar Schreyer, the “Sturm-Bühne” ensemble – later renamed the “Kampfbühne” – created its Bühnenkunstwerke [“stage works of art”] based on plays such as those of August Stramm. These abstractionist scripts experimented radically with language and deliberately avoided the use of conventional characterization and narrative plot structure. However, the most comprehensive source of information about how they were produced by the Sturm-Bühne/Kampfbühne ensemble is Schreyer's own elaborate polemical account published in 1948 under the title Expressionistisches Theater. Despite the subjectivity of this memoir, written at three decades' distance from the fact, the theoretical principles Schreyer sets forth therein as the basis of his work with Sturm-Bühne/ Kampfbühne actors are worth examining. One reason is that they bear close relationship to the writings of Vassily Kandinsky, of all the artists associated with the Sturm circle the most significant early theorist of Expressionist abstractionism. Whether Schreyer was successful in realizing the performance principles he derived from Kandinsky's theoretical work is questionable. The one disinterested account of a Sturm-Bühne production that I have been able to find, Herbert Ihering's review of a mounting of Stramm's Sancta Susanna, is highly critical both of the performance and of Schreyer's theoretical remarks preceding the performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of witchcraft studies appears to be holding pace with innovations in scholarly communications just as well as other academic pursuits. The number of international conferences has grown considerably since the 1980s. Their conference volumes offer excellent reference points for acquainting oneself with the latest developments and research in progress throughout Europe and the rest of the world. However, a glance at the catalogue of the Pisan exhibit Bibliotheca Lamiarum or the internationally renowned journal Past and Present give the impression that nationalistic tendencies in scholarship still linger on, indeed may have even hardened in the age of ‘European Unity’. A closer examination of witchcraft studies and their historiography reveals that this was not always the case. Long before the onset of modern conference tourism, an international forum of witchcraft studies thrived and communicated in the former language of learned discourse, Latin. For this traditional intelligentsia, it was a matter of course that Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) analysed a pan-European array of documents for his Dissertatio de origine ac progressu processus inquisitorii contra sagas. Pierre Bayle (1647–1765) constantly referred back to Thomasius' text and John Wagstaff published a commentary on Thomasius, the De crimine magiae, in 1701. And the cosmopolitan character of witchcraft studies did not end with the use of Latin as the lingua franca. Thomasius himself authorised the translation of several of his English treatises into German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many readers of this chapter my early encounters with science were not only through the school laboratory and classroom but also through reading biographies of scientists. Excepting the adventures of Biggies and Gimlet, my serious reading as a child was largely confined to biographies of Newton, Davy, Pasteur and many others, often in the form of collected biographies, such as Egon Larsen's Men who Changed the World (1954) and J.G. Crowther's Six Great Scientists (1955). Such works kindled my interest in science and played some role (which I leave to my future biographers to specify) in my choice of career, first as a physicist and subsequently as an historian of science. Yet as a young consumer of biographies I would have had no appreciation of the complexities of biographical narratives or of their cultural, educational and ideological functions. I simply lapped them up and contented myself by reading about the Great and the Good and how they contributed to science. More recently I have re-engaged the subject of scientific biography not only as a consumer but also as a producer, in writing a biographical study of Michael Faraday, in which I paid particular attention to the interrelation between his science and his religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

kant was the one contemporary who took Rousseau absolutely seriously. Like Rousseau, he saw that ‘the one science man really needs is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man’, and he believed that in Rousseau and Rousseau alone, that ‘Newton of the moral world’, lay the basis for such a science. Rousseau had shown, most clearly in the second Discourse, that what others had taken as the constants of human nature were to a great extent the products of society. In Emile and The Social Contract, however, he had argued that man did nevertheless have an inviolable moral sense, and that if he were to use it, freeing himself of the contingent contaminations of his social experience, he would be able to discern the correct law. It was this second argument that impressed Kant, who wished to put it on a more secure footing. His achievement was to have done so. In doing so, however, he freed himself completely from Rousseau's first argument. The result was a further dilemma. The Enlightenment's defence of its conviction that man was largely a product of society had been shown to rest on an epistemological muddle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late sixteenth century, Hamburg provided an attractive haven for many whose livelihood was threatened in Western Europe by the turmoil and persecution which accompanied the Reformation and the Religious Wars. From the 1580s, Catholics, Calvinists and Jews began to settle there. Later exiles, such as the Huguenots, also gravitated to the city, which had become the most prosperous and dynamic commercial centre in Germany by 1700. Collectively, the immigrants had a substantial impact on the development of the city's economy. Their importance was recognised from the start. But the process of acceptance and establishment was both long and difficult. For the liberal policies of the mercantile Senate repeatedly came up against the opposition of the clergy, who for two centuries struggled to maintain the exclusive position of the Lutheran Church in Hamburg. The fortunes of the original immigrant groups differed markedly. The Sephardim were replaced by the poorer Ashkenazim within sixty or seventy years. But although the latter also provided valuable economic skills, the Jews were exceptional from beginning to end. They were thoroughly alien in terms of both race and religion, and although a significant attempt was made to give them religious freedom in the 1740s, they were not included in the toleration debate after 1760. The Catholic community also changed, losing its original mercantile character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of the toleration mandate in 1785–6 marked a true watershed in the history of Hamburg. The struggle for the liberties it granted had dominated the city since before 1600. The gradual realisation of the mandate's constitutional implications was to preoccupy the city's elite for much of the following century. Of course, both before and after 1785, other issues also stand out, and certainly other European developments had a crucial bearing on Hamburg's evolution. But from the point of view of the local dignitary, whether in the secular or in the ecclesiastical domain, the present was interpreted and articulated in primarily religious terms. The city's relationship with its non-Lutheran minorities thus provided a touchstone on which attitudes were tested and broader issues defined. For this reason the debate over religious toleration can only be fully understood in the context of the broad social and cultural development of early modern Hamburg. This chapter will thus amplify many of the problems raised in the first five chapters, and, by looking at the self-image of the city, explore some of the political, social and cultural dimensions of the debate. One major question arises from much of the analysis above: why did it take so long to concede so little? Throughout, it might seem that the battle lines were relatively clearly drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

POLITICAL AND CONFESSIONAL COMPLEXITY OF THE NORTH-WEST The Moravians traversed the North-West of the Empire between their bases in the Wetterau, in Denmark and in the Netherlands, as busily as the South-West. Everywhere they went they created new interconfessional connexions – the way they passed Wesley from hand to hand all the way from Rotterdam to Herrnhut and back is especially instructive – and also new disputes; but in this area, unlike the South-West, their history is not an organising principle for that of revival as a whole. For the crux of the religious geography of the North-West was that both revival and Pietist renewal suffered great setbacks, and that Lutheran Orthodoxy staged a notable, if brittle, comeback in the great Imperial cities and in some other important territories. There were good reasons (as we have seen) why religious revival set in first in the little Reformed principalities in the Wetterau, and more importantly, though much more slowly, in the larger Reformed communities. To these developments Zinzendorf's aspirations to create a Reformed Tropus based on Herrnhaag were entirely marginal. In the North-West political fragmentation had proceeded further than anywhere else in the Empire; nowhere were the religious faiths tolerated in the Empire more confusingly mixed together, and mingled with other faiths not tolerated (in Frankfurt the Jewish ghetto already made up 25 per cent of the population). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE CIRCULATION OF INFORMATION: (1) LETTERS This study of international religious revival in the Protestant world in the eighteenth century may without paradox commence with a postscript, perhaps the most breathless postscript of the century: P.S. As to the churches in Germany, you'll inquire how their discipline is exercised, and particularly the discipline of the Lutheran churches, their worship and government; how the affair of the union between them and the Calvinists stands. All you please to send anent the present state of the Barnavelt and Arminian party and Cocceians in Holland, with the conditions of religion there, will be most acceptable. You will likewise be fond to know the present numbers of the confessors and new converts in France; and, if you have as much time, I would fain know the state and issue of that affair between the Cardinal Noailles and the Bishops who join him anent Father Quesnel's tenets, and the rest of the clergy in France who adhere to the Pope's Bull; and if there be any numbers in France that are in any way breathing after a reformation, as we hear there are. Anything anent the success of the Gospel in the Dutch and English plantations, in the East Indies and the Danish missionaries in Malabar; of the state of the Greek churches … May I expect anything anent the much forgotten Jews in Africa, Asia, or Europe? […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation in musical life at the end of the eighteenth century In few other periods has the social world of music suddenly undergone such vast and radical changes as it did in the years 1770–1820. The life of a musician in 1810 was more like that of one of his present-day colleagues than the life of a maestro di cappella in 1760. The present circle for the production and diffusion of music is still largely that bequeathed by the final decades of the eighteenth century, when the industrial revolution and the bourgeoisie under the leadership of the state changed the face of the greater part of the countries of Europe. The period's great social changes mainly involved, in the musical field, the replacement of the maestro di cappella with the independent professional musician. The old maestro di cappella, like other salaried persons in the service of a gentleman or a council, was a servant of greater or lesser rank depending on his patron's inclination or on the fame that he himself enjoyed. In any case he had a series of stipulated duties: to compose or direct performances of every type of music required by the public or private life of the chapel or municipality; to enforce discipline and see to the good behaviour of the musical personnel; and to buy instruments, to check that they were working properly, and to supervise the musical library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]