As explained in the introduction to volume 3, p. li, from the 1860s acts of special worship became more diverse. As these ceased to be largely ordered by the state and were increasingly left to decision by the churches, the leaders of the established churches began to appoint various types of special services and prayers. In some cases, these calls to prayer continued to be appeals to the whole community on issues of general national or international significance – the ‘national prayers’ which are the subject of this edition. Other appeals were for causes more specific to the churches themselves and in practice were directed towards those who regularly attended church services. This second type of special worship is designated here as ‘church prayers’. These ‘church prayers’ were of two types, annual and particular. Given their more limited purposes, no texts or commentaries are provided for these ‘church prayers’, but some further explanation may be helpful.

It should be emphasized that the distinction between ‘national prayers’ and ‘church prayers’ is an editorial decision. The distinction is sometimes fine, and it is not one that was necessarily intended or that would have been recognized by contemporaries. An indication of the fine differences is the commemoration of centenaries or semicentenaries of major events in the history of the churches, for example the 400th anniversaries in 1883 of Luther's birth and in 1938 of the English bible.

Placide-Alexandre-Guillaume Poultier (1814–87) was a French tenor at the Opéra from 1841, when he took over the role of Arnold in Guillaume Tell on 4 October, to 1851. He was particularly successful in Halévy's La Juive and in Auber's La Muette de Portici.

The arrival of a new tenor on the stage of the Opéra is an event whose musical importance becomes greater by the day. It's easy indeed to think ahead to a time not so far in the future when the staging of most of the great works in the repertoire will be impossible unless some young singer, with talent and a voice, with a figure and a voice, with sensitivity and a voice, with energy and fire and a voice, comes to the aid of the theatre, the composers, and the public – who after all have a stake in this, even if in these areas they seem sometimes to have gone into retirement. We need a tenor made for the music and not a virtuoso for whom the music must be made: an artist who sings his roles and can avoid accommodating them to the needs of his organ. We need a tenor whose strong, vibrant, beautiful chest voice goes from at least e to b′ flat (an octave and a half), whose low notes are truly acceptable and sonorous, whose head notes are pure and achieved without effort, who can sing at speed without losing energy, and can hold a g′ and even an a′ without fear in an Andante.

The one who's set this story down in French has included fine songs with their melodies to keep them at the forefront of the mind. He hopes its reputation and acclaim will travel to Reims in Champagne and reach the ear of good Milon of Nanteuil, one of the true worthies of the kingdom; for just as scarlet dye is put in clothes to make them more distinguished and admired, so songs and music have been added to this Romance of the Rose. This is something novel; and it's so different from other works, and embroidered here and there with such fine verses, that the base sort won't appreciate it at all. I tell you truly, it surpasses all the rest! No listener will tire of it, for if desired there are parts to sing as well as read. It's so enchantingly composed that it’ll delight all who hear it read and sung – they’ll never have heard the like. It tells of Arms and Love, and sings of both, too, at the same time – indeed, it may seem to everyone that the author of this romance composed all the words of the songs, as they’re so well fitted to the story. And here he begins his tale. [30]

The story, my lords, tells that in the Empire where the Germans have been sovereign for many a long year, there was once an emperor named Conrad after his father who’d been emperor before him.

Introduction

The evolution and development of human history depend heavily on trade and exchange across various cultures and geographical areas. People relied on collecting crops and hunting for animal food sources to provide sustenance during pre-historic times. Subsistence farming was prioritized in the emerging agricultural production era that succeeded the hunting-gathering civilization. A shift in how people met their wants was driven by human demands for a greater range of products and services starting in the pre-modern era. The economic fact that human needs are insatiable and the means of producing them is limited has not only led to the evolution of other economic considerations like the scale of preference and opportunity cost but has also generated the evolution of trade both on the local and international scales. Trade offers individuals, communities, and nations opportunities to procure goods and services that they could not otherwise produce themselves due to a lack of requisite resources. As we have shown in Chapter 6, the scarcity/abundance matrix in pre-colonial African communities occasioned the evolution and development of intra-African trade. With the advent of colonialism and globalization, African communities have engaged in trade and exchange beyond the continent. Just as we have shown rivers to be crucial in intra-continental trade previously, this chapter attempts to assess the dynamics of Africa's historical and contemporary involvement in international trade vis-à-vis the role of rivers and seas as crucial conduits of trade and exchange beyond continental frontiers.

The appearance of this volume within Irish Musical Studies gives me more joy than I can say. Although I have been closely engaged with the series for almost thirty-five years, indeed since its inception under the imprint of Irish Academic Press in 1990, this is the first occasion on which a book entirely of my own making has featured among its contents. The series itself has been a going concern (so to speak) for most of my academic career, thanks in no small measure to my fellow general editors, Professor Gerard Gillen, and more recently, Professor Lorraine Byrne Bodley, who joined me as series editor when Irish Musical Studies transferred to The Boydell Press in 2021. My gratitude to Gerard and Lorraine is heartfelt and lifelong on this account (among much else), but I also owe profound thanks to the first publisher of the series, the late Michael Adams, as well as to his colleagues in Irish Academic Press and Four Courts Press, under whose imprint the series appeared from 1996 until 2020. Simply to name Michael in this way is to remember a cherished friend whose work on behalf of Irish studies generally was both pioneering and immense. And as for his ‘stevedores in Malpas Street’, as Toby Barnard once memorably characterised them, my indebtedness most especially to Martin Fanning, Martin Healy and Anthony Tierney for their expertise, wise counsel and sheer kindness over the years will never be forgotten by me.

Ngũgĩ’s theatrical activism in Kamĩrĩĩthũ in the 1970s and 1980s was a kind of homecoming. His conscription into theatre activities in the village was a homecoming to his adopted home, and to an epistemological one where theatre was linked to practical and historical concerns articulated by the underprivileged subjects of his earlier writing. Writing plays in Gĩkũyũ enabled him to reach his ideal audience, the workers and peasants who could not read his works written in English. Their lives embodied the broken promises of independence, concretised in community-building. A repoliticised gitiiro dance sequence evokes the joining of hands that would deliver a second liberation. Joining the community theatre project was a kind of homecoming to the storytelling and theatrical performances of his youth. His detention for theatrical activism connected him to a long tradition of community activists who used art to advance social and political causes. In turn, Kamĩrĩĩthũ needed Ngũgĩ to thrive. The theatre of learning and its investment in praxis enabled the community to read their embodied material conditions and act upon them, thus energising the Kamĩrĩĩthũ people’s rallying cry that their sons and daughters who were inspired by anti-colonial nationalism to enter the theatre of war in the 1950s will return home in triumph over colonial and neo-colonial forces.

The concert, which took place on 4 May 1844, included Liszt playing a concerto by Weber, his own Réminiscences de Don Juan (Mozart's Don Giovanni), and his transcription of ‘Un Bal’ from Symphonie fantastique. The orchestra played the overtures Le Carnaval romain and Les Francs-juges, and the symphony Harold en Italie. The concert ended with Liszt and Döhler playing Liszt's Hexaméron, variations on the duet ‘Suoni la tromba!’ (‘Sound the trumpet!’) from Bellini's I puritani. Berlioz reported to his sister Nancy Pal on 19 May that ‘Liszt was marvellous, and the takings (12,000 francs) astonishing’. At the end of the article, by way of thanking them, Berlioz singled out orchestral players whose work he especially appreciated.

I can't abide that man! He's one of the weirdest characters, one of the most unlovable people, one of the most absurd intelligences anybody could meet in this world of ours, so lacking as it is in decent folk, happy beings and cheerful spirits. And it's yet it is I who have been chosen to write about him. – ‘Go on! Go on!’ I’m told, ‘it’ll be acceptable to one person and disagreeable to another, and all the more original because you both have the same name. People will think he's reviewed his own concert, there’ll be complaints and arguments, it's exactly what's needed’. All very fine and generous! So all it needs is for me to speak enthusiastically about it in order to wreck it and cover it with ridicule. But as there are people simple enough to take my praises seriously, and also as I’m unable to say much against it and have just declared someone to be profoundly antipathetic to me, the best I can do is to say nothing about it at all.

Cherubini wrote this mass for the coronation of Charles X in Reims on (29 May 1825). It is generally held to be less successful than his C minor Requiem of 1816. Dietsch had just taken up his post as choirmaster and organist of Saint- Eustache. Although in this article Berlioz asks for Dietsch to be given ‘a little encouragement’, in the JD (13 November 1842) he had summed up Dietsch's opera Le Vaisseau fantôme as the work of one who ‘has carefully and over a long period thought about the various doctrines of the masters, objects of his admiration, but who has not yet made a clear choice between them’. Perhaps he simply thought Dietsch should stick to religious music.

M. Dietsch is a tireless fighter. He has taken it upon himself to reactivate the fervour of artists, if not of the public, for religious music; and thanks to the intelligent enthusiasm of the parish priest of Saint-Eustache, who's at one with his young choirmaster in his views, we shall perhaps soon see the problem resolved. We’ve already had the opportunity a few months ago of sincerely praising a mass M. Dietsch had just written and seen performed at Saint-Eustache. Certainly no artist could do more to prove his disinterested love of art than to give, as M. Dietsch has done, his time, his care, his work, his thought, and above all his mass, and all too often his money, without even the certainty of having any listeners, and so without earning the weak compensations of legitimate pride that are so justly his. M. de Gasparin, when he was minister of the Interior, had the excellent idea of using an annual sum from the funds of the beaux-arts to encourage religious music.

What can we do to increase access to mental health treatment?

There are intrinsic defects in Whig playwrights’ use of reform plots as ‘revolutionary propaganda’ for resistance and against passive obedience, but they received little attention before the considerable public debate provoked by The Careless Husband over the behavioural code of meek obedience. First, the authors were unable to limit the application of their state–family analogies solely to politics and not to the family. There had been an inherent contradiction between the means and ends of Whig dramatic propaganda since the Exclusion Crisis. Whig dramatists, as recent scholarship on Restoration drama has shown, used ‘women's resistance’ as ‘a symbol of the subject's resistance to tyrannical government’. They drew an analogy between the family and the state, but their purpose was purely political. These defenders of resistance to political tyrants, being themselves patriarchs, would not admit whether they were tyrants at home, nor acknowledge the justness of other family members’ disobedience to them. Nevertheless, the direct, and not collateral, damage to the consensual domestic order was unavoidable, as it was the prerequisite of the intended political effects. The persuasiveness of the arguments against the political aspect of unconditional obedience was formed at the expense of its moral/ethical aspect. Second, even if their state–family analogies were understood politically, Whig playwrights could not prevent the application to the new regime. Every government wants its subjects’ obedience, and the government established by the Revolution of 1688–9 was no exception.

From 1910 to 1914 Émile Jaques-Dalcroze directed the Bildungsanstalt für Musik und Rhythmus, the institute built to support his experimental teaching in the garden city of Hellerau north of Dresden. The Swiss pianist-composer attracted students from across Germany and countries beyond to explore music through the moving body. This chapter evokes a community interacting, honing skills, forming identities, and making connections. Their work led to innovations in music, education, dance, theatre, and therapy that spread around the world.

The names of students enrolled in the training course, listed with their home towns, appeared in one of the first publications of the Bildungsanstalt. I was fortunate to meet former students Elsa Findlay and Nathalie Tingey from England, Annie van Deventer from Holland, and one teacher, Suzanne Perrottet from Switzerland. Perrottet studied with Jaques-Dalcroze from childhood in Geneva and moved to teach with him as a young colleague in 1910. She was almost ninety and still teaching when we met in in Zurich in 1979. Gradually I collected the traces of many Hellerau students, mapping careers and networks evolving through time. Recovering the working lives of specific people led me to write a series of microhistories, beginning with an article on the dancer Mary Wigman in 1986, the year of her birth centenary. I joined details from archival research and my fieldwork with living sources to construct studies of teachers, students, visitors, and supporters. Taken together, these narratives provide multiple entry points into the rich interplay of people and practice that emanated from Hellerau.

One can hardly measure nowadays the spectacular success of Klopstock, the most idolised author in the German countries during the second half of the eighteenth century. His odes (written from 1747 to 1780) and Der Messias constitute the largest corpus of his poetic work. A monumental poem inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost narrating the life of Jesus in twenty Gesänge (cantos), it was published over a time span of twenty-five years between 1748 and 1773 and counts among the best-selling texts of the eighteenth century published in German. The epic proportions of this work were judged all the more astounding in that its roughly twenty thousand verses are entirely written in the six-foot line known as hexameter, or to be clear, in Klopstock's own adaptation of the classical hexameter – also known as heroic hexameter – the most highly regarded verse in Greek and Latin poetry, notably in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.

Since his lifetime, Klopstock has often been nicknamed the ‘father of the German hexameter’, although the very first German adaptations of this verse go back to the sixteenth century with poets Konrad Gesner (1516–65) and Johann Fischart (c. 1546–90), if not earlier. Some commentators would have preferred to give this title to Gottsched, who had used this form in his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (1730); however, Gottsched's examples were primarily intended as didactic demonstrations. In any case, no German poet prior to Klopstock had ever attempted to adapt the Greek hexameter in such a large-scale poetic work. Klopstock's interest in the hexameter was motivated by his desire to recover the expressive potential of the German language. For this, he reconceived the rules on poetic metre – Silbenmaß in German – to develop a poetic system that he considered the most suitable for rendering the expressive genius of the German language.