John Marston’s The Malcontent was first performed in 1603 by the Children of the Chapel Royal at the Blackfriars. It was quickly appropriated by the King’s Men, who performed it at the Globe the following year. It was printed three times in 1604, but there were no further editions, and neither is there any evidence of the play being performed again until 1635, when the diarist John Greene records a performance by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars on Saturday, February 28. This chapter considers the fragmentary remains of Greene’s diary and asks what it might tell us about the early performance history of The Malcontent and the wider practice of revival in early modern London while also reflecting on the challenges faced by scholars who attempt to interpret evidence, or the lack thereof.

Weeks had passed, and life at Arpa Castle was proceeding just as planned. Franziska had indeed begun to study Hungarian, and every day without fail, the little priest who was instructing her would come up from Szegenihaza. He was a plump, easy-going little fellow, who before and after lessons would do full justice to the breakfast that was always provided, eating with gusto and smacking his lips in a manner that suggested the monk he once had been. As he ate, he would address questions pertaining to his church with cheerful good humor, though always with great tact and never forgetting his cloth. Franziska often drew parallels between this tone and the one she remembered from her parents’ house: a tone which, despite her father's air of freedom in private life, became a touch heavy and pompous and worst of all, unctuous, among his fellow pastors.

Apart from the little priest, it was old Toldy to whom she felt herself drawn more and more. She would make almost daily visits to his little cottage, the “nursery,” which lay hidden behind an arbor of vines. There had been no mother there for a year, and Franziska would tend to the smaller children and assist with the rather sorry state of the housekeeping. When she encountered old Toldy himself, she never tired of hearing about his time with the honvéd and the heroic struggles of 1849, and was undaunted by the deluge of Hungarian curses that concluded each of his recitations.

Chapter 2 develops the book’s theoretical contribution: a model explaining how partisan inclusion fosters de facto autonomy in electoral management bodies. The chapter distinguishes between de jure independence, which is often established through constitutional or legal reforms, and de facto autonomy, which emerges only when political actors perceive electoral management bodies as legitimate, transparent, and predictable. It outlines how partisan engagement can build trust, reduce informational asymmetries, and create mutual constraints that deter manipulation. The chapter presents an “institutional pathways” approach, detailing how some electoral commissions have followed a process of legal reform, stakeholder embedding, and administrative routinization that lead to autonomous practice. It further examines how consultation mechanisms, conflict-resolution procedures, and internal accountability practices reinforce autonomy over time. The chapter concludes with a set of comparative expectations linking variation in inclusion to observable differences in election quality and crisis resilience across “cases”.

It is no surprise that Berlioz, the lover of Gluck, should have been equally enthusiastic about Spontini, who was greatly influenced by his predecessor. In the words of René Dumesnil, Spontini ‘was able to create a kind of work that fitted the sensibility of the imperial age; more dramatic than lyrical but, despite the simplicity of its architecture, retaining the passionate accents of Italian opera’. La Vestale, which was accepted by the Opéra only though the intervention of the Empress Joséphine, was premiered there on 15 December 1807.

Spontini's masterpiece, so much admired throughout France for twentyfive years, has become almost a stranger to our present musical generation. Opera houses have not kept it in their repertoire, and concert halls and salons fight shy of programming excerpts. This is a boon for which the composer should be considered very lucky. Performance of this kind of work really demands qualities that are becoming ever rarer. For La Vestale, as for Gluck's operas, one needs grand voices trained in the grand style, also male and especially female singers possessing more than just talent. One needs choruses who can sing and act, a powerful orchestra, and, above all, it's vital that all the performers are steeped in the art of expressivity. This feeling is almost extinct these days in Europe, where the most enormous absurdities become astonishingly popular, and where the most trivial, and particularly the falsest style, is the one that has the greatest chance of theatrical success. This leads to extreme difficulty in finding listeners and interpreters for these artistic masterpieces. The degradation of the public in general, its inability to understand matters of imagination or feeling, its love of brilliant platitudes, the lowness of all its melodic and rhythmic instincts, all these have inevitably reacted on performers and led them along the path they now tread.

Claiming that Klopstock firmly believed in a form of equivalence between music and language is not going out on a limb considering the popularity during the Enlightenment of the quest for the common origins of music and language. Klopstock's revisionist conception of poetic metre was fuelled by a desire to return to an ideal form of poetry such as the one exemplified by the Greeks. Less banal is what Klopstock made from this equivalence, as it laid the foundations of poetic recitation during the nineteenth century. First, according to eighteenth-century standards, we need to grasp that the term ‘music’ encompassed a broad lexical field that went beyond our modern definition of music as a culturally constructed artefact. German offered in that respect the advantage of having the choice between Musik and the compound noun for music, Tonkunst: music in the sense of the art (Kunst) of sound(s) (Ton). The music that Klopstock really cared about was not so much this Tonkunst as the euphonic quality proper to language. In his ode ‘Das Gehör’, Klopstock opposes a form of natural music, birdsong, to music he explicitly refers to as Tonkunst: ‘Yet again the happy song from the hollowed nest; not the sweet charm of music [Tonkunst] […]’. A better term would be melos, although it might reduce language's euphonic quality to its melodic essence alone, thus discarding the parameters of rhythm, accentuation, and even dynamics that Klopstock considered to be all equally paramount to his poetry.

Klopstock's theoretical and poetic texts systematically use one specific word to refer to this euphonic quality: der Wohlklang (wohl: well + Klang: sound). Documented at least since the seventeenth century especially in poetry, Wohlklang was frequently used by Martin Opitz (1597–1639), Klopstock's main forerunner when it comes to the reform of German poetry.

When melodrama arrived in the German-speaking countries in the early 1770s, a cultivation of orality heralded by the practice of poetic recitation was already well in place. The four chapters of Part II will focus on specific aspects related to this encounter between a musical genre and a literary practice, showing how it facilitated a more musicalised approach to the German language. It was essentially through the further developments of the declamatorium and its spectacularisation that such a step would be accomplished. Departing from its first, original Klopstockean state as an intimate practice, the declamatorium became a fully fledged form of public performance, a change that came hand in hand with a greater reliance on musical accompaniment. As I will discuss in this chapter, this increasing presence of music also owed much to the shadow cast in German poetry by the idealised figure of the Italian improvvisatore – that is, the poetic improviser.

Published in 1710, Giambattista Vico's De antiquissima italorum sapientia (On the wisdom of the ancient Italians) celebrated the atavistic predisposition of the Italian people for expressive immediacy. Some hundred years later, Andrea de Jorio's 1832 La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Gestural expression of the ancients in the light of Neapolitan gesturing) said very much the same thing: that certain southern European societies had still retained, in their modern idiom, the trace of the pre-vocalic inflected language shaped by the accent of passions of a non-verbal expressive gamut that was still tied to the eloquentia corporis of the ancients. The chronological space between Vico and De Jorio was filled with similar studies, Jean-Baptiste Dubos's 1719 Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture being the most influential.

Filmmaking is contingent upon geopolitics. During the Cold War (1946–1989), the Sino-Soviet Split that started in 1960 became the single most decisive event in determining the filmmaking relationship between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the world's largest and most populous continent, Asia. The GDR was a satellite state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and thus dependent on Moscow for political direction, even when their policies did not coincide. Meanwhile, China proved itself to be an independent power in the Global South after the Split, making bilateral arrangements with countries in Asia and Africa. It was already a major force behind the Bandung Conference in 1955, which demarcated a third way apart from the American and Soviet empires and later led to Mao Zedong's denunciation of Soviet revisionism in 1961. Economic and cultural relations between China and most Eastern bloc countries were gradually severed. In pragmatic terms for the East Germans, this meant that China went from being a subject of great documentary interest in the 1950s to a taboo subject from the 1960s onward. No entertainment feature film co-productions ever emerged between China and the DEFA Feature Film Studios, the GDR's primary fiction film production unit and a major film cultural force in the Eastern bloc, despite the otherwise active and diverse transnational filmmaking engagements between China and the GDR. With China out of the picture, other Asian countries in the Soviet sphere of influence filled a symbolic role in the GDR's state and cultural policy, standing in for global consensus regarding the GDR's socialist vision of the world.

National Library of Wales MS Brogyntyn ii.1, formerly known as Porkington 10, has long been treasured for the diversity and uniqueness of its texts. Only five of its fifty-seven texts are wholly in Latin; the fifty-two works wholly or mostly in Middle English are variously practical, devotional, and entertaining. They include most of the genres of vernacular writing, and the majority of them either occur in no other extant manuscripts (fifteen items) or appear in Brogyntyn ii.1 in uniquely altered versions (sixteen items). More recently, the extent to which the manuscript reflects the concerns of the gentry class has been highlighted; it seems to have been made for a gentleman, a newly specific term for the lowest rank of the gentry. Yet only a few of its texts have received attention from anyone other than their editors, and even fewer scholars have discussed the manuscript as a whole. Among the reasons for this relative neglect of the manuscript is that eleven scribal hands are found in it, an unusually large number compared to the miscellanies that have been studied most. Furthermore, no scribe or fifteenth-century owner has been identified; such anonymity is known to be a disadvantage for a miscellany in need of scholarly attention. Finally, Brogyntyn ii.1 is unusual among mis-cellaneous manuscripts because it is not divisible into booklets. These factors led us to realize that only collaboration can begin to answer the questions and solve the problems presented by this fascinating manuscript.