In 1940, Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger's lifelong friend and correspondent, Alfhild Sandby, published a play whose main character was almost certainly modelled on Grainger. Titled Artist-Comrades, the play concerns a young sculptor, Leon, who is tormented by conflicting loyalties, as he is forced to choose between his lover, Varenka, and his domineering mother, Leonora. Sandby sent a copy of this work to Grainger, who, after damning it with faint praise for its ‘decorative & delightful’ cover and ‘charming’ print quality, was unflinching in his criticism. It seems that Sandby had diverted from her model, allowing Leon and Varenka to elope, escaping the clutches of Leonora's tyranny. Writing ‘as an Australian’, Grainger said,

While Sandby's play was possibly the first work for stage inspired by Grainger's life, it was certainly not the last. Since his death in 1961, there have been at least ten other plays inspired by Grainger, not counting the dozens of other screenplays, radio plays, novels, and performance works stimulated by his dramatic life and unorthodox lifestyle.

This book explores the depiction of Percy Grainger (1882–1961) on page, stage, and screen, examining how his public persona and received biographical narrative were developed, then transformed by writers, play-wrights, and filmmakers, to suit the needs of the stories they wanted to tell.

The 1960 Coup d’État, led by brothers Germame and Mengistu Neway, marks the abrupt right turn in Emperor Haile Selassie's reign, ending his struggle to consolidate power against foreign and domestic challengers and inaugurating his determination to hang on to power while deaf to the counsel of trusted advisers and blind to societal signposts. As Bahru Zewde states: “In the three decades between Liberation and Revolution, no event shook the imperial regime or attracted as much public attention as the abortive coup d’état of December 1960.”1 The plotters tested the regime to its core and their suppression challenged the monarchy to implement a just solution.

Serving justice, or not, is the focus of this chapter. The first section probes a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual currents coursing through Ethiopia at the time. It concentrates on the Qachane Club, for many of the drivers of the coup and countercoup were members of this social and intellectual club. The second section outlines the adoption of European legal practices in Ethiopia by focusing on procedural developments in the courts and the reorganization of the Ministry of Justice. This is followed by an account of the coup d’état as background for the trial of the plotters, the most noted of whom was Mengistu Neway. Comprehending how hanging from a rope in the middle of a square in Addis Ababa would ensure his place in history as a revolutionary martyred for his cause, Mengistu Neway did not appeal his death sentence or seek other means of redress. The trial was an outright rejection of restorative justice and, if probed further in cases of less prominent supporters of the coup d’état, the tricky reconciliation process showed elements of traditional restorative justice long practiced by the state, yet with omissions that reduced its ability to bring about reconciliation.

In short forms such as the bagatelle, there is a strong correlation between the dynamic of the form and the shaping of the spatial envelope. In several of the bagatelles, the analysis has shown how the ‘recapitulatory registral shift’ creates a teleological process and climactic goal within the combination of binary and ternary forms. Over the next two chapters, I look at how Beethoven's use of register and shaping of space using a different strategy, spatial expansion, contributes to a similar sense of teleological coherence across the theme-and-variations form. Traditionally considered as an additive form due to its static tonality, any sense of directionality in variation form is conventionally explained as deriving from intensification of rhythmic activity. The analysis of a selection of variations spanning Beethoven's career, from his youth in Bonn to the visionary late period, highlights how spatial expansion and contraction acts as an important structural agent, through which theme-and-variations form becomes imbued with teleological energy and climactic process.

Radical innovation characterises Beethoven's approach to variations, emphasising development over decoration and creating a strong conclusion through an extended ‘composite’ final variation. These works, so popular with the Viennese public from his earliest mature sets, were vehicles for virtuoso display, exploiting as variational techniques a panoply of registral gestures drawing on the entire piano range. It is striking to compare, for instance, the spatial envelope of Beethoven's earliest and last variation sets, the ‘Dressler’ (1782) and the ‘Diabelli’ (1819–23), composed forty years apart, the former's range restricted to around 3 octaves, whilst the latter's range, saturated with spans of 5 octaves and more, reaches the widest 6-octave span at the end of variation 10.

That William Young had benevolent intentions, if strictly on his own terms, towards the enslaved who worked his plantations in Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago can hardly be doubted. It does not, however, necessar¬ily follow that his intentions significantly affected the lives of the enslaved for the better, above all in the fundamental questions of life and death: of the lifespan enslaved people could expect and of the numbers of children born and successfully nurtured through their earliest years.

A recent study by Richard S. Dunn of the enslaved on the Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica is a grim example of the utter failure of good intentions to alter lives for the better. Mesopotamia was the property of Joseph Foster Barham from 1789 until his death in 1832. Like Young, Foster Barham was an absentee planter, living a patrician life in Britain and serving as a member of parliament. They were close allies in pressing for reform of the slave system to be left to the colonial communities. Foster Barham, like Young, proclaimed his generous intentions towards his enslaved. Yet, in Dunn's view, he inherited and permitted to continue in operation ‘an extraordinarily abusive slave system’ with a high death rate and low birth rate.1 Whether that was also the case with William Young's plantations in St Vincent and Antigua is the theme of this chapter.

St Vincent

The two plantations in St Vincent that William Young inherited from his father in 1788, Calliaqua and Pembroke, were his principal concern in his managing of his Caribbean estates, which was conducted mostly at a distance, other than two short visits to the islands.

Introduction

There is an overlap in time between this chapter and the previous two, because although peat shrinkage and storm surges continued to plague the inhabitants of the North Sea Lowlands, the first half of the sixteenth century also witnessed the beginning of a new period of expansion. This expansion was so strong that I will call the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the era of the Second Reclamation of the North Sea Lowlands. This Second Reclamation was less impressive than the Great Reclamation of the central Middle Ages as far as land area was concerned, but it required much more capital than the earlier reclamation phase and it fundamentally changed property relations and farming systems in the lowlands. The strongest drive for this change was the growth of population and economy in the Low Countries, first concentrated around the port of Antwerp, later in the northern Low Countries, the emerging Dutch Republic. Like the preceding periods, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will be covered in two chapters. This chapter will demonstrate how Dutch capital, expertise and institutional innovations made the Second Reclamation possible. Chapter six will be dedicated to the changes in property relations and farming following this second wave of reclamations. Firstly, a survey of the history of the North Sea area from 1500 to 1700 provides context.

The forest in medieval romance is a liminal landscape that variously provides a haven for lovers, a proving ground for young knights, and a gateway to the Otherworld. In a specific textual tradition, the forest also becomes a refuge for mothers who have been wronged by chivalric elements of elite society and, as such, allows romance authors to explore an alternative way to raise and educate sons that foregrounds maternal influence. Whereas the previous chapters in this book have shown how women in romance assert their role as mothers in the built environment, such as birthing rooms and castles, the next two chapters explore how mothers behave in ostensibly natural spaces that have been nonetheless shaped by human perception and interaction: the forest and the sea. Motherhood in these natural spaces is characterised by levels of isolation (from court) and interaction (with other characters) that show that they are part of, rather than existing outside, society.

The representation of the wild forest as both separate from and essential to the courtly environment occurs in a number of medieval romance texts, including Sir Orfeo and Perceforest.

In the Book of Esther, the humble and modest young queen, selected as such despite having chosen not to adorn and beautify herself and being secretly a Jew, throws herself before the king to beg for the lives of her people who have been sentenced to death. In doing so, she risks her life, not only by revealing that she herself is Jewish, but because nobody is permitted to enter the King's chamber and approach him without being invited to, on pain of death. But King Ahasuerus tells her ‘Non morieris: non enim pro te, sed pro omnibus haec lex constituta est’ (Esther 15.13) (‘You will not die, for the law is made not for you, but for all the people’). Esther thus is shown to have a singular privilege; in approaching the king and interceding for her people, she saves them. In this, Esther can be read as a type of the Virgin Mary: just as the Virgin intercedes for sinners, and thereby helps Christians obtain salvation, the Jewish people are therefore saved by Esther's love of them, and the king's love for Esther. However, Esther's typological relationship with the Virgin extends beyond this intercession: Esther's exemption from the law, established in 15.13, is what enables her to save her people and parallels the Virgin Mary's exemption from the law of original sin, a parallel drawn upon in service of promoting the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which teaches that Mary, at her own conception, was preserved entirely from all stain of original sin. Marian lyric abounds in the Middle Ages, and the vernacular French tradition uses commentary on the Book of Esther in the form of lyric as a way of praising the Virgin, but moreover as a means of advocating a contested doctrinal position.

Having introduced new theoretical concepts and analytical methods in the previous chapter, the present chapter clarifies and expands on those through a demonstration of the analytic approach in action, at both micro- and macro-levels. The two case studies, Für Elise WoO 59 and the Andante Favori WoO 57, are both well known and share a use of rondo form, thus enabling a comparison of the interaction of space and form. In each case, I employ PSM and RG diagrams to illustrate processes including the large-scale spatial structure, narrative design, and consider the use of specific devices and metaphorical meanings.

Case study 1: Für Elise WoO 59

Für Elise, WoO 59, one of Beethoven's most popular and widely-known piano miniatures, is a bagatelle composed in 1810. Because of its simple rondo form (see Table 3.1), the piece offers a wonderful example in which to show both the analytical methodology at work and some of the aforementioned types of registral strategies in practice. The 22-bar rondo theme is itself a closed rounded binary form, a1|| a2–a1’ with repeats applied at its first appearance. Its striking spatial characteristic is that all the dramatic expansions occur in linking sections, the largest and most impressive of which is in the longer link to the final appearance of the rondo theme. At the same time the two main episodes each represent excursions to upper and lower extremes of the range, whilst the rondo sections exert a stabilising effect by asserting registral identity, returning each time to the same pitch-space, within the normative range.

Pepe is the Spanish diminutive of José, and though the subject of this book was named at birth José Luis Romero Gallego, he is universally known as Pepe Romero. Born into a family of guitarists in Málaga in 1944, he was a genuine child prodigy and began appearing in public already in the early 1950s. His career really took off after the family moved to Southern California in 1957, seeking a wider field of opportunity for father Celedonio (b. 1913), his eldest son, Celín (b. 1936), Pepe, and Ángel (b. 1946). (Editorial note: Celin and Angel will hereafter be spelled in the English manner, without accents.) All four were virtuosos, and within a few years they formed the Romero Guitar Quartet, a novel ensemble that took the music world by storm. Pepe maintained dual careers as a quartet member and soloist, and he excelled in the realms of both classical and flamenco guitar, twin peaks rarely scaled by a single guitarist. Since those early days, he has continued to make his mark not only as a leading concert and recording artist, arranger, and composer, but also as a teacher. He is widely and justifiably regarded as one of the leading and most influential guitarists of the past six decades.

His is a life rich with memories, experiences, associations, and insights that have much to offer to a wide range of readers, not just guitarists. As he approaches retirement, he wishes to leave a permanent record of the music he has loved and played and of the people who have touched his life and whose lives he has touched in turn. It has been a rare privilege to assist him in this important task, but one might well ask how I came to merit such an honor.