For many years, Josef Tal (1910–2008) was the leading modernist and thus also universalist among Israeli composers of concert music. He arrived in Israel in 1934 but, unlike most Israeli composers of his generation, was scarcely affected by the so-called Israeli Mediterranean School. Among other innovations, he pioneered serious electronic music in Israel. Among his nonelectronic works, his 1969 double concerto for violin and cello with chamber orchestra is one of the most challenging for listeners.

Tal was awarded the highly esteemed Israel Prize in that same year (although specifically for an electronic work). Unlike composers who had previously received the prize, his artistic output was not directly related to the national culture. One might be tempted to think of a universalist Zeitgeist that allowed this. In commentaries on Israeli culture, the years around 1970 reflect competing signals: it was the time of the War of Attrition between the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur war—a short but intensive period that combined national centrism with the emergence of universal traits. Dating these years as the time of the Israeli breakthrough toward universality is based on the popular music scene (1970 was the year of the first significant Israeli rock albums); in the concert-music scene, however, modernist universalist composition had become the norm much earlier.

This double concerto, an adventurous tour de force of about twenty minutes in a single movement, includes no harmonious passages. While based on motivic remnants throughout, only sporadically does it include traditional motivic work.

In Madrid, 1633, Jusepe González de Salas published his Nueva idea de la tragedia antigua, the last neo-Aristotelian poetics to be written in Spain during the seventeenth century. In this treatise, he follows Heinsius's De constitutione tragoediae and centres his discussion on tragedy. In contrast to Pinciano and other minor poetics of the preceding century, the treatise's aims are radically different. For González de Salas, who was part of the intellectual circuits at Philip IV's court throughout his lengthy career, it is no longer a question of defining the primacy of poetics in the system of disciplines or of declining the different species of poems in a poetics conceived as an ante litteram anthropology, as was López Pinciano's Philosophía. Nor does he aim to provide a more accessible version of Aristotle's Poetics, understood as a vulgate version of the classical text, as Mártir Rizo, Ordóñez or Mariner had done a few years earlier.

González de Salas's ambition is to ‘illustrate’ certain modern theatrical practices in light of the theory (‘idea’) of ancient tragedy, and ancient spectacle more broadly. This exercise in illustration does not aim to provide a prescriptive definition of the rules of composition. Instead, it seeks to better understand spectacle and the singularity of its ancient and modern forms. Deploying a historical framework, this understanding of spectacle is based on an accumulation of ancient erudite facts. Yet González de Salas's treatise goes beyond erudite factualism to evidence a certain curiosity and vivid enthusiasm for his object of analysis. Specifically, he is personally interested in spectacle and, as a result, he supersedes the boundaries of a straightforward archaeological approach to the topic.

Book V begins as though it will be a critique of knighthood (milites), construed initially as the second estate of the three-tier social system Gower set out to analyze. It turns into a discussion of the commons, however, as the poet realizes that the system he has proclaimed will guide his account proves to be no longer useful to a discussion of a society that has outgrown it. The separation of a knightly class from the upper nobility, and the former's consequent interspersion alongside the commons, Gower saw reified by the protocols of parliament, which by at least the Good Parliament of 1376 had become bicameral, the peerage sitting apart from the commons, whose elected speaker reported the results of its deliberations to the upper house. The peerage comprising the House of Lords was restricted to some seventy or so families whose heads traditionally received periodic notification from the king that their counsel was required. The rest of the nobility necessarily came to belong to the House of Commons, represented there along with everybody else by Members of Parliament. If not already belted knights, elected by regional authorities, parliamentary members received the title “Knights of the Shire” for the duration.

Gower's commentary on the milites here must accordingly be taken to refer to knights and gentlemen, i.e. the gentry who constitute the rural elite, the shire landholders who were retained by magnates who expected loyal service in their affinities in return for lands. This is Gower's own class, and he chastises it severely, seeing around him contemporaries neglectful of their traditional responsibility to protect the Church, widows and orphans, and the common good.

The imprisonment of King Richard I, ruler of the Angevin empire, first by Duke Leopold V of Austria then by Emperor Henry VI between 1192 and 1194, ranks among the most famous Anglo-imperial encounters of the Middle Ages. In terms of political amicability, it probably marked an all-time low in relations between the rulers of these two realms, and in terms of its consequences, it can hardly be overrated. John Gillingham has indeed characterised it as a turning point in medieval German history. He argues that it was Richard's desire for revenge that made him intervene in the imperial election of 1198 and successfully promote his nephew Otto against Henry VI's brother Philip. This in turn prevented a seamless transition of power within the Staufen family. There were also significant consequences on the economic and personal levels, which makes this case particularly suited for consideration in this volume. The economic effects are well known and need to be only briefly recapitulated. The huge ransom – 150,000 marks were agreed on and more than 100,000 marks of silver were actually paid − played an important role in financing Henry VI's campaign to conquer the kingdom of Sicily.

The Victory. Declared 1 April 1939, the end of military combat involved a process of national rewriting of society. Prodigious quantities of ink were used to legislate, solidify, and lay the foundations for a new social structure composed of the victors and the defeated and the schism between these two groups. A battery of laws was put in place, one after another, starting before the end of the war: the Law of Political Responsibilities (9 February 1939), the Law for the Repression of Masonry and Communism (1940), the Law of State Security (1941), and the Causa General (1942). The functional nature of these laws was two-fold. Firstly, they constituted an ambitious rewriting of history that eliminated the coup d’état from the course of events and maintained that continual attacks against the fatherland had led the Army and the movement that backed it to react to eliminate this evil, putting themselves forward as saving actors by revealing what had occurred in ‘Red’ territory and in Spain as a whole since 1934. The insurgents’ pure motives were identified with goodness, thus turning the attempted coup into a Crusade and sidestepping the violence committed in insurgent territory. Conversely, the violence committed in Republican territory was emphasised by describing it in precise detail and claiming that ‘Judeo-Masonic Bolshevik evil’ was behind it. Secondly, once the backing of arms, which was decisive in the first and last instance, had been conveniently justified, these laws served to legitimise the dominating position of the victors and the dominated position of the defeated.

The Polish Princess Elżbieta ‘Izabela’ Dorota Czartoryska (née Flemming; 1745–1835) was a prominent art patron, garden designer, and reformer. Her collection of Polish art and culture at her estate of Puławy formed the basis of the Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, to preserve the culture and heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Izabela's husband Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski (1734–1823) was a member of the so-called Familia, the political dynasty of the Houses of Czartoryski and Poniatowski. Historians and contemporaries have not necessarily appreciated Czartoryska's reform activities, and read her patriotism as Romantic, at best, and as self-serving and performative at worst. Zdzisław Żygulski recognised, if in adulatory words, that Czartoryska transformed herself during the period of the partitions from a ‘cosmopolitan socialite’ into

a fiery patriot, into a freedom fighter, into a ‘Spartan mother’ sending her sons to battle, and most of all, the founder of the pantheon of Polish historical mementoes, the centre of her ambitious political, cultural, and educational plans.

As we have seen with the case studies von Friedland, von Itzenplitz, and von Kurland, the role as cosmopolitan socialite does not necessarily prevent nor contradict women's engagement in politics and patriotism. Czartoryska played all roles, as the ‘Sibyl of Puławy’, a ‘fiery patriot’, and, as the ‘Spartan mother’, the mother to all peasants.

Her nostalgic patriotism was expressed in different ways. The collection of Polish artifacts on the grounds of her Eastern Polish estate Puławy became an emblem of historical nationalism.

The Royall Health to the Rising Sun (Figure 8.1) was published soon after the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649. Transparently allegorical, the song's visual, lyrical and musical elements lamented the country's condition after years of civil war. It not only mourned the death of the king, but also breached the new Commonwealth government's treason laws by seeking to bring comfort and assurance to the old king's supporters by ‘healthing’ (or toasting) ‘the Rising Sun’, the exiled heir, Charles Stuart:

No certain information survives regarding the song's producers, sellers, singers or buyers. The only copy sits among a collection of more than a hundred ballads that mostly date from the era of the civil wars and the interregnum. Of unknown provenance, the collection was purchased by Manchester Central Library in the 1930s. The ballad's imprint offers little help. The publisher's initials, ‘H. E.’, cannot be traced and are probably pseudonymous, intended to mimic compliance with government regulations requiring publishing details to be included. None the less, as this chapter will argue, the ballad's unusual woodcut illustrations can offer important clues as to the circumstances of its creation.

No literary work addresses the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603 with more attention to its immediate political circumstances or greater interest in its historical and dynastic significance than “A Panegyric Congratulatory to the King's Most Excellent Majesty,” a poem comprising seventythree stanzas of ottava rima by Samuel Daniel. The poet, who had spent much time at the court of Elizabeth I and in the households of some of the country's leading families and who was still at work on his massive historical epic, The Civil Wars of the Two Houses of Lancaster and York (1595–1609), must have felt uniquely qualified to write on the topic. England's submission to the king of Scotland was a dark prospect to some, but it might seem brighter if it could be placed within a long mythopoetic history of civil war and reconciliation. That is what the Janus-like poet does in the “Panegyric Congratulatory.” There the past and present complete each other and offer memories that will be useful for the future. The values that the Stuarts will call upon throughout their mid-century crisis are the same ones that, for Daniel, make the Stuart presence possible in England from the beginning.

England, now become “all great Britain, and no more,” writes Daniel, has been brought under the unifying sway of an “imperial Prince” (2).

Based on the 1819 historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott, the main conflict in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is centered around a long-standing feud between two families in the Lammermuir Hills of late sixteenth-century Scotland. Before the start of Act I, Enrico Ashton has killed the head of the Ravenswood family and now occupies his castle and lands. Forced to live in a run-down shack on the edge of the castle grounds, the last surviving Ravenswood (Edgardo) has fallen in love with Lucia Ashton after rescuing her from a wild bull. Their love is kept a secret until it is discovered by Enrico that Lucia and Edgardo meet every morning to walk the grounds together. After receiving such news from his trusted advisor (Normanno), Enrico is doubly upset, for not only is Lucia in love with a mortal enemy but she is also destroying his plans to marry her off to a wealthy benefactor (Lord Arturo Bucklaw), who will rescue the Ashton family from financial and political ruin. Everything in the opera therefore rests upon the actions of Lucia; what she does or does not do has consequences for all. In the end, Lucia breaks off her secret engagement to Edgardo, marries Arturo, kills him on their wedding night, eerily greets her brother and the wedding party in a blood-soaked night dress, sings gleefully of her love for Edgardo and then dies the next day owing to the damaging effects of an acute mental derangement. When Edgardo, who has been waiting at the tomb of his forefathers to fight Enrico, hears of Lucia's death, he commits suicide, leaving Raimondo (a Presbyterian minister) and a chorus of mourners to pray for his soul.

An examination of the musical material of the Sinfonietta reveals the extent to which Janáček had achieved an extraordinary level of com¬positional sophistication by the time he came to write the work. Hans Hol¬lander declared that with the Sinfonietta, ‘Janáček reached the zenith of his orchestral works… . Although he remains faithful to his characteristic idiom, his style is of a thematic density and formal conciseness as in no other work. His inspiration has freed itself from its habitual literary and extra-musical stimulus, and has created a series of five orchestral minia¬tures that are of absolute mastery in invention, sound and structure.’ The overall five-movement form of the Sinfonietta has been likened at various times to a ‘suite’ (by Helfert and others), a ‘divertimento’ (by Hollander), and even a ‘symphony’ (by Janáček himself in a letter to his wife). These attempts to redefine or explain the title demonstrate how difficult it is to pin any conventional genre description on this highly original structure. In the published score, seen through the press by the composer, the movement titles have no programmatic designations, underlining Hollander's point about the composer moving away from any specific non-musical stimulus:

• I. Allegretto

• II. Andante

• III. Moderato

• IV. Allegretto

• V. Andante con moto [Allegro]

The Písek, Sokol and Brno inspirations, all discussed at length in Chapter 1, were of great significance for Janáček himself, but no mention of them is to be found in his manuscript or in the editions published in his lifetime.

Near the end of the twelfth-century Pamplona Illustrated Bible, there is a picture sometimes called the ‘Crowd of the Damned’ (Fig. 1). It is an illustration of countless souls waiting, patiently, it seems, for judgement. Taking up almost the full page in its manuscript, it is as ‘visually spare and unpretentiously rendered’ as the other scenes from the Old and New Testaments and various saints’ lives that are depicted there.1 The image is repetitive; many of the figures’ features (such as their rather bulbous hairstyles) are reproduced identically, over and over, and one has the sense that the illustrator would be fine with the charge of quantity over quality. In this, the image is reminiscent of many other medieval depictions of large groups, like the crowds of saints that can be found in Books of Hours, or the masses of carved sculptures that adorn cathedral chancels and lintels.2 But spend enough time looking at the people in the ‘Crowd of the Damned’, and one begins to see that the sea of sameness is punctuated sporadically, here and there, with a distinctive difference: a figure looks to the side; hair falls over a few foreheads; there are various styles of beards and personal grooming. There is no narrative need to distinguish between these figures (the point is not who they are, simply that they are many, and they are damned), but a sporadic individuality emerges nonetheless through the subtleties of distinction scattered through the crowd.