Comparison of the Instrumentation on the Urtext Scores of Gustav Holst’s Original Military Band Works

No one seeing or reading Friedrich Durrenmatt's tragicomedy Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit of the Old Lady, 1956; usually translated into English as The Visit) would dispute that Claire Zachanassian, the “old lady” of the play's title, is one angry woman. The play is now almost seventy years old—older than Claire in the play—and dates back to a time long before women felt they could speak openly about men's sexual misbehaviors. This “old lady” of a play returns repeatedly and seems to be aging quite gracefully (unlike the character of Claire). One might ask why this particular work continues to hold the stage (and screen) since its main characters are neither young nor beautiful nor, perhaps more important, particularly admirable; it may, of course, be precisely their unsavory nature that continues to fascinate us. At different times over the years since the play premiered, the various themes that Durrenmatt sounded in this work have been the subject of heated debates, even causes célèbres, and, depending on the particular historical moment, the play and characters get different emphases in direction; thus the play continues to remain thoroughly timely and relevant, and allows us to see the characters through varied lenses.

The Tragicomedy, Then and Now

When Friedrich Durrenmatt created his masterpiece, he was thirty-five years old and had already realized some success as an author and playwright. But his real breakthrough onto the international stage came with the creation of Claire and the townsfolk of Gullen.

Introduction

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tendencies that were already visible in earlier times continued: the role of oligarchies within the water authorities was strengthened; there was trust within the water authorities, but not between them. Localism, as Dorothy Summers termed it, was rampant. This tended to lead to stagnation in institutional development. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, for instance, Friesland was one of the last regions to introduce monetisation of dike maintenance while other regions stuck to maintenance in kind. Although some changes occurred in the eighteenth century, real change came mostly in the nineteenth. That change came largely from outside through both state intervention and, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the introduction of the steam pump, which would cause a revolution in water management.

Following a general introduction and a survey of land reclamation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this chapter will discuss six case studies that will illuminate the problems and opportunities confronting the North Sea Lowlands in this period: the slow and tortuous introduction of monetisation of water management in parts of the Netherlands and north-west Germany; the introduction of Internal Drainage Boards, and later the steam engine, in the English fenlands; the struggle against deteriorating drainage in the Frisian fenlands; the consequences of and response to the devastating floods of 1715 and 1717; and the development of water management in the Dutch province of Groningen. These case studies confirm S. R. Epstein's view that pre-modern states did not possess undivided sovereignty as they were confronted with groups and bodies claiming to have legal privileges, which were defended fiercely against the state and any other party.

In 1804, the Commissioners of Naval Inquiry triggered a scandal that shook the second Pitt ministry to its foundations. This scandal concerned Pitt's closest political companion Henry Dundas, now Viscount Melville. During his long tenure as Treasurer of the Navy (1783–1800), Dundas had not only left most of the duties to his deputy Alexander Trotter (1750–1830), but also tolerated the fact that Trotter systematically ignored basic regulations of the office. Trotter channelled the immense sums he accounted for through a private bank account, used the money to speculate in the stock market, and grew rich on the interest. Dundas had reformed the Treasurership of the Navy in 1785 by following the model of Burke's similar reform of the Army Paymastership. The inquiry revealed that Dundas had consistently disregarded the rules, which he himself had introduced. As the inquiry widened, the Commissioners of Naval Inquiry unearthed evidence suggesting that Pitt had similarly ignored reform legislation by systematically misappropriating money from the Civil List and permitting the Civil List to amass enormous debts without parliamentary approval. The findings of the inquiry incited new debates on economical reform issues in Parliament. The debates once again revolved around corruption, secret influence, and ministerial extravagance. The lines of attack, which the Whig opposition had developed in the 1760s, were very much alive half a century later. A decade after the Hastings impeachment, Parliament sat once again in judgement over a prominent politician. Starting with the Melville impeachment, moral outrage fuelled a renewed interest in administrative reform that attempted to root out individual wrongdoers and submit them to exemplary punishment.

Stitched together from her various guises within the corpus of Arthurian literature, Sir Thomas Malory's Gwenyvere is expected to perform multiple roles in the Morte Darthur. Often called contradictory in nature, her characterisations adhere to contemporary stereotypes that either villainised or idealised women as ‘Jezebels, who were overmighty viragos, adulterous wives, and wicked enchantresses, or Virgin Marys, who were supportive wives and mothers, and modest intercessors and peacemakers’. Malory's Morte bears remnants of many of the ancestral versions of Gwenyvere found in his source material, and tries to reconcile a textual history rife with contradictory depictions of Arthur, his queen, and women in general. Malory's Gwenyvere is an exemplary queen and, adultery aside, a loyal and obedient wife: as Helen Cooper notes, she ‘never acts publicly against the king’. She is the quintessential female lover of a chivalric romance, and she is the emotional woman, ruled by her passions rather than her mind.

Women's superlative – or supernatural – medical skill is one of the most common types of feminine power associated with magic in Middle English romance, and therefore a useful starting point for this study of gender and genre's intertextual accumulation of meaning and moral weight. Because romance's heroes regularly suffer grisly wounds – grave enough to demonstrate the extremity of their heroic prowess – the women who heal them must therefore be equally extraordinarily skilful. Their abilities, which walk the line between medicine and magic, are registered as benign within the structure of the genre. However, a close and intertextual examination reveals ways in which they may be sites of potential tension, generated by the complicated relationship between women's associations with medicine and also poison and the genre's uneasy relationship with the realities of social prohibitions against women's professional medical practice. Taking the unusually skilled and visible versions of the female-healer character type found in the Middle English Tristan texts – the fourteenth-century verse Sir Tristrem and Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century ‘Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’ – as case studies, we may observe the way a narrow textual corpus transforms the role of the healing woman over time, responding to the changing cultural attitudes about women's medical authority.

The Tristan legend was one of the most popular romance narratives in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, with a broad multilingual corpus of surviving texts. The two distinct (though related) branches of the tradition each trace back to fragmentary twelfth-century Old French texts, by Béroul and Thomas of Britain respectively, with closely related recensions in German and Old Norse as well as English.

Francisque was the head of the first foreign company to come over to England since the passing of the Licensing Act, which had ended the careers of all actors not engaged at one of the patented theatres. He had been present in London in March 1735 when the earlier bill was introduced in the House of Commons and French players were cited as examples of ‘lewd and idle diversions’ in need of regulation. During his visit in February 1738, when he and Lesage were petitioning the Lord Chamberlain for permission to perform, he must have heard of players made redundant by the Act. Indeed, during that time, The London Daily Post had reported that an actor from Fielding's disbanded company had been sent to prison for attempting to perform a ‘shew’ at York Buildings. Yet ambassador de Cambis seems to have foreseen no problems. In a dispatch sent later to the French foreign minister, he reported that ‘La chose, effectivement, ne fit aucune difficulté, et le Duc de Grafton, après avoir eu l’ordre du Roi d’Angleterre, fit expédier la permission’ [This, in fact, was no problem, and the Duke of Grafton [the Lord Chamberlain], having received his orders from the King of England, had the permission sent]. The ambassador, who had arrived in London only in September 1737, may not have been aware of the feelings aroused by the Licensing Act which had come into force three months earlier.

A major theme of this book so far has been the implications of the north as a pagan and barbarian space. The astute reader may have noticed, however, that there has been thus far no corresponding discussion of the south. There is a simple explanation for this: little to no discussion of the south is in fact to be found in the works of these historians. While this might be partially explained by selection bias, its absence is especially striking, since the negative conception of the north is understood exegetically in opposition to the Church as the south. This north-south dualism, underscored by the same opposition in classical climatic theory, is frequently presented as a basis for understanding the Latin perception of the north in the early and High Middle Ages. While such a pairing of north and south, or at least language reminiscent of it, is not wholly absent from medieval history- writing, the radical disparity between the two has not generally been acknowledged.2 This chapter will unpack some of the contexts in which historians of the Middle Ages did engage with the south, showing how it was, for the most part, relativised within Europe rather than addressed on a global scale. More broadly, it will consider why the south, on both a local and global scale, lacked relevance for the spatial narratives of early twelfth-century authors. Finally, it will offer a discussion of one major exception in the eleventh and early twelfth century, the Abbey of Cluny.

Founded in 1922 under the auspices of the Beaux-Arts Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Association francaise d’action artistique (AFAA) was committed to developing French cultural presence through the practical organisation of cultural events abroad, particularly in the United States. Although numerous orchestras were sent on tour, such as the Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire and the Musique Militaire Francaise de Paris, the AFAA favoured experienced and well-established soloists (pianists, violinists, flautists, harpists), which meant that a greater number of events could be organised at a lower cost while still ensuring high artistic quality. Although both female and male soloists were given opportunities to represent France and develop their career abroad, the AFAA archives show that fewer women soloists received government support than their male colleagues, a circumstance related to the fact that women were denied equal access to musical education and professionalisation, and often experienced a difficult balance between public and private life.

In this male-dominated landscape, several women pianists were nevertheless active in the USA: Yvonne Lefebure, Jeanne-Marie Darre, Yvonne Loriod, and this chapter's case study, Gaby Casadesus (born Gabrielle l’Hote, henceforth ‘Casadesus’), a notable member of one of the most illustrious families of French artists. Also known as ‘Madame Robert Casadesus’, she initially travelled to the United States in 1935 to accompany her husband, pianist and composer Robert Casadesus (henceforth Robert), for his first AFAA-funded American tour. The following year, she made her first American appearance as part of their piano duo before performing onstage as a soloist.

Scholarship about the Spanish invasion of Peru tends to focus on the agency of European actors in the colonial project. As a result, scholars see few windows into the criticism Indigenous people expressed about the coloniality of their lives. One such critique comes to us through the illustrated chronicle of an Indigenous man, Felipe Guamán Poma, whose Quechuan names mean falcon (Guaman) and puma (Poma) and who possessed mixed Indigenous ancestry, with an Incan mother and a Yarowilca father. The author-artist, whose chronicle is titled Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (c. 1615), had hoped to deliver it personally to the king of Spain. Split into two parts, the first provides a history of Guamán Poma's culture and traditional lifestyle, and the second recounts how life changed in Peru after the Spanish invasion. Guamán Poma uses the chronicle genre as a means of educating the king about the ills of Spanish-Peruvian life. To adequately describe these unacceptable conditions, Guamán Poma reaches for the animal world to express a significant critique of the Spanish invasion and subsequent colonization of the Andean world (Andean, in this sense, includes the many Indigenous peoples and identities associated with pre-invasion and colonial Peru and Tahuantinsuyo).

Whether intentionally or not, Guamán Poma configures his seventeenthcentury text using several medieval forms, including the bestiary, chronicle, and mappamundi (map of the world). By using these genres, Guamán Poma frames the knowledge and critique that he extends to the king using a discursive strategy with which the king would have been familiar. Guamán Poma may even have been exposed to printed versions of medieval European works, such as the much-copied thirteenth-century Estoria de España, one of the earliest written chronicles for Spanish history.

During the Siglos de Oro, Spain was an active participant in a global ‘fashion’ and ‘obsession’ for dance also influencing other European courts of the period. Much more than a passing trend, dance was a practice intrinsically enmeshed in court culture. With deep roots in chivalric medieval society, dance was one of the core disciplines structuring the pedagogies of nobility during the dawn of humanism and an art central to court sociability and rituals.

In the transition from the ‘Autumn of the Middle Ages’ to the Renaissance, dance was consolidated as one of the practices of ‘homo ludens’ best adapted to a new culture of the body which no longer valued strength as much as it did elegance and skill. Simultaneously, it nurtured – somewhat nostalgically and idealistically – the ethical and physical ideals of chivalric society and courtly eroticism. The male dancing body was expected to demonstrate strength, vigour, and speed; the feminine body, grace, beauty, and elegance. The interaction between the two through dance was mediated by well-established codes of service and seduction. Moreover, the persistence of this ethics of service did not only regiment the dancing couple. It also influenced the dancing group as a whole. In short, dance exemplified, in a deictic sense (following the term’s etymological origins), the essential qualities of the person dancing.

Yet during the early sixteenth century, when politics became science and calculation at the hands of Machiavelli, ethos was no longer conceived in terms of morality or rhetoric.

Q. Why revive works? Do you have a philosophy regarding revivals?

A. My philosophy is that revivals are a crucial contribution to our knowledge of the history of the guitar, of Spanish music, and of classical music in general. The guitar is a relatively modern instrument but has an incredibly rich literature. It was a fixture in European salons, on the concert stage, including concertos, and it played a leading role in musical life until the advent of the fortepiano in the 1700s, which caused the guitar to recede somewhat into the background— except in Spain. So for me, reviving music has become a great passion, one that started with two composers: Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani. The majority of my revivals have been works by those two giants, especially Giuliani, and I have worked in collaboration with music scholars who specialize in this repertoire, in particular Thomas Heck, Brian Jeffery, Richard Long, and John King.

While the preceding chapters scaled the lofty heights of Olympus, now we will plumb the depths of Avernus and turn from the Classical gods to their infernal counterparts. The present chapter will discuss the myriad Furies, witches, and battle spirits that appear throughout medieval Irish literature and their Classical influences and analogues. This is the area of Classical mythological reception that has drawn the most critical attention from scholars of medieval Irish, largely in response to the dramatic equation of Allecto and the Morrígan in the first recension of Táin Bó Cúailnge. However, with a few exceptions, the infernal characters who appear in the Classical adaptations have generated far less interest than the Furies who turn up elsewhere in Irish literature. We ask what the use of Morrígan to gloss Allecto can tell us about Táin Bó Cúailnge, but rarely how and why Allecto functions in the Classical adaptations more generally.

This is not to say that infernal beings in the Classical adaptations have received no critical attention. Both Brent Miles and Erich Poppe identify the enhanced description of Allecto in Imtheachta Aeniasa as an example of epic style pursued by the authors of the text. Jacqueline Borsje and Michael Clarke have examined the Furies in Statius (and a lesser degree Togail na Tebe), Fled Dúin na nGéd, and the second recension of Cath Maige Rath at length, as will be discussed later in this chapter. Clarke has also situated the Furies and Irish battle spirits within traditions of late antique and medieval demonology and Fulgentian allegory.

The Military Band's Quest for Repertoire

The year 1908 began inauspiciously for Holst with the announcement that his opera Sita had not won the Ricordi competition, though it did receive an honorable mention. Due to his embracement of folk songs and dances, Holst's compositional style had changed considerably over the past two years; it was now leaner and more direct. Although he would later dismiss Sita as “good old Wagnerian bawling,” he was still very depressed over the results of the contest. His three teaching positions were wearing him down, and now, with the birth of Imogen, he had three mouths to feed. Just when it appeared that he might be headed for some sort of a nervous breakdown, his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams came to the rescue once again.

Vaughan Williams, who was in Paris studying with Maurice Ravel, wrote to Holst,

Holst seized on the opportunity and, having secured a leave of absence from his schools, went on a solo bicycling holiday in Algeria. He saw and heard many things that were entirely new and exciting but also some that were irritating.

At the inaugural Battle Conference in 1978, Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent, was famously described as ‘an ambitious, acquisitive and arrogant bishop-prelate whom William had in the end to crush’. This view has remained largely unchallenged thanks, at least in part, to the portrait provided by Orderic Vitalis. The following discussion takes a narrower focus, exploring Odo's relationship with Scolland, abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, during the early years of the Norman Conquest. It will be argued that Scolland actively pursued a policy of close cooperation with the bishop, united as they were in their mutual distrust of the proprietary claims of Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury.

Little attention has been paid to the early history of St Augustine’s, beyond Susan Kelly's magisterial work on the Saxon charters, which is understandable given that the abbey's archive consists predominantly of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century transcripts scattered among several research libraries. Leaving aside the practical issue of access, evaluation of the material is difficult due to the tendency by scribes to update documents to reflect the status quo at the time of copying. For the purposes of this article, reliance is placed upon the first twenty-five folios of TNA, E164/27 commonly known as the White Book. As Susan Kelly has observed, these earlier folios contain, inter alia, a list of charters and named benefactors, Domesday- related surveys, manor rentals, papal privileges, and knights’ fees. Only the charter list (at fols 3v–6v) and a survey known as the Excerpta (fols 17r–25r) have been transcribed and published.

When considering the relationship of comics to social justice, textual meaning can be understood in two interconnected ways. First, new comics contribute to an ongoing tradition of graphic narratives reaching back over a century, documenting and supporting normative views of dominant groups, revolutionary social change from the margins, and everything in between. Second, their authors and readers engage with comics as formally malleable multimodal texts with unique affordances for representation. Given their communicative capacity through both content and form, comics’ ability to address representational injustice and other oppression that can lead to trauma requires that we effectively understand what as well as how they communicate.

To investigate the complexity of this interplay and how it relates to injustice and trauma, this chapter considers how Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940–75) samples comics in his Popliteratur work. In two poetry volumes created in dialogue with 1960s American counterculture, Die Piloten (The Pilots, 1968) and ACID: Neue amerikanische Szene (ACID: New American Scene, 1969), Brinkmann samples comics for his aesthetic goals—to interrupt normativity and preclude any attempt at literary analysis. This chapter focuses on the playful form and countercultural con tent—sampled from the American Beat and hippie movements—in the comics Brinkmann selects. It considers how their formal innovations ultimately fail to undermine certain content norms, specifically heteronormativity and hypermasculinity. Thus, through the results of considering their multimodal form and content separately, I point to the shortcomings in Brinkmann's project of using samples to break norms and—by extension—promote social justice.