'Ambition was my idol', Byron wrote, looking back to his 'hot youth - when George the Third was King' (Don Juan, i.212.8). That ambition had been political. As an hereditary legislator of the British Empire, he had hoped to sway the destiny of nations by the power of oratory. His classical education offered the examples of men like Demosthenes in Greece and Cicero in Rome. Among his elder contemporaries were figures such as Henry Grattan, a founding father of the Irish 'patriot' parliament, and Byron's friends, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the eloquent manager of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and Thomas Erskine, the famous advocate of freedom of speech. A greater ambition yet might move a young man called by the duty of rank to public service. The statesman might also be a war leader and a maker of nations. The pre-eminent example for the age was George Washington and, for a European aristocrat, the example of Washington's ally, the Marquis de la Fayette, was close behind. More dangerously dazzling was the career of the disastrous comet, Napoleon Bonaparte and the meteoric disaster of the Irish revolutionary, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

For each of his operas, Verdi employed a complicated process that included many phases of creation and involved other individuals. Some aspects of this process remained remarkably consistent across his career. For example, despite changing conceptions of orchestration that emphasized families of instruments, Verdi continued the tradition of scoring primarily by pitch, putting violins and violas at the top of the page, cellos and basses at the bottom, other instruments in between generally in descending order of pitch range, and voices immediately above the cello line. Other procedures changed considerably over time and even from opera to opera. Consequently, any general discussion of Verdi's working methods quickly involves many exceptions, and scholars have understandably focused on the creation of single works while hesitating to postulate broad theories. In attempting this overview, I shall limit my discussion to the changes in Verdi's compositional circumstances across his career and the changes in his treatment of seven creative stages through which his works normally progressed.

Periods of composition

From the perspective of working conditions and methods, Verdi’s operas fall into four basic groups: 1) early: Oberto (1839) through La battaglia di Legnano (1849); 2) middle: Luisa Miller (1849) through Un ballo in maschera (1859); 3) “modern”:4 La forza del destino (1862) through Aida (1871); and 4) late: Simon Boccanegra (revised 1881) through Falstaff (1893). The coincidence of these groups with traditional stylistic groupings is striking and underscores the importance of considering working conditions and methods when providing an overview of his operas.5 Changes from one period to another involve his pace of composition; association with different librettists, theatres, cities, and performers; the degree of interference from censors; changes in political life and other factors external to the opera business; and Verdi’s own growth and maturity.

While it was not until the advent of the works of William Perkins in the late sixteenth century that England produced a theologian of truly international stature, the earlier phases of the English Reformation witness to the work of a number of talented individuals who were able to draw upon that of their continental counterparts and take advantage of the developments in university education in order to articulate distinctively Protestant theologies within the English context. Thus, while the theological contribution of the English reformers was in no way as significant as their innovations in, say, liturgical practice, it nevertheless stood in positive relation to continental movements and defined the kinds of debate that were to shape English church life until the end of the seventeenth century.

ORIGINS

The wider field of the intellectual history of the Reformation has, over recent decades, preoccupied itself with tracing dogmatic and exegetical trajectories back into the theological world of the Middle Ages. Study of the English Reformation over the same period has, however, been to a large extent the preserve of social and political historians with little interest in theology. Their work has tended not to take English Reformation theology seriously in terms of its place within the ongoing Western tradition of thought. In addition, the slight and occasional nature of many of the theological productions of the English Reformation, combined with little hard evidence (for instance, in the form of citations) regarding relations to late medieval thought, has made such study almost impossible to raise above the level of educated guesswork.

In Erasmus' time, Catholic critics circulated the tag, 'Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it.' The idea that Erasmus was a 'pre-reformer' and that his theology is best studied in the context of Luther’s thought has been perpetuated by modern historians. Protestant theologians, of course, capitalized on the doctrinal differences between the two men rather than on their common ground. This approach prompted Ernst-Wilhelm Kohls to accuse them of using Erasmus as a 'dark foil against which their own hero could shine more brightly'. Alternatively, Erasmus' religious thought has been viewed in the context of Christian humanism, which seems to me a more productive way of examining his theology. In either case, however, Erasmus' lack of a systematic approach has raised serious questions for the would-be interpreter and has led some historians to deny him the title of theologian altogether. Any investigation of his theological concepts must therefore begin with the subject of Erasmus' own claim to the title and the testimony of his contemporaries on that point. Although Erasmus’ professional status may be in doubt, it cannot be disputed that he engaged in activities that come within the purview of a theologian. He formulated a curriculum for theology students; he edited, translated, paraphrased, and expounded biblical and patristic texts; he commented on doctrinal questions; and he offered spiritual advice in devotional tracts. From these writings emerge the main points and general features of his religious thought.

Something odd happens to the popular Turkish Tale in Byron's Mazeppa, a poem that is rarely discussed because the accident of its publication in June 1819 meant that it was almost completely overshadowed by the first cantos of Don Juan. Following the verse narratives of The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa's octosyllabic couplets, triplets and quatrains sweep its readers along in a pulsating adventure story. In Mazeppa, however, the thrills and spills of another set of fugitive exploits are mockingly undercut by a narrative frame which draws attention to boredom in the audience. King Charles requests the tale but, as we discover at the end of the poem, he falls asleep almost as soon as it commences:

Romantic egotism (Mazeppa’s pride in being ‘haunted . . . With the vain shadow of the past’, 229–30) comes up against a more recalcitrant physical domain. King Charles demonstrates what Byron suspected of his own and all writing – that it was a literature of exhaustion.

My essay is concerned with the overtures (sinfonie) and preludes; the storms and battle scenes; the stage music accompanying marching armies, religious ceremonies, dances, and balls; ballets, and shorter episodes of pantomime; and certain other episodes where the burden of the musical argument is carried by the orchestra. This is the music by means of which Verdi places his operas in their social frame; since so much of it functions as sounding décor and sounding spectacle, it provides some of the most thought-provoking insights into how he wished his operas to be staged; it also forms the locus for some of his boldest experiments in exploring the balance between “realism” and stylization in the operatic medium.

Verdi's overtures enjoy a life of their own – that is, independent of the operas to which they belong – less securely than those of the German tradition, less securely indeed than Rossini's overtures. One reason is certainly that they are less firmly rooted in a Classical, sonata-based symphonic ideal. Verdi knew those German overtures, and occasional traces of their influence are discernible; but in general his sinfonie occupy a space fascinatingly poised between the symphonic ideal and the idea of a potpourri, a medley or parade of themes from the body of the opera. What gives them their distinctive Verdian character is the manner in which the themes are set out: the formal framework plays on our sense of movement, alternating kinetic or transient episodes with episodes that seem suspended in time, in a manner that is surely evocative of an operatic scena. And though they may fall into several movements, they typically highlight a slow cantabile and a rousing Allegro.

In 1997, when a friend of Andrew Cunanan wanted to defend the gay serial killer's posthumous reputation, Byron helped him to make his case:

For this writer, invoking Byron raised Cunanan from the sordid world of drugs, violence, and queer sex with which the media surrounded him. Byron appears in his letter as an icon of high culture, a canonical British poet whose works appear in 'beautiful' books and are appreciated by sensitive men. While it would certainly be possible to read a gay subtext into this letter, in which giving a young man Byron's poems on his coming of age introduces a gay cultural past, the writer says nothing about sexuality, either his, Cunanan's, or Byron's. Instead, the gift of Byron's poems simply proves Cunanan's good character; a man who could like Byron and encourage others in that admiration could not be all bad.

Introduction

After the mid-nineteenth century, it became a stereotype that asylum inmates imagined themselves as the omnipotent Napoleon - but also the brilliant Byron. Extreme as it seems, this desire for vicarious experience, this tendency to translate one's life into the idealization of another, is common - so common that it led Albert Camus to define biography itself as 'nostalgia for other people's lives'. Camus notes that our fascination with the careers of the famous stems from our belief that such lives have strong plots, while our own seem fragmentary and directionless. However, since even the careers of celebrities are not as neatly plotted as we could wish, the production of that 'nostalgia' has required an unholy alliance between fiction and biography. Lord Byron knew this as well as perhaps anyone in history. In writing his own story and seeming to live what he wrote, he made it impossible to discuss his work apart from his life. The vignettes and anecdotes he relished and promulgated produced a tale unified around themes of sex, violence, genius, and adventure, or - in the case of hostile biographers - sex, violence, cruelty, and hypocrisy. But in either case, the indivisibility of the life and work explains much of the delight and frustration to be found in the immense canon of Byron Biography, everything from laurel wreaths to slash-and-burn character assassination, from factual accounts to encounters beyond the grave, such as Quevedo Redivivus's A Spiritual Interview with Lord Byron (1840) and Amanda Prantera's Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years after His Lordship's Death (1987).

The Eighteenth Century was the first to be mythologised as a century. This happened almost as soon as it was over. Byron gives us the reason for this:

Byron means here that in seven years he has witnessed Napoleon's surrender, escape from Elba, defeat at Waterloo, and death on St Helena, together with the restoration of the old dynasties that ruled Europe before the French Revolution; but for him, as for us, these changes are all part of a larger single change. For virtually all Europeans, the bewildering events from the Fall of the Bastille in 1789, to the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, shaped and symbolised a decisive break between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history. When the cultural events initiated by or accompanying these socio-political changes came to be retrospectively characterised as a single phenomenon called 'The Romantic Movement', then it was natural that this 'movement' should be contrasted with 'The Eighteenth Century' which itself was seen as a single age.

In Verdi's operas words are set to music in order to produce drama, to establish communication between the stage and the audience. Words and music are never entirely separate or completely independent domains, and therefore can never be fully understood in isolation. This aesthetic principle and its interpretive corollary have not always been obvious to Verdians, but now seem to be accepted by most. However, as soon as attention turns to the ways in which the aesthetic principle has been translated into practice, which involves applying the hermeneutic corollary to concrete examples, matters become more complex. There is no simple answer to the question of how drama is produced in Verdi's operas. Communication between the stage and the audience can be established at any given moment in many different ways. Moreover, both the concept and the practice of drama evolve through time. This means not only that Verdi's ideas on how communication might be established changed during his very long compositional career, but also that our ideas of drama might be significantly different from Verdi's and from those of his original audiences.

The paths to drama in Verdi's operas are not infinite, however, since interaction of words and music is always filtered through a set of conventions. Far from being a constricting presence – and notwithstanding what Verdi might have said about the matter in his letters – conventions make theatrical communication possible, and dialectic engagement with them seems to have been the composer's attitude through most of his career. Much of this chapter will therefore be devoted to operatic conventions that impinge on the relationship between words and music. I have decided to concentrate on three areas that best demonstrate Verdian conventions and their evolution: the interaction between text and music within the movements that constitute an operatic number; the so-called “parola scenica” and other moments of especially important communicative significance; and word painting.

The general councils of the medieval Catholic Church were instruments for crisis management. This was particularly true in the early fifteenth century, when the church was divided by two, and then three, rival claimants to the papal throne. Unlike chapter meetings and episcopal visitations, councils were not a routine part of the church’s self-governance. When the Council of Trent finally convened in 1545, it was only the nineteenth general council in the long history of the Catholic Church.

The crises that provoked councils might be internal to the Catholic Church, such as the rise of the Joachite heresy, or stimulated by external pressures such as the Turkish invasion of Europe. They might touch on matters of the church’s doctrine or of its practice. Early councils articulated the dogmas of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ. Later councils decided on the place of icons in Christian worship, defined the doctrine of transubstantiation, and ended the scandal of a divided church.

Popes were often reluctant to take the risks inherent in the convocation of a general council. They were painfully aware that the Council of Constance had deposed three competing popes and installed a fourth. By the time of Luther, however, it was generally conceded, even by theologians who were jealous defenders of papal power, that under certain circumstances the convocation of a general council might be the church’s only recourse to resolve a crisis that had proved impossible to resolve in any other way.

In the opening lines of the third canto of The Corsair (1814), Byron sets the mood for his narrative of the tragic death of Conrad's faithful wife Medora, by means of a sunset evocation of Greece, as the radiant sun of antiquity sinks over a land no longer consecrated to the antique spirit. The fact that Byron 'borrowed' the bravura sunset passage in its entirety (1-54) from his 'unpublished (though printed) poem' (CPW, iii, 448), The Curse of Minerva, suggests that he was particularly wedded to the sublimity of sunset as a melancholy symbol of modern Greece. In the latter poem, the same lines introduce another betrayed female, the battered and insulted goddess Minerva, who curses Lord Elgin for despoiling her temple, as the shades of evening lengthen over the plundered ruins of the Parthenon. Byron's recycling of his lines suggests a conscious connection between the values of Conrad's apolitical love for the 'housewifely' Medora, and the philhellenic ideology flagged by Minerva.

'Louis XIII being aged only nine, Parliament gave the regency to his mother Marie de Médicis. Intrigue and ignominy were rife at the court . . .' ['Louis XIII n'ayant que neuf ans, le Parlement donna la régence ê Marie deMédicis sa mère. L'intrigue et la bassesse régnaient ê la cour . . .' (OJ 3)]. So wrote the nine-year-old Gustave Flaubert, no doubt identifying with the boy king, in a text dedicated to his own mother for her name-day on 28 July 1831. With this, the first text in the new Pléiade edition of Flaubert's early works, begins a lifelong passion for history and historiography. Encouraged from 1835 onwards by his teacher Chéruel, Flaubert devotes much of his early writing to historical subjects, with a preference for the Middle Ages, and an obvious fascination too for Ancient Rome.

Yet what strikes any reader of the early work is the sheer range of subjects and styles to which this extraordinarily precocious writer turns his pen. Alongside the historical stories and dramas, we find philosophical and moral tales, journalistic and critical essays, tales of the fantastic, mystery plays, and realist or psychological stories. To a scatological early piece on constipation, we can add the bilious humour of an 1837 sketch, owing much to Balzac, in which the young writer derides the habits and the clichés of the office clerk (Une leçon d’histoire naturelle: genre commis).