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.

The heading of Chapter 17 of the Pilgrim's Guide reads: “Concerning the stonecutters of the church and the beginning and end of its work” (De lapicidibus ecclesie et de primordio et fine operis ejus). These master stonecutters, in the sense of teachers (didascali), are named as Bernard the Elder, mirabilis magister, and Robert, along with another fifty or so anonymous stonecutters.1 These are not the twelfth-century masons, but rather those who worked on the foundations of the basilica during the reign of Alfonso VI. It has long been concluded from the names and the architectural form of the east end of the building that these stonemasons were from north of the Pyrenees.2 More recently it has been suggested that they came from Conques.3 However, the author of the Guide gives no information on their origin or on the means of their arrival in Compostela. Unfortunately, this is typical of medieval sources, and this void has left room for a variety of debates and assumptions. Although few scholars today would argue for the importance of the pilgrimage roads as active conduits for the spread of artistic ideas, the concept of itinerant masons and sculptors continues to appear as an assumption underlying other arguments. In the popular romantic version, masons and sculptors travelled from site to site seeking patronage or work, sometimes even along the pilgrimage roads and in the company of troubadours. Yet no evidence exists for such a model in any text or image.

The all-women compilation album A Woman's Heart was released in 1992 during a period of increased change and continued conflict in Irish society, particularly in relation to the role, status, and recognition of women and women's rights. Even with significant positive advancements and legislative reform, 1990s Ireland remained a sometimes oppressive place, with continued violence toward and mistreatment of women and girls. Notable examples include the “X case”, where the High Court prevented a fourteen-year-old rape victim from going to Britain for an abortion, and the findings of the “Making the Link” study, which showed that out of 677 women surveyed, 18% had been subjected to male violence in intimate relationships and 51% knew of another woman who had similar experiences. Parallel to these statistics, according to Connolly and O’Toole, “for many commentors, the 1990s signalled the onset of a postfeminist era or, at best, a third wave of feminism more characterised by political fragmentation and identity politics than feminist solidarity. Young women are considered to have rejected feminism and the women's movement”.

Despite a possible backlash toward feminism and the continued prevalence of male violence, there were also some indications of positive change in relation to the treatment and role of women in Ireland.

During this time, there was an increase in “locally based (mainly working-class) women's groups concerned with women's poverty and with empowering women in their families and communities”, and “‘femocrats’ or bureaucrats committed to advancing a feminist agenda” who positioned themselves within several professional and political arenas, including:

Words are at the heart of the matter. Words spoken and written, then as now. What words say and what they do, who speaks or hears, and above all, who interprets what words are meant to do and say. Words taken from the Bible are especially fraught when two faith communities coexist in unequal tension. In the world of northern France from the latter twelfth through the thirteenth centuries, Jews are increasingly perceived by Churchmen, moralists, and monarchs as an unwelcome, even threatening Other whose persistent disbelief calls for condemnation, conversion, and expulsion. In such a context, speaking with biblical words took place in a hotly contested arena, a place of encounter, a contact zone.

This study examines how biblical material is encountered in a variety of French works, in order to follow how claims to authority, hence correct and incorrect reading, are enmeshed with competing approaches to interpretation and intimately tied to the way different levels of literal and figurative meanings are defined. In this epilogue, I briefly put into dialogue key turning points to “come to terms” with a range of Jewish representations within Christian texts that engage the question of how we might appropriately characterize their stance.

What is deader than drab, glossier than gold, and bad all over? Answer:Lazarus haud procul hinc Bethanes regna tenebat Dives opum, clarus, genus alto a sanguine regum. (Not far from there, Lazarus of Bethany ruled his kingdom – rich in resources, famous, descended from the high blood of kings.)

The only poetry that comes off worse than ‘drab’ in C. S. Lewis's study of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama is neo-Latin. Lewis denied that his use of the term ‘drab’ was ‘dyslogistic’ (although, he confessed, ‘[t]here is more bad [drab] than good’). He would have owned, however, that his characterisations of neo-Latin verse certainly were dyslogistic. Vida's Christiad, a sixteenth-century Virgilian epic on the life of Christ, was, for Lewis, ‘the supreme example’ of neo-Latin's entirely original, unrivalled and unprecedented kind of badness, ‘which no man could incur by sheer defect of talent but only by “endless labour to be wrong”’. If Lewis is to be believed, an ‘unchanging and unmeaning glossiness’, a ‘varnish and stucco’, spreads across Vida's lines above on Lazarus, the influence of which was ‘deadly’ and threatened to destroy the likes of Milton. It is not just that Vida ‘polishes up the lowness’ of the biblical story, giving Lazarus a lustre he lacks in the gospel; it is also (we might add) that this polishing is achieved by stitching together fragments of a pathologically, meaninglessly Virgilian language, with the result that, beyond the dazzling, glossy surface, this still-living Lazarus is no less clothed in strips of graveclothes than when he is later resurrected: ‘regna tenebat’; ‘dives opum’; ‘genus alto a sanguine’.

On 4 June 1630 the Privy Councillors and chief justices who reconvened as judges in Star Chamber pronounced verdict and sentence against Alexander Leighton (c.1568/70–1649), a Scottish-born minister, medical doctor, and controversialist charged with ‘framing, publishing and dispersing a scandalous book against king, peers, and prelates’, a book the court found to be ‘full of most pestilent, devilish and dangerous assertions’. By writing, printing, and distributing this ‘seditious’ work (An Appeal to the Parliament: or Sions Plea against the Prelacie, 1629) Leighton had ‘committed a most odious and heinous offence, deserving the severest punishments the court could inflict’. Being a prerogative court, based on the royal will rather than statute or the common law, Star Chamber could not impose death, but had a versatile range of sanctions in its armoury. It used them to the full against Leighton.

This review is followed by another on Ambroise Thomas's Carmagnola, ultimately premiered on 19 April, but this latter is not included here.

The new work [Carmagnola] would have been staged much earlier if the numerous rehearsals of [Mozart’s] Don Giovanni had not caused its postponement for several weeks. It's annoying that these prolonged sessions delayed the performance of the new opera without any advantage to the ancient masterpiece; we know that twice in a few days Don Giovanni was announced to no avail as Barroilhet, feeling hoarse during the first performance, which was consequently abandoned, was replaced by the overture and a trio from Guillaume Tell. He was then indisposed shortly before the second performance, which did not take place at all.

If Barroilhet doesn't give up this celebrated role, which seems to terrify him, it's worth making some observations about the way he seemed to me, on the basis of a few scenes, to understand the Mozartian style. Barroilhet clearly belongs to that class of singers, so abundant in Italy, for whom the music, words and the plot of an opera are merely more or less plausible vehicles for his personal success. Everything, if we are to believe these people, must lend itself to the demands and even the characteristics of their talent. If they’re dealing with a living composer, they oblige him to change a host of passages in their roles according to their own ideas.