This brilliant and fiery piece, composed in 1883, was performed all over Europe and America in its first few years and received a rapturous reception wherever it appeared, frequently being singled out by the critics as the most entertaining work on the programme. It has remained a firm favourite on the concert platform ever since.

sources

A  Autograph score (1883), in the Czech Museum of Music, Prague. As so often, A is not the final, definitive text; many details (e.g. the initial tempo marking, which in A is Presto) were revised later

E  First edition score, published by Bote & Bock, Berlin in 1884 (Pl. No.12893)

P  First edition parts, published by Bote & Bock (Pl. No.12894)

EE  Miniature score, published by Eulenburg; this score was taken from E, the rehearsal letters were replaced by bar numbers, and some new errors crept in

Ua  Urtext edition, published by Artia, Prague1 in 1955

E and P have rehearsal letters which are (annoyingly) removed in both EE and Ua in favour of bar numbers. These, however, differ: the numbering is technically correct in EE, but for the convenience of conductors that in Ua, which (according to its normal practice) counts through the 1st-time bars 455–70 (i.e. the 2nd-time bar is 471), is here retained. Hence EE 455II–871 = Ua 471–887.

In 1999, writer Leora Tanenbaum argued that “despite three decades of feminism,” young women in the US were still largely “defined by their sexuality.” To be sure, she acknowledged, “some of the rules ha[d] changed” but “the playing field” was “startlingly similar to that of the 1950s.” Almost twenty years later, comedian Hannah Gadsby addressed that “playing field” in her searing live comedy performance Nanette (2018). Standing before an audience at the Sydney Opera House, Gadsby joked that studying art history in college taught her that “there's only ever been two types of women: a virgin or a whore.” “Most people think that Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift invented that binary,” she continued, “but it's been going on thousands of years.” Like Tanenbaum, Gadsby argued that the paradigm of the virgin or the whore was alive and well in the twenty-first century. But what about within the world of American opera? As one might expect, over the latter half of the twentieth century, the landscape for American opera continued to change and the repertory to develop in new ways. Yet some of the old ways persisted. Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's Dead Man Walking (2000) serves as a case in point. An oft-performed American opera with clear ties to the canon established in the 1950s, Dead Man Walking draws on but eventually departs from the paradigm of the virgin or the whore that is so central to The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden.

Heggie (b. 1961) and McNally (1938–2020) began talking about writing an opera together in 1996. According to Heggie, McNally arrived in San Francisco the following year with “a list of ten ideas, only one of which he really wanted to do.” McNally started to read the list, beginning with Dead Man Walking, a 1993 book by the Roman Catholic nun Sister Helen Prejean (b. 1939) about her work counseling men awaiting the death penalty. 7 As Heggie recalled:

The numbering of the Leonore overtures is misleading. No.1, thus called because Beethoven's biographer Anton Schindler asserted it was the first to be written, was instead almost certainly composed last (in 1807). No.2 was the first, for the original version (1805) of the opera that Beethoven wished to call Leonore but which actually appeared with the title Fidelio. When he revised this opera in 1806 the overture was what we now call No.3. The final version of the opera (1814) has an entirely different overture, in E major.

This “No.2” was long considered no more than an Urfassung for No.3, hence not published at all until 1842, but it is very much a complete and valid piece in its own right, and perhaps especially the passage between bars 214–35 presents an attractive alternative turn of phrase that is worth preserving and cherishing.

sources

(A  Autograph score, lost)

(PX  First performance parts, lost; some manuscript parts in the Beethoven- Haus, Bonn were copied later from B and are of no significance)

B  Copyist's score (1805) with some corrections by Beethoven, others (not all necessarily correct) by Mendelssohn, housed in the Beethoven-Haus (shelf mark H.C. Bodmer Bk 3). Some pages, containing bars 38–52, 433–42, 484– 519, are missing entirely. B was very possibly copied from A

C  Copyist's score (1808) written by Joseph Klumpar; copied from PX (but Pos, and off-stage Tr, missing); no LvB corrections. Discovered in 1852 by Otto Jahn, now in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (shelf mark Mus. ms. autogr. Beethoven 66)

B and C are mutually independent and, as authentic sources, are of equal value; many of the differences between them are listed in Hess 1972 (but he calls our C, “A”)

E,P  First edition score and parts, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1842; text inevitably taken from B, hence bars 38–52 and 433–42 are simply missing. But in order to bridge the gap between 483 and 520 the equivalent passage was lifted from Leonore No.3 and inserted here

F  New edition by Otto Jahn, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1854 following the discovery of C, and taking the text of C as its model (instead of E's B – apart from Pos, which of course stem from B)

Introduction

The second protagonist of Martín Gaite's 1992 novel, Nubosidad variable, also makes a descent to the inner world through writing, and her story retells another ancient myth. Through the series of writing exercises Sofía Montalvo does at the behest of her friend Mariana León, Carmen Martín Gaite retells the familiar story of Demeter and Persephone. The descent by the goddess Inanna, discussed in Chapter 4, was voluntary. While there are some broad similarities with this later myth, there are far more important differences. However, Martín Gaite, in her retelling, brings the two myths closer together.

Demeter and Persephone

The myth of Demeter and Persephone is regarded by Jung as a feminine myth and has been interpreted in various ways with different emphases. All begin with Zeus, god of the sky, allowing or encouraging his brother Hades, god of the underworld, to take Zeus's daughter Core as his wife, without regard for the wishes of either Core or her mother Demeter, goddess of the cornfield. At the start of the myth, the young goddess Core is playing with her friends and picking flowers. Graves cites Ovid in identifying the flowers as poppies and argues that, as well as the association of poppies with Demeter and other goddesses, ‘Core picks or accepts poppies because of the soporific qualities, and because of their scarlet colour which promises resurrection after death.’ The Homeric Hymn to Demeter names a range of flowers – roses, crocuses, violets, irises, hyacinths and a narcissus. All are identified with spring, which connects them with rebirth, particularly as they are planted in autumn and stay hidden in the ground throughout the winter, which connects them with Core's future life pattern. Hall identifies Core's companions as Athena and Artemis.

Core strays away from her companions on seeing a beautiful, strongly perfumed, thousand-petalled narcissus and bends over to admire and possess it. The flower has been placed there by Gaia, goddess of Earth and sister to the conspiring gods. Narcissus is also the youth who fell in love on seeing his own image reflected back to him from clear water – the white narcissus flower springing up where his blood spilt after killing himself when he found he could not possess himself. It is one of the plants sacred to the god of the underworld.

conversations with h.c. robbins landon, 12–15 october 2000

A personal note is necessary here in order to set this chapter into context. Back in 1995, when Bärenreiter were considering whether to commission me to prepare Urtext editions of the Beethoven symphonies, Robbie (as he was affectionately known) was one of my foremost sponsors, his distinguished recommendation greatly helping the wheels to turn. When the project was completed, in 2000, he generously invited me to pay him a visit at his château in the south of France. This was an irresistible opportunity to tackle him about a niggling problem which had long aroused my curiosity: Haydn's use of horns in C alto. For sceptics point to apparently absurd instances such as Symphony No.48 where the poor horn players have to work at the limit of endurance, playing at the absolute top of their register, yet all to no avail since two trumpets are doubling them identically alongside. I was therefore delighted and privileged to learn, from the horse's mouth (as it were), that this was never the intention; see paragraph on No.48 below.

horns in c

The word “alto” or “hoch” occurs quite frequently in the early sources, including in Haydn's handwriting; e.g. Symphonies 56 “in C hoch” and 90 “in C alto” and several operas. It is important to realise that the scoring for C alto horns is absolutely specific to the Esterházy orchestra (i.e. 1761/62–1785), which was a fabulous orchestra boasting no fewer than six amazing horn players. Josef Martin Kraus, of whom Haydn thought extremely highly, reported on 18 October 1783 that “the orchestra is … one of the best. It … makes an outstanding impression” (HCRL 1978:478). As soon as Haydn wrote a symphony for any other orchestra (e.g. London) he would simply assume that the horns could not play alto, and wrote basso for them, without needing to specify it.

Regarding range, top a (a1) was the highest note Haydn wrote for C alto horns. In most of the following symphonies (32, 33, 37, 38, 41, 48) it occurs at least once.

In the Seventh Symphony Sibelius takes the process he had begun in the Fifth to its logical conclusion: all the movements are fused together, like a Cubist-period Picasso, into one composite, concentrated, complex structure into which no division, even embryonic, is any longer possible. Like the Sixth, elements of this, too, were conceived as early as 1917 alongside work on the Fifth, but the battle to compress was even more of an intense struggle, to the extent that the process could go no further; the Eighth, which Sibelius “finished many times” (but never to his final satisfaction), ended up in the 1940s as ashes in his fire. Indeed the Seventh is already so terse, pared down to essentials, that it lasts hardly more than 20 minutes, and was premiered in March 1924 under the title Fantasia Sinfonica. But by the time it was published in 1925 Sibelius had changed this to “Symphony No.7 (in One Movement)”, and it thus stands as the majestic non plus ultra conclusion to his symphonic achievement.

sources

A  Autograph score (1924), in the National Library of Finland, Helsinki

E,P  First edition score and parts, published by Wilhelm Hansen in 1925; E is viewable online at IMSLP

F,R  Revised edition of score and parts, published by Hansen in 1980, both viewable online at IMSLP

Though (like Symphony No.6 above) F omits any mention of Paavo Berglund's name, it is in fact a revision of E altered precisely according to a booklet which Berglund published in Turku, Finland in 1970 entitled A comparative study of the printed score and the manuscript of the Seventh Symphony of Sibelius. This booklet does exactly what it says: meticulously taking the score page by page (as in section 3 below), it corrects E to A. This booklet (or Berglund himself) is referred to below as Bg.

But of course nothing is ever quite as simple as that. Sometimes markings in E are patently valid, yet happen to be absent in A; sometimes dynamic inconsistencies in both A and E necessitate editorial suggestions; then there is the problem of pencil markings in A whose status is unknown. These are discussed in sections 8, 4 and 7 respectively, below. The whole affair is therefore complex, and there are many corrections and discussions.

Meaning

‘Meaning makes a great many thing endurable – perhaps everything’. When we think about the impact of seeing the meaning in something, perhaps after not understanding the experience for some time, we may agree that the sense of calm, of a world opening up, of seeing a way forward in a new direction, rooted now in understanding, really does make difficult, challenging, even devastating experiences bearable. In 1989 Carmen Martín Gaite told the Italian Hispanist Maria Vittoria Calvi that eventually she was able to understand the meaning in everything, that she experienced everything in a very meaningful way. The understanding she arrives at represents an objective appreciation of situations and experiences that may not have been apparent at the time. Four years earlier her twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Marta, had died as the result of a heroin addiction, yet Martín Gaite sets no limits to her understanding. In a recent book exploring Martín Gaite's six final novels with reference to the writer's own testimony, shared during their many years of friendship, Joan Lipman Brown relates that Martín Gaite told her ‘she saw Marta as “una pionera” [a pioneer], since she was one of the first to confront the twin plagues of heroin and AIDS that would claim the lives of so many young Spaniards’. Martín Gaite's perspective endows the experience of Marta's life and death with meaning, opening up a new way of seeing and understanding. It may also provide a sense of a new dimension, which is not surprising when we consider the source of Martín Gaite's view that everything is meaningful.

In the same interview, Martín Gaite described herself to Maria Vittoria Calvi as religious, as having a lot of religious feeling. The qualification she placed on her definition of ‘religious’ brings it closer to what might be described as ‘spirituality’. Martín Gaite is not describing adherence to a creed or following prescribed practices, but a perspective that recognises the presence of a supernatural world in addition to the day-to-day world, and seeks to reunite the two. It involves living in full recognition of the interaction of the day-to-day and spiritual worlds. For Martín Gaite defines her understanding of ‘religion’ as ‘volver a atar’ (from religare), meaning to bind back or bind again, with the idea of reconnecting:

Respighi was a Roman only by adoption; he was born in Bologna, then travelled to Russia where he played in the St Petersburg Opera orchestra and studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov, then to Berlin where he studied with Max Bruch. He then played violin and viola professionally for some years before in 1913 being appointed professor of composition at the Accademia S. Cecilia in Rome. Suddenly he remarked to his wife Elsa that he wondered why no one “had ever thought of making the fountains of Rome sing, for, after all, they are the very voice of the city”. Fontane was written in 1916, followed by Pini di Roma in 1924 and Feste Romane in 1928, but Fontane remains by far the most winning, and has justifiably become his most popular work. At 26 it reveals all too transparently Respighi's assimilation of the idiom of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.

sources

A  Autograph score (1916), Stichvorlage for E, in the Archivio Storico Ricordi, Milan

PX  Manuscript orchestral parts, in the Archivio Storico Ricordi, Milan

E  First edition score, published by Ricordi in 1918 (Pl. No. 117463). Page 1 has bars 1–3. This score was reprinted identically in miniature, only with Pl. No. P.R.438

F  Reprint of full score, more commonly found than E, dated 1947 (Pl. No. P.R.206), differently laid out; page 1 has bars 1–7

P  Orchestral parts; the validity of the errata below is confused both by a reprint (of Vl 1, at least) and by the online (IMSLP) parts which appear to have been doctored, perhaps according to an errata list, and generally corrected

The introverted, contemplative Pastoral Symphony is in a sense the counterpart to its predecessor (the London Symphony, above), much as Sibelius's Sixth is to his Fifth. Written in the aftermath of the Great War, it depicts a ‘pastoral’ landscape far from the country idyll that might be imagined from its title (Peter Warlock crassly likened it to “a cow looking over a gate”), much more the fields of Flanders, scarred and despoiled by the ravages of war. As VW himself wrote: “It's really war-time music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance waggon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset – it's not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted”. Beneath its tranquil, gently undulating surface its highly personal expression reveals much turbulence and vehement intensity in its emotional response to the tragedy of a war-torn countryside. It was first performed in London under Adrian Boult in January 1922, but was later, as so often with VW, substantially revised.

This symphony was often the butt of the cruel humour of Sir Thomas Beecham. Introducing it to one orchestra, he began: “Gentlemen: a slow movement!”; after playing through the first movement he roared: “Gentlemen: another slow movement!”, and so on for all four. On another occasion (this one is more precisely documented: it was a public rehearsal in Leeds in 1931), the final note in the violins having faded away to nothing as directed, Sir Thomas was still beating. The leader whispered to him, “It's over, Sir Thomas. It's finished.” Beecham replied, alarmingly loudly: “Thank God”. Even at one broadcast concert he permitted himself an indiscreet comment just after the last note had ceased (heard by the entire radio audience, therefore); he turned to the leader and muttered quite clearly: “A city life for me.” Vaughan Williams got his own back: asked once whether he was going to a Beecham concert, he replied: “I am not; and I don't propose to attend any of his concerts until he learns to play my music” (Jefferson 1979:232).

This beautiful symphony has endured something of an identity crisis. Though it was traditionally always called the ‘Scotch’ Symphony, it was decreed at some time around 1980 by the good folk from the “sterner side of the Tweed” (Forsyth 1935:486) that that adjective is incorrect and improper in this context, and may only be applied to certain comestibles such as (obviously) whisky, but also beef, pancakes and broth. If “Scottish Symphony” possesses not quite the same ring, this is equally true of Dvořák's ‘American’ Quartet, and arguably the popularity of neither work has suffered from its enforced renaming.

The original inspiration for the symphony was Mendelssohn's walking tour of Scotland back in 1829 whose first fruits were the Overture Fingal's Cave (see p.305 below) in 1832; the symphony took longer, following only in 1842. By the time it was published in 1843 it had undergone considerable revision, especially in the outer movements, and it is in this new form that the work has always been known. In 2011, however, the original version was reconstructed by Christopher Hogwood for his Bärenreiter Urtext edition (Uh below), which contains both. The present report examines only the familiar 1843 version.

Already in 1831 Mendelssohn had experimented with continuity, linking all the movements of his Piano Concerto No.1 without a break, but in this symphony he retains the idea even though each movement comes to a full close: on the blank page opposite the first page of score (source E) he adds this instruction: Die einzelnen Sätze dieser Symphonie müssen gleich auf einander folgen, und nicht durch die sonst gewöhnlichen längeren Unterbrechungen von einander getrennt werden. (The individual movements of this Symphony must follow each other directly, without being separated by the usual long breaks.) This idea was later taken up by Schumann, in the revised version of Symphony No.4, the Cello Concerto and the Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra.

The anonymous fourteenth-century Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a game, an element of play – though deadly serious, if not just plain deadly, play. A mysterious Green Visitor (“a monstruous apparition […] / one of the tallest creatures in the whole earth” [136–37]) calls at Arthur's court on New Year's Day and proposes an exchange of blows between himself and Arthur, or between himself and Arthur's stand-in:

Such an exchange of blows, playful and not, occurs in earlier Celtic literature in tales related to Cuchulainn, and some scholars have traced Gawain’s distant origins back to the Irish hero and demi-god. Later in the poem, when Gawain arrives at the castle of an overly generous host en route to his potentially fatal second encounter with the Green Knight, his host seeks to ease his worries by offering him comfort and hospitality, and a three-fold game of exchanges that leads in turn to a three-fold temptation of Gawain by the host's wife. Versions of such temptations also have analogues elsewhere in medieval literature. The anonymous author of the poem thus proves himself just as well read as well skilled in writing a romance whose oft- and rightly praised narrative progresses both linearly and with an abundance of asides. In the end, it is revealed that the entire poem has been built around a magical game, a test, devised by Morgan Le Fay:

The gestation of this titanic work, now a pillar of the concerto repertoire, was exceptionally long and tortuous. Brahms was first and foremost a pianist, and when he first visited Schumann in 1853 it was with two huge sonatas completed and the third in his head. Already that same year he started work on a D minor sonata for two pianos, but a crucial inspiration for the stormy first movement was the traumatic events of early 1854, when Schumann attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine, was hauled out raving, and taken to an asylum. By spring that year, when still a young man not yet 21, Brahms had completed three movements which he played through with Clara Schumann. But he wrote to Joachim: “…to tell the truth, not even two pianos are enough for me”, and he tried to rework the first movement as the opening of a symphony, but virtuoso piano writing kept intruding into the texture.

The initial inspiration for making the piece into a piano concerto came in a dream which Brahms related to Clara in January 1855: “Just listen, what I dreamt last night: I had transformed my poor wretched symphony into a piano concerto, and was playing it all, a first movement, then a scherzo and a huge and terribly difficult finale – I was quite inspired.” The slow scherzo eventually reappeared as the second movement of the Requiem, and the finale was doubtless replaced completely, but the essential concept was there. The Adagio was probably composed at the very beginning of 1857, both an affectionate portrait of Clara and a reverent tribute to Robert Schumann who had died so tragically the previous July; between the two piano staves in the autograph score Brahms wrote – in ink, as if belonging definitively to the score – (Benedictus, qui venit, in nomine domini!), and the extent to which these fit exactly to the opening melody is most poignant.

But he remained dissatisfied, repeatedly asking for Joachim's advice, and even after the first performance, which he gave in Hanover on 22 January 1859 with Joachim conducting, he was still revising the first movement “which refuses to be born”.

During the first half of his papacy, Honorius dealt with a crisis in one of the most powerful monastic houses of the time, Montecassino. The monastery saw the deposition of two Cassinese abbots, Oderisius II (1123–1126) and Nicholas of Tusculum (1126–1127), as well as the appointment of Seniorectus (1127–1137) as the new superior. The pope intervened in the affairs of the cloister to impose his own candidate for this role, forcing the monks to accept it. Moreover, in the same period, there was also a change at the head of the abbey of Farfa, as well as the troubled situation in Cluny with Peter the Venerable and the former abbot, Pontius, which came to an end with the latter's trial in Rome.

Nevertheless, there is a common feature to all these works that has hindered a full understanding of the scope of the pope's intervention. These episodes have always been studied as separate events or without paying attention to the links between them. A particular case which should be dealt with separately is Hayden White's work. He already juxtaposed the leadership changes at Cluny and Montecassino (he did not consider Farfa). However, he read these depositions as results of an alleged ‘new spiritual reform’, forestalling most of the key aspects of the historiographical model later refined and developed by Schmale. Building on White's analysis, the purpose of this chapter is to show that all these episodes were linked, and were key points in a wider strategy aiming to affirm the primacy of the bishop of Rome over the libertas of these monastic institutions – and not the result of a different, more spiritual, orientation of the papacy. The analysis will focus especially on Montecassino, both because it is the least-studied and because it best depicts the intervention of Honorius. However, systematic comparisons will be made with events at both Cluny and Farfa.

A multi-faceted perspective is important in reconstructing this papacy's ideas of the Church in practice. Although claims of primacy had already been made in other contexts, as we have seen, this particular case is significant because of the challenge to Rome that the monasteries had previously shown. They had always pursued their own strategies independently from the Roman church, even during the reforms of the eleventh century, and they worked with the papacy only when their interests coincided.

some important corrections made in the bärenreiter new berlioz edition

The standard edition for Berlioz used always to be the Breitkopf & Härtel Gesamtausgabe, edited by Charles Malherbe c.1900. But this edition did take some liberties with Berlioz's original text, making emendations on more or less arbitrary grounds, and from the 1970s a new and excellent Gesamtausgabe was published by Bärenreiter. However, many orchestras continue to use their own Breitkopf material (these overtures only appeared in the NBE in 2000), so a guide to some of the important differences follows.

In all these Berlioz works the Eulenburg miniature score (EE) derives from the original French edition, so is in almost every case correct (✓ below). Only in some (more recent) printings has Berlioz's 4 Bassoons been changed to 2 (× below).