At least half a dozen Southern poets have acquired the nickname “Poet of the Confederacy.” This was never an official kind of title or even a widely recognized ceremonial one, but it has stuck until today for at least a few of them. Almost all of these poets were well-educated men who also served in the Confederate Army; I know of only one woman who was given that title. My interest in these poets is not just their poetry, which for the most part is highly conventional and sometimes just pedestrian, and I have selected the so-called Poets of the Confederacy for convenience. Many other Southern poets favored the Confederacy, but the particular honorific is meaningful because it coincides with the rise of the Lost Cause narrative, which started in 1869 with the establishment of the Southern Historical Society and really took off in the 1880s, the decade at the end of which the unification of Southern veteran organizations occurred with the founding in 1889 of an overarching organization, the United Confederate Veterans. Google's N-gram supports the connection: the phrase “Poet of the Confederacy” did not come into vogue until 1887, two decades after the end of the Civil War, and one decade after the end of Reconstruction. There is no comparable “Poet of the Union,” as far as I know, though one can find a few informal references to Walt Whitman; the title “Poet of the Confederacy” is clearly the invention of the party that lost and tried to reframe history afterwards.

The language of chivalry was common parlance ever since Sir Walter Scott took the United States by storm, and especially the South caught a serious case of what Mark Twain called the “Sir Walter Disease,” but for all the talk of honor and chivalry it is difficult to find out precisely what its import is.

The Violin Concerto, one of the four greatest of the 19th century, was Mendelssohn's last completed orchestral work, and thus stands – together with Symphony No.3 – defiant against any claim that Mendelssohn's creative faculties declined in his last decade. Like other violin concertos it is a tribute to the violinist who inspired it: Ferdinand David, close friend of the composer who had appointed him leader of his Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra back in 1836. It was only natural that Mendelssohn should write him a concerto, and ever since the idea was first mooted in 1838 the two of them worked long and hard together, David advising on many technical details. A first version was ready in 1844, but a further six months of revisions followed, including a significant extension to the cadenza, before Mendelssohn was satisfied. Finally the concerto was premiered by David in March 1845 (though Mendelssohn was not in Leipzig at the time, and the orchestra was conducted by Niels Gade) and published a few weeks later in May. Such was its success that it was repeated in one of the first concerts of the following season, already in October, this time with Mendelssohn conducting. Just two years later the concerto stood once again on the programme; but this time it was David who was not available, so he sent his 14-year-old pupil Joseph Joachim to play in his stead. Thus are founded the great traditions of virtuoso violin playing.

sources

A  Autograph score of original version (1844), in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Krakow (shelf mark Mus. ms. autogr. Mendelssohn), published in facsimile by Laaber in 2010

B  Copyist's score with Mendelssohn's pencil revisions to final version (1845), in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Krakow (shelf mark Mus. ms. autogr. Mendelssohn 39), viewable online

P  First edition, published in parts by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig in 1845

E  First edition score, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1862

Br  Full score edited by Julius Rietz, published by Breitkopf & Härtel c.1874 as part of its Gesamtausgabe

EE  Eulenburg miniature score

After the performance of his First Symphony in 1897 Rachmaninov's career seemed to be in ruins. It was a fiasco; the conductor, Glazunov, was said to be drunk, and critics were hostile, Cui likening it to “a programme symphony on the Seven Plagues of Egypt”. Rachmaninov had a nervous breakdown, is said to have destroyed the score (the orchestral parts were discovered only in 1945, in the library of the Leningrad Conservatoire), and vowed never to compose again. However, he was persuaded to undergo medical hypnosis whose direct result was, extraordinarily enough, the inspiration and composition of what became his most popular work, the Second Piano Concerto, which he accordingly dedicated to his psychologist. Its success encouraged him to resume composition, but his onerous conducting duties at the Bolshoi Theatre, together with the political unrest that had swept Russia after the 1905 uprising, left him so little time that in the autumn of 1906 he decided to move to a secluded villa in Dresden in order to concentrate on composing. Here he worked in secrecy on a new symphony, hoping to eradicate the painful memory of the first, though its initial draft still left him miserable and even in 1907 he could still write to a friend, “To hell with them! I don't know how to write symphonies, and what's more, I have no real desire to write them.” Bored with it, he let it lie, only revealing its existence at all when one of his friends spotted a reference to it in a Russian newspaper. Upon his return to Russia he managed to complete it towards the end of that year, and conducted the first performance in St Petersburg in February 1908, which happily was a success, earning him the Glinka Prize.

sources

A  Autograph full score (1907), since 2014 on loan by the Robert Owen Lehman Foundation to the Morgan Library, New York. Each movement has its own separate pagination: pages 1 (title page) and 2–4 of I (as far as, and including, 14), pp.19–22 of IV (463–1364 inclusive) and the last two pages (902 to end) are missing

In Firefly Studio's real-time strategy game Stronghold: Crusader II, players are tasked with creating order and wealth from an otherwise anarchical wilderness. Entrusted with Richard the Lionheart's expeditionary force, they sail to the Holy Land to prepare a beachhead for his march towards Jerusalem. Yet after rough weather and plague devastates their small flotilla, they land with only a handful of peasants and even fewer supplies. To make matters worse, players soon discover that this “strange new land” is not as uninhabited as the game's narrator, their loquacious scribe, seems to think. Despite its inhospitable climate, fierce beasts, and volatile weather, the vast majority of the game's arid landscape has been settled and fortified by Saladin's forces – forces that hold the upper hand in almost every aspect that the game counts as success: population, trade, troop strength, and martial technology. Players, however, do possess one advantage that the “infidel” does not. Privy to the secrets of Western architectural praxis, they know how to build castles. They know where to site granaries, where to establish farms and quarries, where to build barracks, hovels, workshops, taverns, churches, and everything else that, in popular accounts of the Crusades, are constructed as prerequisites to Western cultural and military dominance.

Players, as such, are ultimately able to redeem the Holy Land. Wielding a kind of architectural sovereignty, they are able to reshape and thereby conquer its spectacular topography. As David Matthews writes about St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, Australia, they are able “to medievalise it,” which is to say, “to colonize it.” Stronghold: Crusader II thus constructs medieval architectural praxis as a strategy of domination. As with the real-time strategy games in the aptly named Civilization and Ages of Empires franchises, Stronghold: Crusader II engages players in a fantasy of empire-building, one that justifies genocide and wholesale environmental devastation through what Dan Kline describes as the always-moral imperative of imposing economic and cultural hegemony on territories that are constructed as otherwise wild, unruly, or contested. In doing so, Stronghold Crusader II inverts one of the most enduring tenets of nineteenth-century medievalist architectural praxis: the idea that the exigencies of the present can be contained in and understood through the more permanent values of an idealized past.

Cellists have the great Mstislav Rostropovich to thank for many works in their repertoire, especially by Britten and Shostakovich. This first of Shostakovich's two concertos for Rostropovich was written in the summer of 1959, and received its first performance in Leningrad in October, with Mravinsky conducting. Within the following twelve months Rostropovich had premiered it both in the USA and in London, and it has remained a huge success ever since. It seems an extrovert and ebullient work, but the beautiful slow movement is a deeply-felt lament. Rostropovich related: “When Shostakovich played the Cello Concerto to me for the first time, I knew that in his private life he was having great difficulty with his wife, whom he was divorcing at that time. When he played the second movement for me, I saw at one moment that tears were rolling down his cheeks, and striking his chest, and he said to me, ‘Slava, I’m sorry, but this composition is very close to my heart.’ “

sources

A  Autograph score (1959), presented by Shostakovich to Rostropovich, hence in private hands, Moscow

E  First edition score, published by the State Music Publishers, Moscow in 1960, reprinted in miniature format in 1961 (almost identically, but 274 Vc sƒ is correct)

V  Cello and piano score, published by Boosey & Hawkes, London in 1960; the arrangement is by the composer, hence significant when it differs from the score (404, 656)

W  Reprint of V, published by Peters, Leipzig in 1961; annoyingly, W has no rehearsal figures, but instead has bar numbers (useless, because not in E). Unless otherwise stated below, W = V

M  Miniature score, published in New York by MCA Music in 1966

Ur  Complete edition score, published in Moscow (1985)

There are several different printings of the orchestral parts, with different errors.

This appendix is a calendar of the letters produced by Honorius's chancery during his pontificate for which there is still at least a reference. Some images of the originals have been inserted after the relevant calendar entry.

In 1900, a few months before the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra were due to play at the Paris World Exhibition, Sibelius received a letter from an anonymous admirer (Axel Carpelan), asking whether he had considered writing an overture for the opening concert. “You ought to put something really devilish in. Rubinstein wrote a Fantasy for the Paris Exhibition of 1889, all based on Russian themes, and called it ‘Russia’; surely you can write an overture called ‘Finlandia’?” The rest, regarding that piece, is history; but Carpelan did not stop there. Soon after the success of the First Symphony he wrote to Sibelius, declaring: “You have sat at home quite long enough, Dr. Sibelius. It is high time you were on your travels. You can spend the late autumn and winter in Italy. Everything there is lovely – even the ugly. You will remember the important role that Italy played in the development of both Tchaikovsky and Strauss.” To ensure that Sibelius had no excuse for ignoring his exhortation, he managed to raise 5000 Markka (then about L250) for the composer's trip. Sibelius obeyed; he rented a villa in the mountains near Rapallo (near to Genova) for the spring of 1901, and duly started to compose. The story of Don Juan also occupied his thoughts, and soon the doleful melody of the second movement was associated with the entry of the Stone Guest into Don Juan's castle. As his work progressed in Florence and then back at home, he constantly kept Carpelan up to date with his progress, and essentially the symphony was finished in December, though final revisions delayed its completion until the first days of January 1902, when (8 January) he was able to report that a copyist was “at this very moment” writing out the orchestral parts. The premiere took place on 8 March in Helsinki, with Sibelius himself conducting. It was repeated three times, always to capacity audiences, and was a huge success; some saw it as the musical expression of Finland's struggle for independence from Russia, but Sibelius consistently denied it had any programmatic content. It has remained the most popular of all Sibelius's symphonies.

Schumann's Fourth Symphony is at once his greatest and his most problematic. It was first composed in 1841; just as in 1840 he had devoted his energies almost entirely to the writing of songs, in this annus mirabilis he plunged with wholehearted romantic enthusiasm into symphonic composition, producing also the ‘Spring’ Symphony, the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and an early version of the first movement of his Piano Concerto, and the D minor symphony was performed in December. But it had a mixed reception, and after a half-hearted attempt in 1843 to have it published by Peters, he abandoned it. However, exactly ten years after its unfortunate premiere he decided to rework it, improving two transition passages (from the opening introduction to the first allegro, and from the Scherzo to the Finale), but at the same time greatly thickening the texture with over-generous doublings, apparently in an anxious desire to make each entry as safe as possible due to his own shortcomings as a conductor. The unfortunate result was that individuality of timbre was lost, but the music remains ardently passionate and melodically glorious, and the first performance in March 1853, conducted by Schumann himself, was a success. Agreement from Breitkopf & Härtel to publish it followed within a few weeks.

sources

XA  Autograph of original 1841 version, in the Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna

XE  First edition of 1841 version, published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig in 1891

A  Autograph of 1851 version, in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin); viewable online at IMSLP. The bare notes of WW, Str in II and III were taken directly from XA, and are in the hand of a copyist (leader of the Düsseldorf orchestra)

P  First edition in parts of 1851 version, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in November 1853 (Pl. No. 8735)

Bartók would not have recognised such a title; this was his ‘Violin Concerto’. It only became known as No.2 after the discovery of the concerto he wrote in 1907–8 for Stefi Geyer to whom he gave the manuscript; this was entirely forgotten during his lifetime (he had reused the first movement as the first of his Two Portraits op.5), only surfaced after her death, and the work was first performed in 1958 and published in 1959.

The Violin Concerto (therefore) was commissioned by Zoltán Székely with whom Bartók had already given many recitals. The original idea had been an extended set of variations, but Székely insisted on a proper concerto, and the result was a compromise: the slow movement is clearly a set of variations, while the entire finale is a variant of the opening movement, both thematically and structurally. The concerto was written in 1937–8 at a difficult time: with the onset of Fascism Bartók forbade broadcasts of his music in Germany and Italy and left Universal Edition, so that from 1937 his works were published by Boosey & Hawkes. But the war intervened, it was a miracle his manuscripts survived moves for safe-keeping to London and then to the USA, and the Violin Concerto was first published in 1946.

sources

A  Autograph score, in the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel

E,P  First edition of score and parts, published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1946

The first printing of E (both full and miniature) had an error in the bar numbering from III 416 to the end: bar 416 reads “415”, and so on. This is corrected in reprints of E from at least 1957 onwards, but P was never corrected, so that score and parts continue to be at odds with one another. The only pragmatic solution to this is to change the (‘correct’) score to agree with the parts; every number from 416 to the end has to be reduced by 1. This original (wrong, but practical) numbering is used in the notes that follow.

The first ending is always played, never the second (in which Solo Vl oddly drops out entirely).

THE MIDDLE DECADES of the seventeenth century saw tumult arguably unparalleled in British history. Charles I (r. 1625–1649), even more autocratic than his father, James I, incensed English puritans in his promotion of William Laud to Bishop of London (1628) and Archbishop of Canterbury (1633). Many of Charles's subjects disagreed with Charles and Laud about how church services should be conducted, as well as about acceptable behaviors on Sabbath outside of church. Charles lacked both tact and diplomacy, and the Laudian ceremonialists and the puritans opposed to them entrenched in their camps. Charles's other advisors were every bit as unpopular with his Parliaments as his Archbishop of Canterbury. The Duke of Buckingham, whom many English subjects genuinely believed had poisoned James I, was Charles's closest friend and advisor until his murder by a disgruntled former sailor in 1628. In his grief, Charles grew close to his queen, Henrietta Maria of France – a practicing Roman Catholic, whom many English Protestants suspected of trying to convert Charles and the upper nobility back to the Church of Rome. Charles's other chief advisor, Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Stafford, was similarly hated.

Charles dissolved Parliament in 1629 and for the next eleven years ruled without one – a period now called the “Personal Rule.” However, his desire for religious conformity to his and Laud's ecclesiastical vision not only in England but in Scotland drew him into two disastrous wars with his northern kingdom at the end of the 1630s; between them, he called a Parliament to help fund his army but dissolved it almost immediately. Following the second failed attempt to war with the Scots, Charles called another Parliament – the “Long Parliament” – which ultimately took up arms against him in the Civil Wars of the 1640s. Loyalties were fractured – many people opposed Charles's autocratic rule and ceremonial church but were not willing to war against him. Some insisted on their liberties in the face of Parliamentary taxation and legal proceedings, which became as oppressive as royal exactions and Star Chamber had been during the Personal Rule. After Charles's capture, trial, and execution, Parliament's leadership clashed with its army, several of whose members and leaders were Independents and did not want to embrace the Presbyterian ecclesiastical model that many remaining MPs supported.

Almost a hundred years after the publication of Scottish writer James Macpherson's Ossian Poems (1760–65), which are purported translations of ancient Highland epics that were actually reinvented by Macpherson himself, the Irish Ossianic Society was founded to discredit Macpherson and establish the Ossianic, or Fenian, heroic cycle as a noble and unequivocally Irish contribution. As noted by Nicholas O’Kearney in the first volume of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society, access to Ireland's worthy Fenian tradition depended largely upon medieval manuscripts, sources that the society and similar organizations translated, studied, and discussed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Though invested in glorifying Irish culture, the Ossianic Society – exposing the political potential of such material – maintained a clear nonsectarian policy, stating “that all matters relating to the Religious and Political differences prevailing in this country, be strictly excluded from the meetings and the publications of the Society.” But, in response to these antiquarian developments, some Fenian medievalisms emerged that were bound by no such stipulation. This essay examines how Irish writers from the Land War to the Easter Rising of 1916 used Fenian medievalism as a vehicle for political dialogue, and, more specifically, as a site upon which to construct essentialist visions of Ireland and its national future in relation to the British Empire.

First, I suggest that writer and historian Standish James O’Grady (1846–1928) reinvented Fenian materials in terms of medievalist ideals to shape a chivalric, duty-driven Irish identity suitable to his anti-revolutionary, imperialist agenda. I then argue that insurrectionists Patrick Pearse (Padraig MacPiariais) (1879–1916) and Constance Markievicz (1868–1927), drawing from O’Grady, reinterpreted Fenian narratives to instead create an Irish identity defined by a knightly fighting spirit in order to promote revolution, an endeavor that culminated in the Easter Rising. These writers each reinvent the Fenian cycle to reconstruct the essence of the Irish identity in a manner conducive to their own specific national program. Yet, while they pursue oppositional political interests through their particular, medievalized formulations of intrinsic Irishness, they readapt each other's rhetoric, models, and strategies. Their Fenian medievalisms, thus, not only reveal a multiplicity of Irish nationalisms in this period – demonstrating a plurality of competing constructions of essentialist Irish identities – but also their mutual dependence.

Like the first concerto above, No.2 is played without a break; but whereas No.1 retains clear vestiges of the old four-movement division, No.2 is a thoroughly integrated single-movement structure, its (perhaps) six sections linked together by Liszt's own method of transformation of themes. An early version was complete in 1839 with the title 2d Concerto Symphonique, but again was revised in several stages before its first performance in 1857, this time with Liszt conducting (he never played it himself) and one of his pupils as soloist. It was revised again by 1861, and eventually published by Schott in 1863.

sources

A  Autograph score (1839, but differing substantially from the final version), in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar

B  Manuscript score copied by Raff in 1857, with Liszt's revisions and corrections up to 1861, in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar

E  First edition score, published by Schott, Mainz in 1863

Br  Full score, edited by Bernhard Stavenhagen, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1914

Ur  Urtext edition, edited by Imre Sulyok, published by Editio Budapest in 1986

In Act I, Scene 2 of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955), the title heroine sings a hopeful and arresting entrance aria. Similar to Laurie Moss, who marveled in her entrance at “the world so wide,” eighteen-year-old Susannah Polk imagines the world “beyond them mountains.” Like Copland, Floyd relies on an ascending major-seventh motive, painting a picture of a young woman who has just reached the cusp of adulthood. The whole world, it seems, lies at Susannah's feet. Moments before the final curtain descends on the opera, Susannah sways in the yard outside her family's cabin, singing a very different kind of song. In a much lower voice, she pretends to seduce one of her former friends. When he finally reaches out to touch her, she slaps him across the face, sending him fleeing from her property.

At the end of Susannah, the title heroine reasserts her right to her body and voice, yet she is far from whole. She is clearly traumatized by the violence she has endured over the course of the opera. According to Floyd, she is an “inexorably lonely prisoner of a self-imposed exile.” One might say that Susannah resembles Baby Doe and Lizzie Borden, also imprisoned at the end of their operas. I think, however, that there is an important difference. Susannah's imprisonment brings no closure. As Susannah sings her final number, eerily reminiscent of the deadly conclusion to Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), she troubles her opera's conclusion, seemingly compelling her audience to consider uncomfortable questions about the nature of opera, rape, and survival. Thus Susannah has the potential to illuminate, rather than gloss over, the longstanding tradition of violence against women in opera.

Sopranos have perhaps known this all along, for many have identified something special in this opera and in the title role. In September 2014, the San Francisco Opera mounted a new production of Susannah starring soprano Patricia Racette (b. 1965). Prior to the production's opening, Racette recalled that she had first sung the title role while in college. “Susannah is the only role I’ve ever paid to sing,” she declared dramatically in an interview for Opera News: