Misha Donat's splendid book on Beethoven's piano chamber music ploughs a neglected field. His familiarity with this repertoire seems, at least in part, the result of many years of experience as a recording producer for the BBC and other institutions. For a performer whose concerts are being recorded there is no greater favour than to be able to rely on a producer's technical knowledge, his musical intuition, and his ear for the quality and three-dimensionality of sound, on his alertness as a critical listener as well as his appreciation of performances that spontaneously hit the right note. With Misha Donat, I invariably found myself in the safest hands. Besides this, I have much enjoyed Misha Donat's analytical notes, which count among the finest. At a time when live recordings are no longer the exception, introductory texts take on a new significance. The question arises as to whether and how such texts can be helpful to the listener, and the player, at all. In Misha Donat's case, there are three things I particularly admire: his professionalism that goes far beyond the notes in the score; the familiarity with the material as a whole, that enables him to compare, point out, and synthesise a grasp that generates insights both formal and historical; and, last but not least, the luminous clarity of his style. Programme notes can be a respectable bread-and-butter task or, in rare cases, provide the springboard for a comprehensive framework. Misha Donat's book, representing the work of a lifetime, is an all-embracing summing up of this kind.

Such mistakes are of course only possible in the case of a reader who substitutes his own ideas for those of the poet, while the simpleminded reader, perhaps unconsciously to himself, takes in the matter more easily, just as it is.

—Wagner to August Röckel, January 26, 1854

This book does not look at Wagner's Ring cycle through concepts drawn from contemporary philosophy, as Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht do in Finding an Ending. Nor does it begin with the philosophers that Wagner was known to have read “and show in what ways their ideas got into Wagner's work,” which was Bryan Magee's intention in Wagner and Philosophy. Instead, it is a kind of experiment in interpretation. I begin with Wagner's own philosophy and then think through the Ring with the ideas that he himself had set out while preparing to write its text. I have made use of the secondary literature when it serves my argument, but the guiding thread is spun from Wagner's own words.

That is to say: I take Wagner seriously as a thinker, as a creator of philosophical theories rather than as a consumer of other people’s. He was not a philosopher of the first rank, it is true, but his talents in that direction were substantial. Though he was strongly influenced by many of the better-known thinkers of his day, he developed his own theories on topics as diverse as humanity's place in the larger world, the limitations of human knowledge and the pitfalls of self-consciousness, the social function of art, the historical and cultural influences and constraints on artistic creativity, and the prospects for political transformation. More impressive than that was his ability to bring those ideas together into a single, surprisingly coherent world view.

Publication by subscription had become, by the eighteenth century, a common method by which composers, editors and authors issued their latest musical and literary works while minimising any personal financial risk. Indeed, for many composers, particularly those who were British born, it could be the only way through which publication might be achieved. Once issued, such works would frequently include a printed list of all those who had subscribed. These lists are of importance to anyone investigating British social history as they shed considerable light on the nature of the subscribers, including status, place of employment, residence and/or musical interests, along with their personal links with the composer.

Britain's booksellers, since the seventeenth century, had been of significant importance to the function of the subscription method for music books, as they were frequently tasked with taking subscriptions on behalf of the composer. By the 1720s, booksellers regularly appear in the subscription lists to new musical publications, with their presence providing a modicum of free advertising. It was even commonplace for different publishers to subscribe to each other's publications. Indeed, many of Britain's most important music businesses, the majority of which were located in London, were involved in this practice, including that managed by John Walsh the younger (1709–66). An analysis of their subscriptions indicates a willingness to sell other publishers’ works, including some from outside of London, presumably in an effort to make their business the music shop of choice in the capital.

While Bayard was ostensibly to act as a neutral wartime judge, he had much to gain by aiding the British, and was, in his official capacity, woven into the web of British governmental operations. Indeed, a provenance note regarding a portrait of Robert Bayard's second wife documents that he was not only known as Major Bayard but would later also be known as “the Loyal American” by family descendants. Correspondence can be found in which British military commanders enquired about the status of cases, with Bayard acting as a hub of knowledge, regardless of whether the cases fell into his official jurisdiction. Other correspondence, however, shows a far closer link to the British government, with Major Thomas Murray, the aide-de-camp of William Tryon's successor to the governorship of New York, James Robertson, writing to Bayard, that, “I am directed […] to request that you will give the necessary Orders that the Vessel […] mentioned may not be condemned till the matter is enquired into”. Though it is hard to discern from the lack of context, it appears from this letter that Bayard as the vice-admiralty judge, was receiving orders from officials who definitively expected condemnations before any due process had taken place.

To understand Bayard's role in military operations, it is important to examine his court and the realities faced by claimants facing him.

The highly-cultivated canon and humanist Sebastian de Covarrubias Horozco (1539–1613) relied on a variety of sources for the composition of his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola (Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language) (Madrid 1611), the first monolingual dictionary of the Castilian language. Case in point is the entry for argolla (ring), in which Covarrubias illustrated his definition with an early traditional song used to calm children, ‘Canta, Jorgico, canta’ (Sing, Jorgico, sing). After quoting the song, the lexicographer explained his choice of this example:

Nothing supports our language more than that which was used by our ancestors, and this is observed in proverbs, in old ballads and in trivial ditties, and thus they should not be underestimated, but rather venerated for their antiquity and simplicity; that is why I do not hesitate to cite them, rather I strongly rely on them to prove my intention. (Covarrubias 2006: s.v. argolla)

The original nucleus of Iberian balladry is the romancero viejo (old balladry). Since the fifteenth century, learned poets have been inspired by it to create other kinds of ballads. Learned ballads are beyond the scope of this chapter, which will focus on the relationship between early traditional lyrics and ballads, the two main branches of Iberian archaic poetry. Covarrubias quoted multiple examples of oral traditional genres in his Tesoro. In other entries, Covarrubias reaffirmed his appreciation for early lyrics and ballads; in his opinion, these were compositions as valuable as the poetry of the influential Renaissance poet Garcilaso de la Vega (ca. 1501–1536) who was regarded as equal to Homer and Virgil (Covarrubias 2006: s.v. cerca).

C. S. Lewis's representation of gender roles in his series The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56) has long been a topic of critical discussion. Other writers for young people as well as scholars of Lewis's works and/or young people's literature more generally debate the extent to which Lewis represents gender as hierarchical, conventional, and essentialized, often by analyzing female protagonists; this debate renewed and intensified with the appearance of twenty-first-century film adaptations by Walden Media.

January. A new year begun, and to all appearances as happy a one as I have ever had. Eliza, all the children and myself very well; all happy together, and everything apparently thriving. With Eliza I have never been more happy than at the present moment.

On the 2nd we had a little dinner party; my Aunt, Mrs Finch and Dr. Skey, Mr and Mrs Kinder, and my Sister; two or three more in the evening. It went off very well. … I had news yesterday that Hinck's eldest son had died; when I saw him last year he was a sweet boy of 5 years old, but very delicate. I have not had a letter from him but wrote to him yesterday.

5 January. … I finished Bruno Bauer's Kritik of the Gospels. It is a very clever book and has interested me very much. His theory is that Mark was written first then Luke, then Matthew, and then John, which he proves by showing how Mark's is a consecutive, consistent narrative, which is spoiled by each of the others as [they] introduce more matter. He considers it to be quite doubtful whether such a person as Jesus ever existed, and that at any rate the biography as given by the Evangelists is a fiction, and that they, when they wrote, knew they were inventing or composing … How the religion arose he considers it impossible to discover otherwise than by referring it to the state of the world at the time after heathenism had ceased to suffice and the Jewish nationality was destroyed by the Romans.

The Commission: Patron and Recipient, Families and Book

The patron of the Welles-Ros Bible and its principal intended recipient are figured in, or near, some of its key painted histories. Maud de Ros makes her initial appearance as creator and genitrix on the first page of scripture, a frequent locus of donor imagery, where a rebus in the upper right margin asserts her creative power (Fig. 7). Here, an elongated female figure floats between the words of the chapter head “Liber Genesis.” Wearing garments matching those of the world's Creator as well as the frilled veil favored by women of status, Maud gazes on the word “Liber” and touches a foliate tendril, her gesture echoing that of the Lord himself in the miniature's upper register. The generative power of patronage finds analogous, if less bold expression in the lavish Sherborne Missal, made c.1399–1407 for the Benedictine abbey of St. Mary’s, Sherborne (Dorset). In the upper left border on the first page of the ritual text, the missal's principal donor Abbot Robert Bruyning is framed by Creation scenes and gazes reverently toward the initial, where the Word is “made flesh” (Fig. 8).

Another marginal rebus proclaims Maud's son John as the volume's destinataire. Seated atop the stave of the initial “L” that opens the book of Malachi, the final Minor Prophet, a beardless youth sporting a prophet's hat – John de Welles as a thirteenth Minor Prophet – takes hold of the word “Liber” and the tail of a blue vine (Fig. 9).

The historiographical inheritance left by Moore, which has dominated the twentieth century, was as we saw one which looked to the Isle of Man as an island with primarily Irish connections. It viewed the period covered by this volume, from the establishment of Stanley lordship until the Revestment, as one in which English political and governmental control became progressively more intense, and saw with an embarrassed silence a lack of the type of resistance which Moore and his colleagues believed was characteristic of ‘Celtic’ societies, particularly in Ireland. While the structures of Manx autonomy around Tynwald and the House of Keys might have remained, there was little he could find to celebrate in its activity, paralleled in an apparent paucity of Celtic folk survivals. This was even true in the years of the wars of the seventeenth century. The recovery which Moore and his peers attempted to sponsor therefore felt all the more urgent and even desperate.

Yet this was a picture painted on the basis of a limited palette of evidence: as we also saw, Moore's frustrations included the limited efforts of the learned societies of his time in putting primary source material into print and making it accessible for study. The work of the past couple of decades, and particularly of the projects which have borne fruit in this volume and its companion, have added to and qualified those accounts to a considerable degree.

INTRODUCTION

It is inevitable that this chapter can only give an overview of the cultural life of the Isle of Man during the period. Reflecting economic and political changes, and through language, literature, the arts and entertainment, it offers glimpses into the developing ideas and beliefs of both the Manx and the incomers, and the growing awareness of the Island's history and unique identity. While the early part of the period draws mainly on primary documents such as the presentments, later histories and commentaries, mainly by visitors to the Island such as Waldron, Feltham and Robertson, provide interesting insights. Newspaper reports, diaries and other manuscripts are important sources and contributors to this chapter have also made good use of up-to-date research by scholars in a wide number of disciplines.

The evidence for Manx cultural activities during this period is uneven. Apart from accounts in diaries and journals, the early centuries reveal little factual information outside of the Stanley/Derby household. During the late 1700s, newspaper reports detail some of the more formal events or give occasional descriptions of the more unusual happenings, such as the circuses that visited the Island. Artworks that survive are those of personal, social and political value to the owners. The output of the bulk of the population seems to be invisible. Each of the following sections provides an introduction to the subject and will hopefully stimulate new research.

Adalbert Stifter reminded readers in “Wiener Salonscenen” (Viennese Salon Scenes), the final installment of Wien und die Wiener in Bildern aus dem Leben (Vienna and the Viennese in Sketches from Life, 1841–44), that his roots were in rural Upper Bohemia: “Ich glaube dem Leser schon gesagt zu haben, daß ich so glücklich war, meine Kindheit nicht in den Mauern der großen Stadt verlebt zu haben” (HKG 9,1:444; I believe I have already told the reader that I was so fortunate not to have spent my childhood behind the walls of the big city). He explained that writing about the city was not that much different from writing about life in the countryside: “es ist hier, wie überall: die Einseitigkeit gebiert den Ekel, und die Vielseitigkeit die Harmonie” (HKG 9,1:439; it is here as it is everywhere: one-sidedness breeds disgust, and diversity [breeds] harmony). Stifter thought that it could be boring at a Viennese salon, and that there could be plenty of “Koth, Steine und Morast” (HKG 9,1:439; filth, stones, and morass) in an Alpine landscape). Despite his claims to the contrary, the opinion persists that he was more interested in rural than in urban life and that it would be a mistake to claim otherwise. This observation was cemented long ago for a variety of reasons: autobiographical remarks found in his letters and fiction; a narrative focus on nature; a publication history and scholarship privileging realist fiction over administrative correspondence and cultural criticism; an emphasis on single rather than collective authorship; and little scholarly consideration for mid-nineteenth-century city life and leisure.