Music Director at the Interim Theater

Smetana had long prepared himself for the position of music director at the Interim Theater. Since his time in Göteborg, he had regarded it as his main goal. With the position now secured, his success hinged on introducing the principles and artistic standards he had criticized his rival Maýr for lacking. However, he soon encountered formidable opposition—a conservative clique that considered Italian opera, with its extensive coloratura, the cornerstone of the operatic repertory. He had to implement reforms cautiously, navigating aesthetic, technical, and financial obstacles. Despite these challenges, he solidified his team and led them with boundless enthusiasm.

Departing from Maýr's routine, workman-like approach, Smetana introduced new methods and spirit into the theater. His distinctive conducting style and his attitude toward the personnel had already made an impression during the production of The Brandenburgers in Bohemia. These qualities were instrumental in securing him his current position. Rather than imposing tyranny on the orchestra, he worked collaboratively, showing genuine respect for their work and treating each musician as an individual. In rehearsals, he started by explaining the opera's nature and significance, then explored it with contagious enthusiasm, drawing everyone along with him. No mistake in entry or attack escaped his notice; he tapped his baton on the desk to offer polite and constructive feedback, often revisiting passages with meticulous attention to tempo and dynamics.

At that time, the orchestra was modestly sized, perfectly suited to the dimensions of the Interim Theater. Despite its small size, it included outstanding musicians, such as Antonín Dvořák in the viola section. During critical moments—such as in the early 1870s, when Smetana's adversaries sought to oust him—the orchestra rallied spontaneously behind their conductor. The seeds of such intrigue had been sown as early as 1868, during performances of Smetana's third opera, Dalibor.

Early Iberian Traditional Lyric

Old popular Hispanic poetry encompasses a multilingual tradition of Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Portuguese non-narrative brief compositions. Although these texts originated in a rich oral tradition, in which they were transmitted across generations by word of mouth, court musicians and poets, influenced by literary-musical trends, adopted and adapted these popular poems to the written poetic conventions of the time. Largely, it is through these adaptations that we have come to know this tradition.

However, alongside these documented pieces, there exists an oral tradition that has persisted through the centuries, only coming to light through extensive field research conducted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This research has uncovered a number of songs that have remained alive in the collective memory, revealing the enduring vitality and variability of these compositions. Songs circulated between the oral and the written mediums with remarkable versatility. The written compositions, such as songs and poems, were not confined to the pages of manuscripts but were performed by the troubadours and jongleurs, thus maintaining their oral character even after being documented. Conversely, the oral traditions, once thought to be ephemeral, found permanence through their transcription into written forms, enabling their preservation and dissemination across time and space. This interplay between orality and textuality suggests that these pieces possess a hybrid existence, operating simultaneously as oral performances and written texts. A comprehensive study of old Hispanic popular lyric requires an approach that recognises this mixed orality (Finnegan 1992), as the interdisciplinary research carried out in recent decades demonstrates.

A compendium or encyclopedia devoted to a single composer is the ultimate accolade from the scholarly community. After the complete works, the biographies, the critical and source studies and the scholarly conferences, a single volume consisting mainly of dictionary-style entries relating to various aspects of the life, works and reputation is a convenient way of summarising the accumulated scholarship devoted to a great composer. In Henry Purcell's case, this volume appears 30 years after the tercentenary of the composer's death in 1995, so it is a good moment to take stock. 1995 produced a spate of new Purcell biographies, none of them detailed and authoritative enough to replace Franklin B. Zimmerman's classic but ageing ZimPur – to use the bibliographic code explained below. Our brief Biography is intended only as a stopgap: there is an urgent need for a new full-length treatment, taking account of recent archival work and source studies, and in particular deploying a more sophisticated understanding than in the past of Purcell's milieu and his relationships with his family, colleagues and patrons. However, readers will notice that we frequently cite chapters from the two volumes of scholarly essays produced for the tercentenary, PurStu and PMHP, the latter the proceedings of a conference held at New College, Oxford in 1994.

A few years later, in 2000, Robert Shay and Robert Thompson revolutionised our knowledge of Purcell's manuscripts with ShaMan, work subsequently built upon by Rebecca Herissone in HerCre; in her invaluable online appendix HerCat; and in a series of ground-breaking articles, notably HerFow of 2006.

Upon its initial release, Robert Gluck's 1994 novel Margery Kempe was met with equal parts disgust and scorn by a bewildered reading public. While ostensibly a retelling of the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Gluck parallels the waning gay romance of Bob – a thinly veiled representation of Gluck himself – with that of Margery Kempe and Christ. The result is a novel that is neither purely historical fiction nor clearly autobiography. A 1994 Publisher's Weekly review wryly declares that “Margery Kempe lives up to neither its potential nor its premise […] Whatever Gluck's intention, he has failed.” In the same year, an anonymous review in Kirkus voices great displeasure regarding having read Margery Kempe: “Gluck pushes the envelope way too far as he attempts to use the history of a failed, would-be saint from the 15th century to explore his own romantic obsession in the 1990s.” Holding little back, the reviewer ultimately finds Margery Kempe “[n]umbingly frenzied, frustrated, and futile.”

Unlike the queens who ruled England afer her, Mathilda lef behind a tombstone that utterly ignores her children. The text of her epitaph celebrates her royal genealogy and her activities as ruler – especially the construction of Holy Trinity – while the maternal element of her identity is completely marginalized. It is revealing that this contemporary representation of Mathilda does not communicate that she had any ofspring at all.

While the omission indicates that other identifying features took precedence, Mathilda gave birth to nine children, which had a signifcant efect on her life and rule.

When Henry VIII removed the English Church from the authority of the pope in 1534 as a result of the latter's refusal to grant annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, it was to prove the catalyst for events which were to bring about profound changes for the church's music and musicians. Although the theological repercussions of the Reformation set in motion by Martin Luther in 1517 soon found discussion and support in England, it was firmly repressed and its sympathisers persecuted, until Henry's break from Rome enabled English reformers to embolden themselves. For choirs, the first realization that their traditional life was under threat came with the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540. For the most part they were no longer in the vanguard of choral life, but the greater monastic houses were still significant centres of choral activity, with perhaps as many as fifty having choirs involving the employment of boys and lay adults. Although the monks were pensioned off and many monastic buildings were destroyed, not all their musical bodies were disbanded. The eight old monastic cathedrals remained, transformed into secular establishments headed by a dean and chapter – many of the posts being occupied by former monks – with a choir of boys, minor canons and lay clerks, doubtless formed in part from the previous Lady Chapel choirs, but now regularly occupying the stalls of the quire. Such was the transformation effected at Canterbury, Carlisle, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester and Worcester. But Henry's reorganisation did not stop there, for, in addition, five former monastic churches which had never been cathedrals, were given that status as mother churches of the newly created dioceses of Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford and Peterborough. Westminster Abbey was also briefly made London's second cathedral at this time, but, after reverting to an abbey under Mary Tudor, in 1560 it was turned into a ‘royal peculiar’, which it remains to the present day.

A Programme of Diversity

To begin with a word of caution: in the “Remarks on the Novel” that Döblin published in 1917, he firmly rejected the notion that the style of a narrative text was there to be noticed and admired in its own right, likening it rather to the hammer with which a sculptor chisels out the shape he wishes to present to the world. The style of a literary text, in other words, was merely the instrument with which the distinctive character of a subject, or a situation, or an episode, is conveyed to the reader. And yet, as we noted in our introduction, no less a discerning reader than Jorge Luis Borges was moved to endorse Döblin's skill with that stylistic hammer twenty years later, in 1937, when he described him as the most versatile writer of his time. A similar point was made more recently by the German novelist Ingo Schulze when he recalled that the stylistic diversity of Döblin's narratives had helped him to see beyond the notion that, to be successful, literary authors needed to cultivate a style that was unmistakably their own.