There is, at the heart of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 1853), a fundamental emptiness. This might seem like an odd thing to say. For the most part, Stifter's world is painstakingly, perhaps even lushly described. Natural landscapes, social relations, and physical objects are depicted with a care that some might consider excessive. The plotlines are driven by activity that runs the gamut from the measured to the manic, from calm routine to strife and disaster. The text offers us a bounty on the level of both action and description, but something still seems to be missing.

For Walter Benjamin, this absence is a fundamentally linguistic one, a form of what he calls “reticence” [Verschwiegenheit]. Because Stifter is cut off from “the essence of the world” [das Weltwesen] that is language, he cannot give a persuasive account of the relationship between the natural world and the moral one. The homologies that he tries to establish between the two remain restricted to the visual register and therefore mute. Because it is inarticulate, Stifter's world is also disarticulated, for an unbridgeable gulf separates material impressions from the forces that are responsible for them.

The Jay Treaty was published by the US government and widely disseminated in the press. Known as one of the first outcries in American politics and infamous for the public reaction to it, its circulation can barely be underestimated. 1 But how did US merchants interact with the commission or with Bayard in his capacity for assistance in claims and appeals? What information did the US government provide to mercantile communities, in which manner did they themselves interfere with the court process, and how was such information circulated?

Merchants were already following regular updates on condemnations and captures, both in the vice-admiralty courts and in the High Court of Admiralty. Decrees and lines of argumentation in court were published in newspapers.2 John Proctor obtained knowledge “by a late Bermudian paper, that the Ship Hamilton, Capt. Farrett, was taken by the Thetis British Frigate, and carried into Bermudas”3 and thus took up correspondence with the US government. Some government instructions had been printed in American newspapers, even printed in their entirety, with specific references made to the importance of providing merchants with information.4 The merchant community also functioned as a communication network in itself, with two merchants corresponding in 1797, whether they should contact other persons who might be in a similar position concerning captured property and get them in touch with Samuel Bayard.5 Yet the knowledge of what exactly the Treaty meant for their private cases remained unclear to many. The main initial point of governmental contact for most queries was the Secretary of State, although individual members of the commission, and additional staff on both sides, such as Jacob Wagner, Chief Clerk at the State Department, or Samuel Bayard, all received letters. Occasionally, citizens were referred there by other government officials.

While there has been no shortage of monographs on Beethoven's symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas, his chamber music with piano has received relatively scant attention, particularly in the Beethoven literature in English. Yet this area of the composer's output contains some of his greatest and most famous works, among them the ‘Ghost’ and ‘Archduke’ piano trios, the ‘Spring’ and ‘Kreutzer’ violin sonatas, and the A major Cello Sonata op.69. It is true that the combination of piano and strings produces by its very nature a more heterogeneous form than the string quartet, and that Beethoven reserved some of his most profound and spiritual utterances for his late quartets in particular; but his piano trios, violin sonatas and cello sonatas together make up a larger corpus of works, and one that covers scarcely less stylistic ground – from his very first efforts at composition during the years when he was living in Bonn, to the threshold of his last period (the two cello sonatas op.102) and beyond (the two series of variations for piano and flute opp.105 and 107). No other composer, moreover, made as significant a contribution to all three principal forms of chamber music with piano. Haydn's piano trios, it is true, belong among his most remarkable and original chamber works, but the special nature of their textures assigns them a place apart in the history of the genre. Haydn, moreover, made no excursion into the field of duo sonatas; and if Mozart's violin sonatas number among them some of the finest works in the repertoire, and his piano trios contain a comparable number of masterpieces (though none, perhaps, that quite matches the grandeur and visionary quality of Beethoven's ‘Archduke’ and ‘Ghost’ trios), he never attempted to cultivate the more problematic medium of the sonata for piano and cello. Beethoven's five cello sonatas remain a unique achievement: not only did he essentially create the genre and contribute considerably more to it than any later composer of the front rank, he also raised it to a level of perfection that was never to be matched.

WAGNER SEEMS to have had, at best, an ambivalent attitude towards philosophy. His autobiography is not always a reliable source, and there are reasons to doubt his memory of his first encounter with Feuerbach, but it still provides an illuminating account of his early interest in the subject: