This premiere took place on 30 December 1846 with Paul Barroilhet as Robert and Rosine Stoltz as Marie. The plot was concocted by two librettists, the Belgian Gustave Vaez (1812–62) and the Frenchman Alphonse Royer (1803–75).

The situation at the Opéra is extremely serious. I shan't deal with the question of money, about which I’m ignorant and which anyway I’m not competent to write about; as I understand it, it's a question over which the government has the right to intervene, rather than any individual. Instead, I’ll concentrate on the musical resources still available to this unfortunate theatre, and on the influence of the disastrous condition to which it finds itself reduced upon the state of the art throughout France, to the astonishment of those who visit our country. This ruin of an institution which was, and maybe still is, so beautiful, so much loved by our country in every way – for which it makes so many sacrifices each year, and which it's in the habit of regarding as the focal point of its pretentions to artistic splendour –this ruin is due to causes we can't help wondering about, the reality of which continues to strike everyone who can see clearly and is without prejudice.

Having failed to acquire a new work from any of the major composers of Germany, Italy or France, the Opéra has found itself constrained to beg Rossini to do them the insulting favour of rummaging around in his paperwork to extract from it fragments of old scores made popular throughout Europe by the best Italian singers – admirable fragments, no doubt, but which, put together more or less competently by someone else, could not by any means, at any time or in any country however barbarous, constitute a true, serious work of art or, whatever the posters might tell us, justify the title of ‘a new opera’.

The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland represents the first comprehensive survey of Irish musical experience across recorded history, although its principal span extends from the early Middle Ages to the present day. EMIR (to use the abbreviation by which it is now known) addresses several distinct areas of musical practice, including traditional music, art music, church music, popular music and the music trade (printing and publishing; instrument manufacture), as well as the relationship between music, literature and political culture in Ireland. It also documents Irish musical practice elsewhere, notably in North America (the United States and Canada) and the United Kingdom.

Perhaps the most important aspect of EMIR from the general perspective of musical lexicography is its attempt to broaden the base of musical practice as this is conceived in older works of musical reference. In particular, EMIR reflects a sequence of editorial principles sufficiently pliant to address the topography of Irish musical practice, in which there has long been a pronounced tension between the claims of the composer and the musical work on one side, and the claims of oral and popular culture on the other. Although EMIR represents the apparatus of Irish art music (as in biographical and critical entries on composers, complete with worklists, sources and bibliographies), it also engages closely with the transmission and dissemination of traditional and popular music. But however comprehensive its address, EMIR implicitly draws attention to the fundamental challenge of musical lexicography (in Ireland as well as elsewhere), which is to reconcile an apparently insatiable quest for information with the imperative of critical and historical interpretation.

The Five Axes

In the poetry of many cultures, there is an enduring image: of a shore that recedes even as you move towards it. If transformative constitutionalism's metaphor of the bridge expresses confidence that the chasm between the past and the future will be bridged, then the language of poetry warns us about the ‘essential cruelty of hope’. Transformative constitutionalism may be a bridge, but a bridge to a horizon that is always receding.

The chapters in this book trace the journey of transformative constitutionalism under Kenya's 2010 Constitution, between the bridge and the horizon. These chapters – each dedicated to a constitutional dispute that was brought before the Kenyan courts between 2010 and 2025 – correspond to five axes of transformation.

The first axis is that of constraining the executive and empowering the People. This was at issue in the BBI Case, where an executive-driven attempt to make large-scale changes to the 2010 Constitution was rebuffed by the courts. The ball was set rolling by the High Court, which reached into history to hold that sweeping constitutional change could not be done without a correspondingly deep participation of the People. In doing so, the High Court offered to the world a new – and distinctively Kenyan – articulation of the famous basic structure doctrine. While the Supreme Court disagreed with the High Court on the applicability of the doctrine to the Kenyan context, its own interpretation of the Constitution affirmed – in substance – the document's commitment to public participation in constitutional change.

On January 11, 1896, Johannes Brahms spent several memorable hours in the company of Adolph Menzel, the dean of German artists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Menzel had recently marked his eightieth birthday, and Brahms, who enjoyed a warm friendship with the artist in his autumn years, had come to join him in a belated private celebration at his Berlin atelier. After ascending four flights of stairs, the composer was greeted by his host in the corridor and escorted into the studio. Upon entering he would have immediately caught sight of the large unfinished oil painting “Frederick the Great Addressing His Generals before the Battle of Leuthen” (1859–61), which was prominently displayed on one of the studio walls. The two men soon sat down to a deluxe meal of oysters served with fine wine. The drinking was heavy, the examination of the artist's work so engrossing, that Brahms lost all track of time and barely made it to a dinner that had been arranged in his honor by the Prussian Academy of Arts. Max Kalbeck, the author of the first substantial biography of the composer, described the visit in characteristically flowery prose:

The tiny hoary [Menzel], in whom a sorcerous necromancer was hiding, had held [Brahms] spellbound. One glass after another was emptied as libation for the spirits that emerged from the books and folders all around and took on flesh and blood when the conjurer, to the boundless astonishment of his guest, called them all by name.

The chapter explores the multifaceted role of Roman villas, focusing on their dual function as symbols of social status and units of agricultural production, set within a broader landscape of towns, farms, and transport infrastructure. The focus of the discussion is peninsular Italy, but examples from other parts of the Roman world are also presented.

Chapter 4 investigates how mental models, particularly the Economist Mental Model (EMM), shape Italians’ support for globalization policies: EU membership, free trade, and immigration. Against a backdrop of economic stagnation and rising populism, the chapter shows that individuals with higher economic knowledge – those who think like economists – are significantly more likely to favor these welfare-enhancing policies. Notably, this holds even for “losers” of globalization in terms of lower income, lower education, or routine jobs, suggesting that economic reasoning can override short-term self-interest. The chapter also explores time preferences, finding that EMM adopters have lower subjective discount rates, making them more apt to weigh long-term gains over immediate costs. Additional tests confirm these findings are not driven by general education, highlighting the distinctive role of economic reasoning in shaping attitudes toward globalization.

Murcia is an important city in southeastern Spain, the center of what was once a small Islamic taifa state that was erased during the major Christian advances of the thirteenth century in the movement known as the reconquista. The ultimate disposition of reconquered territory around Murcia became an abiding cause of friction between the two major kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Although the city itself fell to Castile, some of the territory that had once made up the Muslim kingdom became part of Aragonese Valencia and tension over this division remained for decades. Ultimately, the final settlement of the borders in this region became the major reason for the brutal, ten-year War of the Two Pedros.

This article will explore not only Murcia's role as a frontline city in that conflict, a staging point for what was largely a Castilian war of aggression, but also its enormous importance for our understanding the conflict as a whole, an importance it derives from the fact that surviving city documents provide much of what we know about the conflict from the Castilian perspective. We also learn about the asymmetry of source material scholars of medieval Spain encounter when researching and writing about the history of these two kingdoms.

Late in June, 1364, urban authorities in Murcia, a major city in southeastern Spain, received an urgent message from the king of Castile, one of the medieval period's most controversial monarchs, Pedro I (1350–66/1367–69), better known to history by his unflattering sobriquet as Pedro the Cruel.

By the last third of the eighteenth century, poetic recitation had thrown its anchor into the fertile waters of the Lied, a genre that possessed a formal malleability and a simplicity bordering on the domain of the improvisatory and the popular Volkston. Putting such declamatoria as Junker's ‘Genofeva’ or Dalberg's ‘Evas Klagen’ side by side with through-composed Lieder by Schubart or Zumsteeg reveals that their differences were more of degree than of kind. Both genres were animated by an idealised declamatory melos, explaining the Lied's attraction for modes of spoken declamation, however stylised these may have been. Still, this absorption of the declamatorium into the frame of the Lied remained conflictual: how far could the Lied go in its integration of declamatory speech without losing the defining quality of Sangbarkeit? This question led Reichardt, one of Zumsteeg's contemporaries, to devise by the 1800s the Deklamationsstück (what twentieth-century scholarship has usually rendered as ‘declamatory Lied’), a vocal piece with keyboard accompaniment, located at the junction between poetic recitation and Lied.

There is a continuous line running between Schubart, Zumsteeg, and Reichardt, in that all three composers intended to incorporate theatrical declamation within the musical frame of the Lied. Their strategies, however, differed greatly. Located at the crossroads between music and poetry, Schubart's contributions epitomise the primacy of an improvisatory, aus dem Stegreif approach. Zumsteeg explored the through-composed form by incorporating it into expanded, or modified, strophic forms, favouring a recitative-like approach in which the musical accompaniment bears similarities with the melodramatic score of the Benda model. As for Reichardt, he envisioned the Deklamationsstück. In this, Reichardt attempted to capture prosodic spontaneity, yet through much more calculated artistic means than Schubart and less complex formal approaches than those of Zumsteeg.

Who is Leonore? What is she? She's plain Fidelio in pants, Leonore on the dotted line, Florestan's angel, Marzelline's boyfriend, Jaquino's love rival, Pizarro's would-be tyrannicide, and all throughout a wife in drag. But if his title heroine has an identity problem, Beethoven's only opera has itself hardly fared better, for up until the mid-20th century, there was surprisingly little agreement about what it is. Wilhelm Furtwängler said it was “more of a mass than an opera,” the German critic Paul Bekker saw an “oratorio” in it, while Arnold Schoenberg called it one of the “fighters for liberal freedom” (comparing it, oddly, with Uncle Tom's Cabin). The most extreme reaction was Richard Wagner’s, who basically said Beethoven needn't have bothered writing it, since his third Leonore Overture said it all so much better. In 1940, Edward Dent remarked on how views on Fidelio shifted according to the opinions of the day, adding an obvious reference to contemporary tyrants: “German stage-directors after the revolution of 1918 saw [Florestan and Leonore] as man and woman of their own time; they are alive for us today, and Pizarro too.”

This kaleidoscopic reaction to Fidelio should not surprise us unduly, for it is arguably a late reflection of the vicissitudes of the work's own compositional history. Originally based on an extant French libretto that had itself already undergone numerous interpretations, Beethoven spent some ten years on it, working with three different poets to complete and stage three different versions, and writing no less than four different overtures (he at one point groaned that the labor he invested in the opera should entitle him to a “martyr's crown”).

The Peterhouse 1418 register is remarkable in the history of Cambridge libraries. It is not the first list of books – there are earlier inventories at Corpus Christi College and King's Hall and registers of borrowed books at King's Hall and Gonville Hall. It is, however, the first comprehensive register of a sizeable collection. The fourteen-word titulus capitulates the organization of the Peterhouse Library: a core collection of chained volumes, a circulating library, as well as books suitable for sale.