Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly's libretto for Hector Berlioz's 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini contains a work stoppage by the foundry workers who are casting the Italian Renaissance artist's ...sculpture of Perseus and the slain Medusa. While Cellini describes no such event in his autobiographical Vita, he does recount another story that may have suggested to the librettists their invention of the workers' strike episode. Contemporary Romantic writers, including Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo, in their theater and verse, treated the themes of the suffering of industrial workers and the insensitivity of industrialists. Barbier published, also in 1838, Lazare, a collection of satiric poems that analyzed the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution in Britain, above all the exploitation and suffering of the working class. The France of the 1830s saw a notable increase in the pace of industrialization, the formation of the proletariat and the manufacturing capitalist class, and the first laborers' strikes. It is in this historical and literary context that one can best understand the incorporation of the apocryphal and anachronistic work stoppage episode into the opera libretto.
The four actors whose careers the essays in this volume explore are not only the greatest English actors of their own times but also performers whose brilliance is still invoked by all interested in ...theatre. Each took a distinct approach to the Shakespeare roles they played and the texts they used: from David Garrick's ability to move other actors as well as the audience to tears, to the noble classicism of John Philip Kemble, from the grand tragic style of Sarah Siddons to the terrifying energy of Edmund Kean. Each changed forever the concept of what Shakespeare's plays might mean in performance.
Editorial Calico, Joy H
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Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany, at least one reviewer noted that it helped fill a surprising gap in the literature on the music-science relationship during ...the early-to-mid-nineteenth century.1 Brittan further addresses this lacuna by connecting microscopy, and the burgeoning field of entomology which it enabled, to the fairy music of Felix Mendelssohn and Hector Berlioz in the 1830s. The intersection of clinic and theater put this reader in mind of an earlier instance in which medical terminology entered common parlance and informed both creative process and audience perception: the idée fixe, established by French psychiatrists as the principal symptom of monomania well before Berlioz attached the term to his recurring motif.3 As to the second theme, singing women across history are enjoying unprecedented popularity.
The closest of friends in the early eighteen-thirties, Berlioz and Liszt shared artistic aspirations (especially around the latter's reworkings of the former's Symphonie fantastique and its sequel, ...Le Retour à la vie) and personal adventures (especially around the former's irrational passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson and the latter's efforts at counsel and consolation). These matters are discussed in the context of Berlioz's private (and I believe insensitive) announcement, in a letter to Liszt sent four days after the marriage, that his new wife had been a virgin.
This paper examines and acknowledges the evolution of the left-hand range and the demands in the classical guitar technique since the 19th Century. In that regard, after presenting the problems which ...surround the main subject of investigation, special attention will be given to the section dedicated to the guitar in the Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes by Hector Berlioz (1844), the development of the guitar music after 1850, as well as the 20th Century and the contemporary music heritage of this instrument. The next stage of the evolution of the use of the left-hand range in guitar technique will be discussed and options presented.
The Requiem-literally "Rest"-as a dedicated part of the Roman Catholic funeral service (Missa pro defunctis) appeared in musical form as early as the tenth century, and its now familiar chant ...treatment was in place by the 1300s.3 The Sequence, Dies irae Day of wrath, depicts the Last Judgment. The Tuba mirum is the third stanza of the Dies irae (Figure 1) and it was formally added to the funeral liturgy at the Council of Trent (1543-1563) although it had been in use earlier in both chant and polyphonic treatments.4 The text of the Dies irae, based in part on lines from the Bible's book of Zephaniah and which has long been attributed to Thomas of Celano (c. 1185-c. ...Walsegg was unaware that the Requiem had already been performed on January 2, 1793-with full credit given to Mozart-in a performance to benefit Mozart's widow, Constanze, and their two children,10 and portions, most likely only the Introit and Kyrie, may have been performed at a service in Mozart's memory on December 16, 1791, in St. Michael's Church (Michaelerkirche) in Vienna11 Because the Requiem was left unfinished at the time of Mozart's death, Constanze, needing to present a completed work to Walsegg in order to receive the second half of the commission fee, turned first to Mozart's student Franz Jakob Freystädler, then to his student Joseph Eybler, then to his friend, Abbé Maximilian Stadler, and finally to Franz Xaver Süssmayr to complete the work. ...the melodic contour of the fugue subject for Mozart's Kyrie is identical to that for Handel's chorus, And With His Stripes from Messiah, HWV 56 (1741), and the Kyrie 's second subject is similar to a subject in the final chorus, We Will Rejoice, from Handel's Dettingen Anthem, HWV 265 (1743).12 Mozart's Requiem manuscript contains completions by Eybler around which Stadler later drew circles to distinguish later additions from the composer's fragmentary original.13 In his completion of the movement, Süssmayr- who made up an entirely new score while imitating Mozart's handwriting-continued the trombone solo in measures 24-34 but added no additional phrasing to the trombone solo in measures 1-18 beyond what was found Mozart's original score.14 Mozart's specific instructions for inclusion of trombones in the Requiem are limited to the trombone solo in the Tuba mirum and an indication for three trombones to play four quarter notes in measures 7-8 of the Introitus followed by the indication for the trombones to play tutti (Figure 5).
