Introduction

Author(s):  
Laurie McManus

This introductory chapter establishes foundations of the book: who formed the priesthood of art (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Amalie Joachim, Joseph Joachim) and the birth of artistic priesthood from the art-religious spirit of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In particular, this chapter introduces the notion that the artistic priesthood occupied a kind of alternative gendered space—neither fully masculine nor feminine—and that desirable characteristics of an artistic priest (devotion, humility, spiritial leadership) could be gendered in various ways in musical-critical discourse. After midcentury, changes in music aesthetics and gender roles created pressure to understand Romantic notions of musical priesthood as antiquated and outmoded. In short, Brahms offers a case study in the intersection of art-religious values with a gender dichotomy that became increasingly prescriptive over the second half of the nineteenth century.

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.


2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-474
Author(s):  
VINCENT VIAENE

In 1855 the sisters of St André in Tournai (Belgium) openly revolted against their bishop by sending a delegation to the pope. It was the high point of a conflict that had been simmering since 1850, and would continue to reverberate until 1886. This case study illustrates the religious, social and gender fault-lines opened by modernity between authoritarian bishops and a new generation of self-conscious religious women active in society. The field of tension provided Vatican diplomacy with the opportunity for an unprecedented affirmation of its mediating role. The affair of St André was one of the first occasions on which the Curia was directly confronted with ultramontane feminism, and it neatly defines the margins within which the Holy See was hammering out a matrix for the Romanisation and ‘standardisation’ of religious women. At the price of ‘following the beaten track’ to Rome, the second sex could sufficiently escape the grip of the first estate to operate a silent revolution in education, charity and devotion during the nineteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-60
Author(s):  
Shaena B. Weitz

In the mid-1830s, Henri Herz (1803–88) was an internationally renowned pianist, but his reputation today, for the most part, is that of a second-rate musician who wrote trivial variations on opera themes. This enduring picture of Herz was painted first in France in 1834 by the Gazette musicale. The Gazette’s campaign has been understood by modern scholars as a conspicuous moment in a broad aesthetic shift away from French salon music and toward high German Romanticism, and the Gazette has garnered praise for its prescience. But a closer examination of the Gazette’s articles, the events surrounding the coverage such as a pistol duel and a libel case, contemporary correspondence, and Herz’s publishing record indicate that the Gazette’s negative treatment of Herz was not an organic assessment of his output, but rather a revenge scheme orchestrated by the Gazette’s owner and Herz’s former publisher, Maurice Schlesinger (1798–1871). As a case study, the Gazette’s Herz campaign exposes the endemic corruption of the nineteenth-century press that has been portrayed as an unseemly rarity rather than a central component of historical criticism’s production. But taken more broadly, the Gazette’s articles on Herz highlight limitations in the history of reception. This article turns to media studies to explore the problematic relationship between propaganda and reception and shows how the Gazette, and other nineteenth-century journals, are still manipulating our cognition.


2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID R. GREEN ◽  
ALASTAIR OWENS ◽  
JOSEPHINE MALTBY ◽  
JANETTE RUTTERFORD

AbstractStudies of wealth-holding in nineteenth-century Britain focus either on establishing aggregate measures or on individual case studies. These do not allow for a comparative analysis of the way that the composition of wealth was influenced by age and gender. This article explores the importance of these factors using both a case-study approach and a more comprehensive analysis of wealth left at death for a sample of 1,444 individuals. By establishing the age at death for 1,274 of these individuals, together with evidence from a series of death duty records, it is possible to determine the composition of assets by age and gender. For both men and women, shares became more important over the life course. Real estate was more important for men of all ages compared to women, for whom safe investments in government securities assumed greater significance with age. These findings confirm that both age and gender influenced the amount and composition of wealth and demonstrate that these factors need to be taken into account in any model that seeks to make generalizations about the pattern of wealth-holding in the population at large. Emphasizing these demand-side factors provides a different perspective on the rise of Britain as a ‘nation of investors’.


2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Leistra-Jones

AbstractJoseph Joachim, Johannes Brahms, and other members of their circle were important figures in the ascendancy of the Werktreue paradigm of performance in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article explores the ways in which their approach to Werktreue intersected with a broader ideal of “authentic” subjectivity. An authentic performer, according to this ideal, would be true to himself or herself, absorbed in the music, oblivious of the audience, and restrained in gestures and overall expressivity. I examine how these musicians performed authenticity in different types of self-representation, including autobiographical writings, portraits, and musical performances. Furthermore, I explore the connection between the subjectivity modeled in their performances and the aesthetic ideology of nonprogrammatic instrumental music. Concerns about authenticity played an important role in the struggle over the ownership of the Austro-German musical tradition; debates about which performers were “authentic” often hinged on the question of who could claim the cultural and spiritual aptitude necessary to inhabit the thoughts of master composers. In this context, the performative strategies associated with authenticity also evoked social codes associated with gender, nationality, and race during a period in which participation in Germanic culture was being conceived of in increasingly exclusive terms.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Stainthorp

This article analyzes the tensionbetween the active, present body and the absent, passive body in this medical case study, presented by doctor and prosthetist Henry Robert Heather Bigg in his 1885 bookArtificial Limbs and the Amputations which Afford the Most Appropriate Stumps in Civil and Military Surgery. I reproduce Bigg's account in its entirety because, to date,Artificial Limbshas not been digitised, although it is held at around a dozen academic libraries in the UK and USA respectively. Bringing attention to and providing a close reading of a source not previously discussed academically sheds new light on the way the disabled body was read by medical professionals in the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition, I consider Bigg's narrative rendering of this unique case study alongside several contemporary sources, including memoirs, novels, short stories, and journal articles. In doing so, I identify how assumptions made by Bigg about the (disabled, female, privileged) hand mirror and echo those in the wider cultural sphere. The sensing hand is an instrument of will, and the creation of such a prosthesis troubles the dynamics of active and passive, touching and touched that Pamela K. Gilbert has identified as crucial to nineteenth-century discourses surrounding the hand. By designing and making this prosthesis, Bigg exerts his professional and masculine agency to make the woman's body assume the position of something beheld rather than embodied.


Author(s):  
Mathew Bumbalough

This case study examines the language and sexuality of a gay man living in South Korea, exploring current literature, theories, and interview data as a way of investigating sexuality as a marker of identity. I define sexual identity in this case through the subjective reality of the participant as he expresses his ‘true’ self in the lived experience of his travels to different countries and speaking multiple languages. The aim of this study then is to analysis the discourse using Philip and Jorgensen’s (2002) method of critical discourse analysis from a single interview to see how pronoun selection, language selection, speech intonations and inflections in his speech to see how it informs current research in Korean Studies and gender discourses.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
William Horne

Beethoven's String Quintet, Op. 29, has been described as a ‘wallflower’ work that, without enough suitors, remains on the sidelines of the string chamber music repertoire. But in the nineteenth century it had a prominent champion, Joseph Joachim, whose performances of the quintet must have attracted the attention of his close friend, Johannes Brahms. The opening theme of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18, is clearly reminiscent of the beginning of Beethoven's quintet. Evidence from Donald Francis Tovey's recollections of Joachim, Joachim's correspondence with the Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, and the manuscript of Op. 18 shows that Joachim influenced an important revision that aligns the beginning of Brahms's sextet closely with the opening of Beethoven's Op. 29 also in terms of texture and formal design. The striking tremolo opening and virtuosic scale passages in the finale of Beethoven's quintet prefigure similar elements in the last movement of Brahms's Op. 36 sextet. But the deeper relationship between these movements lies in certain shared formal elements: a common emphasis on sound, texture and sharp contrasts between agitato and pastoral elements as defining features of the overall form – and several distinctive similarities of contrapuntal strategy, form and tonal design between the substantial fugatos that dominate the development sections of both movements. It is often observed that Brahms wrote chamber works in pairs. Scholars have often posited that his two string sextets form such a pair, but the separation of four years in their inceptions and his extensive use of Baroque-style materials composed in the 1850s in the later sextet have made this argument tenuous. It now emerges that an unusual pairing feature of Brahms's string sextets is that both works respond to Beethoven's ‘wallflower’ masterpiece.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


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