Individual and Communal Freedom and the Performance History of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach and Mendelssohn

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-179
Author(s):  
Markus Rathey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Liturgical Music ◽  
Original Performance ◽  
Performance History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Performance Conditions

When Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the concert hall of the Berlin Singakademie in 1829, he not only transferred a piece of liturgical music into a secular space, but he also made numerous cuts that changed the theological profile of Bach’s composition. The essay explores the theology of the St. Matthew Passion in the context of early eighteenth-century theology and gives an overview of the original performance conditions and the audiences at the performances in Bach’s time. The second half of the essay analyses how these parameters changed when Mendelssohn conducted the Passion in 1829. It becomes clear that the sociological profile of the audience (educated middle and upper class who had to pay money to attend the performance) remained essentially the same, while the theology shifted from a focus on the freedom of the individual in Bach’s time to an emphasis on the community (congregation, Volk, nation) in the adapted version the Singakademie presented to its listeners in 1829.

TWO HUNTERS, A MILKMAID AND THE FRENCH ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ CANON

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA DOE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Stage I ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Printed Music

ABSTRACTLarge-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century:Les deux chasseurs et la laitière(1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history ofLes deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, likeLes deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?

The Enterprisers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Educational Innovation ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Modern School ◽  
Regular Army ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Era

The Enterprisers traces the emergence of “modern” school in Russia during the reigns of Peter I and his immediate successors, up to the accession of Catherine II. The efforts to “educate” Russia represent a trademark of Peter I’s reign and reformist program, and innovations in schooling in Russia in the eighteenth century have traditionally been presented as a top-down, state-driven process. As with many other facets of the emerging early modern state, the Petrine-era school usually appears as the product of the practical needs of the tsar’s new “regular” army, which demanded skilled technical personnel. It is also commonly taken to be the personal creation of Peter I, who singlehandedly designed it and forced it on an unwilling population. Contrary to this received wisdom, The Enterprisers argues that schools were instead invented and built by “administrative entrepreneurs”—or projecteurs, as they were also called in that era—who sought to achieve diverse career goals, promoted their own pet ideas, advanced their claims for expertise, and competed for status and resources. As the in-depth study of some of the most notable episodes in the history of educational innovation and school-related “projecting” in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century demonstrates, the creation of “modern” schools took place insofar as it enabled such enterprisers to pursue their agendas. The individual projects these enterprisers proposed and implemented served as building blocks for the edifice of the “well-regulated” state on the threshold of the modern era.

Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Thirtieth Anniversary ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet the work remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the accuracy of the surviving scores cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris provides a detailed consideration of the many theories that have been proposed for the opera’s origin and chronology. She re-evaluates the surviving sources for the various readings they offer and examines the work’s historical position in Restoration theater. She also offers a detailed discussion of Purcell’s musical declamation and use of ground bass. The final section of the book is devoted to the performance history of Dido and Aeneas from the eighteenth century to the present.

Electric Signals: Emotional Currents, Cultural Conduits, Social Voltage and Power Generation in Eighteenth-Century Cultural Encounters

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Nicole Eustace
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Cultural Negotiations ◽  
Electric Signals ◽  
Current Resistance

Abstract In the middle of the eighteenth century, natural philosophers began to posit connections between emotion and electricity. The metaphors they explored then have continued methodological implications for scholars today. The electrical concepts of current, resistance, voltage, and power, provide an extended metaphor for conceptualising the history of emotions in ways that usefully bridge the biological and cultural, the individual and social, in order to more fully reveal historical links between emotion and power. By way of example, this article examines cross-cultural negotiations of power made possible through the expression, exchange, and evaluation of grief as recorded in the diary of a British-American Quaker woman who lived among Indians in the Pennsylvania borderlands in the midst of the Seven Years’ War.

Sir Isaac Newton’s enlightened chronologyand inter-denominational discoursein eighteenth-century Ireland

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (154) ◽  
pp. 210-229
Author(s):  
Macdara Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

In the advertisement prefacing Charles O’Conor’s Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (1753), the editor challenged an unnamed gentleman who had, apparently, smeared the good name of the author. The editor, Michael Reily (who went under the cognomen ‘Civicus’) was intricately involved in this dispute from its early stages and did not spare any criticism for the individual he deemed responsible, Dr John Fergus, the erstwhile friend and associate of both Reily and O’Conor. ‘A Gentleman of great Reputation’ alleged Reily, had branded O’Conor with ‘the meanest Species of Immorality’. The dispute did not centre on some esoteric point of Irish mythology or any disagreement over issues of interpretation. It was not even, at least not in any direct way, a rift over political issues regarding the penal laws and the status of papists in the Irish polity, a tendency quite prevalent among the fissiparous Catholic organisations and pugilistic personalities of this period. Rather, it was wholly concerned with those most pertinent aspects of existence for an eighteenth century gentlemen – credit and honour. The disagreement was about Newton’s Chronology and its application to the Irish annalistic corpus as a means of validating the latter – not about the principle of its applicability, nor regarding the minutiae of dates or similar arcana, but to who should gain the credit for appropriating Newton’s prestige to such a particularly Irish topic.

The cultural semiotics of African encounters: Eighteenth-Century images of the Other

Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (232) ◽  
pp. 103-146
Author(s):  
David Dunér
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Western Africa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Distant Culture ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThis a contribution to the cultural semiotics of African cultural encounters seen through the eyes of Swedish naturalists at the end of the eighteenth century. European travellers faced severe problems in understanding the alien African cultures they encountered; they even had difficulty understanding the other culture as a culture. They were not just other cultures that they could relate to, but often something completely different, belonging to the natural history of the human species. The Khoikhoi and other groups were believed by Europeans to be, from their perspective, the most distant culture. The Linnaean disciple Anders Sparrman and others, however, tried to transcend this cultural gap, and used their cognitive resources, such as empathy and intersubjectivity, in order to understand the alien culture they encountered.The aim of this paper is to unearth the cultural semiosis of African encounters and the intersubjective challenges that human interactions provoke. These encounters not only changed the view the travellers had of the Other, but also changed themselves and their self-perception. The encounter between the Ego and the Other is, however, not static, something predestined by the differences in their cultures, but dynamic, changing according to individual encounters and the actual intersubjective interplay that transform and change the perception of the Other. There are in particular four meaning-making processes and challenges within cultural encounters that are in focus: recognizing cultural complexity; invoking intersubjectivity; determining similarities and dissimilarities; and identifying the Other as a mirror of oneself.The triad of cultures – Ego, Alter, and Alius – can be understood as gradual and changing aspects depending on the actual situation of the encounter and the personal perspectives, interpretations, and behaviour of the thinking subjects involved. Using concrete examples from Southern and Western Africa in the 1770s and 1780s, this study aims to explore this dynamic semiosis. One of the conclusions is that the relation between the Ego and the Alter/Alius is not something only predetermined by the cultures involved and their ideologies, but also depends on the individual thinking subjects and how they use their specific cognitive and semiotic resources, not least their intersubjective abilities, within specific temporal and spatial contexts.

Fra Leopold Ranke ed Eduard Gans. Un autografo inedito di Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy dalle lezioni rankiane del 1827 sulla Rivoluzione Francese

2009 ◽  
pp. 709-730
Author(s):  
Corrado Bertani
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

- Certain circumstances and stylistic considerations lead us to believe that the manuscript MS. 114 in the Mendelssohn Archive at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is (in part) evidence of a course in "Contemporary History" held by Leopold Ranke at the city's university in the summer term of 1827. The course was on the chronological history of the French Revolution. Ranke had already dealt with the same subject the year before, though in a less detailed manner. And it was not until 1875 that he published a work on the period of the Revolution, but focussing solely on the war between the European powers in 1791-1792. Hence the importance of the new manuscript - in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's own hand - which, previously, had been mistakenly connected with the teaching of the Hegelian jurist Eduard Gans. Mendelssohn attended his course on the French Revolution in the summer of 1828.

William Hunter's Goliath beetle, Goliathus goliatus (), re-visited

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Geoffrey Hancock ◽  
A. Starr Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gulf Of Guinea ◽  
Native Habitat ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

The first Goliath beetle was found floating in the mouth of the River Gabon in the Gulf of Guinea in 1766. It became the centre of eighteenth-century arguments concerning ownership and engendered petty jealousies between collectors. The search for more specimens was initially fruitless as its native habitat was unknown. Illustrations and descriptions of it appeared with varying degrees of accuracy. This paper develops the history of the individual beetle and the species to which it belongs as the result of finding additional contemporary sources.

scholarly journals Europäische Rezeption der Berliner Hofoper und Hofkapelle von 1842 bis 1849

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthieu Cailliez
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
General Music ◽  
Giacomo Meyerbeer ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Music Activities

The subject of this contribution is the European reception of the Berlin Royal Opera House and Orchestra from 1842 to 1849 based on German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, Belgian and Dutch music journals. The institution of regular symphony concerts, a tradition continuing to the present, was initiated in 1842. Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy were hired as general music directors respectively conductors for the symphony concerts in the same year. The death of the conductor Otto Nicolai on 11th May 1849, two months after the premiere of his opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, coincides with the end of the analysed period, especially since the revolutions of 1848 in Europe represent a turning point in the history of the continent. The lively music activities of these three conductors and composers are carefully studied, as well as the guest performances of foreign virtuosos and singers, and the differences between the Berliner Hofoper and the Königstädtisches Theater.

Unaccompanied Solfeggio

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-265
Author(s):  
Nicholas Baragwanath
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Liturgical Music ◽  
History Of

The chapter recounts the history of unaccompanied solfeggio from the eleventh century to the eighteenth. This includes plainchant and Renaissance-style contrapuntal ricercars of the sort that continued to inform liturgical music in many churches. Archaic Type 1 solfeggi were used for canto fermo lessons throughout the eighteenth century, whereas more up-to-date examples were used for the study of theory, for scales and leaps, and for exercises in melodic composition. The earliest known collection of Type 2 solfeggiamenti (1642) derived from vocal ricercars and sung counterpoints. This tradition persisted in Bologna but in Naples the solfeggiamento adopted the latest fashionable styles, as seen in examples by Pergolesi and Durante. The chapter ends with a discussion of the solfeggio fugue with examples by Zingarelli and Haydn.

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