Haydn-Gellert, Betrachtung des Todes: A meeting of tradition and innovation

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-199
Author(s):  
Katalin Komlós

Haydn’s Betrachtung des Todes , a late little masterpiece by the composer, represents the simultaneity of the old and the new. The text is the second verse of Gellert’s fourteen-verse poem ‘Wie sicher lebt der Mensch, der Staub!’, No. 50 in the volume Geistliche Oden und Lieder , 1757. In the short catalogue at the end of the volume Gellert names the hymn ‘Herr Jesu Christ, meines Lebens Licht’, as the appropriate melody for the poem. Haydn’s vocal trio with basso continuo is perhaps the most extraordinary setting in the series of the Mehrstimmige Gesänge (Hob. XXVb:3). Its harmonies and key changes uncannily foreshadow the language of Schubert and Mendelssohn. The musical representation of the poetic lines, on the other hand, is full of rhetorical devices. Most startling is the presence of figured bass, as an anachronistic code for the keyboard accompaniment. Co-existence of Baroque and Romantic, or ‘First Viennese Modernism’ (James Webster): the roots of the composer’s professional education preserved in a highly innovative setting of an old Protestant poem, in the very last years of the eighteenth century.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-400
Author(s):  
Jolanta Mędelska

The author analysed the language of the first Polish translation of the eighteenth-century poem “Metai” [The Seasons] by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a Lithuanian Lutheran pastor. The translation was made in 1933 by a socialist activist and close associate of Józef Piłsudski, Kazimierz Pietkiewicz. The analysis showed that the language of the translation is peculiar. On the one hand, this peculiarity consists in refraining from archaizing the translation and the use of elements that are close to the translator’s style of social-political journalism (e.g., dorobkiewicz [vulgarian], feministka [feminist]), on the other hand, the presence at all levels of language of peculiarities characteristic for Kresy Polish language in both its territorial variations. These are generally old features of common Polish, the retention of which in the eastern areas of the Polish Rzeczpospolita was supported by the influence of substrate languages, later also Russian, or by borrowing. This layer was natural in the language of the translator, born in Ukraine, who spent part of his life in Vilnius, some in exile in Russia. This is the colourful linguistic heritage of the former Republic of Poland.


10.12737/3080 ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-61
Author(s):  
Зеленкина ◽  
Tatyana Zelenkina

Optimized way to nurture parents’ readiness to guide vocational choice of their teenaged children is considered as a consistent element of vocational guidance potential and is scientifically proved. What makes the paper theoretically important, is the fact that the author clarifies the meaning for quite new concepts, as «family vocational guidance potential», «parents’ helpfulness», «successful vocational choice». Families are classified in terms of vocational guidance potential; several limitations in vocational choices of children in each category of families are outlined and illustrated by pictures and tables. Given the accented challenge of insufficient parents’ integration in vocational choices, made by their children, the idea of pilot testing described here, has been to use capabilities of additional professional education establishments to better preparing parents to the mission of facilitating the vocational choices of their children. As a result of parents-children cooperation, the parents are better prepared and eager to help their children in professional self-determination on one hand, while teenagers make more thoughtful vocational choices, on the other hand. Significant results and conclusions are provided, to prove reliability of researching hypothesis, put forward by the author.


Author(s):  
Henning Lehmann

In 2012, through various presentations and exhibitions, the 500th anniversary of thefirst printed book in Armenian was celebrated. Thus, 19 Armenian books printed from1565 to 1745, belonging to the collections of the Royal Library, were on display in theBlack Diamond.These books are described in their original historical contexts above. It is underlinedthat initiatives taken by the Armenian Church were important in the early historyof Armenian printing. For example, the Armenian Catholicos was active in establishinga printing house in Amsterdam, and quite a few of the early books were intendedto meet ecclesiastical needs for books of ritual and pious practices, including the Psaltereditions: Venice 1565, Amsterdam 1664, Marseille 1677; a Hymn Book: Amsterdam1664; and a Breviary: Amsterdam 1705.On the other hand, the publishing of certain books must be seen in the context ofRoman Catholic missionary endeavours, e.g. the publication of documents concerningthe Gregorian Calendar, translated into Armenian as early as 1584 (printed in Rome),a translation of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitatio Christi (printed in Constantinople 1700),and a collection of fourteenth century Dominican sermons (printed in Venice 1704).The collection also contains early editions of important works by medieval Armenianauthors, including Moses Khorenatsi (Amsterdam 1695), Gregory Narekatsi(Constantinople 1701) and Nerses Shnorhali (Venice 1660). In addition, there area couple of contemporary Armenian works: Arakel’s ‘histories’ about seventeenthcentury Armenian history (Amsterdam 1669) and eighteenth century Constantinoplepatriarch Yakob Nalean’s Commentary on Gregory Narekatsi (Constantinople 1745).In some cases, various owners’ ex libris or marginal notes allow glimpses into theuse of the books by Western scholars and their routes through the hands of booktraders and collectors. To name just a few: 1) M.V. de la Croze, the famous orientalist,on the basis of a Lipsian manuscript, added a fairly large number of collational notesto the text of the 1695 Moses Khorenatsi edition; 2) one of the two copies of the 1664Psalter is dedicated to Frederik III of Denmark by Theodore Petraeus, a Danish scholarwho was active in the Armenian-Dutch publishing world in the 1660s; 3) and some150 years after Theodore, another Danish Orientalist, Bishop Fr. Münter, is seen tohave acquired an old Armenian grammar (Amsterdam 1666).The 19 books do not represent a collection that has been systematically built upaccording to a master plan by any librarian or scholar of the time. However, it can beconsidered to be broadly illustrative of the Armenian culture of that period, not leastof its early links with Western printers, binders, artists and authorities, and the trendthat shows Eastern centres (Constantinople and others) gaining ever increasing importancethroughout the centuries in focus.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Pieniążek-Niemczuk ◽  

The modern political class, which has been established on democratic principles both in Europe and America, is keen to use rhetoric and tools it provides. Any attempt to define the influence of these tools principally refers to the essence of rhetoric which is persuasion. Persuasion, on the other hand, is core to political discourse which, according to Teun van Dijk (1997, p. 14) is contextual, therefore must be recognized by its functions and/or goals. The functions of the discourse are often expressed in rhetorical devices and therefore play an important role in achieving political goals. The pieces of information presented in this article depict rhetorical devices as useful in increasing persuasiveness. Attention is paid to figures of repetition which constitute a universal category of rhetorical devices and thus need to be examined in a greater detail, especially in a discourse whose users focus their efforts on constructing effective persuasion.


Food Fights ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Charles C. Ludington

On the one hand people like to say that “there is no accounting for taste.” On the other hand, people constantly make judgments about their own and other people’s taste (gustatory and aesthetic). Charles Ludington examines the taste for wine in eighteenth-century England and Scotland, and the taste for beer in twenty-first century America, to argue that taste can in fact be accounted for because it is a reflection of custom, “tribal” identity, gender, political beliefs, and conceptions of authenticity, which are mostly but not entirely conditioned by class status and aspirations. And rightly or wrongly, we judge other people’s taste because taste positions us in society.


2020 ◽  
pp. 210-250
Author(s):  
Mike Goode

The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that Austen theorizes the novel form as a design medium wherein narrative is just a contingent ecological experiment.


Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart

The final chapter summarizes the findings of the preceding chapters and offers an epilogue on how the tension between different approaches to classical literature has parallels in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the debates described in the monograph between the ‘Dutch School’ (philologia) focusing on textual problems and the ‘French School’ (philosophia) focusing on moral issues had no clear winners. Rather they led, on the one hand, to a more technical and professional approach to the study of ancient texts and, on the other hand, to the continued popularity of classical ideas and models of moral virtue in the eighteenth century thanks to more accessible works of ‘popular’ scholarship.


Der Islam ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Reilly

AbstractLate-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources from the Homs and Hama region in Ottoman Syria present contrasting portrayals of Bedouins. Taken together, these sources offer conflicting perspectives with respect to relationships between peoples of the towns and the steppe. On the one hand, literary sources typically portray Bedouins as antitheses of urban life, as savage wanderers who lived outside the norms of propriety and who collectively posed a threat to the wellbeing and property of settled people and of travelers. But on the other hand, legal sources portray Bedouins variously as targets of exploitation or taxation by urban-based governments; or as partners with urban people in contractual undertakings; or as imperial subjects who, like any others, would seek justice in the urban Sharīʿa courts. The article explores these differing characterizations, and seeks to explain the multifarious realities that different sources convey. It concludes by suggesting that relationships between town and steppe were on their way to becoming more institutionalized in the last years of the eighteenth century. This development foreshadowed documented nineteenth-century trends in which urban civil norms and institutions became noticeable in the lives of Bedouins who lived in proximity to towns and urban centers.


1988 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-249
Author(s):  
Iain Fenlon

If Scipione Gonzaga is remembered at all today, it is most likely to be for his friendship and patronage of Torquato Tasso; as the dedicatee of the poet's youthful Discorsi dell'arte poetica and one of his dialogues, the transcriber (in the crucial year 1575) of all the stanzas of the Liberata then available to him, and the editor of the celebrated edition of the full text of the poem brought out by the Mantuan printer Osanna in 1584. Of his own literary efforts little remains. A handful of poems in a respectable if conventional Petrarchesque idiom appeared during his lifetime; on the other hand the Commentam, evidently inspired by classical precedent and a rare example from the period of a prelate's autobiography, was not published until the end of the eighteenth century when it appeared in an elaborate edition with annotations by Giuseppe Marotti.


2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Agnew

For Charles Burney, as for other Enlightenment scholars engaged in historicising music, the problem was not only how to reconstruct a history of something as ephemeral as music, but the more intractable one of cultural boundaries. Non-European music could be excluded from a general history on the grounds that it was so much noise and no music. The music of Egypt and classical antiquity, on the other hand, were likely ancestors of European music and clearly had to be accorded a place within the general history. But before that place could be determined, Burney and his contemporaries were faced with a stunning silence. What was Egyptian music? What were its instruments? What its sound? The paper examines the work of scholars like Burney and James Bruce and their efforts to reconstruct past music by traveling to exotic places. Travel and a form of historical reenactment emerge as central not only to eighteenth-century historical method, but central, too, to the reconstruction of past sonic worlds. This essay argues that this method remains available to contemporary scholars as well.


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