scholarly journals The Harpers’ Legacy: Irish National Airs and Pianoforte Composers

Author(s):  
Una Hunt

Ireland’s harpers were part of an ancient culture and they left behind an unique and important legacy of indigenous art. The harpers’ airs enjoyed renewed popularity during the nineteenth century when visiting virtuosi to Ireland extemporized on the best-known melodies. Among these musicians were some of the most highly regarded pianist-composers of the era, including Frédéric Kalkbrenner, Ignaz Moscheles and, later still, Henri Herz, Franz Liszt and Sigismund Thalberg. In addition, a substantial number of pieces were published for the drawing-room market. This article charts the rise and fall in popularity of Irish airs in nineteenth-century piano literature and aims to provide reasons for these trends. It shows that Thomas Moore’s almost universally-known drawing-room songs, the Irish Melodies, exerted an influence. But, while these songs may have prompted significant activity among nineteenth-century Irish and Continental musicians, Moore’s role was by no means exclusive. Irish airs were in vogue in the eighteenth century, and even earlier. A catalogue of around 500 works published between c1770 and c1940, included as an appendix to the article, demonstrates the diversity and surprisingly wide-ranging nature of this virtually unknown repertoire.

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-431
Author(s):  
Sharmila Sen

In 1529, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, descendant of the Timurid dynasty and founder of the Mughal empire, wept at the sight of melons. A mere fruit had reminded Babur of the homeland he had left behind in central Asia. In a letter to Khwaja Kalan, the emperor writes of the drudgeries of a ruler in a foreign land, who is forced to do without the tastes of home: “How can one forget the pleasures of that country? . . . Recently a melon was brought, and as I cut it and ate it I was oddly affected. I wept the whole time I was eating it” (423). The Baburnama, a personal record of the establishment of a new empire in the subcontinent, might seem like an unusual place to begin an essay on Victorian India. But Babur's nostalgia for the home left behind in Samarkand poignantly anticipates some of the hidden longings of the British as Company Raj gave way to Crown Raj in India. While the East India Company attempted to oust the Mughal rulers between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, after India was incorporated into the Empire, the British would also attempt to don the mantle of the Mughals. On 1 November 1858, when India officially became part of Queen Victoria's Empire, the British inherited the Mughal's melons. Whether it was roast beef or mulligatawny, a pint of pale ale or a chhota peg, the British discovered their own versions of Babur's melons over time – an idea of homeland contained in a mouthful.


1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Hudson

The mission at Burton Park in West Sussex has been most recently discussed by Fr. Geoffrey Holt in Recusant History 13 (1975). A few amplifications and corrections can, however, be made from sources not known to him.First, the position within the Elizabethan house of the chapel that served the mission until the early nineteenth century can be identified from a local newspaper report of 1826. Successive manor houses at Burton occupied the same site, pace the speculations reported by Fr. Holt. A curious feature of that site was that at one time it straddled the boundary between Burton and Barlavington parishes (Fig. 1); the medieval house was evidently in the former and expanded eastwards into the latter. The Elizabethan house, which survived until the early nineteenth century, had at least two courtyards, of which the westemmost lay eighty metres south of Burton parish church and had an elaborate frontispiece, known from a drawing by Grimm. The east end of the house was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni, with a fine classical façade and a notable saloon and drawing room, but in 1826 the building was largely destroyed by fire caused by a servant girl's carelessness. The report of the event in the Brighton Herald states that the chapel was at the west end, which together with the centre of the building was the part that was burnt.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Dolores Pesce

In the preface to his Septem sacramenta (1878–1884), Franz Liszt acknowledged its stimulus — drawings completed in 1862 by the German painter J. F. Overbeck (1789–1869). This essay explores what Liszt likely meant by his and Overbeck’s “diametrically opposed” approaches and speculates on why the composer nonetheless acknowledged the artist’s work. Each man adopted an individualized treatment of the sacraments, neither in line with the Church’s neo-Thomistic philosophy. Whereas the Church insisted on the sanctifying effects of the sacraments’ graces, Overbeck emphasized the sacraments as a means for moral edification, and Liszt expressed their emotional effects on the receiver. Furthermore, Overbeck embedded within his work an overt polemical message in response to the contested position of the pope in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For many in Catholic circles, he went too far. Both works experienced a problematic reception. Yet, despite their works’ reception, both Overbeck and Liszt believed they had contributed to the sacred art of their time. The very individuality of Overbeck’s treatment seems to have stimulated Liszt. True to his generous nature, Liszt, whose individual voice often went unappreciated, publicly recognized an equally individual voice in the service of the Church.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


2011 ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Galley ◽  
Eilidh Garrett ◽  
Ros Davies ◽  
Alice Reid

This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative evidence of this phenomenon, but an analysis of the rich census and vital registration data for the Isle of Skye reveals that this practice was widespread, with over a third of eligible families recording same-name siblings. Our results suggest that further research should focus on regional variations in sibling name-sharing and the extent to which this northern pattern occurred in other parts of Britain.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.


Author(s):  
William Weber

This chapter shows how selections from English operas composed between the 1730s and the 1790s—chiefly by Thomas Arne, Charles Dibdin, William Shield, and Stephen Storace—became standard repertory in concerts throughout the nineteenth century. Such pieces were performed at benefit concerts organized by individual musicians and at events given by local ensembles that blended songs with virtuoso pieces and orchestral numbers. Critical commentary on such songs justified their aesthetic legitimacy as groups separate from pieces deemed part of classical music. By 1900, songs by Arne, Storace, and even Dibdin were often sung in recitals along with German lieder and pieces from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Italy or France. The solidity of this tradition contributed to the revival of the operas themselves from the 1920s, most often Arne’s Artaxerxes (1762). This chapter is paired with Rutger Helmers’s “National and international canons of opera in tsarist Russia.”


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