This chapter explores Wagner’s use of Greek myth as a framework for his operatic reform and as the basis for key aspects of plot and character in the Ring cycle. Providing an overview of the composer’s lifelong fascination with the Greeks, it highlights Wagner’s aim of creating a new form of “music drama” that would capture the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy while constituting its rebirth in a modern Germanic guise. It further calls attention to parallels between the Ring and elements of Greek tragedy but shifts the customary focus away from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Prometheus trilogy toward the Oedipus myth and specifically the character of Antigone, who bears several similarities to Brünnhilde. Wagner’s apparent use of Antigone as a model for Brünnhilde reflects his understanding of both figures as redemptive agents who, through a self-effacing and thoroughly human kind of love, enact a symbolic destruction of the state and thereby point the way toward a more utopian future characterized by a downfall of the existing world order along with a return of the cultural and artistic significance of myth.

Since the Renaissance, artists introduced imaginative narratives to complement, or even replace, the Christian stories that functioned to shape society. They tried to introduce new mythologies. Despite the danger of encountering criticism from rationalists, as well as the threat of being absorbed by commercialism, some mythologies managed to gain influence in modern societies. Wagner’s venture, undertaken in an era no longer dominated by theology, but also not yet favored by “mythophile” psychology and spirituality, is arguably the most successful of them all. This chapter analyzes the ingredients of the success for the narrative to become a forceful mythology in the nineteenth century. This includes the ideology of humanism, the romantic idea of myths as symbolic narratives, Feuerbach’s idea of gods as signs of human alienation, Nietzsche’s view of Wagner’s Ring as an instance of anti-intellectualism, and the interpretation of the opera as at its core a socialist work of art. According to the author, the Ring should be conceived of as a special type of modern myth, namely a revolutionary myth.

Composers coming of age in the early twentieth century inherited from the Western European art tradition at least two ways to articulate temporality, both dependent on the highly organized language of tonality and a vocabulary of proportionally related durations (whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, etc.). This musical time evokes an ordered, continuous flow – a sense of moving forward toward a goal, one where complexity arises from possible diversions in an ongoing flow and a pattern of metric accent. The temporal identities are determined by their placement within a phrase and within a hierarchical, fundamentally periodic series of beats, measures, and hypermeasures; for example, a chord may occur on a beat within a measure and (often) a hypermeasure, and also at the beginning, middle, or end of a phrase.

This chapter gives an overview of the traditions of English lexicography from the early modern period to the present day. Rather than presenting a linear story of evolutionary development, it surveys changes in the whole ecosystem of lexicographical publishing, from the most elementary spelling-books to the most scholarly multi-volume dictionaries, emphasising the books which came into the hands of the most readers: these were of course the smallest and cheapest. It is therefore attentive to changes in publishing technology (from handpress to machine press to digital) and to information about dictionaries as material books, such as physical size, number of editions, and size of print runs.

The period from the inaugural production of the Ring (1876) to the bicentenary of Wagner’s death (2013) encompasses a variety of dramaturgical approaches. The tradition of naturalistic, illusionist theatre, to which Wagner was heir, was exposed within twenty-five years to the innovations of Alfred Roller and Adolphe Appia, then in turn to the austere iconoclasm of Wieland Wagner, the ideological revolutions of Bertolt Brecht and metatheater, and more recently to the radical theories of deconstruction and post-dramatic theater, all of which have come to constitute what is known as Regietheater. Wagner’s richly multivalent cycle also provided fertile territory for political, environmental and feminist interpretations, but this focus on ideological aspects of the work has developed alongside an emphasis on the theatrical dimension (including mime, dance, avant-garde design, video, and new technology). Indeed, it could be argued that the primacy accorded mime, gesture, and choreographed movement in recent decades represents a fidelity, in some respects, to the composer’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and that the apotheosis of the latter has been achieved only in the age of Regietheater.

When we think about the musical features most characteristic of jazz, those that particularize its style and distinguish it from other kinds of music, we almost always think of rhythm first. There are other important features, to be sure – the centrality of improvisation, for example, or the blues foundation of jazz melodic practice. But rhythm has typically been the feature addressed first in most writings on jazz since its origins early in the twentieth century, pride of place signaling its significance to jazz fans, critics, and historians.

From the earliest decades of British colonisation of India to Indian independence in 1947, dictionaries of English in India focused exclusively on the English spoken by the British who were resident in India, and not on English as it was spoken by Indians. Not until the late twentieth century did dictionaries begin to document true Indian English. Yet despite the continuing role of English as an official language, as the language of choice in higher education, and as a lingua franca between speakers of different mother tongues, the lexicography of Indian English remains underdeveloped, and no current comprehensive dictionary of this variety exists, nor has any standard been established for Indian English.