From the beginning, the libretto (“little book” because of its small printed format) played a fundamental role in operatic structure and style. Until the mid-eighteenth century, a dramma permusica was considered a literary text, judged according to the canons of spoken theatre. It led an autonomous life, and its music constituted an aspect of staging, one that could change over time. By the nineteenth century, however, this relationship was inverted: the music became more important, and composers intervened in writing the libretto, assuming the role of “musical dramatists.” This trend culminated in Germany with Wagner and in Italy with Verdi, who did not write his own librettos but influenced their genesis profoundly. Through this reversal, nineteenth-century librettos lost importance as a literary genre. They were compared unfavorably to their literary sources (especially when these were the greatest examples of dramatic literature by Shakespeare, Schiller, and others) and criticized for unrealistic plots and purportedly bombastic, antiquated language. In the last thirty years, however, literary critics as well as musicologists and those in theatre studies have recognized the nonliterary values of the libretto and have reappraised its function in musical dramaturgy.

In considering Verdi's librettos, it is useful to distinguish between dramatic, poetic, and literary design. The fact that Verdi intervened in the first category most and the third least implies that they should be considered as being of decreasing importance.

Between the middle of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the Reformed theology of John Calvin and several of his predecessors and contemporaries developed into a significant international movement that has come to be known as 'Calvinism'. As is typically the case in history, the movement was named, not by its proponents, but by its detractors, who took the name of its most famous leader as the basis for a label. The movement itself was in fact fairly diverse - bounded by confessional norms but guided by the thought of a group of founders and formulators rather than by a single person, and developed on an international scale by numerous theologians and exegetes, none of whom took it as their central task to reproduce Calvin’s theology in other times and places. Given this diversity in origin and in development, it is more accurate to speak of 'the Reformed churches' or of 'the Reformed tradition' than of 'Calvinism'.

ROOTS AND BRANCHES – PERSONS AND PLACES

The Reformed or Calvinist tradition is rooted in the Augustinian tradition of the Western church and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, found its antecedents not only in the works of Augustine himself but in the medieval Augustinian tradition. This is not to say that one must reify a ‘new Augustinian school’ of thought (schola Augustiniana moderna) as some scholars have tended to do, but rather that the Reformed tradition looked to the theology of grace as mediated and developed by a host of medieval thinkers – Aquinas and Scotus among them, as well as theologians of the Augustinian order such as Giles of Rome and Gregory of Rimini.

What next?

Or, to frame the question somewhat more precisely, what problems in historical theology are likely to engage students of the Reformation in the twenty-first century? The short answer, of course, is that historians will continue to be fascinated by many of the same problems that fascinated their predecessors in the twentieth. There will always be fresh generations of scholars who will be captivated by the theology of the great figures of the sixteenth century - whether Luther or Calvin or Teresa of Avila - and who will devote their careers to resolving unresolved issues in the interpretation of their thought.

Popes were often reluctant to take the risks inherent in the convocation of a general council. They were painfully aware that the Council of Constance had deposed three competing popes and installed a fourth. By the time of Luther, however, it was generally conceded, even by theologians who were jealous defenders of papal power, that under certain circumstances the convocation of a general council might be the church’s only recourse to resolve a crisis that had proved impossible to resolve in any other way.

In an oft-quoted assessment of Shakespeare's Desdemona, Verdi described her as “not a woman, but a type. She is the type of goodness, resignation, self-sacrifice. They are creatures born for others, unconscious of their own egos.” Shakespeare's play, of course, provides ample material for this sort of interpretation, as characters extol her beauty, virtue, selflessness, and other merits. And as James Hepokoski has documented, in recreating Desdemona for their own Otello (1887) Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito were probably influenced by nineteenth-century critical traditions represented by August Wilhelm Schlegel and by Victor Hugo, who viewed Desdemona as “saintly” and as “a spiritualist and almost amystic,” and also seem to have drawn upon such late nineteenth-century literary themes as decadentismo devotional iconology and the femme fragile. Of course devout heroines in peril were nothing new to Verdi, the Leonoras in Il trovatore and La forza del destino being prime examples, while heroines falsely accused had long been stock-in-trade, and Violetta (La traviata) provided a precedent for the physically fragile heroine. So by emphasizing Desdemona's purity, naïveté, and vulnerability, Verdi and Boito adhered to an aesthetic involving the cathartic destruction of a sympathetic female lead with which their audience could readily identify.

Like his predecessors, Verdi relied on an elaborate system of conventions – termed the “customary forms” (“solite forme”) of set pieces (or “lyric numbers”) by Abramo Basevi in 1859 – for organizing introductions, arias, duets, and finales. Gradually narrowing the diversity of approaches found at the end of the previous century, composers such as Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti had “standardized” designs sufficiently that even a provincial critic such as Carlo Ritorni, writing in 1841 about Bellini, could formulate accurate templates for the most extended version of each form. However, while adhering to shared outlines composers also revised internal details for new dramatic effects, a process that Verdi embraced in his own operas. Whereas Rossini's lyric numbers had summarized relationships presented in the scena or reacted to its events, Verdi's take an increasingly expository role in the foreground action, weakening the traditional polarized relationship between an active scena and static lyric number. Dramatic continuity is paralleled by continuity of musical style: the more frequent appearance of lyrical melody in the scena and declamatory singing in lyric numbers allows more flexible expression and stronger characterization in both sections. Innovative treatment of individual movements within the lyric numbers also enhances dramatic momentum, undercutting traditional dichotomies between active and reflective passages and weakening musical disjunctions. Verdi made the presence of these forms less obvious and adapted them to more diverse dramatic circumstances by varying the internal designs of movements, omitting movements, interpolating additional sections (particularly in extended ensemble scenes), and changing the complement of characters within scenes.

'I love history, madly. I find the dead more agreeable than the living. Where does the seductiveness of the past come from?' ['J'aime l'histoire, follement. Les morts m'agréent plus que les vivants. D'o ù vient cette séduction du passé?' (Cor. iii 95)] The fascination with history that Flaubert evokes in this letter of 1860 lasted throughout his life and colours all his work. Although at first sight his writings may seem to fall neatly into two categories - those set firmly in the France of his own time (Madame Bovary, both versions of L'Education sentimentale, Un coeur simple, Bouvard et Pécuchet) and those set in the distant past (most of his juvenilia, Salammbô, La Tentation de saint Antoine, La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier, Hérodias) - this chapter will argue that a concern with the past, and how we make sense of it, runs through all of them. If he was seduced by the past, Flaubert also recognised that historians, like novelists, must sift and shape their material and find a perspective through which to view and reconstruct the world. He was acutely aware of the fluid and subjective nature of history, and his gradually evolving views on how to represent the historical past are fundamental to his conception of the creative process.

The years 1816-17 saw a major shift in the direction of Byron's poetry. This began in Childe Harold iii, where Byron turned away from the vision of extreme human suffering that had dominated his poetry since 1812 to explore other areas of human experience and consciousness. Here began the movement towards Don Juan, as Byron set his sights not on a future of painful memory but on the redemptive possibilities opened up by the human capacity to forget.

A glance back at the Tales will help to situate Childe Harold iii in its immediate literary context. In the Tales, the heroes are emotionally blasted by some devastating event. They are temporarily sustained by thoughts of revenge, but once this is accomplished they find themselves in a ‘dreary’ emotional ‘void’ (Giaour, 958) where the capacity to feel is crushed, the mind is a ‘leafless desart’ (Giaour, 959) and the future is a stretch of ‘journeying years . . . where not a flower appears’ (CHP, iii.3.8–9). But the Tales are studies of the power of painful memory to simultaneously devastate and, in a sense, redeem. The heroes find in their ability, indeed compulsion, to remember the pain that devastated them the capacity to still feel and the vacant bosom discovers a ‘pang’ (Giaour, 940) that makes it less vacant. Yet in remembering what devastated him, the hero subjects himself once again to its devastating power, locking himself in a tortured life of ‘sleepless nights and heavy days’ (Parisina, 547). Emotional death is escaped only through intense, indeed potentially fatal, pain. Childe Harold iii turns away from this Pyrrhic victory.

Flaubert is now recognised as one of the greatest travel writers. His travels may not have been of the same order of magnitude as those of, for example, the mighty Humboldt, whose accounts of South America, distilled into the Tableaux de la nature, Flaubert found so captivating. Yet he travelled far more widely and intensively than other major writers of the period who drew on travel as generously as he did for inspiration, writers such as Baudelaire, Fromentin, Gautier and Nerval. However, unlike most travel writers of the time, Flaubert did not publish any of his accounts, with the exception of one fragment from Par les champs et par les grèves, which does not look like travel writing at all. He held the genre in very low esteem: it was 'triste' (Cor. ii 327), 'facile' (Cor. iii 96), a poor, shabby sub-species of literature, which he had learned from his own experience was also almost 'impossible' (Cor. iii 561). According to his friend and travelling companion, Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert wrote travel accounts only in order to toughen up his style ['corser le style']; 'there was no difference in his mind between writing a travel account and reporting on some trivial event: both were low-grade literature' ['écrire un voyage ou rédiger un fait divers, pour lui c'était tout un, c'était de la basse littérature']. This, though - if we take a broader view of what constitutes 'style' than Du Camp did - is precisely what makes them the masterpieces they are. Even when Flaubert confines himself to note form, as in the Voyage en Italie, the Voyage en Orient and Carthage, the notes are so suited to their subject and to the writer's project, they are so acute, subtle and evocative, that they put apparently more 'finished' accounts by other writers in the shade.

'Ambition was my idol', Byron wrote, looking back to his 'hot youth - when George the Third was King' (Don Juan, i.212.8). That ambition had been political. As an hereditary legislator of the British Empire, he had hoped to sway the destiny of nations by the power of oratory. His classical education offered the examples of men like Demosthenes in Greece and Cicero in Rome. Among his elder contemporaries were figures such as Henry Grattan, a founding father of the Irish 'patriot' parliament, and Byron's friends, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the eloquent manager of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and Thomas Erskine, the famous advocate of freedom of speech. A greater ambition yet might move a young man called by the duty of rank to public service. The statesman might also be a war leader and a maker of nations. The pre-eminent example for the age was George Washington and, for a European aristocrat, the example of Washington's ally, the Marquis de la Fayette, was close behind. More dangerously dazzling was the career of the disastrous comet, Napoleon Bonaparte and the meteoric disaster of the Irish revolutionary, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

For each of his operas, Verdi employed a complicated process that included many phases of creation and involved other individuals. Some aspects of this process remained remarkably consistent across his career. For example, despite changing conceptions of orchestration that emphasized families of instruments, Verdi continued the tradition of scoring primarily by pitch, putting violins and violas at the top of the page, cellos and basses at the bottom, other instruments in between generally in descending order of pitch range, and voices immediately above the cello line. Other procedures changed considerably over time and even from opera to opera. Consequently, any general discussion of Verdi's working methods quickly involves many exceptions, and scholars have understandably focused on the creation of single works while hesitating to postulate broad theories. In attempting this overview, I shall limit my discussion to the changes in Verdi's compositional circumstances across his career and the changes in his treatment of seven creative stages through which his works normally progressed.

Periods of composition

From the perspective of working conditions and methods, Verdi’s operas fall into four basic groups: 1) early: Oberto (1839) through La battaglia di Legnano (1849); 2) middle: Luisa Miller (1849) through Un ballo in maschera (1859); 3) “modern”:4 La forza del destino (1862) through Aida (1871); and 4) late: Simon Boccanegra (revised 1881) through Falstaff (1893). The coincidence of these groups with traditional stylistic groupings is striking and underscores the importance of considering working conditions and methods when providing an overview of his operas.5 Changes from one period to another involve his pace of composition; association with different librettists, theatres, cities, and performers; the degree of interference from censors; changes in political life and other factors external to the opera business; and Verdi’s own growth and maturity.

While it was not until the advent of the works of William Perkins in the late sixteenth century that England produced a theologian of truly international stature, the earlier phases of the English Reformation witness to the work of a number of talented individuals who were able to draw upon that of their continental counterparts and take advantage of the developments in university education in order to articulate distinctively Protestant theologies within the English context. Thus, while the theological contribution of the English reformers was in no way as significant as their innovations in, say, liturgical practice, it nevertheless stood in positive relation to continental movements and defined the kinds of debate that were to shape English church life until the end of the seventeenth century.

ORIGINS

The wider field of the intellectual history of the Reformation has, over recent decades, preoccupied itself with tracing dogmatic and exegetical trajectories back into the theological world of the Middle Ages. Study of the English Reformation over the same period has, however, been to a large extent the preserve of social and political historians with little interest in theology. Their work has tended not to take English Reformation theology seriously in terms of its place within the ongoing Western tradition of thought. In addition, the slight and occasional nature of many of the theological productions of the English Reformation, combined with little hard evidence (for instance, in the form of citations) regarding relations to late medieval thought, has made such study almost impossible to raise above the level of educated guesswork.

In Erasmus' time, Catholic critics circulated the tag, 'Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it.' The idea that Erasmus was a 'pre-reformer' and that his theology is best studied in the context of Luther’s thought has been perpetuated by modern historians. Protestant theologians, of course, capitalized on the doctrinal differences between the two men rather than on their common ground. This approach prompted Ernst-Wilhelm Kohls to accuse them of using Erasmus as a 'dark foil against which their own hero could shine more brightly'. Alternatively, Erasmus' religious thought has been viewed in the context of Christian humanism, which seems to me a more productive way of examining his theology. In either case, however, Erasmus' lack of a systematic approach has raised serious questions for the would-be interpreter and has led some historians to deny him the title of theologian altogether. Any investigation of his theological concepts must therefore begin with the subject of Erasmus' own claim to the title and the testimony of his contemporaries on that point. Although Erasmus’ professional status may be in doubt, it cannot be disputed that he engaged in activities that come within the purview of a theologian. He formulated a curriculum for theology students; he edited, translated, paraphrased, and expounded biblical and patristic texts; he commented on doctrinal questions; and he offered spiritual advice in devotional tracts. From these writings emerge the main points and general features of his religious thought.

Something odd happens to the popular Turkish Tale in Byron's Mazeppa, a poem that is rarely discussed because the accident of its publication in June 1819 meant that it was almost completely overshadowed by the first cantos of Don Juan. Following the verse narratives of The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa's octosyllabic couplets, triplets and quatrains sweep its readers along in a pulsating adventure story. In Mazeppa, however, the thrills and spills of another set of fugitive exploits are mockingly undercut by a narrative frame which draws attention to boredom in the audience. King Charles requests the tale but, as we discover at the end of the poem, he falls asleep almost as soon as it commences:

Romantic egotism (Mazeppa’s pride in being ‘haunted . . . With the vain shadow of the past’, 229–30) comes up against a more recalcitrant physical domain. King Charles demonstrates what Byron suspected of his own and all writing – that it was a literature of exhaustion.

My essay is concerned with the overtures (sinfonie) and preludes; the storms and battle scenes; the stage music accompanying marching armies, religious ceremonies, dances, and balls; ballets, and shorter episodes of pantomime; and certain other episodes where the burden of the musical argument is carried by the orchestra. This is the music by means of which Verdi places his operas in their social frame; since so much of it functions as sounding décor and sounding spectacle, it provides some of the most thought-provoking insights into how he wished his operas to be staged; it also forms the locus for some of his boldest experiments in exploring the balance between “realism” and stylization in the operatic medium.

Verdi's overtures enjoy a life of their own – that is, independent of the operas to which they belong – less securely than those of the German tradition, less securely indeed than Rossini's overtures. One reason is certainly that they are less firmly rooted in a Classical, sonata-based symphonic ideal. Verdi knew those German overtures, and occasional traces of their influence are discernible; but in general his sinfonie occupy a space fascinatingly poised between the symphonic ideal and the idea of a potpourri, a medley or parade of themes from the body of the opera. What gives them their distinctive Verdian character is the manner in which the themes are set out: the formal framework plays on our sense of movement, alternating kinetic or transient episodes with episodes that seem suspended in time, in a manner that is surely evocative of an operatic scena. And though they may fall into several movements, they typically highlight a slow cantabile and a rousing Allegro.

In 1997, when a friend of Andrew Cunanan wanted to defend the gay serial killer's posthumous reputation, Byron helped him to make his case:

For this writer, invoking Byron raised Cunanan from the sordid world of drugs, violence, and queer sex with which the media surrounded him. Byron appears in his letter as an icon of high culture, a canonical British poet whose works appear in 'beautiful' books and are appreciated by sensitive men. While it would certainly be possible to read a gay subtext into this letter, in which giving a young man Byron's poems on his coming of age introduces a gay cultural past, the writer says nothing about sexuality, either his, Cunanan's, or Byron's. Instead, the gift of Byron's poems simply proves Cunanan's good character; a man who could like Byron and encourage others in that admiration could not be all bad.

Introduction

After the mid-nineteenth century, it became a stereotype that asylum inmates imagined themselves as the omnipotent Napoleon - but also the brilliant Byron. Extreme as it seems, this desire for vicarious experience, this tendency to translate one's life into the idealization of another, is common - so common that it led Albert Camus to define biography itself as 'nostalgia for other people's lives'. Camus notes that our fascination with the careers of the famous stems from our belief that such lives have strong plots, while our own seem fragmentary and directionless. However, since even the careers of celebrities are not as neatly plotted as we could wish, the production of that 'nostalgia' has required an unholy alliance between fiction and biography. Lord Byron knew this as well as perhaps anyone in history. In writing his own story and seeming to live what he wrote, he made it impossible to discuss his work apart from his life. The vignettes and anecdotes he relished and promulgated produced a tale unified around themes of sex, violence, genius, and adventure, or - in the case of hostile biographers - sex, violence, cruelty, and hypocrisy. But in either case, the indivisibility of the life and work explains much of the delight and frustration to be found in the immense canon of Byron Biography, everything from laurel wreaths to slash-and-burn character assassination, from factual accounts to encounters beyond the grave, such as Quevedo Redivivus's A Spiritual Interview with Lord Byron (1840) and Amanda Prantera's Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years after His Lordship's Death (1987).