Of what does a fictional character consist? What choices does Flaubert make in devising his imaginary beings? And how do his styles in character creation compare with those of other authors? Flaubert's two greatest achievements are the creation of richly varied dramatic characters and the depiction of ludicrous grotesques. The inner life of the former transcends simple dichotomies: their psychopathology generates delusional projections that blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality; their vague wishes and abortive projects problematise the relationships between thought and action; their dysfunctionality is florid. The inherent mediocrity of the grotesques, displayed as they blindly conform to, unthinkingly cite, or skilfully manipulate cultural clichés, provides the major vehicle of satire. At times, as with Emma Bovary, these two character types overlap.

Though primarily an opera composer, Verdi also wrote a number of works in other genres. Only one of these, the Messa da Requiem, has assumed a significant place in the repertory. The remaining solo songs, instrumental music, and choral works, more-or-less ignored and virtually forgotten, are infrequently performed and have not been broadly discussed in print. Consequently, this chapter will provide an overview of their history, style, and sources.

Beginning as a young boy in Busseto, Verdi composed a variety of non-operatic works, both sacred and secular. In mid-career he attested to the diversity of his youthful compositional activities:

For generations of readers, the experience of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage has been caught up with a reading of Byron's psychology, for the poem has commonly been seen as the expression of an incompletely repressed alter ego to be read in parallel with Byron's own life and expressed opinions. It therefore finds itself firmly placed within the bounds of an interpretative frame whose constant reference point is the concept of a flawed and melancholic psyche. Within this, approving critics may note the perspicuity of the poem's dark opinions, or the fascination of its psychology, while disapproving critics might censure the indulgence of high Romantic self-expression or dramatisation. These approaches, and their approving or disapproving reflexes are not misreadings. In many ways, they constitute a meta-narrative which is historically continuous, amply echoing the response of Byron's contemporary audience, which enjoyed the poem precisely because it seemingly alluded to the authentic experience of its author. But in general, such a view is likely to eclipse other of the poem's achievements, for it tends to reinforce the Romantic cult of introversion wherein the isolation of the private poet is seen as a necessary condition of a gifted perception. I will argue here for an understanding of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage i and ii as a profoundly public work written in a style designed to appeal to a new audience sympathetic to its coherent and anti-teleological explorations of history, politics and contemporary affairs. It is an ambitious poem which constructs a world-view for the modern - that is to say 'Romantic' - post-revolutionary intellectual, a view which in turn produces the psychology of the Byronic hero as a dramatisation of its effects. Significantly, its perspective is European, discarding orthodox or nationalistic understandings of history and empire, in favour of an all-embracing scepticism, which interrogates ideals of civilisation's progress and nationhood through a series of meditations around posterity's judgements on heroism, fame and achievement.

Whereas Childe Harold ii and ii sought the goal of their pilgrimage in the classical world of Greece, at the boundary of civilization and Nature, and Canto iii seeks its elusive goal in Nature beyond civilization, Canto iV concentrates on the high civilization of the Renaissance and of Rome. While obviously to some extent dictated by Byron's own whereabouts, the move also expresses a very significant shift in his world view. In Manfred (pp. 118) we have seen how the individual becomes responsible for the meaning of his or her own life. This is a secular view of meaning, seeing life as a construct of man's own mental activity. This mental activity is represented in and by civilization and culture. Life made meaningful has the form of an artwork - it is a product of civilization and culture. This is the view that dominates Canto iV. The canto opens with the famous image of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice:

Byron's considerable body of dramatic poetry poses special challenges for literary criticism, and studies of Byron have often had little to say about the plays as plays. In part, this neglect reflects a larger failure to bring the verse drama of the Romantic poets comfortably within the standard categories of literary history. All of the canonical Romantics - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats - wrote at least one verse play, but until the last dozen years or so these have tended to be dismissed as misguided attempts at 'closet drama': plays meant to be read but not performed. The counterimpulse to read at least some works of Romantic verse drama as 'mental theatre' (Byron's term) - innovative and iconoclastic poetic forms rather than stage plays manqués - can work well enough for a 'dramatic poem' like Manfred or an intellectual drama like Cain. It tends, though, to lose sight of the productive tension between the dramatic works of the Romantic poets and the lively and politically fraught theatrical culture of their time. Byron not only produced a larger and more varied canon of verse drama - eight works, if one counts Manfred and the fragmentary Deformed Transformed - than any of the other canonical poets, but he also stands out as the only one with extensive, practical experience of the stage. This overview of Byron's poetic drama, then, opens with a look at his relation to the contemporary theatre.

Set at the court of the Duke of Mantua in the sixteenth century, Rigoletto is the story of a jester whose situation is anything but funny. Ugly, with a hunched back, he is pitilessly derided by the courtiers. In his whole life he has known only one brief period of happiness, when – well before the time of the opera – a woman took pity on him, became his wife, and gave him a daughter. Now a widower, his only solace is that daughter, Gilda, whom he protects obsessively, hoping above all that the Duke (a notorious seducer) will not find her. Unfortunately this is precisely what happens: as the curtain rises, the Duke is preparing to make his move. Gilda is aware of her suitor (although not of his identity) but says nothing to her father. In Act I she enjoys her first few moments together with the Duke before being abducted by a group of courtiers intent on playing a trick on Rigoletto – they think Gilda is his mistress. Momentarily thwarted, the Duke is soon back on top of things: the courtiers can’t wait to tell him about their exploits, and about the woman they are keeping prisoner in the palace. Exit the Duke to an adjoining room, to do what he does best. Rigoletto then arrives to quiz the courtiers, soon realizing that what he fears most is happening at that very moment. When Gilda comes back in to confess that she is no longer the emblem of unworldly purity he thought, he swears revenge on the Duke.

If historians have generally regarded Thomas Cranmer as the most complex character among the churchmen of the sixteenth-century Reformation in England, his theological legacy, particularly when finely tuned, is none too difficult to determine. For, somewhat akin to Beethoven’s masterly Eroica symphony, there is a heroic quality about the life and work of the diligent scholar Henry VIII chose to be archbishop of Canterbury. Modern scholarship may spurn such a judgement, no doubt deeming it 'old hat', simpliste, even partisan and divisive. Nevertheless, there remains an extraordinary dimension to the martyred Tudor primate.

It is tempting to take the parallel further and embrace all four movements of the Eroica. Just as Beethoven opened up a new symphonic scene, Cranmer’s involvement with Henry and Cromwell in their spirited break with Rome over the king’s ‘divorce’ surely provided a dramatic start (allegro con brio) to a Cambridge don’s career at the Tudor court. With the mass as the focal point and purpose of priestly ministry, any second stage of development in the direction of church reform also demanded slow, even dignified (larghetto!) consideration, particularly when the royal creed continued to cleave to Catholicism (papal recognition only excepted). And although it would be inappropriate to liken work on the Book of Common Prayer that followed to the light, playful passage of the scherzo, the Protestant convictions of a young and eager Edward VI at least gave Cranmer new freedom to experiment. As for the finale, what could be more frustrating than the quickening pace (allegro molto) of court faction, of the accession of Mary the Catholic, Roman renewal, and Protestant pastoral vision unfulfilled?

John Calvin (1509-64) spent most of his adult life as a refugee from his native France. By far his longest exile was in Geneva, a city in which - in spite of his undoubted prominence - he seemed never to feel completely at home. Many of the figures who assisted Calvin in the reform of Geneva - energetic men such as Guillaume Farel and Pierre Viret - were forgotten by time, their books left largely unread after their deaths except by a handful of scholars. But Calvin’s theological influence did not cease with his death in 1564. If anything, it grew stronger, especially in the English-speaking world. Thomas Norton’s translation of Calvin’s Institutes went through eleven editions by 1632. Calvin’s catechism went through eighteen editions in English by 1628. Arthur Golding translated Calvin’s sermons on Job, which went through five editions between 1574 and 1584. In America, the Calvinism of the low-church Anglicans of Virginia, the Congregationalists of Massachusetts, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of North Carolina, and the Baptists of Rhode Island was reinforced by the Dutch Calvinism of New Jersey and New York and by the German Calvinism of Pennsylvania. Even John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists, a notably anti-Calvinist movement on the American frontier, once confessed that his theology came within a 'hair's-breadth of Calvinism'.

Byron made a number of statements about prose as a medium of expression, and almost always in its relation to poetry. On 17 November 1813, he confided to his journal: 'I began a comedy and burnt it because the scene ran into reality; - a novel, for the same reason. In rhyme, I can keep more away from facts; but the thought always runs through, through . . . yes, yes, through' (BLJ , iii, 209); six days later he added: 'I have burnt my Roman - as I did the first scenes and sketch of my comedy . . . I ran into realities more than ever; and some would have been recognized and others guessed at' (BLJ , iii, 217). In Beppo on the other hand, he announces: 'I've half a mind to tumble down to prose, / But verse is more in fashion - so here goes!'; and in Don Juan: 'if ever I should condescend to prose, / I'll write poetical commandments' (Beppo, 52, and Don Juan , i, 204). Fashion? Inferiority? An unsatisfactory means of achieving and sustaining creative objectivity? As diverse as these reflections are, one thing they seem to tell us is that, unlike Wordsworth, Byron does perceive an 'essential difference' between poetry and prose, though not necessarily - and here he might agree with Wordsworth - between 'the language of prose and metrical composition'; a difference in kind, in creative discipline. I should like to take these as signposts and to begin with a few remarks about his prose in general before focusing a little more specifically on 'To the Editor of the British Review' (1819) and Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1820) (hereinafter referred to as 'To the Editor' and Some Observations respectively). The effort as a whole will attempt to suggest some answers to the questions: What is Byron's Prose, what characterizes it, what sort of subjects does it cover, how well does it work as a creative medium?

Writing to Louis de Cormenin in June of 1844, the twenty-two-year-old Flaubert sketches an ideal society of 'good lads, all men of letters, living together and gathering two or three times a week to eat a good meal washed down with a good wine, while savouring some succulent poet' ['bons garçons, tous gens d'art, vivant ensemble et se réunissant deux ou trois fois par semaine pour manger un bon morceau arrosé d'un bon vin, tout en dégustant quelque succulent poète' (Cor. i 209)]. Friendship, the pleasures of the table, the delights of conversation, above all talk devoted to literature: these are all central to Flaubert's personality, all the more important for someone who chose to lead an existence that was primarily solitary. These are also the motifs that run through his correspondence like brightly coloured threads, even when the general fabric grows dark with the pessimism of his later years.

For Flaubert, the nineteenth century was 'l'Hénaurme siècle'. This distortion of the epithet énorme admirably conveys not only his ironical attitude towards the misplaced self-confidence and pretension of the age, but also his frank enjoyment of the grotesque figures who, for him, embodied these quintessentially bourgeois characteristics. As the novelist Milan Kundera would later put it, with only minimal recourse to hyperbole: 'Flaubert discovered stupidity. I dare say that is the greatest discovery of a century so proud of its scientific thought.' In Flaubert's eyes, bêtise ['stupidity'] contaminated even the highest reaches of intellectual endeavour. Writing to George Sand after reading Lamennais's Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, he boasted: 'I am now thoroughly acquainted with all those monumental jokers who have had such a calamitous influence on the nineteenth century' ['Je connais maintenant, et ê fond, tous ces immenses farceurs, qui ont eu sur le 19e siècle une influence désastreuse' (Cor. iv 758)].

Giuseppe Verdi, born in a country village in the Po Valley in 1813, rose to become the most popular opera composer of his century. Across a career that spanned more than sixty years he won international fame, becoming the venerated and often decorated grand old man of Italy, “il gran vegliardo.” Setting his stamp on two generations of performers, he transformed a showcase for prime donne and celebrated tenors into a serious theatre for singing actors. A patriot, Verdi was twice elected to political office and was honored as Senator for Life. He was also a farmer and philanthropist. At his death in 1901, he left behind a legacy of landmark works. Verdi's art has remained as accessible and popular as it was during his lifetime, his major operas constituting the backbone of today's standard repertory. Three of his homes and the home of Antonio Barezzi, his patron and father-in-law, are open to the public as museums. Now, as before, Verdi speaks to us all, even as he remains a beloved symbol of Italy and its culture, a man for his time and ours.

The child, the village, and the land

Verdi was born on October 10, 1813, in Roncole, a hamlet standing in open land about sixty-five miles southeast of Milan with the Apennines looming on the south and west and the River Po flowing to the north, where most income came from wheat, corn, and hogs. In this world of flat fields edged by rows of Lombardy poplars and irrigation canals, the only large buildings were the parish churches, among them Verdi's San Michele Arcangelo in Roncole. The people there spoke a sweet, liquid dialect that was heavily influenced by French and was the only spoken language of Verdi’s early years. Peaceful today but chaotic during Verdi’s infancy, the area was overrun with troops fighting the NapoleonicWars.

It is not difficult to discover the huge impact which Byron, most Eurocentred of all the English 'Romantic' writers, had on Europe; but it may be difficult to credit it from the perspective of 2004, in which he is just one 'Romantic' name out of half-a-dozen. A document may help. Francesco Guerrazzi was a poet and historical novelist, who had met Byron at Pisa, and became famous later as a politician - he was made dictator of Tuscany on the flight of the Grand Duke in 1849. He records in his Memorie an apparition he experienced while studying law:

For someone who has not entered the pages of history as an opera composer, Mendelssohn's output of dramatic music was remarkable, and the attention attracted by his failure to complete a mature opera is unparalleled. To describe the first and explain the second are the objects of this chapter.

Had Beethoven and Schumann died, like Mendelssohn, at the age of thirty-eight, the lack of Fidelio (completed by Beethoven at the age of forty-four in 1814) or Genoveva (Schumann was forty at the 1850 premiere) would hardly have affected their final evaluation by posterity. Why is it, then, that Mendelssohn's unfulfilled operatic ambitions were considered such a significant – and suggestive – artistic failure? Two reasons come immediately to mind: first, had Mendelssohn lived only a year longer – as his contemporaries were acutely aware – the world might have witnessed the completion of Die Lorelei, an opera that occupied much of his creative energy in the months before his death. Other projects were in the queue, such as a commission for Her Majesty's Theatre in London, which had not reached fruition in time for the 1847 season, but which could well have seen the light of day the following year.

In the case of a composer like Mendelssohn, it is not easy to claim that a certain part of his oeuvre is more important than another: it was his avowed goal to be active and successful in as many different musical genres as possible, and – with the single exception of opera – he achieved just this. Nevertheless, it can be said that the mature chamber works of Mendelssohn rank not only among the finest works of the composer, but among those achievements of his that were of lasting importance for the entire century. The techniques of motivic combination, derivation, juxtaposition, and interplay that characterize his mature chamber style, which arose from Mendelssohn's fascination with the music of both Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig Beethoven, exercised a considerable influence on nineteenth-century instrumental music in general; it is hardly an exaggeration to claim that the technique of “developing variation” has its roots precisely here. Furthermore, their sheer beauty and highly idiomatic writing for all instruments have secured a place in the performance repertoire and the recording market for at least some of these works – particularly the two piano trios and some of the string quartets.

In 1974 the distinguished musicologist Carl Dahlhaus published an edited volume called The Mendelssohn Problem: Das Problem Mendelssohn. The book's preface makes reference to the recent increase in attention to the composer in scholarly as well as performing venues, abetted by the 125th anniversary of his death in 1972. To speak of a Mendelssohn renaissance, Dahlhaus emphasizes in his opening sentence, would be a great exaggeration. This gambit would be equally valid today. The title of this 1974 volume – as Dahlhaus must have known when he chose it – raises the red flags of several controversies and confusions, which have likewise remained unresolved in the intervening thirty years. Immediately, it conjures a rhetorical, ideological, and political parallel: the Mendelssohn problem, “the Jewish problem.” If, in other words, there is a “problem” with Mendelssohn the man or with Mendelssohn the music, the titular phrase works only in the shadow of the larger cultural issue. Is Mendelssohn a minor composer? In the present context we must bracket the question. We would not expect ever to read a book about the Puccini problem, the Mascagni problem, or the Rimsky-Korsakov problem. The Meyerbeer problem, perhaps. But that is the point. It is the abiding cultural anxiety of anti-Semitism or about anti-Semitism that casts an aura over these nineteenth-century composers, fusing and confusing the judgments of their cultural and aesthetic validity. Before 1960 and his elevation to canonic status, Gustav Mahler would likely have appeared as the third man in the group.