This chapter explores the link between poem and song by examining the relationship between texts of poems, their metrical properties, their performance modes, and their musical settings. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of choral support as an element of lyric and Michael Silverstein's analysis of metricalization in ritual serve as the main theoretical reference points. The chapter draws a distinction between, on the one hand, varieties of lyric that retain a historical link to song (such as Ancient Greek stanzaic forms of melos or the East Slavic chastushka) and, on the other, poems that evoke a potential sung performance, often as an invitation to set these poems to music (e.g., Schiller's “An die Freude”). The chapter then considers the political significance of collectively sung lyric with reference to the modern European revolutionary tradition, concluding with an examination of Fyodor Chaliapin's spontaneous performance of “Dubinushka” in Kiev in 1905. The formal properties of this working-class song, whose authors and origin are obscure but whose refrain was familiar to most audience members, contributed to a scene of secular social effervescence.

This chapter provides a cultural history of the wicked advocate from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection reflect deep-rooted problems in the history of local administration. It starts with monasteries’ miracle stories about advocates suffering in death as punishment for their crimes in this life. It then turns to the Swiss legend of William Tell and analyzes the earliest versions of the legend in order to demonstrate that Tell’s rival, the wicked advocate Gessler, abused his position in ways similar to those of other advocates. This chapter then discusses Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell to show that concerns about corrupt practices of justice and protection extended into the early nineteenth century. Local legends about bad advocates, some of them preserved today on the Internet, provide additional evidence for the enduring value of stories about wicked advocates who are punished for their bad deeds.

Peirce’s concept of science entails that normative judgment in science, about which types of theory or explanation or evidence, etc., are good, must depend on the evidence provided by the experience of inquiring (Chapter 2), a thesis supported by the history of science (Chapter 3). This implies a method, at once empirical and normative, which Peirce’s late sketch of a trio of ’normative sciences’ (aesthetics, ethics, logic) generalizes and rationalizes. Its generalization is supported by Peirce’s expansion of empiricism (Chapter 7), and its rationalization depends on the rediscovery of final causation (Chapter 6). Although sketchy, Peirce’s idea of normative sciences is important; for its plausibility undermines that most pernicious of dichotomies, of fact and value. This chapter explicates Peirce’s idea of normative science, traces its method from Schiller’s aesthetics through Kant’s ethics, and suggests that the rediscovery of final causation corrects what is most problematic in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, viz., its anti-naturalism.

E. T. A. Hoffmann famously lauded Beethoven’s ability to separate his ego from the world of tones, an image of autonomy that resonated with Idealist celebrations of human will. This essay challenges the underlying principle of sovereignty so central to Beethoven reception by examining the composer’s attitudes towards nature, both the natural world around him and his own physical nature. By examining contemporaneous notions of hypochondria, it links the interrelationship between physiology and psychology to Beethoven and his contemporaries’ artistic aspirations and works. If Idealists celebrated the power of spirit and the sovereignty of the will, they often did so in response to powerful experiences of their own physical nature.