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Summary

Wagner was the literary musician par excellence … he produced his own dramatic poems, thus giving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony (except for the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added thought and produced the music-drama.

As a music critic, Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was nothing if not honest in his appraisals. He was also scathing, cantankerous and wilfully given to a hectoring and didactic strain of pronouncement which made him the bete noir of Victorian musical culture and – in some respects – its most implacable adversary. Between 1876 and 1898 (when he published The Perfect Wagnerite) he produced numerous columns for the London press (especially The Star, where he wrote from February 1885 under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, and The World, where he wrote from May 1890 as ‘GBS’), columns which now amount to an invaluable (if idiosyncratic) record of English musical life at the close of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, as his career as a dramatist took hold and made him famous, Shaw wrote much less frequently on musical matters, but he continued to publish essays and correspondence on music (including two notable exchanges with Ernest Newman) throughout his long lifetime. His last such publication appeared nine days after his death in November 1950.

The three stout volumes of Shaw's collected music criticism published in 1981 as Shaw's Music (and edited by his indefatigable bibliographer and scholarly advocate, Dan H. Laurence) give due notice of the formative role and abiding presence of music in Shaw's development as a writer. They also attest a striking and pervasive relationship between Shaw's perhaps unrivalled experience of British public musical life and his own convictions about musical meaning. Shaw's journalism extends from reviews of Clara Schumann's performances in London and Wagner's visits there in the 1870s to appraisals of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg shortly before and after the First World War. As late as 1923 (in his preface to the fourth edition of The Perfect Wagnerite) he was still chiding the British public because of its failure to recognize the sea-change that had occurred in English music over the course of his career.

Summary

Among the papers of the Strickland-Constable family of Wassand Hall in the East Riding of Yorkshire, now lodged at the East Riding Archives and Local Studies in Beverley, is a modest little booklet measuring only 20 cm x 15 cm, of paper bound in a piece of recycled parchment, which is listed in the ERA catalogue as ‘Sir John Nevile's memoranda book. 1595’.

The booklet, containing only twenty-eight (unnumbered) folios, in fact appears to be a compilation of memoranda and accounts made mainly for the weddings of Sir John Nevile's children in the 1520s and 1530s, prefaced by a pedigree of the family (Nevile of Chevet, West Riding) up to 1595, which occupies the first half of the booklet; the cover is marked ‘H.N.’ for Henry Nevile, the great-grandson of Sir John. It is not immediately clear how this manuscript ended up in the records of the East Riding family of Strickland-Constable, but it is likely that it passed from family to family when Rosamond Estoft, the granddaughter of this Henry Nevile's grandson Sandford Nevile, married Yarburgh Constable of Wassand (1676–1731).

The Nevile family settled in the West Riding on the marriage of Sir John Nevile in the early sixteenth century to a West Riding heiress, the widowed Lady Tempest, née Elizabeth Bosvile, and Sir John seems to have largely rebuilt the family house at Chevet, which his wife had inherited from her own family. They are known also to have owned property at Mile End in Stepney, Middlesex, but Chevet was evidently the family seat, where it is most likely that family celebrations, including the weddings detailed in the Memoranda Book, took place.

The manuscript contains expense accounts for food and clothes for four Nevile weddings between 1526 and 1533: those of Sir John's daughters Elizabeth (to Roger Rockley, 14 January 1526), Anne (to Thomas Drax) and Mary (to Gervase Clifton), and of his son Henry to Dorothy Dawney, as well as notes on his considerable expenses on a number of other special occasions from 1520 to 1529. All these notes are of interest for what they tell us about Sir John and his sense of the lavish output appropriate to his status, and will be discussed later. However, it is an extra note in the account of Elizabeth's wedding that is the most interesting in the context of entertainment.

Summary

But his flaw'd heart

Alack, too weak the conflict to support!

William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V scene iii, 1606

Introduction

The very phrase ‘broken hearts’ is a flexible expression for many sources of inner anguish, bereavement or disappointment, and it can also mean what it says. The heart is a mechanical pump, and pumps break. The ancients held that the heart was the seat of the soul, so a broken spirit became a broken heart. This distinction will be vital when we try to comprehend the last years of Gustav Mahler, but first let us consider the workings of this complex organ (see Fig. 3).

The heart is made up of specialised muscle (myocardium). It is divided into two upper, low-pressure and thin-walled chambers (atria) and two lower, thick-walled and high-pressure chambers (ventricles). Huge veins bring stale blood back to the right side of the heart, which then pumps the blood through the lungs, where it is revitalised with oxygen, returning afresh to the left side. The oxygenated blood is then pumped, in systole, through the aorta, whose branches bring oxygen to all other parts of the body. If your blood pressure is 130/70 then the systolic pressure is 130 and the diastolic 70, which is a healthy reading.

The heart is lined internally by a membrane (endocardium) and surrounded by a membranous sack (pericardium). During our embryonic development, parts of the endocardium specialise to form one-way valves between the chambers. For example, the aortic valve controls the exit from the left ventricle. Like any other big muscle the myocardium itself needs a good blood supply, and that is supplied by the coronary arteries. The heart is an electrically activated pump; accordingly a band of electrical conducting nerve tissue traverses the central septum within the heart. If it activates seventy systolic beats a minute, the pulse rate is seventy.

So what can go wrong with these excellent arrangements? Th e answer is a lot, of which the following is a very simplifi ed summary.

Summary

Beware the dreaded spirochaete

Anon.

Introduction

The aphorism ‘Beware the dreaded spirochaete’ was wise. A spirochaete (Treponema pallidum) causes syphilis, an infection which may manifest itself in many forms. Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, the leading nineteenth- century specialist, described syphilis as ‘the great imitator’, hence the caution in judging case histories preceding the standard blood test. That test (the WR) was an antibody test introduced by Wassermann in 1905, immortalising his name. There can be both false positives and negatives. There are more recent blood tests (e.g. VDRL), which are beyond the scope of this book.

Few diseases have been implicated more often with past composers, reflecting partly the overall incidence and ubiquity of the condition, but also the enthusiasm and sometimes carelessness with which it has been over-diagnosed retrospectively. The lists below show composers who were definitely syphilitic and those alleged by some to have possibly been so.

Known Syphilitics

Summary

This chapter focuses on four famous clothier families, whose members amassed huge fortunes and left lasting legacies to their communities. Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall in Essex, who came from a family of butchers and cloth-makers, created a magnificent house which is now a National Trust property. The Springs were three generations of clothiers, all called Thomas, whose wealth made Lavenham in Suffolk one of the richest towns in England in 1524, and who were major contributors to the rebuilding of Lavenham parish church. Father and son John Winchcombe I and II of Newbury occupied a substantial house within the town, were large-scale producers of kerseys, and were commemorated a generation later in Thomas Deloney's poem ‘Jack of Newbury’. William Stumpe set up looms in the buildings of the former abbey in Malmesbury, and gave the abbey church to become the town's parish church.

THOMAS PAYCOCKE OF COGGESHALL

For his beautiful house still stood in West Street, opposite the vicarage, and was the delight of all who saw it. It stands there still, and looking upon it to-day, and thinking of Thomas Paycocke who once dwelt in it, do there not come to mind the famous words of Ecclesiasticus? ‘Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us …’

Eileen Power, ‘Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall’ (1924)

With the pride and ostentation of a peacock, Thomas Paycocke's ornate timber-framed house at Coggeshall still catches the eye, five centuries after its construction (Plate VIII). The metaphor is apt as the family name Paycocke was variously spelt Peaycocke, Pecock, and Peacock, and this may be the species of bird carved on the exterior of his house. Indeed his merchant's mark, which also decorates the house, although described variously as a trefoil of pearls or berries, a two-stemmed clover, or an ermine tail, might, with a stretch of the imagination, be a stylised representation of peacock feathers (Plate 14). Paycocke's house has attracted generations of admirers, including Noel Buxton, who restored the property to its original timbered appearance and presented it to the National Trust in 1920.

Summary

Empire and Nation

PUNCTUATED by a series of military and diplomatic conflicts and set against a background of shifting strategic alliances, the reception of Russian and Eastern European music in Britain from 1850 to 1950 vividly illustrates how geopolitical concerns can impinge upon discussion of culture and the arts. In particular, the condition and legacy of empire are at the heart of the relationship between Russia and Britain, whether in the second half of the nineteenth century, or in the first half of the twentieth. Although Russia and Britain found themselves on opposite sides of the Crimean War (1853–6), they were later to become uneasy allies in the major conflicts of the twentieth century. Even when not involved in military conflict, the ideological interaction between the two countries was shaped in the long nineteenth century by territorial rivalries in Central Asia and the Far East (what historians often refer to as the ‘Great Game’), and in the twentieth by revolutionary politics (something that would eventually give rise to the so-called ‘Cold War’).

Empire shaped the reception of the cultures of Eastern Europe too. Until 1918, many of Eastern Europe's national cultures were part of broader, multilingual and multi-ethnic entities. Poland was divided between Austria, Prussia and Russia; Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia were subject to Austro-Hungarian rule. The South Slavonic peoples were governed either by Austro-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire, whether directly or through fealty. Even countries seldom considered part of Eastern Europe share the legacy of imperial rule. Between 1809 and 1917, Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, and its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history was shaped as much by this relationship as it was by that with its Scandinavian neighbours to the west. Long subject to Ottoman rule, Greece won its independence against a backdrop of widespread European philhellenism, something that has masked its cultural affinities with other nations in the Balkans until comparatively recently.

It is this imperial framework that makes the study of the British reception of Russian and Eastern European music such a complex topic, not least because Britain – like Russia – was itself caught between imperial and national (not to say nationalist) agendas.

Summary

In recent years we have come a long way in appreciating the complexities of rhythm in tonal music. This development is in part an outgrowth of our enhanced understanding of the complexities of tonal music itself: for example, our awareness of hierarchical structure as postulated in the theories of Heinrich Schenker. Tonal structure and rhythmic structure are closely intertwined. In a loose, informal sense, one may even say that tonal structure implies rhythmic structure, for such tonal entities as motives, linear progressions, phrases, and so forth carry with them a durational component at any given level.

In studying the rhythmic aspect of tonal music, fugues and related genres pose a special challenge. One of the main reasons for this is that tonal structure in fugal genres—even at a foreground level—is extremely complex. For example, fugal writing demands motivically and thematically independent parts; the rhythmic implications of this independence (which can sometimes be far-reaching) appear not to have been yet systematically studied.

A frequently encountered “symptom” of rhythmic complexity in fugal genres is rhythmic displacement, where corresponding thematic statements do not correspond in terms of notated metric position. Broadly speaking, one may distinguish between two main categories of rhythmic displacement in fugal genres. The first category consists of half-measure displacements in common time. In the 1760 Anhang to his Handbuch bey dem Generalbasse und der Composition, Marpurg addresses the issue of half-measure displacement with reference to the three fugal excerpts given here as example 8.1. Evoking a prevalent eighteenth-century conception of common time, Marpurg states that the measure consists of two equally “good” parts, and therefore there is no essential difference between its first and third beats. It should be noted that half-measure displacements occur frequently in eighteenth-century music notated in common time, whether in fugal or non-fugal genres.

The second category of rhythmic displacement is a more specifically fugal one. In this category the non-correspondence in notated metric position between corresponding thematic statements is considerably more acute than is the case with half-measure displacement in common time. For example, thematic statements may occur on successive beats in some given meter, as is typically the case in fugal strettos. Marpurg uses the locution “per arsin et thesin” to refer to this type of rhythmic displacement.

Summary

Like a number of other Suffolk communities, the town of Beccles, in north-east Suffolk, had a dedicated outdoor recreational site, which Beccles called The Game Place. Records also show that Beccles had its own local players, and other performers, during the late medieval and early modern periods. However, based on the fragmentary nature of the records, it is not possible to confirm or to deny a connection between The Game Place and the players. This lack of clarity concerning the playing tradition in Beccles is typical of the difficulty with Suffolk in general. Parish and civic records copiously confirm that villages and towns in every corner of the county staged plays. Early Suffolk also had innumerable dedicated outdoor recreational sites, called by various names and used for various diversions including, in one verifiable instance, the staging of plays (see below). Those sites turn up in communities great and small in every part of the county; indeed, no other region of England approaches Suffolk in its number of dedicated playing sites. Further, the great majority of surviving play texts from the late medieval period have certain, if confounding, connections with Suffolk. As John Coldewey has observed, of the ‘thirty-five vernacular English play texts and fragments [that] survive from the late middle ages’, many derive from East Anglia – and many of those from Suffolk. But while all these evidences indicate the presence of an extraordinarily rich playing tradition, the tradition itself remains obscure, and largely disconnected from the culture that created it. The dots strenuously resist connecting. This study, focusing as it does on one small town resting in a part of a county that was rich in parish drama, hopes to offer a few brush strokes to one corner of what turns out to be a very complex, and largely unfinished, picture of local drama in early Suffolk.

The Borough of Beccles

Beccles is situated on a rise overlooking the River Waveney in Wangford Hundred in north-east Suffolk, nearly equidistant between the towns of Bungay and Lowestoft. It is one of the oldest towns in Suffolk, and in earlier centuries was ‘the most substantial [town] between Ipswich and Norwich’.

Summary

First do not harm the patient

Hippocrates, c.400BC

The term ‘iatrogenic’, used of illness and/or death, simply means that they were hastened or caused by medical treatment. Sadly, the biographies of many composers are replete with the iatrogenic.

Potion or Poison? Good Music and Bad Medicine

The stark fact is that, until the era of aseptic surgery with anaesthesia, doctors did not really have much at their disposal with which to treat patients. These two advances came in the mid-nineteenth century, followed in the twentieth by intravenous fluids and antibiotics, as well as insulin, steroids and drugs to treat failure or irregularity of the heart rate and raised blood pressure. Then came chemotherapy and radiotherapy to treat cancer. Before the 1840s there were generally half a dozen or so treatments which became somewhat rigid blandishments for most and diverse conditions. Because those therapies applied initially usually failed, others would relentlessly follow. The sick composer was in many cases saved from worse medical remedies only by the felicitous intervention of nature, or by his professing scepticism regarding further medical torture with alternative practitioners. Of these ‘treatments’, the application of leeches and especially bleeding are probably the most notorious although, in fairness, there are today very occasional uses for both leeches and blood-letting. They are specific and beyond the scope of this book. Blood-letting achieved little apart from making patients anaemic, placing a great strain on the heart, which was sometimes the root of the problem originally. This was despite Harvey having explained the circulation in the seventeenth century.

Poultices, often dirty, were applied to open wounds and sores, introducing further infection. Bed rest and mountain air were benign and, for the tuberculous patient (TB sufferer), removal from smog-bound, overcrowded and insanitary conurbations could be genuinely beneficial. One encounters with many case histories practitioners wedded to one particular treatment. Little wonder that Beethoven famously referred to ‘bumbling doctors and medical asses’, for many of them did literally continue regardless. In so doing, perversely, they generally encountered less opposition than did Semmelweis or Lister introducing asepsis, and Simpson pioneering anaesthesia.

Summary

This performance on 8 February 2017, by the New College Players and the Frideswide Voices and directed by Elisabeth Dutton, gained much from its setting in the chapel at New College, Oxford. The feeling that this was a place used regularly for worship helped, with certain physical characteristics to enhance it, including an echo. There was a strong musical element, including dancing, in the performance and many of the actors and singers were women or young girls. This accorded with the text which unusually asks for ‘virgynes’ (line 477). Here women also acted some of the male parts, including an impressive performance of the Poet, who introduced and concluded the play. The slaughtered children were represented by dolls. There was a strong character contrast between Herod who boasted his way to madness and a grotesque destruction, and the virtuous Simeon, who in this production carried a live baby able to sit up and look beneficently at the audience (without needing an understudy). The latter was a fitting part in a play which in performance had a strong emotional appeal, much helped by the music. The episode of the slaughter was disturbing, especially when it came to a frozen pause as one of the Knights held his spear aloft, impaling a dead baby. It was at this point that both modern and late medieval audiences might have anticipated the Crucifixion yet to come, as well as other mass extermination. As a complement the baby in the arms of Simeon might have echoed the many images of the Madonna and Child, as well as the brief appearance of Mary with the child earlier.

Some doubt arises in the text about the order of the two main events, as the Poet in the introduction puts the Presentation first, with the Killing to follow. In this performance the reverse order, as in the text itself, seemed well supported on emotional grounds as the horror of the murders gave way after angelic intervention to the thankful ending centring upon Simeon.

The text is well provided with stage directions and this performance made good use of them.

Summary

This volume testifies to the vitality of the field of early theatre, demonstrating the eclectic range of interests METh engages. A group of essays approach the performance records of civic and community drama. Philip Butterworth takes us back to the founding principles of METh by exploring the technology of pageant-waggon maintenance and manoeuvre in the light of the Chester records – the pageant waggon being the subject of the very first volume of the journal in 1979. Similarly seeking to make sense of fragmentary record evidence, James Stokes investigates the scattered and enigmatic references to ‘camping closes’ and ‘game places’ as potential performance sites in the vicinity of Beccles in Suffolk. Jamie Beckett starts from a puzzling textual reference, the name of the Jew ‘Fergus’ in the lost York Funeral of the Virgin, pursuing local history and tradition to identify a possible hate figure. The perspective is broadened by Tom Pettitt's wide-ranging and suggestive discussion of Gladman's supposed ‘Carnival’ parade in Norwich in 1443, and the revealing analogues of street performance that may be found not in England but in Italy. James McBain pursues not different locations but different types of audience: examining Gascoigne's skilful play on New Comedy in the Supposes, he evaluates how different levels of familiarity with the genre in audiences at the Inns of Court and the University of Oxford suggest different kinds of spectator response. These last three essays all arise from papers given at the 2016 METh meeting at Canterbury, while Diana Wyatt's was delivered at the 2017 event at Glasgow. Based on a family record of a 1526 wedding, this opens up the field of household drama, with the apparently traditional mounting of a ‘maske and play’ as part of the celebrations. Apart from these essays, we are pleased to engage with theatrical productions of the last year, with Peter Happé's review of Elisabeth Dutton's production of the Digby MS The Killing of the Children, mounted on 8 February 2017 in the chapel of New College, Oxford.

The 2017 METh meeting, held in Glasgow with co-hosts Pamela King and Eila Williamson, was a special event, held to honour the life-work of Philip Butterworth, a founder member of METh.

Summary

I occupy with divers cloth-men in Suffolk, and in other places. The which have weekly some of them, as they send up their cloths, must have their money. And if they fail of their money, they say, they cannot set the poor folks to work. There are divers cloth-men, the which I buy all their cloths that they make … I was wont to sell for most part every year 400 or 500 cloths to strangers, which was worth to the king's grace in his customs, more than though I had shipped myself five times so many. I was wont betwixt Christmas and Whitsuntide to sell most part of them.

Humfrey Monmouth, London draper (1528)

The clothier was distinguished by his activities not only in organising the making of cloth, but also in marketing it. In the passage quoted above, Humfrey Monmouth, a London draper and cloth exporter, explains how clothiers, which he calls cloth-men, supply him with textiles to sell overseas. The clothiers send their cloth weekly to be sold in London, and are reliant on the money that Monmouth pays them to employ their workers. Monmouth provided this explanation in May 1528, while he was imprisoned on suspicion of heresy, so we may need to allow for some overstatement of his case to support the petition he was making to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey for his release. Even so, it seems a realistic picture of the commercial environment in which clothiers relied on London merchants to sell their cloths, who in turn were largely dependent on buyers in overseas markets.

Cloth was a relatively flexible commodity. It could be sold on at any stage in the manufacturing process, in any quantity. Clothiers sold cloths both finished and unfinished, with the latter being completed by clothworkers, possibly in London or overseas. Cloth retained its value over time as, unlike foodstuffs, it was not perishable. It was also easily transportable. Officials and organisations acting on behalf of national and local governments regulated quality. Clothiers could choose to sell their cloth locally, in a provincial town, or in London, and to a wide variety of buyers including specialist traders and overseas merchants (Figure 6).

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5 - ‘Making Symphony Articulate’: Bernard Shaw's Sense of Music History

Summary

Bibliography

Elizabeth Nevile's Wedding Entertainments: A Yorkshire Family Celebration in 1526 and its Contexts

Summary

8 - Broken Hearts

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Selected Bibliography

Part One - Setting Texts

4 - Syphilis

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6 - Famous Clothiers

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8 - Russia and Eastern Europe

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8 - Rhythmic Displacement in the Fugue of Brahms’s Handel Variations: The Refashioning of a Traditional Device

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The Beccles Game Place and Local Drama in Early North-East Suffolk

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3 - Iatrogenic Afflictions

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Herod's Killing of the Children in New College Chapel Oxford, 8 February 2017 (review)

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Editorial Conventions

Editorial

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2 - Marketing Cloth

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Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Part Four - Shifting Perspectives

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