‘Nachtwandler’ Op. 86 no. 3 (comp. probably 1877 or earlier, publ. July 1882)

Unaccompanied mixed choir:

Op. 104 no. 3 ‘Letztes Glück’ (comp. probably 1877, publ. Oct. 1888)

ON 22 October 1879, Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms:

Brahms did indeed know the young man, who eventually became his most significant biographer, editor of his correspondence, and ‘apostle’. Kalbeck named his son, the actor and director Paul Johannes Kalbeck, after Heyse and of course Brahms himself, who was the child's godfather. Kalbeck's wife Julie seems to have appealed to Brahms as much as her husband; Brahms gave her manuscripts of popular songs such as his Schmidt setting ‘Sapphische Ode’ and the Heyse setting ‘Mädchenlied’ Op. 95 no. 6, the latter nicely capturing the three-way friendship between Brahms, the Heyses and the Kalbecks.

Kalbeck's friendship with Brahms had begun five years earlier through their mutual friend Bernhard Scholz on the composer's trips to Breslau. Scholz, who was two years younger than Brahms, had met him in 1862 in Hanover with Joachim. He moved to Breslau in 1871 as conductor of the city music society and became a great champion of Brahms's music in that city. Following Scholz's initial invitation to Breslau in 1874, Brahms visited regularly for concerts and private music-making in the company of Scholz's sociable and musical wife Luise (née Seyler). He met Kalbeck in Scholz's home in late 1874, and expressed interest in his poetry. Kalbeck copied out a ‘half dozen’ poems, including ‘Nachtwandler’ and ‘Letztes Glück’, which Brahms received in January 1875 and copied into his poetry notebook.

Kalbeck then recalled:

Early on a sunny morning in Oxford in June 2005, I rode my bicycle to work at the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and at the gates there was a large crowd blocking my way. They were protesters with megaphones and placards. The local television cameras were there, and some of the protesters had set up sofas on the sidewalk. They were potato farmers and members of the British Potato Council who were protesting against the OED for our definition of couch potato (a person who spends leisure time passively or idly sitting around, especially watching television). They wanted us to replace the phrase couch potato with their own invented term couch slouch because they felt that ‘couch potato’ was negatively distorting the image of the potato. As Kathryn Race, spokesperson for the British Potato Council, explained: ‘We are trying to get rid of the image that potatoes are bad for you.’ In other words, they believed the OED was giving the potato a bad name and they wanted us to fix it.

Lexicography has a rich history of people objecting to a dictionary's contents, be it the exclusion of a word, the inclusion of a word, or the definition of a word. A dictionary is seen as an authoritative text that holds the power to standardise language and prescribe its meaning, spelling, pronunciation and usage. Lexicographers may strive to describe actual usage; but the public, especially lobbyists, often wants them to prescribe and to present a sanitised version, or distorted version, of usage that suits their agenda. Both of these expectations are doomed to failure of course: the public, governments or lobbyists will always want more than the lexicographer can give; and, because lexicography is a human activity and inherently subjective, the lexicographer will almost always fail in objective description. Distortion in some form will always exist.

There are many examples of dictionaries being petitioned to present a sanitised version of culture and reality. In May 2016, an online petition called for the removal of the derogatory Singapore English term Chinese helicopter (a Singaporean whose schooling was conducted in Mandarin Chinese and who has limited knowledge of English), which had been added to the OED earlier that year.

More than half of Scotland's natural population increase in the nineteenth century emigrated. At first, many went to England, but more went to the United States, and Canada came in second. Like many other Europeans, Scots followed a trail of gold around the world from California to Australia and to South Africa. The Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s were just as enticing for Scots as they were for everybody else, and Australia became the second most popular destination in the mid-nine¬teenth century. Here, arriving as both convicts and free settlers, they encountered a people and landscape unlikely anything they had known before.

Scotland during the nineteenth century was second only to Ireland among European countries that lost population through net emigration. Imperial admin¬istration, military service, colonial business and trade, and the prospect of greater opportunities in new lands all led to the mass migration of Scots across the world in the nineteenth century. Observers in the late nineteenth century saw migration as a testament to the quality of the Scottish people and as an assertion of their supreme position in the Empire. Charles Dilke wrote in 1868 that, in British colonies, ‘for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that Scotland has not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.’ The popular understanding in Scotland in the nineteenth century was that the Scots were a ‘virile and expansive race’ who took great pride in making a ‘deep mark on the stage of world history’. This triumphal narrative, of course, has little to do with reality.

Most people who left Scotland in the nineteenth century did so in search of a better job and better conditions. Rarely do migrants leave their homelands simply for the sake of a spirited adventure. The choice to emigrate, while indicative of autonomy and mobility, often has its roots in the migrant's material circumstances. As the economic historian Roy Campbell observed, ‘[w]hatever the success and achievements of Scots abroad, their journey from Scotland often began with failure at home’. Although migration may have been accompanied by positive benefits, ultimately the decision to leave involved a condemnation of the social and economic conditions at home.

Introduction

Mother Uganda and Her Children was a music-dance-drama production developed by Rose Mbowa in 1987 with a cast drawn from the Music, Dance and Drama Department (MDD) of Makerere University. Until now existing only in the memories of a few and on some partial and poor quality VHS tapes, the script never having been written down, the play has a big place in the mythology of modern Uganda theatre. Mother Uganda was produced at a moment of historical and political challenge and supported by the incoming – and still in power 30 years later – government of Yoweri Museveni. The manner of its production was highly controversial at the time, challenging institutional, academic, political and personal loyalties. In line with a favoured Mbowa play-making methodology Mother Uganda was an improvisational collective production. It was unique in that it drew on some ten indigenous dance and music cultures to advance an agenda of national reconciliation, reconstruction and unity. Rose Mbowa, arguably Uganda's leading theatrical figure at the time, made a piece that traverses boundaries between popular musical theatre, indigenous dance-drama forms, political theatre, theatre in education and theatre for development as it appealed to unity across ethnic diversity, the possibility of human reformation, and the need for a rapid move towards the embedding of women's rights.

My relationship with Mother Uganda – Patrick

Reflecting on, and writing about, Mother Uganda and Her Children has made me consider my history of working with Rose Mbowa. I was Rose's student from 1984 to 1988, and then I worked with her as a teacher at Makerere University in MDD from 1991 to 1999, when she sadly and suddenly passed on. I acted in her Nalumansi Mother of Lukabwe in 1985. As a student I observed the development of Mother Uganda and Her Children in 1987, and then performed in Mine by Right in 1989. I was subsequently employed by the rival dance-drama Ndere Troupe as Executive Director but soon lost the job, being told I was ‘too close to Rose Mbowa'. Writing about Mother Uganda and Her Children is therefore informed by my experiences as a participant, a colleague and an observer of Mbowa's work.

Britain and Germany settled into an arms competition, while Germany was also in a similar competition with France over their land armies; the strain on all three was very great. This pushed Britain and France steadily closer together. They did not conclude a formal alliance, but they openly cooperated to combat the German threat. France deliberately increased the conscription period of her soldiers from two years to three, so increasing the number of soldiers immediately available if a war began; Britain drove ahead with its determination to outbuild Germany in warships. France's alliance with Russia was supplemented by an Anglo-Russian Convention which attempted, not very successfully, to solve their disputes along the lines of the Entente Cordiale. This alignment was fragile; had German diplomacy been more skilful, it could have brought about its disintegration. But Germany was arrogant and clumsy, and put its faith in power, not in finesse or conciliation.

If a war between Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side and France and Russia and Britain on the other did break out, the Mediterranean was likely to be only a minor theatre of warfare; the only hostile coast, as far as Britain and France were concerned, would be the Austrian Dalmatian province. Austria-Hungary was developing its navy, based at Trieste and Fiume, though this was mainly in competition with its theoretical ally Italy; Italy was also building, with one eye on Austria and the other on France; the exact diplomatic stance of Italy was uncertain. If Italy stayed neutral, the Austrian ships became a threat; and if Italy joined in the war against Britain and France, the two together could pose a serious threat, though cooperation seemed unlikely. Between them in 1914 they had six Dreadnoughts, along with the usual array of smaller vessels. But Britain faced its greatest threat from Germany, and in concert with France adjusted its forces accordingly. Yet it could not permit the route through the Mediterranean to be severed.

Meanwhile the problems of the Eastern Basin continued as before, and contributed to the eventual decisions of all those who participated in the war to come. The international force remained in Crete until 1908, at which time it was agreed by the European consuls and the High Commissioner that a local police force had been properly trained and a reasonable distribution of posts between Muslims and Christians had been achieved.

The news came in a terse message from Olabiyi Yai – our friend, Alain Ricard, had left. He had succumbed on the 27 August last year, to leukaemia.

I was devastated. Although the news rightly aroused a cry of shock and lamentation everywhere, it could not but come to me with a personal edge of pain, for Alain and I had been close friends for more than three decades. Our last meeting in fact had been just a couple of months earlier, in June, at the most recent conference in Bayreuth of the ALA – the Association of African Literature in America, which he had helped set up in 1975, and to which he was assiduously committed, never missing any of its annual reunions. I had received no inkling whatsoever of his illness, not to talk of his imminent demise. True, he did look somewhat pale and fragile, but he was throughout his usual cheerful and teasing teetotaller self, as full as ever of mischievous banter and anecdote, and of delicious laughter. Berenice, his faithful companion of many years, was with him as usual, and we parted with me promising to repeat soon the visit I had made in 1990 to their home in Bordeaux, this time to sample the grapes that Berenice had begun experimenting with in their garden. But now, quite abruptly, he was gone!

Alain and I met for the first time in 1981/82 in Ibadan when, at the prompting of my old mentor and teacher, Abiola Irele, I undertook the translation into English of his first book, a comparative study of Wole Soyinka and Leroi Jones, titled, Théâtre et nationalisme: Wole Soyinka et Leroi Jones (Theatre and Nationalism: Wole Soyinka and Leroi Jones), 1983. From that time on, inevitably, our careers became intertwined, as I began to develop as a scholar-artist, and he as a fast-rising Africanist scholar.

After that book on Soyinka which ignited in him a passionate love for Africa that was to be life-long, Alain then encountered the work of the so-called ‘concert parties’ in the south of Togo and Ghana, itinerant theatre groups very much in the genre of the Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre and, as well, the fiction of chapbook writers like F.lix Couchoro, the Francophone equivalent of Onitsha market literature.

THE THREADS that can be employed to bind together the well-made recital programme are many and various. But the first lesson to be learnt by anyone embarking on a career of singing, playing and planning recitals is that almost every song has two parents – a composer and a poet. The composer is inevitably the kingpin of the enterprise, the person whom the listener immediately identifies, but it is the poet who is the fascinating variable, the creative spirit who enriches (and sometimes muddies) the gene pool of purely musical invention, the wildcard who is the source of a song's character and mood, as well as of its meaning. However much lip-service is presently paid to the equal importance of words and music, the hegemony of the composer remains mostly unchallenged. On most concert programmes composers traditionally appear in majuscules, and the names of poets (sometimes deemed not important enough to appear at all) are printed in smaller letters, and often in brackets.

In this fascinating book, Natasha Loges turns this tradition skilfully and tactfully on its head – and in so doing provides a remarkable resource for singers, pianists and all those who love the music of Johannes Brahms. Here the poets come first, just as their poems had come first – texts that were already written, and mostly printed, before the composer discovered their existence and composed his music. Like all readers (including ourselves) Brahms was drawn to certain poems more than to others; his reactions to literature were entirely different from those of Franz Schubert, and even from those of Brahms's own mentor, Robert Schumann, whose poetry library was at the younger composer's disposal during the earlier years of his career. It is true that the young Brahms borrowed a few poems from Schumann by way of homage, but from the beginning he was his own man in terms of selecting his texts; his music was like no other, and the same could be said of his breadth of reading.

Brahms's response to poetry was sometimes calm and sometimes visceral. At the very least the musical potential of certain texts was immediately clear to his eagle eye – to find a poem ‘useful’ was not to demean its poet.

When the newsof the passing of Professor Isidore Okpewho – ‘Prof’, asthose of us who came under his tutelage called him in aweddeference and fondness – broke, it caused so much sadness atthe loss of one of the finest scholars of the oral arts thatAfrica has produced. But it has also been a personal loss tome as I miss my teacher and mentor of decades.

I was asophomore at University of Calabar, Nigeria, taking arequired course on oral literature, when I first heard ofProfessor Isidore Okpewho's prominence in the discipline. Inthe first semester of that year, I had purchased a fat texttitled Oral Literature in Africa by RuthFinnegan. It was regarded as the bible of oral literaturestudies then, and in those days, you knew a student was asecond year English major when you saw them proudly sportinga copy of Finnegan's book with its distinct yellowish cover.However, our Oral Lit instructor that year, NdubuisiOsuagwu, a freshly minted PhD, was giddily telling us abouta young Nigerian scholar at University of Ibadan who wasbusy demolishing one of the controversial claims inFinnegan's book, that Africa didn't possess epic poems.Osuagwu swore by this Ibadan scholar, told us he was boundto become the youngest scholar to be promoted fullprofessor, that he was taking the field in a radicallydifferent and exciting direction. He was, of course,referring to Isidore Okpewho, who by then was best known asthe author of the novels The Victims,starring foolish Obanua and his desperate wives, andThe Last Duty, where quite a few of usignored the Nigerian Civil War at the heart of that noveland were enamoured of the servant Odibo's awakenedmasculinity. I'm not sure my dear Dr Osuagwu even possesseda copy of Okpewho's The Epic in Africa, theseminal text in which Prof was basically saying, ‘Yes, Ruth,the epic gloriously exists in Africa’. But he had graspedthe full significance of Prof's historic feat in that firstmonograph, which had sprung from his doctoral dissertationat University of Denver, for those of us in that class whowould pursue oral literary studies further, we knew that thetrajectory of our fieldwork had been irrevocablyaltered.