Introduction

This chapter explores the first decade of this millennium; a decade which began with a deep economic crisis but ended witnessing solid economic growth. The change in the political scenario, announced in the previous chapter, was consolidated when Tabaré Vázquez, the presidential candidate of the Broad Front (FA), took office in 2005. The state budget was to be distributed differently, including a much larger investment in culture through the creation of specific funds, from which filmmakers began to benefit. In addition to the funds explored in the previous chapter, this chapter introduces new sources of funding specifically designed to support the development of the national audiovisual production. This national context, in conjunction with other international factors, promoted an impressive increase in the number of productions, which became more diverse and professional. However, even if the scenario definitely changed and it certainly became easier for filmmakers to access public money to make their films, they were still independent individuals who worked on a shoestring budget, spending years scrabbling together the necessary funds to produce their films and who continued exploring cheaper technologies to finish their projects. In addition to the continuous production of documentaries, most of which were related to the recent past, this decade testified to an unprecedented number of feature-length fiction films. Whereas in documentaries there was a noticeable negotiation between memory and oblivion, fictions showed a tension between the artisanal model of working at home and the industrial practice of circulating and trading films internationally.

The first case study is 25 Watts (Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2001), a project originally conceived as an independent film made among friends, which became the stepping stone of Control Z, a company producing most of the Uruguayan films which gained international recognition during this decade; the second film analysed is Hit! Historia de canciones que hicieron historia (Hit! History of Songs which Made History; Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff, 2008, henceforth Hit!), a documentary which makes explicit its performative characteristics in order to address the cultural interruptions caused by the dictatorship; and the final section examines Reus (Pablo Fernández, Alejandro Pi and Eduardo Piñeiro, 2010), a feature which deeply engages with the heterogeneity of Uruguayan society, in terms of class and migration, exploring the popular appeal of international genre conventions.

As we have seen in earlier chapters, concert life was slow to take off in Vienna in comparison with other major European capitals. But chamber music concerts developed more rapidly there, owing in large part to a group of middle-class enthusiasts – among them performers, composers, and writers – who championed the string quartet in particular. Music criticism was central to this development. Chamber music's move into a more public arena was heralded and aided by the emergence of a review culture, which took shape largely but not solely around the string quartet: a public forum was thus established for debate on the genre, its meanings, and its performers. Mutatis mutandis, the increasingly public and professional performance of string quartets provided a talking point that would help establish music criticism more generally. The multi-faceted discourse about string quartets shows the working-out of performance and compositional ideals that would, in the course of the nineteenth century, come to be used as a benchmark by which to canonise or marginalise other music.

This chapter examines the critical voices that were emerging on the subject of early nineteenth-century Viennese string quartets. The critical observations are drawn mainly from reviews of performances, which reveal a duality in the contemporary conceptions of the genre. The duality reflects a larger shift: conceptions of chamber music in general were changing from a predominately performance-based understanding to one based more on the composer and the ‘work’. But the new ‘work’-based concept was established first and foremost with regard to the string quartet. This becomes clear if one compares reviews of string quartets with those of other genres, especially other chamber genres.

Early Nineteenth-Century Music Reviews in Vienna

Reviews of string quartets, as compositions or in performance, were not numerous in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the pace began to gather during the nineteenth century, especially in connection with Schuppanzigh's quartet subscription concerts. Few Viennese journals of the early nineteenth century published music reviews at first. Indeed, only the Wiener Journal für Theater, Musik und Mode had a regular music review column, and it was short-lived: just twenty-four issues appeared, over the years 1805–06. This periodical and the longer-lived Wiener Theater-Zeitung (Vienna and Trieste, 1806; Vienna, 1807–08, 1811–60) are important sources for music criticism of the time, in the absence of a dedicated Viennese music periodical.

Borges and Medieval Germanic Literatures

THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) referred to Old English and Old Norse as his hobby, his delight, even his passion. In interviews about the inspiration for his poetry and short stories he invariably brought up this interest, gave specific examples of etymologies or intriguing details, and offered some comments on the importance of understanding and loving this material. In talks he quoted from Old English texts in the original language, and offered his own comments about the sound of the language; intriguingly, he found it replete with vowels and vocalic sounds, and a language with a rich sonority to it. He even included direct references to Old English in the metafictional short stories he wrote, describing himself in ‘El Otro’ (‘The Other’) as someone who studies Old English and is not at the bottom of the class. Borges also wrote about the major literary texts of northern Europe, paraphrasing and at times translating sections of Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied and Vǫlsunga saga into Spanish. This work was at the heart of his own thinking, reflected in both content and approach in his own texts. Moreover, Borges was a translator himself, at various points in his life offering his own versions of Old English poems, and near the end of his life working with his last assistant and later wife, María Kodama, on a more ambitious project to translate the Old Norse Gylfaginning into that language. That translation, published with Alianza Editorial (a prestigious Spanish press in Madrid) and entitled La alucinacion de Gylfi (The Dream of Gylfi) came out in 1984 and really was the last major project he accomplished before his death in June 1986. Also in collaboration with María Kodama was a small anthology entitled Breve antologia anglosajona (Short Old English Anthology) dated 1978 and appearing as a pamphlet in Buenos Aires and in Borges’ Obras Completas at more or less the same time. This was also among the writer's last projects, for Borges slowed down considerably in his eighties. Borges, then, this subtle and highly intellectual thinker, this citizen of the world, was also an enthusiast for Old English, but an enthusiast with a scholarly bent.

WHEN THE WORD Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation was published in 2010, its ‘spirit of collaboration and creativity’ and productive juxtaposition of diverse poetic voices challenged the academy to rethink how Old English poetry should be approached. Here was a collection of Old English poems translated by poets with very different knowledge of the material: some came to the project able to translate directly from Old English (or like Bernard O'Donoghue, translate certain poems from memory), whilst others needed the aid of prose translations, crib sheets and the careful guidance of the editors (the poet A. E. Stallings quips: ‘I have no Anglo-Saxon, except inasmuch as I speak English’). All of the translations sought to make early medieval poetry accessible and contemporary, and the collection as a whole demonstrates the full range of possibilities that Old English poetry offers to the poet writing for a twenty-firstcentury audience.

This particular anthology's endeavour to match the Old English corpus with ‘a word-hoard of our times’ is also representative of a wider resurgence in attention to early medieval poetry, a rekindling of interest that has seen a succession of high-profile translations including Ciarán Carson's version of the Tain Bo Cuailnge for Penguin Classics; a new translation of the Poetic Edda by Andy Orchard for Penguin, by Jackson Crawford for Hackett, and a revised version of Carolyne Larrington's translation of the same for Oxford World's Classics; and the arrival of Tolkien's long-awaited translation of Beowulf into an already crowded market. The passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013 also saw renewed attention to his merits as a translator, and particularly to his own much-lauded translation of Beowulf, which was serialised as BBC Radio 4's ‘Book of the Week’ following his death; the original Old English poem continues to be reinterpreted in every imaginable medium. The successful ‘Modern Poets on Old Norse Poetry’ and ‘Kennings in the Community’ initiatives in the UK have led to some extraordinary reworkings of skaldic verse by contemporary poets, and the hit series Vikings has seen Old Norse poetry recited in living rooms across the world.

FROM THEIR VERY beginnings, Old Norse myth and poetry have been worked and reworked, written and rewritten, interpreted and reinterpreted, across a range of media. Various runestones, particularly from Sweden, depict scenes from myth and legend which are also recounted in the Poetic Edda. The eddic poetry of the Volsung cycle, to take one example among many, is found preserved – partially – within Vǫlsunga saga. Here, not only do a number of stanzas cited in the saga come from eddic poems but also Vǫlsunga saga itself is largely a prose retelling of the eddic Volsung sources. Slightly later in Icelandic literary history rimur (long stanzaic narrative poems) emerge as a literary form. Three cycles of rimur – Vǫlsungs rimur, Trymlur and Lokrur – find their inspiration in eddic and heroic sources. Furthermore, the development of the rimur form itself was at least partially influenced – in terms of ‘style, diction, and metrics’ – by the conventions of both eddic and skaldic poetry. A range of English poetry – from the medieval to the modern – shows the clear influence of Old Norse sources. O'Donoghue's study of The Return of the Native in this volume makes clear the influence of Old Norse poetry on one particular English author, and a number of novels, ranging from the high fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien to the young adult fiction of Melvin Burgess, also owe a great debt to medieval Norse material. Comics and graphic novels, too, have drawn on material from Norse myth and legend. Norse material has also inspired a range of musical works, ranging from Richard Wagner's operatic Ring cycle to viking metal. Literal translation has kept Old Norse poetry alive, in myriad languages, for hundreds of years. But translation – whether literal, cultural or both – is not limited to the plastic, the graphic, the musical or the textual. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have given rise to a number of cinematic works that are either inspired by Norse material or can be regarded as adaptations of it.

2007: Bad Girls

A prison full of women? The possibilities of making something musical out of it had already been exploited in Prisoner Cell Block H. At least that show proved that having the stage crammed with women didn't make a feminist musical. I'm not sure if that claim would be made by the creators of Bad Girls: The Musical (Garrick Theatre, 16 August 2007; 86). Firstly, it was an adaptation based on a long-running television series, created by Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus, who had also written for Footballer's Wives and Waterloo Road; Kate Gotts wrote its incidental music. The encouraging news was that Chadwick and McManus wrote the book for the musical, and Gotts the music, a follow-through that encouraged expectation. Still, this was a musical made up from television, and musicals from television were seldom good news: think Acorn Antiques (not even fully qualified to call itself a musical), Budgie and – as big a disaster as any – I Can't Sing.

Gotts saw Bad Girls as ‘an indictment of our penal system’, insisting that the musical was ‘not a piss take. It is serious and it is funny. You go on a real voyage of emotions.’ The prison was the all-female HMP Larkhall, whose officers included warder Jim Fenner (David Burt) and Sylvia ‘Bodybag’ Hollamby (Helen Fraser, repeating her television role). A lesbian romance between the newly appointed wing governor Helen Stewart and long-term prisoner Nikki Wade ran alongside the sleazy behaviour of screw (in more sense than one) Fenner.

The notices were mixed. Susannah Clapp in the Observer heard ‘unflaggingly vivacious music and lyrics’; Nicholas de Jongh heard ‘not very tuneful songs’, although the dialogue ‘crackles and snaps convincingly with lush vulgarity, innuendo and violence’. Under the headline ‘Bad's the Word’, Tim Walker in the Daily Telegraph denounced ‘a profoundly immoral piece of work’, accusing the writers of having created ‘a rotten and hideous thing. The show might well come to be seen as the apogee of yob culture’, although one would have thought several other apogees of that manifestation had happened long before.

IN the second half of the twelfth century several English monastic houses installed their own water supply systems. The spread of the idea and the technology was done by Benedictine houses such as Christchurch Canterbury and by the newer offshoot order, the Cistercians, for example at Fountains Abbey. Identifying and enclosing freshwater springs was not, of course, a new idea; the technological novelty was the construction of a conduit-head near the spring or springs to provide a constant head of water, and the ability to cast and shape lead into long, narrow-bore pipes to transport the water from conduit-head to abbey. In the developing monastic tradition, monks required sweet and clean water at regular intervals for spiritual and physical cleansing – before celebrating the services of the Divine Office – as well as for drinking. In the second quarter of the thirteenth century, several such piped water supplies were being developed in and around London. The Augustinian canons at Waltham Abbey were planning and installing one in the 1220s and ‘30s and the City authorities were installing a civic system between the 1230s and 1250s. The London Franciscans and Dominicans planned and installed their systems around this time too, beginning with the Franciscans in the 1240s and the Dominicans a decade later. It seems very likely that there was some cooperation and shared technical expertise in the creation of these four systems in and around London.

The Grey Friars water supply

The four larger London friaries – Grey Friars, Black Friars, White Friars and Austin Friars – established their own water systems, of which by far the best documented is the Franciscan system. Here, a rare combination of archaeological excavation, medieval documents and a surviving medieval conduit-head building allow us to reconstruct the water supply network. Taking the accounts of the donation and the course of the water supply given in the sixteenth-century Grey Friars Register, the early twentieth-century archaeologist Philip Norman carried out a remarkable investigation, mapping the probable course of the underground pipe network and discovering the remains of the two conduit-heads that fed the piped system.

In the second quarter of the thirteenth century, probably in the 1240s, William Taylour granted the Franciscans a spring in rural Bloomsbury, nearly a mile to the north-west of the friary.

Introduction

The brothers Johan Ludvig and Christian Ditlev Reventlow can be seen as later eighteenth-century representatives of cameralist thinking in Denmark. The reforms to agriculture, education and poor relief that Johan Ludvig Reventlow (1751–1801) introduced on his Brahetrolleborg estate, Funen island, were largely cameralist in inspiration. His brother Christian Ditlev Reventlow (1748–1827) was leader of the Rentekammer and one of the highest cameral officials in Denmark; he reformed his Christianssæde estate on Lolland island in like manner. However, in the following I will primarily concentrate on the work of Johan Ludvig Reventlow.

During the second half of the eighteenth century there were plans for reform in every social sector of the Danish-Norwegian dual monarchy. New ideas generally came from the South, passing through the two duchies of Schleswig and Holstein that were part of the Danish monarchy. These two duchies were windows open not only to the ideas of the Continental Enlightenment, but were also influenced by ideas originating in England.

Despite the closed collegial system of the Danish–Norwegian absolute monarchy, its central administration was relatively receptive to new ideas. At mid-century one of the best-known officials in the country was the theologian Erik Pontoppidan, a man who combined pietist faith with enlightened economic ideas. In 1759 his Eutropii Philadelphi Oeconomiske Balance argued for greater emphasis upon Danish raw materials and Danish labour, highlighting awareness of Enlightenment economic ideas in Denmark. At about the same time he published Collegium Pastorale Practicum, a manual in which he counselled newly educated clergymen who would take over local parishes. This connection between religion and economy would be a characteristic feature of Danish cameralist policy in the 1780s and 1790s.

In 1755 the Danish–Norwegian government invited proposals for economic improvements, and many contributions were later published in the first Danish economic periodical, Danmarks og Norges okonomiske Magasin. Erik Pontoppidan was the motive force here, having had encouragement from the King's closest adviser, Adam Gottlob Moltke, an estate owner and high official, the overhofmarskal. On his Bregentved estate Moltke practised so-called holstensk kobbelbrug (a system of crop rotation); he also sought to extend the arable cultivated area of his property by draining and clearing, and encouraged his tenant farmers to adopt improved agricultural techniques and better seed.

WITH A SINGLE, weighty G-minor chord, Beethoven's second sonata for piano and ‘obbligato’ cello is underway. The sonority at the beginning of this deliberately paced slow introduction has nothing of the subtle mystery exuded at the outset of its sibling, nor does the chord pose an unanswerable question. Instead, the composer brusquely asserts a decisive stroke, a fp attack by both players, followed by a slowly sinking, dolorous scale and three more chords, all subdued yet rigidly dissonant. This opening complex forms a single dramatic utterance, unequivocally defining the sonata's key and its brooding, pensive character. The key, curiously enough, would prove to be one that Beethoven almost never selected again, but the pathos that envelops the introduction, finding little relief at the onset of the first movement proper (in sharp contrast to the humorous start of the F-major Allegro of Op. 5 No. 1), anticipates much of what we often associate with the composer's music: melancholy and tragic gestures, dramatic sweep and silence-filled pauses.

Like fraternal twins, the Op. 5 sonatas invite profitable comparisons. Indeed, we can now hardly imagine one without the other, and considering the two side by side reveals as much about their symbiosis as about their separate characters. Outwardly, these works are cut from the same cloth, emerging, as it were, from a unified artistic vision. Both open with slow, elongated introductions that give way to expansive, sonata-form Allegros. In each sonata, Beethoven also dispenses with a formal slow movement, for he likely assumed that his protracted introductions were sufficient, even if they ‘front-loaded’ his sonatas with slow material. And both works conclude with jaunty rondos that, like the Allegros, fill out expansive proportions. Yet each possesses distinct characteristics, as if reflecting the two sides of the creator's own personality. If the F-major sonata impresses as the more extroverted or flamboyant of the two, given the joyful nature of its themes and its first-movement cadenza, the G-minor sibling possesses a more brooding, introspective temper, particularly in its first movement, as summarized in Diagram 3.1. Nevertheless, as we shall see, some salient features of the F-major sonata return in the G-minor sonata in high relief, as if Beethoven decided to raise them to a new, expressive extreme.