It was in 1977 that the Guardian took the trouble to ask Lionel Bart ‘Whatever happened to the British musical?’

It was a fair enough question. Everybody who knew anything about the British musical, about which almost everybody in Britain knew hardly anything, thought it had pretty well gone down the proverbial plughole, but there probably wasn't a moment's hesitation before Bart replied ‘It stopped when I stopped. It was big when Gilbert and Sullivan were doing some; when Noel Coward was doing some. It was big when I was doing some.’

I wish I had seen this brilliantly concise analysis of what happened to the British musical in the second half of the twentieth century before attempting to capture the mystery in a book of 140,000 words. Bart had a point. Of course, enough British musicals have pleased and managed to run into respectable age, and by the beginning of the 1970s a more commercially keen ‘international’ brand of musical had (often clutching a bible) crept up on London, bringing much wider recognition and success to its creators and their products, recognition and success denied its predecessors.

‘Nothing Succeeds Like Success’ ran the title of one of the more intellectually inane songs in The Card, supposedly a period musical based on an undeservedly mutilated novel by Arnold Bennett, but effectually a collection of quasi pop-songs hung out to dry by the creators of the theme tune to Crossroads, and there was no denying the truth of it. Success, however, only exists because of failure. Success romps over failure, swims in clear water above the sinking depths of failure, rolls on as failure folds up, fades away, hides itself shamefaced as the curtain falls too soon, taking its creators down with the speed of a Titanic.

Success versus failure; these are simply, after all, labels, and the labels are slapped on with little heed of justice. Who can say if the show that runs four nights, two weeks or a few months is a failure, or the show that runs five years or seems destined to run for ever is a success? They may have been labelled wrongly.

Beethoven lived during a crucial transition period in the history of chamber music. The early nineteenth century witnessed fundamental shifts in music-making, as concert life began, and previously ‘private’ music was moved onto the concert stage. The changing circumstances of chamber music in Vienna during this period warrant detailed exploration not only because of the canonical repertoire that emerged: chiefly string chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But also, a much larger body of Viennese chamber music deserves attention, as does the relationship between this music and its context: myths, unexamined ideals, and partial understandings cloud our view of this important cultural nexus. This book explores the ‘cultivation’ of chamber music, especially string quartets, focusing on key agents and factors in Beethoven's Vienna: composers, publishers and publications, performers, venues, critics, audiences, and genres. The following chapters consider the traffic among and between the parties, exploring their actions, relationships, and changing ideas and values.

How did these parties shape the unique cultures of chamber music that arose in Vienna in Beethoven's time? First, a number of terms need to be defined for the particular purposes of this study, including, most importantly, ‘chamber music’. I adopt an early nineteenth-century definition, which differs in crucial ways from the way the term is used today. I go back to this historical definition to understand chamber music's place and role in early nineteenth-century Viennese culture. Three key aspects of chamber music culture at this time, especially in Vienna, are also examined: genre, and the dominance of the string quartet; gender and the predominance of male quartet performers; and class, specifically the ‘middle class’.

Conceptions of Chamber Music around 1800 and Today

One has to consider whether composers in Beethoven's time had a concept of chamber music at all similar to that operating today. The term is, for example, never used in Beethoven's letters, although he frequently mentioned quartets and other genres that we now call chamber music. To anticipate: composers of his day certainly had a working conception of chamber music, but it differed substantially from the one that is now common, which is often anachronistically applied to the music of his era.

Today's definitions of chamber music emphasise instrumentation and ensemble size.

THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS presented us with the payoff for construing montage in a narrower fashion. Montage so understood retains the key appeal of Theodore Adorno's and Peter Bürger's proposal—intermedial status—but with the added benefit of being able to track the intermedial relations of the device's instances with unparalleled conceptual and historical precision. The disruptive perceptual effect initially identified in Dadaist photomontage, collage practices, and a subclass of “Russian films,” was with the appearance of Döblin's novel seen to appear in literature as well. It was not only the perceptual experience of disruption, however, that became constitutive of literary montage, but this experience due to a particular use of ready-mades—another element of montage pointing to its intermedial status. This much is revealed by the fact that the perceived absence of such disruptive use of readymades in Ulysses and Manhattan Transfer led the contemporary critics to reserve the notion of “montage” for Berlin Alexanderplatz only. Berlin Alexanderplatz and its reception therefore becomes a privileged site for articulating both the intermedial history of the concept and its perceptual, stylistic, and narratological parameters.

If analysis of contemporary reports articulating perceptual experiences reveals what is common to montage across arts, this chapter demonstrates that stylistics and narratology shed light on what is specific to each medium. From the perspective of stylistics, each medium will have its own type of ready-made. Photomontage uses existing photographs, collage readily available everyday objects, and literature well-known linguistic “genres.” Although they are not essential to film montage in the sense that they are to montage in other arts, the analysis of Piel Jutzi's film will show that film can also use ready-mades in its montage sequences. Specifically, some of the montage shots appear to employ found footage insofar they seem to exhibit little or no control over the mise-en-scène and are characterized by erratic camera movements and a projection rate of less than twenty-four frames per second.

Because the use of ready-made material is not essential to it, the key to understanding film montage remains its disruptive perceptual effect. In the previous chapter, I argued that in the case of literary montage the perceptual disruption can be explained narratologically—only those ready-mades that cannot be understood as issuing either from “Döblin” or other any diegetic character elicit the experience in question.

THE Carmelites or White friars began as a group of hermits living on Mount Carmel in Palestine in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. The Arab reconquest of the Holy Land in the thirteenth century pushed these hermits back towards Europe, and they established Carmelite provinces in Cyprus, Sicily and England, the latter in 1242. This change of location gradually brought about a change in purpose as the hermits became friars, with a new mendicant Rule authorised by Pope Innocent IV in 1247. The early Carmelites brought their eremitic lifestyle with them to Europe, setting up small rural monasteries, for example, at Hulne in Northumberland and Aylesford in Kent. But the change of status from hermit to friar soon brought about a move from country to town and most Carmelite houses from the second half of the thirteenth century onwards were urban friaries. The Carmelite friars became known as White friars in England thanks to the colour of their cloak, the main distinguishing feature when meeting a Carmelite outside his friary.

The English White friars probably established their London house in the late 1240s, although the evidence is not as clear as one would like. The late sixteenth-century historian John Stow, citing the early sixteenth-century Carmelite historian John Bale, says that the London White Friars was founded by the returning crusader Richard de Grey in 1241, and de Grey is also credited in a papal bull of 1254. Modern scholars have, however, suggested that his foundation could well post-date the order's new mendicant Rule of September 1247, which encouraged the new friars to look to the towns. Other evidence shows that the papal authorities were negotiating with the bishop of London in 1246 about the establishment of a friary; furthermore, Carmelite lists of houses place London chronologically before Cambridge, the latter given formal permission in November 1247. Our best guess is therefore to say that de Grey gave the friars their first plot of land for the London friary in about 1247.

The friary became a successful urban institution, housing sixty to eighty friars in the first half of the fourteenth century. Unusually among London's monastic houses, the numbers seem to have recovered quickly after the Black Death with seventy-eight friars identified here at the end of the century.

IN August 1553 England's experiment with religious reform and the country's uneasy shift to Protestantism came to an end with the entry of Queen Mary into London. It would only be a matter of time, surely, before the largely unwelcomed changes of the previous two decades – the break with Rome, the stripping of church decoration, the introduction of the vernacular common prayer book and the Dissolution of the Monasteries – would all be undone. The efforts of Mary, her husband Philip of Spain, the Privy Council and the new archbishop of Canterbury Reginald Pole successfully reversed some of those Protestant reforms in 1553 and 1554, bringing back traditional worship in churches and reuniting the English church with Rome. However, the Dissolution of the Monasteries could not be undone quite so quickly: too many powerful people – including many traditional Catholics – had paid good money for ex-monastic property and were not about to hand it back to the various monastic orders, although this was what Mary and Pole had originally intended. Mary and Pole therefore began the slow process of refounding monastic houses, beginning in London and the south-east of England. In 1555 they were able to endow and renew the house of Observant Franciscans at Greenwich and that of the London Carthusians, now moved to Sheen. The next year saw the re-establishment of the Black Friars at St Bartholomew's (the subject of this chapter) and the return of Benedictines to Westminster, followed by, in 1557, Dominican nuns returning to Dartford (initially to Kings Langley) and the Bridgettines to Syon. There was some discussion about the re-establishment of the London Grey Friars – in their old home – but it was not thought possible or desirable to close down the newly founded school and orphanage of Christ's Hospital, which had opened in 1552 in the old friary. The London Dominicans were, therefore, a significant part of a remarkably small group of religious men and women who returned to their vocation when the opportunity arose in Mary's reign, a very brief opportunity as it turned out.

The Dominican friars refounded their London house in 1556, not at their old cloister at the eponymous Blackfriars but 500 yards to the north-east in the former Augustinian canons’ house at St Bartholomew's.

Retrospect

THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT that Barry and Saramago conducted in their novels culminated in relief bordering on jubilation about the passing of the interregnum of immortality and the restoration of “normality.” The euphoria that the prospect of life without end had initially engendered had quickly faded anyway. So, after living through the various horrors of deathlessness, everybody appreciates “life as usual” more than ever before. This heightened awareness allows for an emerging understanding that it is the very limitation of the human life span that makes life worth living, as it offers an opportunity for self-knowledge and self-realization; as such, this limitation is even seen as an indication of death's benevolent or loving attitude to the living. And however different the worlds evoked by Barry and Saramago, they both demonstrate that the only way that the blessings of mortality can be recognized is through the nightmare of its absence. Reduced to such a thesis, the alternative is of course bland, nor does it come across as original, if one keeps in mind the rich variety of the literary treatments of immortality on earth since the eighteenth century (when enthusiasm for life without end was not exactly widespread). Even in a science-fiction thriller, James Gunn's The Immortals (1962), the reader is advised: “For immortality, you must surrender the right to live,” and in one of the most demanding novels of the twenty-first century, Pascal Mercier's Nachtzug nach Lissabon (2004; Night Train to Lisbon, 2008), there is an echo of it: “It would be hell, this paradise of immortality,” whereas “happiness,” even the happiness of living “for the day, … lives on the awareness of passing time, the idler is an adventurer in the face of death.” The philosophical sanction of this conclusion was formulated, with an eye for paradox, and a maximum of resonance, in 1973 by Bernard Williams, the originator of the professional discussion of immortality that is still going strong today: “Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless …; so, in a sense, death gives meaning to life.”

By the mid eighteenth century Bristol had firmly established itself as the ‘metropolis of the west’, servicing and receiving goods from a vast hinterland. Daniel Defoe foresaw this in his famous Tour of 1724, noting that Bristol merchants maintained carriers ‘to all the principal countries and towns from Southampton in the south, even to the banks of the Trent north; and tho’ they have no navigable river that way, yet they drive a very great trade though all these counties’. Grain came in from the Midlands and Wales, peas and beans from Gloucestershire, butter from west Wales and Glamorgan, eggs and poultry from Somerset. As far as industrial products were concerned, timber came down the Severn from the Forest of Dean, wool from Milford and Cardiff for local weavers and the Cotswolds, metal goods from the west Midlands, tin from Cornwall, copper from Anglesey. Such was the traffic that Bristol emerged as an entrepôt for raw materials, displacing other Severn and Channel ports, who tapped into its trade networks, both regional and Atlantic.

While nearly five hundred vessels linked Bristol to Africa, Europe and the New World, some nine hundred coastal vessels would sail the Avon each year by 1750. Indeed, coastal trade was very much the backbone of Bristol's metropolitan status. At the same time road traffic was important, for local supplies of coal, for the flow of goods to and from neighbouring counties, for the famers and hucksters who flocked to Bristol's two annual fairs.

In the eyes of many a civic booster, the five main roads in and out of Bristol were poor. What were needed were turnpikes, toll roads managed by boards of commissioners who would supplant the older system of statute labour whereby each parish was responsible for its section of the road. First introduced after the Restoration, turnpikes strove to make travel faster, safer, and over time substantially cheaper for commercial traffic. Bristol was among the towns that invested in turnpike trusts in the second wave of activity in the mid 1720s. Its act followed hard on those that linked the West Country woollen trades to vital supplies and expanding markets.

THE QUOTATION IN my title is taken from a lecture delivered by Seamus Heaney in Aberdeen in 2001 and published the following year. After making the claim for Beowulf that I quote, Heaney goes on to cite Bede's account of Ireland in the Preface to his Ecclesiastical History, as follows:

It is not entirely clear what Heaney means by this, but he seems to be suggesting that his translation has turned Beowulf into something distinctively Irish that will have, to judge from what he says elsewhere in his lecture, a healing, palliative effect, allowing Beowulf to be seen as part of a ‘Britannic’ body of literature which includes literature in the Celtic languages as well as English, and so contributing to increased understanding among the peoples of Ireland and its neighbouring islands. If this is indeed Heaney's claim, it is a large one, and I should like to question in this paper his competence to make it. I am not competent myself to discuss in detail the supposed ‘Irishness’ of Heaney's translation, though I would note that it has been pointed out, by one who is competent to do so, that ‘the use of Irish vocabulary’ in his translation is ‘actually quite limited’ (‘Irish vocabulary’ is meant here in the sense of words characteristic of Hiberno-English, some of them derived from the Irish language). What I shall do is concentrate on certain details of two of Heaney's translations with the following conviction in mind: that whatever innovations a translator intends to introduce into the work he is translating, he must approach the task of translation with a clear understanding of the syntactic and, where poetry is concerned, metrical workings of his original.

At the beginning of our period, Bristol was the major Atlantic port, poised to lead the slave trade and become England's ‘second city’. At the end of our period, the city was in flames. When the ultra-Tory Sir Charles Wetherell came to open the assizes in October 1831, having contemptuously dismissed Bristol's enthusiasm for political reform, he was met by protests and an escalating momentum of unrest that resulted in the burning and pillage of large sections of Queen Square and the opening of the gaols. Bristol's burgeoning middle class, thoroughly alienated from the corporation and its allies in the Merchant Venturers, stood by and watched. The more broadly based Bristol Political Union, the political arm of Reform, offered its help, but on condition that its institutional status be recognised. That offer was rejected by the closed corporation, and this rejection paved the way for dragoon repression more savage than that at Peterloo in 1819.

To a considerable extent this narrative frames our book. The broader context charts how a prosperous port with a civic identity strong enough to survive the politico-religious purges of the Restoration degenerated into a narrow, introspective oligarchy that failed the city politically and economically. This means that the book is in part about the power and limits of paternalism, or patron–client networks. Bristol's hierarchical structures worked as long as the economy was buoyant and certain rules about civic responsibility were respected. But Bristol's economy began to lose momentum after the American war and revealed significant structural weaknesses after the Napoleonic, when it proved difficult to tap into the new enterprises of industrial change. And Bristol's politics was a chequered story of new possibilities and arrested development, of the stifling effects of caucus agreements and compromised elections that debased civic freedoms and prompted oscillating bouts of cynicism and hope among the excluded. We found elements of radicalism in Bristol politics: during the American war, the French, and under the banner of Henry Hunt as the Napoleonic wars came to a close. But it proved impossible to fashion a coherent cross-class alliance for radical political reform. The hallmark of Bristol radicalism in this era was ultimately one of impotence.

In 1725 Daniel Defoe completed the second volume of his Tour, in which he took his readers down the Great West Road to Bristol. He had been to Bristol before and had contacts in the city, so his literary visit was not something he simply cobbled together from histories and travel books. Defoe was well aware of Bristol's reputation: ‘the greatest, richest, and the best port of Trade in Great Britain’, he declared, ‘London only excepted’. This was a pretty accurate assessment. Bristol had just surpassed Norwich in the provincial league tables, and was certainly the leading western port. With its expanding commerce to North America and the Caribbean it had surged ahead of other prominent early modern cities, such as York and Exeter, and remained the foremost provincial centre in England for the next half-century. The statistics for transatlantic trade also reveal that Bristol was well ahead of its rival ports. At the time Defoe was writing, Bristol's tonnage from mainland America was conspicuously higher than Liverpool and Glasgow. In 1725 fifty-five ships entered Bristol carrying 4417 tons of merchandise. The corresponding figures for Liverpool were fifteen and 1175, and for Glasgow, which was making strong inroads into the Chesapeake tobacco trade, twenty-six ships carrying 1625 tons. Bristol's trade in the Caribbean was even more impressive. Its cargoes of rum, sugar, indigo and logwood were greater than Liverpool, Whitehaven and Glasgow combined. And in the slave trade Bristol had outpaced London as the premier slave-trading port, sending forty-eight ships annually to Africa and delivering over 10,000 slaves to the West Indies. In the 1740s, Bristol's ships delivered 36,700 slaves to the plantations compared to Liverpool's 21,500 and London's 4800.

Visitors to Bristol were very aware of the hive of activity on the streets and quays. When Alexander Pope approached the city on his way to take the waters at Hotwell, he noted

`AMONG THE WOMEN who touched Beethoven's life, Marie Erdödy held a particular significance. Born Anna Marie Niczky, the seventeen-yearold Romanian became a countess upon marrying the Hungarian Count Peter Erdödy in 1796. She remained a countess even though by 1805 the couple had separated. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a prolific composer of some 1500 Lieder and an author of ‘intimate letters’ of musical journalism, spent the winter of 1808–09 in Vienna, where he attended soirées at Erdödy's residence. He described her as a ‘very small, pretty, delicate lady of twenty-five … afflicted since her first confinement with an incurable malady’, which rendered her bedridden for much of her life. A competent pianist, Marie was nevertheless forced to limp ‘from one pianoforte to another, her feet being still much swollen’, and yet, despite her infirmity, she maintained a cheerful disposition. The mother of three children, she is remembered today principally on account of her connection to Beethoven: she admired his music deeply and remained one of his most faithful friends and patrons. Whether or not their relationship ever tested the bounds of platonic warmth, Beethoven clearly found a kindred spirit in Marie, whom, according to Schindler, he fondly regarded as his Beichtvater, or father confessor.

In 1808, when Beethoven threatened to take up a position in Cassel under the newly installed King of Westphalia, Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte, the countess, along with Ignaz von Gleichenstein, negotiated an annuity for Beethoven subsidized by Archduke Rudolph and Princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky and helped persuade the composer to remain in Vienna. He accepted too her offer to take up lodging at her Krugerstrasse residence, although here their friendship suffered the breach that routinely, it seems, disrupted the majority of Beethoven's relationships. Upon learning that Erdödy had been paying his manservant ‘not inconsiderable sums of money’, Beethoven stormed out and took up rooms elsewhere. Happily, the rift with the countess repaired itself, and their relationship was restored. Subsequently Beethoven honored her in 1808 with the dedication of the two Piano Trios Op. 70, composed while he was living under her roof.