Shortly after returning to Paris from Kristiania and the premiere of On the Mountains, Delius moved to a small apartment in the Petit-Montrouge quarter, bounded by Montrouge to the south and Montparnasse to the north. After a few years in rural surroundings, he was now in a densely populated workingclass neighbourhood to which many young artists were moving.

Some notion of Delius's personality and appearance at that time is to be gained through the eyes of those who observed him. Artist Jelka Rosen, his future wife, gives us this portrait:

The English composer Isidore de Lara was also in Paris and found Delius ‘ascetic and unworldly’, but, on getting better acquainted, concluded: ‘I never saw a man with such irresistible will, and as it is directed with intelligence, he is sure to come to the front. […] He seems to have the working capacities of a brewer's horse.’ Delius was still living on allowances from his father in Bradford and his uncle in Paris, and could rarely allow himself luxuries. ‘His means were very small, and he cooked his own meals’, recalled de Lara. ‘I have often dined with him in his room on a couple of eggs.’ A young English-American pianist, Harold Bauer, lived nearby, and half a century later his encounter with Delius was still clear in his memory:

ALI AND NINO IS A CURIOUS and most probably a rather rare example of a literary text both wittily denouncing Orientalist imagery tied to Western cultural hegemony while simultaneously weaving a tight net of Orientalist stereotypes itself when it comes to religion, gender, and race. If Edward Said had known of the novel, he would, without a doubt, have included it in his analysis to show how literary works have contributed to the emergence of the discourse of Orientalism. Also, he could have praised Ali and Nino as a predecessor of his own enterprise to critique European cultural hegemony and its basis in Orientalism. Precisely these two facets of Orientalism in Kurban Said's novel deserve a deeper analysis. I will show that the author's unmasking of Orientalism as a strategy of power is connected to an attempt to demonstrate European and Russian cultural dominance while simultaneously trying to get rid of this hegemony. However, in Ali and Nino 's treatment of masculinity and femininity, religion, and race, Orientalist stereotypes play a crucial role.

The Critique of European and Russian Cultural Hegemony and the Advocacy for Cultural Relativism

Seen through the prism of Orientalism, Ali and Nino consistently lays bare the functioning of Western claims to cultural superiority involving the construction of an inferior East. The hilarious opening scene of the novel depicting a geography lesson at the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku goes in this direction. The professor tells the pupils about the geographically undefined status of Baku, lying in between Europe and Asia, with “a self-satisfied smile on his lips” (4; Der Professor lächelte selbstgefällig, 5), introducing a clear hierarchy between the two geographical areas: “It can therefore be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia” (3–4; Es hängt also gewissermaßen von Ihrem Verhalten ab, meine Kinder, ob unsere Stadt zum fortschrittlichen Europa oder zum rückständigen Asien gehören soll, 5). The pupils are first overwhelmed and then rebel. First, Ali's friend Mehmed Haidar states that he prefers to belong to Asia, and then Ali joins him (4/6).

As recently as May 2011 the London newspapers reminded us that Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust ‘really isn't an opera at all’, but rather an ‘unstageable’ work, ‘never intended for the opera house’. Such cautions and qualifications have followed the work since its first theatrical staging in Monte Carlo in 1893, a popular success that inspired imitations in England, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands during the next decade and which was revived in Paris during the Berlioz centenary celebrations of 1903. At various stages of its composition Berlioz called it a ‘drame de concert’, an ‘opéra de concert’ and an ‘opéralégende’, finally settling on ‘légende dramatique’, a designation that raises more questions than it answers with its contradictory evocations of the private, internal activity of reading and the public, collective activity of drama. Daniel Albright dubs it a ‘semi-opera’, reconciling the presence of some operatic features – a libretto divided into scenes, dialogue, stage directions, soloists and choruses giving voice to characters in a discernible story – with the absence of others, such as costumes, sets, stage action and dramatic continuity. One may make an analogy between this musical légende dramatique and the literary ‘closet drama’, a play to be read rather than enacted, seen and heard. Although Berlioz's légende dramatique is performed audibly rather than read silently, and although it takes place in public before a collective audience rather than being consumed privately, it similarly evokes action and character in the imagination rather than through picture and gesture. As an unstaged drama for the ‘mental theatre’, it claims unique capacities to transcend physical and material limits.

The first Paris staging of La Damnation de Faust in 1903, a revival of the production originally created ten years earlier in Monte Carlo by impresario Raoul Gunsbourg, thus raises aesthetic questions about the relationships between music, staging, materiality and embodiment, and also historical questions about the French musical canon and musical identity and Berlioz's place in those systems. But where does the story of Gunsbourg's production and its Paris reception truly begin? In the spirit of Goethe's Faust, I will begin with three brief Prologues to the main action.

Prior to 1919, Delius had been to Norway sixteen times, but only once in consecutive summers (1898 and 1899). From 1919 to 1923, however, he and Jelka spent four of the five summers in the country, the last three of them in Lesjaskog, first planning for, then enjoying a secluded life in their own cottage. The story of these visits becomes gradually less and less about ‘light summer nights & all the poetry & melancholy of the Northern summer’, and more about the rapid deterioration in Delius's health. With the advance of his disease and paralysis, many admirable and attractive traits of Delius's personality were curtailed, ‘collateral damage’ in his battle to preserve the innermost core of himself. The commentators who got to know the composer in this period have left us some of the best known and, unfortunately, prevailing descriptions of him as an abrasive and difficult individualist. Before embarking on these years, then, it would be timely to quote from some of the many people who, prior to his illness, were irresistibly drawn towards his light.

ANCHORITES live a life in solitude. Solitude and community seem to be in opposition to one another; indeed, many early Christians withdrew from Roman society, a society founded on city life, in order to live in solitude in the desert. But this was not a total rejection of all society; as more Christians were attracted to the desert, monasteries formed, and although they remained removed from mainstream society, this withdrawal took place with the support of a community. For Cassian (d. 435), one of the first Christian ‘anchorites’, his period in the desert was a training for his vocation, which involved establishing monastic communities in France for men and women in the fifth century. In the sixth century, Benedict (d. c. 547) described anchorites as monks who, having been trained in the community, were able to pursue a solitary vocation. This type of interdependent relationship between solitaries and communities continued throughout the Middle Ages in complex and multivalent ways – as essays in this collection serve to illustrate. However, as many contemporary scholars have begun to point out, there is no impenetrable firewall between the Middle Ages and the modern period and while we inevitably study the Middle Ages through the prism of our present age, that study can also illuminate our own communities and societies.

Margaret Thatcher's infamous declaration in 1987 that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and David Cameron's more recent idea of a ‘Big Society’ suggest a continuing interest and concern with the notion of society, what it means for individuals living within – or rejected by – that society, especially in the face of the expanding and constantly evolving societies and their communities now generated by explosions in digital and communications technologies, the internet and myriad new media platforms in recent years. Every day, sizeable and world-changing global communities are being produced by countless individuals in communication with countless other individuals, whether in densely packed urban centres or remote, isolated settlements; in busy airports and internet cafes or small, single bedsits. More than ever before, or so the story goes, whilst frequently physically alone, individuals are nevertheless grouping together to form – and find strength in – new communities and societies worldwide.

Goethe's Faust was profoundly important for Richard Wagner. He knew of it as a young boy and read it as a teenager; he composed songs, ‘Seven Compositions on Goethe's Faust’ (1829–30), probably in conjunction with the appearance of his sister, Rosalie, as Gretchen, in the first Leipzig production. Wagner suppressed these student works; they were first published posthumously. Unlike numerous contemporaries, Wagner never attempted an operatic or oratorical setting of the play; his single mature work on Faust, A Faust Overture, is seldom performed. Its composition and early reception, however, bear witness to its significance for Wagner as work and as subject matter. Its reception history documents its contribution to the development of programmatic orchestral music and the midcentury debates about it, and its place in the critical discourse on the play. And the many commentaries by Wagner on Faust and Goethe express his continuing, not uncritical fascination with the play and its author.

The Faust Overture: ‘Urfaust’ (1840) and Revision (1855)

Wagner composed a symphonic movement in d minor in December 1839 to January 1840 in Paris, as the first movement of a planned ‘Faust’ Symphony. He sketched a ‘Gretchen’ theme (manuscript entry) for a second movement, but then abandoned the idea of a symphony, writing to Meyerbeer of an ‘Ouvertüre, Faust, erster Teil’. With Meyerbeer's help a performance was arranged in February 1841, but Wagner decided instead on an earlier work, the overture ‘Columbus’. Wagner's hope for a rehearsal performance by the Paris Conservatory Orchestra was not realized.

The movement is in sonata form, with a weighty slow introduction and an extensive coda. The introduction begins by stating a rhetorically weighty rhythmic-melodic ‘Grundgestalt’ (bars 1–5) that underlies the initial ideas of both thematic-tonal groups in the sonata movement (bars 34ff and 120ff, respectively) and frequently appears in thematic extensions and developmental sections. Moreover, the incipits of these themes are first stated in the introduction (bars 10–12 and 21–23 respectively), which presents several other important motivicrhythmic ideas (e.g. the sixteenth-note groups first heard in bar 5).

THE Second World War had a significant political and social impact on the British colony of Kenya. The 1941 propaganda film ‘War Comes to Kenya’ offered an almost idyllic portrayal of an imperial territory that had become a key strategic base and a centre for the production of food and raw materials. While white settlers joined the Kenya Regiment to help fight against the Axis forces in neighbouring Italian East Africa, their wives, daughters and native labour remained at home to run the all-important farms providing much needed supplies for the war effort. This was, in part, true, although the actual story of the military campaign was much more complicated, and the apparent calm and tranquillity of the home front was not quite as all-encompassing as was suggested. Kenya had, however, proven itself an excellent location to assemble and train military forces, and it acted as a major logistics centre, helping sustain the British Empire's second global conflict in less than thirty years.

This now important colonial territory was established formally in 1895 when the East African Protectorate was declared. This remained for more than twenty-five years until June 1920, when Kenya became a crown colony with a governor appointed to represent the monarch. At the beginning of the First World War there were estimated to be several million native Africans and nearly 20,000 Asians but fewer than 4000 Europeans living alongside them. At the time of the 1926 census, the first set of official figures showed there were in fact 12,529 Europeans in Kenya and 2.5 million Africans and, by the outbreak of the Second World War, the gap had widened considerably, with approximately 21,000 Europeans and nearly 4.5 million Africans. For the most part, white settlers came from the ‘gentlemanly stratum’, hence the description of the colony as ‘the officers’ mess’. For one Kikuyu chief it was ‘an island of white settlers surrounded by much larger African and Asiatic population groups’.

How should Ernest Newman be remembered? Had he become a ‘sour old cynic’ in his old age, as Vera Newman feared? Or was he a forward thinker, a progressive biographer? Was he mean-spirited for his sometime confrontational arguments with his readers and rivals? Is he remembered as a naïve and cantankerous old-school positivist, harbouring utopian dreams for an unrealizable system of principles in history, criticism and biography?

In the course of writing this book, I have pondered these questions many times. If Newman was a sour old cynic, he was merely being consistent. His cynicism is evident early in his career in A Study of Wagner (1899), where he cast doubt on the quality of Wagner's prose works. His damning biography of Franz Liszt was certainly a low point in his career. But should one careless book tarnish the reputation and legacy of a scholar whose other works were generally successful and highly regarded?

One of Newman's greatest legacies is ‘The Word of Music’ column for the Sunday Times that, by all accounts, was a highlight of that paper. Newman often wrote affectionately of his audience—‘the plain man’, as he termed it— but he sometimes railed against his readers, thinking them stupid and ignorant. He stopped writing articles on the physiology of criticism from the early 1920s, on the grounds that his readers could not get to grips with his argument. Newman's confrontations with his rivals make for amusing reading, and his stubbornness (some might say arrogance) was often on display. He rarely backed down from a tussle and he always had the last say. He never admitted he was wrong, and certainly never apologized. His fiery exchange with Robertson in the late 1890s is a case in point. But Newman made something of a blood sport of these heady confrontations. He loved a literary spectacle, a good fight.

It is not surprising that Newman lacked sympathy for much of the music composed in his own lifetime. His first love was the romantics and the neo-romantics. It is surprising, though, that he kept his job on the Sunday Times for so long, considering his blind spot for most French music, new music and his resistance to technology. But Newman had become an institution, and institutions are sometimes difficult to refurbish.

The early Middle Ages was a period of great monastic expansion all over Iberia, but it was the patronage of a magnate family that set certain monasteries apart from smaller institutions. In Galicia, riches and political influence are most synonymous with the family that founded Celanova, as many of the charters of the Tumbo attest. Particularly revealing in this respect is a charter dating to the spring of 934, which describes how Rosendo and his siblings oversaw the division of the family inheritance, much of which would later enlarge the holdings of Celanova, founded just two years later. Even at this stage the family portfolio consisted of dozens of estates, stretching from the northernmost tip of Galicia to the Coimbra region of Portugal, creating a patrimony vast in size and geographical spread. Yet it was not just the scale of these holdings that Rosendo and his family were keen to emphasise: the charter's commissioners were at pains to reveal that some of this property had been acquired in the ninth century, and that longstanding family interest underpinned its procurement. The tenth century would see this story of relentless patrimonial growth continue thanks to formalised and targeted campaigns of acquisition by Celanova, and while the parameters of wider society would change in response to the monastery's increasingly assertive presence, the Tumbo also captures something of this society's attempts to right wrongs for the common good. It is the governing structures that made these attempts possible.

Governing, like business, was a family affair in early medieval Galicia. But while business was the calling of the world at large, governing was more properly the province of its richest families. Portela Silva and Pallares Méndez have whittled down the major families of the region to just four, all of them implicated in the government of the region to a greater or lesser degree, but there can be little doubt that the family recorded in the colmellum divisionis of 934 was the most powerful in ninth- and tenth-century Galicia. To understand something of how this came to be we must recognise that the sources of the family's power were not solely to be found in buying land and receiving it in gift: they were also located in an appetite for political manoeuvring abundantly evidenced in the surviving source material.