IN its long history, Three Choirs has not always sailed in untroubled waters. In the nineteenth century it sometimes appeared that the Festival was steering an uncertain course between the opposing fleets of High and Low Church, and in danger of foundering upon the rocks thrown up by those who sought to banish it from the cathedrals altogether.

It is difficult for us to imagine that a music festival should generate controversy and rancour; but Three Choirs is as inseparable from the cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester as religion was from nineteenth-century England. It was religion, the Christian religion, which permeated every aspect of life: political, educational, social, artistic and scientific. Some discord was inevitable.

One of King George IV's subjects whose opposition to the Festival was expressed almost as strongly as his protest against the way in which the country was being governed, was the Radical reformer William Cobbett. For a decade after the rout of Napoleon at Waterloo, depression and political reaction gripped England. Poverty and distress were widespread. Between 1822 and 1826 Cobbett made a number of journeys through the southern counties, on horseback, to see for himself the condition of the people and the changes in the countryside. His arrival at Gloucester in 1826, recorded in his diary account, Rural Rides, coincided with Three Choirs.

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING of Heiner Muller's literary career, we can identify a concern with questions regarding democracy both within and outside the theater. His first major theatrical text, Der Lohndrücker, written in 1956–57 and published in the May 1957 edition of the East German literary monthly Neue Deutsche Literatur, is no exception. The play proved hugely successful, helping to launch the young Muller's career. Even two months before its publication, the dramaturgical staff at the Deutsches Theater indicated interest in staging the text, which, according to head dramaturge Heinar Kipphardt, demonstrated new dramatic talent. Work on Der Lohndrücker also gained Muller and his wife at that time, Inge Muller, the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1959, allegedly because of Walter Ulbricht's own initiative, before it began to feature on East German school syllabuses in 1961. While the text seemed to have initially gained a seal of institutional approval in the GDR, it examines the conditions surrounding the building of socialism in the GDR from a critical perspective, questioning the distinctly Soviet shape of East German socialism. The notion of Produktion (production) is key to unlocking the politics of Der Lohndrücker, as it sets out to harness the productive, interpretive capabilities of its individual audience members. And in turn, the generation of differing interpretations serves to produce what Muller calls “das neue Publikum” (L, 116; the new audience, TB, 28). This is a new democratic audience that differs from the official conception of the public in the GDR. As the text suggests, this was a public whose own myriad German histories had been silenced for the sake of the “Sovietization” of the young state and its political machinery.

The play focuses on a nationalized factory, or Volkseigener Betrieb (VEB), in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany in 1948–49. Production is threatened as the kilns required for manufacturing materials are in desperate need of repair. One mason within the factory, Balke, rises to the challenge of repairing the kilns under dangerous conditions, and he develops a new technique for doing so, so as not to hinder the factory's productivity.

THIS book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Three Choirs: A History of the Festival, researched and written between 1989 and 1991, and published by Alan Sutton in 1992. Now, a quarter of a century later, further research has enabled me to revise and amplify the early chapters; to throw additional light upon the origins of the Festival; to rewrite Chapter 22; and to add Chapter 23, covering the period from 1992 to 1999, years during which I was personally involved as Festival Secretary/Administrator at Gloucester. However, rather than attempting to write about the twenty-first-century Festivals myself, I turned to Dr Paul Hedley for assistance in the preparation of this new edition. Paul, who took on the job of central management in 2008, has written an account of the Festival during the years from 2000, thereby completing this history of Three Choirs up to its tercentenary year, which was celebrated in 2015.

The complete list of works performed in the cathedrals and other principal venues at the Festival, formerly collated by the late Christian Wilson, were published in the 1992 edition of this book. Henceforth, in order to give readers access to the latest version of the Annals, it is intended that detailed listings will be updated periodically and hosted on the Three Choirs Festival website.

Between 1989 and 1990, I had set out to contact as many people with Three Choirs connections as possible, and they and numerous others assisted me in a variety of ways. My very first telephone call was to Harold Watkins Shaw (who preferred to be known as Watkins Shaw). His excellent book The Three Choirs Festival, published in 1954, set the bar high for any writer contemplating following in his footsteps, and I confess to having been rather nervous about approaching him, and concerned that he might have viewed me as an interloper in his sphere of expertise. However, my fears proved to be groundless: he invited me to visit his Worcestershire home, where he and Mrs Shaw welcomed me most warmly and where he was only too pleased to talk openly during a long, informative and helpful discussion.

In this important and innovative book, Gaim Kibreab examines one of the most secretive states in the world, Eritrea, through the prism provided by its system of ‘national service’, which subjects a very large proportion of the population, and especially the youth, to an indefinite period under the control of the state. Drawing both on the analysis of reports in the country's state-controlled media, and especially on interviews with a large and varied number of refugees who have – at the risk of their lives – fled from Eritrea, he is able to provide an insight into many aspects of Eritrean life that have hitherto evaded the attention of researchers. In many ways, the findings of the study confirm what might have been expected. Even though two of the key objectives of national service have been to strengthen the country's defensive capabilities and promote its economic development – its official title is the ‘Warsai-Yikealo Development Campaign’ – the actual effects have been quite the opposite. An army of disgruntled conscripts is unable to replicate the heroism and sense of purpose that drove the epic liberation struggle that culminated in Eritrea's independence in 1991, while the impact on ‘development’ has been disastrous. Particularly important here is the impact on subsistence agriculture and the complex survival mechanisms that have enabled families to spread their risks in an extremely uncertain environment. The gender equality that characterised the liberation struggle has given way to the widespread exploitation of women within the national service system. Yet it is a tribute to the professionalism of the research – in a field often marked by a high level of partisanship on either side – that the author shows how some of the objectives of national service have been achieved. In particular, it has indeed served to promote an enhanced level of national identity and helped to bridge ethnic and religious differences within a country with nine distinct ethnic groups, divided roughly equally between Christianity and Islam. This is ground-breaking research, essential to the understanding of modern Eritrea, and with much to teach us beyond its boundaries.

THE grim austerity of post-war Britain – shortages of food, petrol and paper, the continued requisitioning of city hotels, and greatly increased costs – could easily have deterred the Hereford Three Choirs Committee from embarking upon a resumption of the Festival in 1946. Percy Hull, the Hereford Cathedral Organist, was confident that all of the problems could be overcome, but there were pessimistic voices at a meeting of Stewards and supporters held on 27 October 1945. Once again the Festival was saved by the needs of the charity, whose fortunes at Hereford, according to Prebendary P. A. Lushington, were ‘absolutely on the rocks’.1 The Deans of Gloucester and Worcester made vigorous appeals for more faith, and further support came from Sir Ivor Atkins. But when the question was put to the meeting, several people refused to vote. The decision to hold a Festival in Hereford was carried by about twenty-five votes to six. A new secretary, Mr T. O. D. (Tom) Steel, was appointed and the dust blown from the programme planned for the abandoned Festival of 1939, which was used to form the basis of the revival. Detailed preparations went ahead and were well advanced when, just three months before the start of the Festival, came a major blow.

Percy Hull, who had been unwell since the beginning of 1946, now suffered a nervous breakdown. Hull's doctors were unable to predict how soon he would be well enough to resume his duties, and advised him that the organisers should be prepared for his complete absence from the Festival. At an emergency committee meeting held on 7 June 1946 it was resolved to ask Sir George Dyson to accept the position of deputy conductor for the Festival. The next day he travelled to Hereford and addressed the committee:

This chapter uses the perceptions of the respondents and key informants to examine the extent to which the Eritrean National Service (ENS) has contributed to the development of Eritrea's fighting and defence capability. The factors that have contributed to the failure of the ENS to build an efficient and capable defence and fighting capability are also discussed. We saw in Chapter 2 that participation in national service engenders a powerful sense of patriotism, inducing the affected not only to surrender their interests but also their lives in defence of the nation and the common good (Montesquieu 1989 [1748]; Hart 1994; Farar-Hockley cited in Board 2006). Contrary to these views, some of the respondents who served in the ENS before they fled believed that a country's military manpower and its fighting capability could not be built through coercion, blackmail and intimidation. The construction of a robust military manpower and an effective fighting capability, in their view, is a function of the readiness and wholehearted dedication of members of the armed forces or, in this case, of conscripts. The large majority said that although most of the conscripts were ready and willing to defend and die for their country, this initial powerful predisposition vanished after the ENS degenerated into forced labour. As one respondent put it succinctly, ‘The ENS cannot build Eritrea's fighting capability as long as it remains compulsory’ (R #106). Another respondent said, ‘An armed force that is kept by force against its will for ten years or more cannot build the fighting capability of the country’ (R #147). Not only are the conscripts forced to serve against their will indefinitely, but also noncompliance is punished by detention and torture. Human Rights Watch (HRW), for example, states, ‘National service keeps most young Eritreans in perpetual bondage’ and ‘[t]orture and other abuses during detention are routine.

ON MAY 24, 2016, SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENED. Austria was on the front pages of several British national newspapers, including the Times and the Guardian. The reason was the narrow victory of Alexander Van der Bellen, an independent candidate and former leader of Die Grünen (Austrian Green Party), against the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party) candidate, Norbert Hofer, in the second round of the Austrian presidential election, held on May 22, 2016. Van der Bellen had won the election by the narrowest of margins, by only 30,863 votes, getting 50.3 percent of the total vote, with Hofer polling at 49.7 percent. The election was effectively decided by the 759.968 postal voters, making up almost 14 percent of the electorate, whose votes were counted on the day after the Sunday, May 22, election. For an Austrian presidential election to be decided by postal votes in this way was a highly unusual occurrence. Ordinarily, the winning candidate is able to gain enough of a majority for the postal vote count on the following day to be largely a formality, with the winner announced already on the Sunday evening. On this occasion, the end of the election day saw Hofer lead at 51.9 percent (with Van der Bellen at 48.1 percent), while pollsters from the SORA Institute for Social Research and Consulting predicted the final result (including postal votes), to stand at circa 50 percent and 50 percent for the respective candidates, with everything still to play for. The presidential election saw the candidates of the ruling political parties, the Social Democratic Party of Austria and the Austrian People's Party, eliminated in the first round, with Norbert Hofer, the farright Austrian Freedom Party candidate, winning this first heat with 35,1 percent of the votes. It was an election that polarized the country, rural against urban areas, male voters against female voters, young against old, and divided those communities where the vote reflected the national picture of a near fifty-fifty split of votes for the two candidates.

MICHAEL Kennedy's essay ‘Musings on the Three Choirs’ has already been mentioned. Published in the programme book of the 1997 Festival at Hereford, it embraced Kennedy's reflections on Three Choirs past and present and, as the twentieth century drew ever closer towards the twenty-first, posed a few timely and pertinent questions about repertoire. Kennedy also looked back to Elgar's involvement with the Festival, considered the steady decline in the great man's reputation in London during the composer's lifetime, but pointed out that, in spite of this, ‘in his own West Country [Elgar] was sovereign in his kingdom’. Kennedy then moved on to write of that other undisputed ‘giant personality’, Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose Three Choirs association lasted unbroken (except for two world wars) from 1911 to 1957: ‘Where Elgar was autocratic’, wrote Kennedy, ‘Vaughan Williams was democratic.’ Kennedy himself had been in Worcester in 1954:

In the context of Ede's religiously plural society, religious identification is both a producer and a product of distinct corporate and social identities. But religion is not reduced to its social function: it offers a wide range of visions of personal and community success. While some visions focus on exclusive religious practice, the general emphasis on good relations between members of different religions confirms that at the personal level, religious difference is not necessarily understood as a problem. This chapter explores the way in which the embrace of both Islam and Christianity has shaped the life of one of Ede's prominent families. It illustrates in what way religious plurality – rather than a privileging of one or the other religion – also contains the possibility for the creation of successful institutions, and by implication offers a vision of the town as religiously diverse rather than explicitly Muslim.

While the study of Yoruba kinship and family relations has a long history, it has traditionally focused on the lineage system, the relative importance of the paternal lineage and the importance of shared residence in compounds for the making of family ties. Though a close study of politics in any Yoruba town illustrates that family ties are often fluid and dependent on context, Karin Barber has emphasised the importance of human agency, and creativity, in the drawing and redrawing of family boundaries. Equally, the importance of Islam in confirming and mediating kinship has been discussed in chapter 5. And while several authors note that many Yoruba extended families have both Muslim and Christian members (as well as often some traditionalists), the way in which family relationships may be structured in order to transcend religious difference has not been investigated in detail.

Most extended families in Ede are shaped by the control of family elders and leaders over practices within the house and, especially in the old or indigenous Ede families, the control of practices in the compound. House or compound rules apply to direct descendants of the family, wives married into it and tenants on family land, although they may do so in different degrees. As described in chapter 5, most of Ede's families and compounds have a strong religious identity, and the elders’ control of compound and family affairs includes the limitation of religious activities that challenge their religion.

FOR the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, Britain was the unchallenged supplier of the world's goods, skills and services. Although one-third of the people lived in a residuum of wretched poverty, the nation as a whole attracted unprecedented wealth, as a result of which the finest foreign singers were drawn to London opera houses and concert halls to perform alongside the best British artists.

At a time when the radio and the gramophone were less than dreams, a public hungry for music was prepared to pay high prices for opera and concert tickets, and national and international celebrity singers could demand huge fees for their appearances. At the end of the London season each year, these stars would tour the country, singing at regional music festivals such as Leeds, Liverpool, Norwich, Birmingham and Three Choirs.

To enable provincial concert-goers to see and to hear as many of their renowned favourites as possible, it was customary for the solo parts of a work performed at Three Choirs to be divided between a first and second singer of the same voice, the former receiving a higher fee than the latter. Not surprisingly, this division sometimes led to rivalry and to contractual problems.

In addition to singing in performances of sacred works in the cathedrals, the same stars would take part in the evening Miscellaneous Concerts in secular venues. To modern tastes these concerts would seem to have been overlong and indigestible mixtures of operatic arias, ballads, humorous songs and instrumental and orchestral pieces. However, they gave people living in rural communities the occasional opportunity to experience a cross-section of the entertainment enjoyed regularly by their compatriots in London. To them it seemed not the least bit incongruous that, as at Gloucester in 1847, Marietta Alboni should share the bill with, among others, John Parry – a comic singer and ‘shaker of sides’ – and that following Alboni's performances of operatic arias and duets with the great bass Joseph Staudigl, Parry was ‘received uproariously, was in uproarious humour, and was uproariously encored in both his ingenious pasticcios’.

IT was on an afternoon in early June 2015, while working on final preparations for the Hereford Festival, that the Three Choirs management were invited to attend a meeting at the London residence of the Festival's president, the Prince of Wales. Despite knowing very little about what would be discussed, there was no doubt that the invitation would augur something quite significant.

The Chief Executive and his assistant found themselves, some days later, in a beautiful room in Clarence House with a surprising number of others, including representatives from the Prince's staff and senior members of the firm that runs events at Buckingham Palace. In short, it transpired that Prince Charles was offering to recognise the tercentenary of the Festival by hosting a performance in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace. In terms of the numbers of performers, this would be perhaps the largest concert ever held in that space. Organising the event was to prove hugely challenging, and required much dedicated work; but the result was extremely successful from all angles.

Organising a concert in any such significant space is never straightforward, but the challenge of doing so with a massed choir of 300, an invited audience in excess of 400 (all of whom had to be vetted), and a little-used historic organ was immense. Very early in the planning the decision was taken to involve all of the Festival's ‘in house’ choirs – massed chorus, cathedral choirs and Youth Choir – who would each perform alone and together in a programme intended to capture the nature of the Festival, past and present. Logistically, it was no small feat to transplant such a large number of performers to London, particularly given the Prince's wish to spend time with each group of performers following the concert. Little rehearsal time was available – a constraint which impacted significantly upon the assistant organists, who were required to adapt extremely quickly to a difficult instrument. The Palace organ pre-dates such modern niceties as registrations, and so three organists were required at any one time: one organist playing, one selecting stops to his left, and one selecting stops to his right.

THROUGHOUT the eighteenth century the music of Handel had dominated Three Choirs and, supreme among all his works, Messiah remained safely anchored to the Festivals for the whole of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. It was a brave S. S. Wesley who, in his first Festival as conductor at Hereford (1834), dared to present only a selection from Messiah instead of the whole work – an experiment which he was not allowed to repeat. However, the Handelian domination did slowly subside as successive Festival conductors, by patient persistence, gradually stimulated the appetites of their provincial audiences to accept a more varied oratorio diet. The turning point came in 1800(W).

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) had attended the Handel Festival at Westminster Abbey in 1791. The experience had an enormous effect upon him. After one performance of Messiah he said of Handel: ‘He is the master of us all’, and, as a result of this festival, began to consider the possibility of composing an oratorio of his own. Haydn completed The Creation in 1798. The work occupied him for two whole years, of which time he said, ‘Never before was I so devout as when I composed The Creation. I knelt down each day to pray to God to give me strength for my work.’ When urged to bring it to a conclusion, he calmly replied, ‘I spend much time over it, because I intend it to last a long time.’

The Creation was published in 1800, performed in London in March, and heard for only the third time in England at the Worcester Music Meeting of that year. The individuality of Haydn's genius was not at first fully understood by Three Choirs audiences nurtured on the style of Handel, but selections from The Creation became ever more popular as the century progressed.

With its depictions of ploughing, felling, shaping and refining, the Exeter Book riddle collection offers us an insight into the way the Anglo-Saxons perceived their relationship with the rest of creation. In the riddles, humanity is seen taking from the natural world and using its resources to create weapons, clothes, food and other objects for human use. These depictions, with their apparent emphasis on nature's usefulness to mankind, led Frederick Tupper to make the following observation in his 1910 edition of the riddles:

There is, however, another, far less anthropocentric, way to read the riddles. Whilst it is true that the riddles depict ‘man and his works’, often remarking on their subjects’ usefulness to humans,or else using the familiar human world as a point of orientation within a vast, overwhelming cosmos, the riddles also offer an alternative, ecocentric view of their subjects, one that considers the natural origins of manmade products and the individual integrity and personal plight of these useful human resources. In this book, I argue that there is a programme of resistance to anthropocentrism at work in the riddle collection, whereby the riddles challenge human-centred ways of depicting the created world. In doing so, I forge new pathways into riddle analysis and interpretation, drawing on ecocriticism and ecotheology to offer insights into a largely underdeveloped area of Old English scholarship.