Future highlights of the careers of many who appeared on stage in 1924, including Evelyn Laye, Florence Mills and Adele and Fred Astaire, are summarized, as are the legacies of musicals such as Kid Boots, Il paese dei campenelli, Madame Pompadour, Gräfin Mariza, Rose-Marie and The Student Prince on stage and screen.

In the decades since his death, Debussy has become a cultural icon – a symbol of music’s modernity. He has been immortalised by a monument in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, a museum in his hometown of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and a bust in the Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique. His portrait even appeared on a twenty-franc banknote. Over the past few years, Debussy’s stock has only risen. In 2011, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini ranked him the fifth greatest composer of all time, behind Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert. This chapter ranges widely over many aspects of Debussy’s reputation and legacy.

The chapter examines Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It focusses on the policy pressures and dynamics shaping BBC music broadcasting, and interrelationships between those and the creation, promotion, dissemination, consumption, and reception of Vaughan Williams’s music, reflecting on the ways in which a range of public and quasi-public bodies dedicated to the production and promotion of ‘national’ culture created a distinct political dynamic to the ‘field of cultural production’ in Britain in the period from the foundation of the BBC in 1922 through the interwar, war, and postwar years. It argues that this context and relationship is foundational for understanding his work, style, and reception, and invites (re)consideration of the role of authorial agency and authorial voice in reception history.

In this essay, we survey the history of Either/Or’s English language reception in order to contextualize the importance of the Critical Guide’s contribution to current discussions of Kierkegaard.

The transformation of Beach’s reputation from an almost-forgotten relic of a bygone era to one of the most highly regarded American Romantic composers provides a case study in reception history. Her “renaissance” resulted from determined advocacy on two fronts: scholarly research and musical performance. In scholarship, the University of New Hampshire and the Library of Congress have assembled formidable archival collections, while Adrienne Fried Block and a bevy of dissertation writers have worked to shed light on Beach’s life and works through publications and conferences. In the performance realm, pianists Virginia Eskin, Mary Louise Boehm, and Joanne Polk have worked tirelessly to introduce her music to the public in concerts and recordings. Several recent documentary films confirm her appeal as a subject and her status in American cultural history.

The manner in which Die Zauberflöte established itself as a cultural icon in late-eighteenth-century German society is remarkable. It permeated daily life in countless ways: fashion, pet naming, board games, risqué party entertainments, mechanical toys, children’s playlets, and whistling birds. While this represents the escapism of the opera’s fairy-tale plot, darker strands are woven into the fabric of its early reception. It swept across Europe during a period of bloody revolutionary war, and all sides made use of it in their political propaganda. Papageno was ensconced at the heart of the Prussian military establishment when one of his tunes was added to the carillon of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche. At the same time, his music, under the banner of freedom, entered the republican song repertoire. After Napoleon’s cataclysmic defeat near Leipzig in 1814, a satirist was quick to wish him a derisory farewell as he sailed back across the Rhine. What better choice than the language of the opera: auf wiedersehen!

This chapter situates Smith scholarship in a long historical view. It highlights the kaleidoscopic nature of reading and writing about Smith from the eighteenth century to the present. A brief survey of the early reception of Smith’s works in the anglophone world demonstrates how and why Smith was initially read as a practical resource before being transformed into an intellectual and political authority. Interpretive problems like “Das Adam Smith Problem” and the Chicago School Smith, introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then became starting points for critical and revisionist historiography. Contemporary scholarship has been marked by several distinctive features: an increasing interest in Smith as a philosophical thinker, the centrality of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, engagements with Smith to proliferate new defenses and critiques of liberalism, and the reformulation of older categories of analysis. I suggest that the ambiguity and contestability of Smith’s intentions as well as the slipperiness of the conceptual categories that he inspired have engendered shifting meanings, emergent problematics, and the enduring political relevance of his works and ideas.

From his own time up to the present, Robert Schumann has been associated with the idea of subjectivity, to an extent perhaps greater than any other composer in the Western tradition. This opening section traces the historical reach of the connection between Schumann’s music and subjectivity, its situation in early nineteenth-century (and primarily German) discourses about the self and interiority, and starts to unravel the range of meanings contained in the term subjectivity. I outline the three primary aims of the following book, which can be given as Critical, Musical, and Philosophical. Finally, this section provides an overview of the ensuing argument of the book.

McCarthy builds on a trend in the theology of scripture according to which the truth of the text is discovered in the ‘performance’ of the text in the lives of individuals and communities. On this basis, he offers a series of cameos in which the ‘exegesis’ of a gospel text takes biographical form, and the lives of saints and martyrs become a kind of extension of the scriptural canon.

Frances Young explores the changing relationship in the history of the early church between the gospel texts and the determination of true doctrine. She shows that, even when the four gospels had been accepted as canonical, what shaped doctrine most was the overarching sense of what scripture as a whole was about, epitomized in the ’Rule of Faith’ and the creeds.

Studies the ‘afterlife’ of the gospels into the public realm – the realm of morality and politics. According to Bader-Saye, the gospels are misunderstood if they are confined to the realm of the personal. Rather, the gospels are a summons to a moral life expressive of shared ‘deep themes’ of liberation, dispossession and love. He elaborates on this through a critical appreciation of the way these gospel themes have been taken up in modern discussions of ethics and politics from Immanuel Kant to Romand Coles.

Examines the reception of the canonical gospels and of their ‘effects’ in particular times and places. Here, the first part gives an account of reception history as a relatively new discipline in gospel studies, while the second part offers as a case study some of the ways in which the synoptic stories of the women who visit the tomb of Jesus have been represented in the visual arts.

The role of Christian worship and devotional practices in making the gospels come alive in ever-changing historical circumstances and across ecclesial traditions is explored. Among the arts, attention is paid to the signal contribution of music (J. S. Bach, Black gospel music, and hymns) to the appreciation and appropriation of gospel texts.