Belshazzar's Feast Research Articles

BBC Proms 2015: Gary Carpenter, Anders Hillborg, Ørjan Matre, Alissa Firsova, B Tommy Andersson

Sibelius' and Nielsen's 150th anniversary year has prompted a proliferation of events to celebrate the music of the Nordic composers, from conferences to concert series. The Proms has been no exception, with an unusually high number of Nordic composers represented throughout the festival (although Glazunov, also in his 150th anniversary year, has been forgotten). British composer Gary Carpenter's Dadaville was premiered on the first night, which opened to the sounds of Nielsen's Maskarade and Sibelius's Belshazzar's Feast, while later concerts covered here presented premieres by the Swedish composers Anders Hillborg and B Tommy Andersson, the Norwegian composer Ørjan Matre, and Moscow-born (though UK-based) composer Alissa Firsova.

Motivi biblici nell'opera teatrale di Stanislaw Wyspianski e Jerzy Grotowski

The paper deals about two plays by the so called “fourth bard” of Polish literature, the modernist playwright Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869-1907). Best known for his drama The Wedding (1901), Wyspianski devoted his first theatrical work, an opera libretto published only after his death, to Daniel (1895). In this early work, the Biblical theme is developed according to the messianic virtues attributed to poetry by the main Polish romantic poet and playwright, Adam Mickiewicz. While writing about Daniel, Wyspianski was inspired by a Rembrandt’s painting, Belshazzar's Feast (1635) preserved at the National Gallery in London. As a matter of fact, the biblical thread of Daniel’s prophetic dream about the subduing of Three Kings (Daniel 7: 24) was exploited by Wyspianski in order to allude to the political predicament of the Polish nation oppressed by the three parting powers: Prussia, Austria and Russia. The play was therefore edited by Austrian censorship and was staged for the first time only in 1927, once Poland had regained her independence: not on a Polish scene, though, but by the Krokewer Yidish Teater in Dawid Liebl’s yiddish translation. The second play partly centered on a biblical theme is Akropolis (1904), a monumental drama set in Cracow’s Pantheon, the Wawel cathedral. In the second act of the play, the characters of the tapestries hanging on the walls of the cathedral come to life. One of the tapestries portraits the story of Jacob (Genesis: 25-33). Wyspianski was very likely inspired by Raffaello’s fresco paintings in Eliodor’s room at the Vatican, and by Gerhard Hauptmann’s fragment Das Hirtenlied. The playwright closely follows the text of the Bible but for a few „apocryphical” insertions, the more relevant of which refer to Jacob’s struggle with the Angel. The Angel defies Jacob, founder of tribes”, claiming that he’ll thread „on the weak ones, in this graveyard of tribes”. Much has been debated on where the action of the drama should take place. Wyspianski himself thought about staging Akropolis in the cathedral on the Wawel hill, but the best known production of the play, performed by Jerzy Grotowski (1962), dispensed from the original setting. For Wyspianski, the cathedral on the Wawel hill, with her tombs, was the most significant achievement in Polish national history and culture, but for Grotowski the most meaningful event in the history of the whole humankind had taken place in Auschwitz extermination camp. Grotowski sees the setting of the play – using Wyspianski’s words - „in a graveyard of tribes”. This graveyard is not longer the peaceful and magnificent cathedral where the playwright used to stroll in search of inspiration, but a dramatically real one, the graveyard in which millions of human beings belonging to all nations have been buried after having completed the crematorium in which they and their companions will be burned. Grotowski has not altered Wyspianski’s lines, just changed the order of the scenes, so that Jacob’s struggle with the Angel could be at the centre of a play which could be reintepreted by the light shed on Auschwitz extermination machine by Tadeusz Borowski’s concentrationary short stories. The last line of the play comes from a caption imagined by Wyspianski for its monumental drama, but the old words have for the modern audience a tragic and complete new meaning: „they’re gone, spirals of smoke float in the air”.

Aspects of Walton's Second Symphony

Any consideration of William Walton's Second Symphony should begin with some mention of its predecessor, first performed complete in November, 1935, twenty-five years before No.2. The First Symphony created an enormous impact, coming soon after the successes of the Viola Concerto of 1929 and the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast of 1931. The Symphony's vast scale, its emotional power and fierce utterance, allied to an impressive consistency of style, conspired to declare a work of originality and almost instantaneous appeal. An early Decca recording of it under Sir Hamilton Harty, who had conducted the first performances, enabled the Symphony to be heard worldwide.

Blake's Material Sublime

1. Kantian Blake IN AN ESSAY OF 1833, ENTITLED THE BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE in the productions of Modern Art, Charles Lamb lambasts what he calls the (1) of John Martin's paintings. In an argument that passionately privileges spirituality over materiality and imagination over visual presentation, Lamb criticizes Martin's panoramic canvas Belshazzar's Feast (1820) for being too material. Although Lamb considers the towered structures of Martin's art as belonging the highest order (Elia 259) of the the term itself--invented, it seems, by Coleridge--is not an honorific. In Table Talk, Coleridge uses the term describe the furious images of Schiller's dramas, the sheer sensual tumult of Schillerian theatricality: its excess of effect over spiritual meaning. Schiller has the sublime, he remarks; to produce an effect, he sets a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames.... Shakspear drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. (2) For Coleridge, the sublime of Schiller's drama is mired in materiality and sensation; Shakespeare's, however, rises effortlessly into the region of mind. For Lamb, too, the sublime designates a privative attachment materiality, a fixation on sense that in Martin's case discloses a defect of [the] imaginative faculty (Elia 262). Wedded matter over mind, sublimity seeks present in a pictorial, corporeal form ideas that should properly, according Lamb, have a poetic (Elia 264), supernatural or imaginative denotation. In the case of Belshazzar's Feast, the fearful judgment of God upon the self-regarding King Belshazzar at his table in his stupendous palace is too material because Martin presents the written judgement of God in a blaze of flight on an immense wall: a brilliant blaze that is seen both by the crowds at the feast and by the spectators of the canvas. Lamb insists, however, that this divine writing is seen only by the King in the Biblical account, and not by the spectators. For this reason, the sublimity of the scene resides in the immateriality of the King's terrified, phantasmal reception of God's sentence, and not in any gaudy materiality of blazing light on a panoramic, architecturally immense structure. In the way Lamb sets it up, Martin's painting sustains only a perilous hold on the sublime. For this kind of art is, he says, the product of a [d]eeply corporealized mind, enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality. Against this, the sublime for Lamb belongs the intellectual (Elia 264), not the eye. The sublime is, in this sense, well on the way being engulfed in--and identified with--a kind of debased spectacle: specifically, with crude theatricality and sensationalism. Effecting an erasure of mind and of the imaginative faculty, sublimity becomes a vitiating, privative and expropriatory simulacrum of the sublime. Lamb's formulation of the sublime belongs, of course, that broad shift in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries that saw the displacement of sublimity away from the materiality of the external object, and its relocation in the self-conscious interiority of the subject. If the eighteenth-century sublime variously staged a crisis in the subject's relation an overwhelming externality--whether figured as nature or God--the romantic which received its privileged philosophical formulation in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790), installed the scene of that sublime in and as an agon of the subject's mental faculties. The empirical, physiological emphases of Burke's sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) were themselves, indeed, part of this resituating of the sublime in the passions of the subject rather than the qualities of the object: part of what Thomas Weiskel calls the eighteenth century's nascent psychological aesthetics. …

Seers and seers not: John Martin's Belshazzar's Feast and the sublimation of self

Using a response made by Gorgias to his student Evathle, I will summarize the dialectical figure in the following way: it is precisely in affirming that the series of your judgements is finite that you deny it, for in so doing you add a new judgement to this series. It is precisely, says reason to the imagination, in showing that you cannot 'comprehend' more magnitudes in a single intuition than you are doing that you show you can, for in order to show the limit, you must also show beyond the limit. Such that the pleasure in infinitude, which is mine, is already latent in the unhappiness you feel in your finitude. The process consists in displacing the examination of judgement from its (negative) quality to its (assertive) modality: you say that . is not, but you affirm it. The modus of a proposition is in effect independent from its content, the dictum.

François Venant. Enige aanvullingen

AbstractSince J. G. van Gelder was able to identify a number of works by François Venant (1591/92-1636) in 1938 (note 2) and Kurt Bauch and Astrid Tümpel added to these one painting and a drawing (notes 14 and 3), the artist has been known as one of the so-called Pre-Rembrandtists. Together with his contemporaries Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert (c. 1590/91-1655) and Jacob Pynas (1592/93-after 1650) he was one of the younger artists of this group. Its style was dominated by Pictcr Lastman (1583-1633) and Jan Pynas (1581/82-1633), both of whom underwent the influence of Adam Elsheimer during their stay in Rome. Venant married a younger sister of Lastman in 1625. The latter's influence on his work had however set in well before that year. Jacob's Dream, signed and dated 161(7?) (note 10, fig. 2) testifies to this, as well as showing traces of Elsheimer's influence, possibly transmitted by Jan Pynas (notes 12 and 13, fig. 3). A somewhat later signed work, David's parting from Jonathan (note 5, fig.1), closely follows Lastman's version of the subject of 1620 (note 6) though the grouping of the two figures may be taken as typical of Venant's personal style. In an unsigned picture of Gideon's Scacrifice, which may also be dated to the early 1620s (note 14, fig. 4), the artist once more makes use of motifs from various works by Lastman. Two undated drawings would seem to represent a slightly later stage in the artists's development. The Baptism of the Eunuch (notes 16 and 18, fig. 5) betrays the attempt to emulate Lastman's pictures on the subject, especially one of 1623 (note 17), by enhancing the dramatic actions in the scene, and so does Gideon's Sacrifice (note 20, figs. 6 and 8), which seems to be based on Lastman's Sacrifice of Monoah of 1627 (note 21, fig.7). To these works, spanning a period from 1617 (?) to the late '20s, may be added two more, another drawing and a painting. The drawing of Daniel at Belshazzar's Feast was formerly attributed to Lastman (notes 25-33, figs. and 10). While the technique, notably the use of wash, differs from that in the drawings mentioned above, the similarities to these in linear rhythm and conception are such that they may all be attributed to the same hand. The technical differences may be accounted for by assuming a slightly later date and, more particularly, a different purpose; whereas the other drawings were in all likelihood self-contained products, Belshazzar's Feast appears to be a sketch for a painting. The last phase of Venant's career seems to be represented by the largest painting known to us and the only one on canvas, Elisha Refusing Naäman's Gifts (note 34, fig. 11). It shows the artist disengaging himself from Lastman at last, possibly after the latter's death in 1633. While the composition is still reminiscent of his carlier work, here Venant seems to have made a fresh start by allowing study from life to play a more important role than before. The landscape differs radically from earlier backgrounds and may well have been influenced by Barholomeus Breenbergh, who returned from Italy around 1630 and whose influence may also be detected in the heavy wash that marks the Belshazzar drawing. The artist's further development was cut short by his untimely death, probably of the plague, in 1636.

Belshazzar's Feast and the Cult of the Moon God Sîn

Abstract Beaulieu has recently suggested that the festival which ancient sources connect with the fall of Babylon in 539 BC may have been an akītu festival in honor of the moon god Sîn. This proposal can be supported by two additional arguments. First, the dates of the festival (the 16th and 17th of Tašritu) would always have come immediately after the Harvest Moon or Hunter's Moon. Second, a Mesopotamian akītu festival celebrated in Tašritu and dedicated to the moon god appears to be the background of the Aramaic liturgy preserved in Papyrus Amherst 63. Given the religious politics of Nabonidus' last years, in which Sîn was promoted at the expense of Marduk, it is likely that a similar akītu festival took place in Babylon at the time of its fall.

Belshazzar's Feast and the Cult of the Moon God Sîn

Abstract Beaulieu has recently suggested that the festival which ancient sources connect with the fall of Babylon in 539 BC may have been an akītu festival in honor of the moon god Sîn. This proposal can be supported by two additional arguments. First, the dates of the festival (the 16th and 17th of Tašritu) would always have come immediately after the Harvest Moon or Hunter's Moon. Second, a Mesopotamian akītu festival celebrated in Tašritu and dedicated to the moon god appears to be the background of the Aramaic liturgy preserved in Papyrus Amherst 63. Given the religious politics of Nabonidus' last years, in which Sîn was promoted at the expense of Marduk, it is likely that a similar akītu festival took place in Babylon at the time of its fall.

Accounting for the Achievements of Capitalism: Alfred Chandler's Business HistoryScale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Alfred D. Chandler , Takashi Hikino

This monumental work culminates Alfred Chandler's lifetime historical study of the formation of modem business enterprise. I know of no other history of economic institutions that musters so large an array of cases and deploys them to sustain so comprehensive an argument. The research rests on a massive compilation of data on the two hundred largest manufacturing firms in each of three major countries: the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. For Chandler these corporate giants represent a major achievement of our civilization. By following their rising and declining fortunes Chandler seeks to distill the logic of capitalist growth since the late nineteenth century. What emerges is an awesome comparative history of corporate leadership, of three different national patterns of modem capitalism, and, not least, a moral tale of growth and decay. Chandler discerns an underlying model of economic growth that prevailed from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War and into the 1960s. Thereafter, new incentives apparently impelled industrial managers away from proven principles of earlier achievement and toward a more fienetic and self-defeating search for profits. The recent decadence reveals the virtues of the preceding century: the author concludes with a survey of America's modem Belshazzar's feast of enterprise. The moving hand might well have written Mene mene tekel . . . Milken. As a title, Scale and Scope describes the volume as well as its argument. Coverage is massive as Chandler relentlessly musters the lessons of one firm or sector after another. Although the stories of the great enterprises remain fascinating, the cursory accounts of smaller branches occasionally fade into historical Yellow Pages: Commercial intermediaries continued to distribute 50% or more of the product during the 1930s. These subindustries remained far less concentrated, and nationwide mergers were rarely successful. This was true in such four-digit categories of Group 26 as envelopes, writing paper, and wallpaper;

An Error in the Menetekel Inscription in Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast in the National Gallery in London

An Error in the Menetekel Inscription in Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast in the National Gallery in London

Liturgy, Prophecy, and Belshazzar's Babylon: Discourse and Meaning in Cleanness

"Liturgy, Prophecy, and Belshazzar's Babylon: Discourse and Meaning in Cleanness." Whatever problems Cleanness has posed those who have been provoked to write on it, the decipherment of its meaning has not been one of them. The poem's exhortations to the virtue of cleanness have generally been understood as homiletic in spirit, and like good homily the poem seems to explain itself and preempt the interpreter-all the more since it seems to address the Christian layperson. Recovery of the several "languages" that compose the text, however, reveals a work coded to prosecute a much more specific and highly topical agenda. Cleanness coordinates lexical and conceptual materials rooted in traditional liturgical and contemporary prophetic discourses, in order to indict the perceived failure not only of the priesthood but of the papacy itself. The poem's sacerdotal and institutional critiques converge in the profane liturgical ritual allegorized by Belshazzar's Feast in the poem's figure for a corrupt papacy, Babylon. In Cleanness's case, eliciting the ways in which the poem signifies involves recognizing the specificity and situatedness of fields of language such as the liturgical and the prophetic, and so reconnecting the poem to history.

Belshazzar's feast.

Belshazzar's feast.

Style and structure in the Middle English poemCleanness

For students of literature, the power of a computer to count and manipulate data has been most useful in solving problems of attribution or classification. Of its relevance to the discipline of criticism, however, which relies so much upon abstract and subjective analysis, literary critics seem skeptical. Still, it can be argued that the applicability of computer-generated data is limited not entirely by the computer per se, but in some part by the resourcefulness of the critics who apply it. This study, therefore, statistically analyzes a large amount of data in an attempt to solve a long-standing critical controversy of some importance in Middle English studies. The problem is with the structure of the late fourteenth century alliterative poem Cleanness, or Purity, a narrative homily of 1812 lines. A solution to the problem is important not only because Cleanness is putatively a work of the socalled Pearlor Gawain-poet, but also because it is a major Middle English poem in its own right. Its main substance is three exemplums: the stories of the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar's Feast. In the relations among these exemplums, some critics perceive a lack of unity: the first two are inherently related because they illustrate sins of the flesh, but Belshazzar's Feast, an instance of the blasphemous desecration of the Church through a profane use of holy objects, would seem to be associated with a different subject. On the other hand, some critics defend the work's structural integrity.' The problem, therefore, can be stated as follows: are the first part of

Washington Allston'sDead Man Revived

Washington Allston's Dead Man Revived by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 1811–14 (Fig. 1), has long been neglected for a number of reasons. It was executed in England fairly early in Allston's career and apparently was only rarely discussed by Allston himself. Indeed, most critical attention has been given to Allston's uncompleted Belshazzar's Feast, 1817–1843 (Detroit Institute of Arts). The latter painting has aroused interest because it testifies to Allston's “romantic” temperament and to the unsympathetic environment he found for history painting in America.1 It is the Dead Man Revived,2 however, that is crucial for Allston's entire later career, for his approach to painting and his aesthetic theories.3 In the scope of its ambition, the Dead Man Revived stands as one of the few significant history paintings by an American.

'Belshazzar's Feast'

'Belshazzar's Feast'

Venezuela: A Study in Imperialism

For Venezuelans, the dread words that wrote themselves on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, "Mene, mene, tekel upharsin," have a special meaning. In the Indian language of that country, "mene" means oil.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

RELATIONS OF SOCIETY TO THE DRUG HABIT

NO social problem has within recent years come into prominence with the same startling acuteness as that of drug addiction and the duty of the state towards it. The practices of peoples and individuals in the use of various intoxicating substances have an historical interest, reaching back to pre-Christian times, while the effects of drunkenness on the decline and fall of empires seems to have been always the occasion for homilies, when national prosperity has been associated with sudden accessions of wealth and social effeminacy. Belshazzar's feast, the orgies of Nero and the excesses of even the courts of the Caliphs, successors of the Nazarite Mohammed, whose precepts taught abstinence as a rule of life for the faithful, are but illustrations of what has marked the aberrations, whether of kings or nations, who have departed from the simple teachings of the sages of every age. The growing complexity of modern society has, however, by what Professor T. H. Greene speaks of as series of sanctions, had to evolve rules of life, which we call laws, by which the liberty or freedom of the individual is limited in certain matters for the sake, as Greene puts it, of greater good to the individual as a member of the community. Such sanctions are the basis upon which all sumptuary laws, whether affecting health, morals or taxation, depend and their permanence will depend upon the judgment of popular opinion as to their utility. Unfortunately, laws have not infrequently been passed during periods of national excitement or danger, which can scarcely be said to be based upon popular sanction, as where monarchy was restored after the excesses of the French Revolution, due to the fiction of the divine right of kings, and when in Spain the Inquisition was re-established, To make the world safe from democracy. We have recently had illustrations of this kind of legislation as when the Russian Czar signed an ukase abolishing vodka-drinking, with the intent to make sober a people whose personal liberty was still a visionary thing. In the United States and Canada the legislatures of almost every state and province have passed prohibitory legislation to abolish the use of alcohol as a beverage and, contrary to the Russians in revolution, the people have again and again supported the legislation at the polls, basing their action on scientific or social grounds or on the religious beliefs of the individual voters. The restrictions which have been conceded in the matter of alcohol have brought into prominence the dangers, which may arise to society from the use of opium, cocaine and other sedative drugs, which find a useful place in medicine. A century of history in America, during which few of these drugs were known, has taught that the relatively simple lives of the people were free from any intoxicant other than alcohol, whose disappearance as a beverage now has general sanction. This is the best evidence of a healthy national morale; while the prominence being given to drug addiction serves to bring into relief what may be best looked upon as a quickening of the public conscience in the matter of other degenerative influences affecting the national welfare. Unfortunately, the mere votes of the people cannot determine biological questions such as underlie the neuroses of the higher class drug addicts in many cases, nor do they solve the problems, primarily moral and educational, of those on a lower plane. A Western woman judge in her annual report of the Juvenile courts, sum-

Belshazzar's Feast

Belshazzar's Feast

Belshazzar's Feast

Journal Article Belshazzar's Feast Get access Francis P. Marchant Francis P. Marchant 1Streatham Common Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s11-VI, Issue 156, 21 December 1912, Page 496, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s11-VI.156.496b Published: 21 December 1912

Belshazzar's Feast

Belshazzar's Feast