Opening Verses Research Articles

Monsters and music: The private worlds of Maurice Sendak and Oliver Knussen

Abstract This article traces the process of composition of the opera version of Where the Wild Things Are, libretto and set and costume designs by Maurice Sendak and music by Oliver Knussen. The article looks in particular at how elements in early drafts of Where the Wild Things Are – especially motifs in a version entitled Where the Wild Horses Are – which were deleted from the published text of Where the Wild Things Are were reintroduced into the opera. The article also compares the early lives of both Sendak and the composer Knussen, and reflects on their shared tastes in music for children and the success of their collaboration.

Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Adapted for Covent Garden, 1819 by Henry Rowley Bishop (review)

BISHOP'S ADAPTATION OF LE NOZZE DI FIGARO Henry Rowley Bishop. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Adapted for Covent Garden, 1819. Edited by Christina Fuhrmann. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 55.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2012. [Introd., p. ix-xix; 9 plates; score, p. 3-217; crit. report, p. 219-37; appendix of items from the autograph score, p. 239-70. ISBN-13 978-0-89579-720-9. $252.]It is now widely known and accepted that, after their premieres, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas were often altered and adapted for subsequent productions. These modifications could be simple, such as the inclusion of substitute arias, or quite complicated involving character changes and large sections of new music. In spite of the ubiquity of this practice, only in the last twenty years or so have scholars paid attention to some of the more extreme adaptations, examining them as a source of great insight into the audience expectations and the performance practices of a certain time and place. Christina Fuhrmann's edition of Henry Rowley English-language adaptation of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro is a splendid contribution to this field of study, providing a window into the practice of adaptation in nineteenth-century London. As Fuhrmann states in the introduction: Bishop's Figaro . . . is an important example of typical practice that scholars of opera, Mozart, musical theater, and music in both Britain and the United States will benefit from having readily (p. ix).This edition also provides an artifact of the reception of Mozart's operas in England. During Mozart's lifetime, the only portions of his operas heard in Britain were occasional arias and ensembles inserted into other operas, often by performers such as Nancy Storace who originated the role of Susanna in Vienna. In the early nineteenth century, more complete, but still altered, versions began to appear at the King's Theatre, sung in Italian usually by Italian singers. There were also occasional concert performances of isolated pieces, but the average early-nineteenth-century Londoner would not have known much of Le nozze di Figaro at all, let alone the entire work. adaptation brought the opera into the realm of common parlance and made it accessible by conforming to audience expectations. Figaro was so successful in its audience appeal that it continued to be performed for several years following its premiere: a significant feat in the fickle and novelty-hungry world of British theatrical tastes.Fuhrmann first explored alterations in her dissertation, 'Adapted and Arranged for the English Stage': Conti - nental Operas Transformed for the London Theater, 1814-33 (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 2001) and a full description of changes to Le nozze di Figaro is now also available in the front matter of this edition. Fuhrmann provides a discussion of the form and structure of Figaro, as well as an explanation of the practice of adaptation, audience expectations, and the work's reception.In addition to an excellent introduction that contextualizes the adaptation, the edition also contains a complete piano-vocal score of the opera with interpolated dialogue, the critical apparatus and report, and some items from the autograph score that Fuhrmann used to reconstruct missing numbers. Additionally, Fuhrmann has included a few facsimile pages from the printed and manuscript sources.Bishop's adaptation of Figaro premiered at Covent Garden in March 1819. Although operatic repertoire had typically been confined to the King's Theatre, Englishlanguage versions of continental operas were starting to appear at other venues, and Bishop played an essential role in developing the trend for operatic adaptations. Figaro is not only an example of a common practice in nineteenth-century London, but it is also a particularly highquality example, illustrating how a continental opera can be modified to suit a particular venue and audience. …

Sin and Redemption in the Hours of François I (1539–40) by the Master of François de Rohan

Sin and Redemption in the <i>Hours of François I</i> (1539–40) by the Master of François de Rohan

“Gehyre se ðe Wille”: The Old English Exodus and the Reader as Exegete

This article examines two important but understudied passages in the Old English Exodus, the poem's concluding scene and its opening verse paragraph, in order to show that the text holds its reader partially responsible for producing the poem's allegorical meaning. The opening and closing lines place the reader in the position of interpreter, requiring him or her to read for the manifold senses of the text rather than relying passively on the poem to supply the allegorical meaning of the narrative. In doing so, these lines foreground the importance and value of allegoria as a practice of reading, one that relies upon the fourfold sense, rather than of “allegory” as a method of composition. By concluding with an exultant portrayal of “gold out of Egypt”, the poem invokes Augustine's teaching on the propriety of putting secular learning to Christian uses; in this way, the conclusion broadens the domain of allegoria to encompass the reading of a range of genres and languages. The introduction anticipates this move by framing Moyses domas, “Moses' decrees” (l. 2), in terms of the fourfold sense, inviting its audience to read each moment in the poem with an eye to fourfold meaning.

Two Pre-Chandella Inscriptions from Kālañjara

The hill-fort of Kālañjara (Kalinjar), has been an important centre of Śaivism for many centuries. Its presence in the list of Śiva’s abodes (āyatana) in Skandapurāṇa 167 and in other early sources indicates Kālañjara’s importance in early Śaivism. The major royal inscriptions from the Chandella period have been edited, but many other inscriptions from the hill remain unpublished. Following a survey of references to Kālañjara in early literary sources, this paper presents two pre-Chandella inscriptions from Kālañjara: 1) an inscription already reported by Cunningham, but never transcribed beyond the opening verse, and 2) a newly discovered inscription.

The Fate of Orpheus on the Operatic Stage: Death and Transfiguration

The Fate of Orpheus on the Operatic Stage: Death and Transfiguration Peter Burian 1 Although not a subject of Greek tragedy, the story of the ill-fated love of Orpheus and Eurydice is, in the usual telling, of the kind we commonly call tragic. Here in outline is the tale as it came down to the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, and ultimately to us, thanks largely to its retelling in Vergil (Georgics 4.453–527) and Ovid (Metamorphoses 10.1–105, 11.1–81). Eurydice, Orpheus’ beloved, was fleeing the unwanted advances of Aristaeus when a snake bit her and she died. Orpheus could not be consoled and finally resolved to enter the underworld himself and plead with the gods below for her release from the bonds of death. He charmed everyone, from Charon the ferryman, to the monsters of Hades, to the very gods of the world below. Indeed, his song and the music of his lyre so enchanted Plutus and Persephone that they allowed him to take Eurydice from the land of the dead to the light above, but on one condition: that he not look back on her until they had left the underworld. Driven by a mixture of motives, Orpheus broke this pact. In Vergil, “a sudden madness seized the incautious lover” (subita incautum dementia cepit amantem, 4.487) and, overcome by his emotions, he became forgetful (immemor, heu! victusque animi, 4.490). In Ovid, Orpheus fears that Eurydice has disappeared and is passionately eager to see her (ne deficeret metuens avidusque videndi, 10.56). As soon as Orpheus looked back, Eurydice had to return to the world below. Orpheus tried to reclaim her but this time was rebuffed, and so he went back to the world of the living without her. Thereafter, faithful to the memory of his beloved, he rejected the love of any other women. In Ovid’s version, indeed, Orpheus’ spurning of women led him [End Page 51] to become the “inventor” of pederasty (10.83–5). A group of Bacchants whose advances he refused attacked him and tore him limb from limb. At one level, it is not hard to see why this tale looms so large in the early history of opera, and specifically why it had a special appeal to a group of musicians, poets, and scholars in Florence known as the Camerata, who were engaged in inventing a new art form, opera, around the year 1600. Opera was, among many other things, an attempt to reinvent a form of music that had, as Renaissance scholars knew from their reading of Plato and other ancient authors, an extraordinary effect on the hearer. From this point of view, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as a demonstration of the power of music even over death itself, seems almost predestined to have a place of honor in the history of opera. The harrowing of hell, a feat Heracles accomplished by force and Odysseus by magic, Orpheus achieves through art. Thus, the special quality of the myth as an operatic subject is its reflexivity, its probing of the power and limits of music itself. The importance of the Orpheus myth in the early history of opera suggests that it was construed as an analogue for the efforts of the creators of opera to devise a newer and more powerful form of musical expression — just as the hero transforms his grief into musical expression powerful enough to conquer hell and bring his beloved back to the world above.1 One aspect of the myth, however, is problematic for early opera: Orpheus, for all the power of his love and his song, finally fails. Indeed, the myth as recounted by Vergil and Ovid insists on double failure — the second death of Eurydice caused by Orpheus’ premature gaze, and his own death and dismemberment. As we shall see, both failures, but especially the tragic fate of Orpheus himself, constitute the source of continued discomfort for operatic versions, and that discomfort in turn leads to a series of fascinating innovations and variations. The first opera to survive deals with the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Its libretto, by the poet Ottavio Rinuccini, was given two...

Abhidharmadipaの序文について

Abhidharmadipaの序文について

Operatic Mythmaking and Bliss: Peter Carey's Novel as Film and Opera

Peter Carey's first novel, Bliss, garnered much popular acclaim on publication in 1979, and, similarly, the 1986 film of the novel by Ray Lawrence with Barry Otto as Harry Joy, the protagonist, is equally highly regarded as an imaginative and highly effective generic transposition of the novel. The operatic version of the novel by Brett Dean and Amanda Holden met with great critical acclaim at its premiere by Opera Australia in Sydney in 2010, followed by performances in Melbourne and Hamburg. This paper examines the phenomenon of the operatic adaptation, or ‘re-visioning', of literature through the prism of both the source work as well as the influence of film adaptation. While the film captured the surreal quality of the novel and offered an often richly comic vision of Australian society in the 70s and 80s, the opera presents a much bleaker depiction of society without departing from the original timeframe and overall structure of the novel. Librettist Amanda Holden has used Dante's Inferno as a richly allusive basis for her libretto, while Dean's music captures the fractured yet comic nature of Australian life but at the same time universalising the work's frame of reference. Dean's music is highly original, and shows deference to models such as Berg's Wozzeck and Britten's Peter Grimes, and the combination of a skilful libretto, colourful orchestration and strikingly demanding yet lyrical use of the voice, makes Bliss a powerful example of contemporary music theatre.

Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

Italian Opera in Age of American Revolution. By Pierpaolo Polzonetti. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge Uni - versity Press, 2011. [xix, 376 p. ISBN 9780521897082. $125.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Italian opera was one of dramatic genres that most directly responded to epoch-changing social, political, and cultural events in American Colonies during second half of eighteenth century. News from overseas flooded into European gazettes and newspapers, arousing as much enthusiasm as harsh criticism. They carried along ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, as well as new types of characters that found their way onto operatic stages: good-hearted Native, peaceful Quaker, emancipated woman. This had far-reaching effects on ways operas challenged established social structures and institutions, even when America was not directly evoked in subject of librettos. Given pervasive impact that American events had on European culture of time, it is surprising that music historians have paid such scant attention to ramifications for opera. Pierpaolo Polzonetti's monograph fills this lacuna and provides a welcome contribution to our understanding of genre. Through an impressive array of philosophical texts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and memoirs, all tied to close readings of musical sources, his study analyzes burgeoning influence of American subjects in eighteenth-century Italian opera and relationship to development of several different strands of thought in Enlighten - ment culture. The book covers several geographical areas inside and outside of Italy, and it focuses on a period of forty years: from 1750, when Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi's Il mondo della luna received its premiere in Venice, to 1790, year Lorenzo Da Ponte turned Giuseppe Palomba and Pietro Guglielmi's La quakera spiritosa into a pasticcio for Vienna. The first of these, in fact, antedates earliest entry in Polzonetti's core repertory (p. 4), I napoletani in America (libretto by Francesco Cerlone, music by Niccolo Piccinni), by eighteen years. Il mondo della luna introduces profound impact of contemporary American events on Euro - pean culture at large. In Haydn's 1777 version of opera for relatively conservative court of Eszterhaza, Moon, a topsy-turvy counterpart of Earth, becomes a metaphor for America, serving court's attempt to align itself with enlightened reformism promoted in Vienna. The terminus post quem non of Polzonetti's work shows that European fascination with America as the land of hope and opportunity (p. 15) gradually came to an end when French Revolution violently shook political foundations of Europe. As censorship became stricter, characters like Vertunna, independent, gun-toting female protagonist of La quakera spiritosa, were looked upon with increasing discomfort, and subjects dealing with revolutionary topics were considered subversive. As Polzonetti argues (pp. 298-307), when Da Ponte made a pasticcio out of Palomba's libretto for Vienna, he toned down stereotypical features of main character and tempered gender role inversion that dominated original work. While Polzonetti's forty-year time-span coincides with golden age of opera buffa, his discussion of works on American subjects begins with an opera seria-Carl Heinrich Graun's Montezuma on a libretto by Frederick Great, King of Prussia (Berlin, 1755). Although Montezuma does not concern itself specifically with North America, it serves as an introduction to web of discourses that joined European interest in New World with growing cultural influence of Enlightenment. If opera seria provided a platform for ideological agenda of Frederick's enlightened absolutism in Prussia, opera buffa became principal vehicle for disseminating view of America as a place of political utopias in Italy. …

Affirming the Resurrection of the Incarnate Christ: A Reading of 1 John

The first letter of John is commonly understood to contain no reference to Jesus's resurrection. Matthew D. Jensen argues that, far from this being absent from the theology of 1 John, the opening verses contain a key reference to the resurrection which undergirds the rest of the text and is bolstered by other explicit references to the resurrection. The book goes on to suggest that the author and the readers of this epistle understand themselves to be the authentic Israel from which faithless Jews had apostatized when they denied that Jesus was 'the Christ' and left the community. Jensen's interpretation calls for a new understanding of the historical context in which 1 John was written, particularly the question of Jesus' identity from the perspective of his fellow Jews. An innovative and provocative study, of interest to scholars and advanced students of New Testament studies, Johannine theology and Jewish history.

The Impotence of Adult Toys: The Dance of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Drosselmeier and Marie from Page to Stage

The Impotence of Adult Toys: The Dance of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Drosselmeier and Marie from Page to Stage Holly Blackford (bio) First and foremost a musician and composer, German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann believed he would be remembered for his music. He appropriated the “A” in his initials from Mozart’s middle name, Amadeus. He composed nine operas, a symphony, ballet and chamber music, piano sonatas and songs (Taylor 65). His operatic adaptation of Undine influenced Carl Maria von Weber, who, in an 1817 review, praised it as “the purest, most ethereal language of passion” (3). His music, aesthetic theory, and writings influenced Richard Wagner (Taylor 53) and Heinrich Heine, who, in turn, influenced Friedrich Nietzsche (McGlathery, Mysticism 15). Hoffmann saw music as the most Romantic of all arts. In his “now famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” he elevated Beethoven to “a symbol of the longing that is quintessentially Romantic” (Donovan and Elliott xi). This passion for music infiltrated his fiction, and the vibrant cross-pollination of the fine arts, literature, and theater that characterized his work also caused other artists to embrace and adapt his writings into new forms. Most famously, his story Nutcracker and Mouse King (1816) was adapted into a ballet by Marius Petipa and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1892. Now a beloved Christmas tradition in the United States primarily, this version of Hoffmann’s story is strongly associated with child performers and playgoers. As I will demonstrate, however, the ballet’s recasting of Hoffmann’s tale as the innocent fantasy of an imaginative young girl only partially cloaks the disturbing aspects of the relationship that links the figure of the child—and the actual bodies of child performers—to adult male artist figures who depend on young people to animate their creations. The Nutcracker story develops a theme recurrent in Hoffmann’s fiction. He continually created protagonists torn between two realities, possibly [End Page 93] insane, and longing for imaginative and artistic transcendence of the so-called “Philistine” world, named such in his well-known tale The Golden Pot. If Hoffmann characters intimately experience the duality at the heart of German Romanticism (Taylor 35), this duality was also a response to the conditions of his own creative life. Although he wished to make music his exclusive career, Hoffmann trained as a lawyer and served for most of his career as a Prussian judiciary (McGlathery, Mysticism 40–41). When Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806 and Hoffmann lost his position, he achieved moderate success supporting himself through the arts, serving for a short time as music director and conductor of Joseph Seconda’s opera company and supplementing his income through teaching music. He returned to government service after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, spending many years as a jurist and well-respected judge. His thriving creative life was his other world. In a letter dated 23 January 1796 to his friend Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, he described his double life: “On weekdays I am a jurist and at most a bit of a musician, during the day on Sundays I draw and in the evenings I am a very witty author until late into the night” (McGlathery, Mysticism 64). Though he seems so flippant about it here, in his works he explores the darker difficulties of leading a double life, a condition that leads many of his characters to madness (The Devil’s Elixir, “The Sandman”), inebriation (The Golden Pot), or merely pathetic gestures of impotent artwork and uncanny inventions (Nutcracker and Mouse King). The adult male artists and inventors in Hoffmann’s fictions are too bound to the material world to create anything other than mechanical, lifeless works of art. Their creative impotence is symbolized in his stories by inventors who create lifeless, uncanny automata, indicative also of the Romantic era’s rejection of the mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment, when “the intellectual golden age of automata” (1637–1748) wondrously captured ideas of the universe, state, and human body as masterfully and divinely ordained machines (Kang 112). In Hoffmann’s “Die Automate” or, in English, “Automata” (1814), Professor X invents a disturbing, lifeless mechanical symphony (played by machines), which unsettles the Romantic...

Adaptation and Adaptability in Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron

Schoenberg's operatic masterpiece Moses und Aron is an adaptation of a biblical episode that is itself about adaptation – both its benefits and its dangers. Since, according to the Book of Exodus, the people cannot communicate directly with God, mediators are needed. The uncompromising Moses remains closest to God but, lacking eloquence, requires Aaron's assistance to adapt God's message for public consumption. Aaron's willingness to accommodate the worldly preoccupations of the people, however, leads away from God, to the casting of the golden calf and the mortal sin of iconolatry. Schoenberg's operatic adaptation of this tale has often been read as a defence of his own ‘Mosaic’ dedication to the purity of the twelve-tone system, with influential critics like Theodor Adorno promoting the system as a kind of New Law while casting rival composers such as Stravinsky in the iconolatrous role of the all-too-adaptable Aaron. It is possible, however, to reframe these claims in terms of the adaptive value of Schoenberg's compositional choices. This approach is entirely compatible with both the biblical tale and Schoenberg's libretto (even God recognizes the need for Aaron's expediency), and opens up a number of questions about music, representation and the operatic tradition. At the centre of this inquiry is the question of Schoenberg's understanding of the relationship between musical meaning and narrative meaning.

Intrusive Narrators: The Representation of Narration and Narrators in the Operatic Adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Sophie's Choice

Intrusive Narrators: The Representation of Narration and Narrators in the Operatic Adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Sophie's Choice

Introduction

This Special Issue arose from our interest in the relationship between the two genres of opera and the novel, and the ways in which it has developed over the last three hundred years. The relationship may take many forms: of course, operas set novels, but they may also provide a setting for them. The essays below explore operatic adaptations of novels, and novels that are in various ways about opera; the examples range from settings of Don Quixote in the 1690s to contemporary works. We were intrigued by the fact that some novels selected for operatic setting seem, at first glance, unlikely choices: Henry James's fiction, in which, notoriously, ‘nothing happens’, or War and Peace, in which there is a surfeit of plot and action in relation to what can be presented on stage in two or three hours. Similarly, Robin Holloway's choice of Richardson's Clarissa for operatic adaptation in 1976 suggests that epistolary form and a first-person narrative are not, as we might expect, intrinsically problematic for operatic handling, precisely because music is the medium above all of interiority, and also because music can take on a role analogous to that of a novel's narrator.

A Note on Deleuze and Language

Nothing is more fragile than the This is how Gilles Deleuze begins the thirteenth series of his Logic of Sense dedicated to the comparison of Antonin with Lewis He goes on to ask: not this secondary organization threatened by monster even more awesome than the - by formless, fathomless nonsense?1 What are in confrontation here are a surface and a language in depth,2 with the latter having the possibility of apprehending and at the same time creating what Deleuze calls subsense or a-sense or infra-sense, which must be distinguished from the nonsense of the surface.3 What he has in mind is primary order in the constitution of signification as opposed to any artificial (secondary) production.4 It is Artaud's language that offers this insight to Deleuze who in the previous twelve series of The Logic of Sense had built on Carroll's works, namely on Alice' s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass, but also on The Hunting of the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno. The poem Jabberwocky is used by for An Antigrammatical Effort Against Lewis Carroll. Here is the first verse of the original: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves. And the mome raths outgrabe. Artaud's translation, which can only be quoted in the original French, runs as follows: Il etait Roparant, et les vliqueux tarands Allaient en gilroyant et en brimbulkdriquant Jusque-la ou la rourghe est rouarghe rangmbde et rangmbde rouarghambde: Tous les falomitards etaient les chats-huants Et les Ghore Uk'hatis dans le GRABUG EUMENT.6 What does this mean? As in the original Jabberwocky, we do find some that belong to the dictionary and we can still detect grammar. But towards the end we are not only left with meaningless signs but also grammar seems to vanish. Is there something here that Deleuze can extract for logic of sense? He writes: As we read the first stanza of Jabberwocky such as renders it, we have the impression that the two opening verses still correspond to Carroll's criteria and conform to the rules of translation generally held by Carroll's other French translators.... But beginning with the last word of the second line, from the third line onward, sliding is produced, and even creative, central collapse, causing us to be in another world and in an entirely different language.7 Artaud's version of Jabberwocky indeed produces by means of his breath- words and howl-words de-construction or de-formation of (natural) language establishing new grammar and, consequently, new lexicon, new syntax, new phonetics. This is not to say new dialect or new orthography and still less the creation of neologisms, but new alphabet of thought.10 In reality, morphology and syntax evaporate in because the grammar of our way of being is modified. Moreover, the study carried out by Deleuze in the thirteenth series of The Logic of Sense shows that Artaud's conceptuality is not arbitrary. It corresponds to specific systematization, having much in common with Louis Wolfson's, schizophrenic student of foreign languages, but containing aspects that can only be considered from the perspective of Artaud's genius. The problem cannot truly be posed only from the clinical point of view, as if there could not be philosophical sense in the language of schizophrenic - as if this were but simple aphasia.12 Artaud's work is quite the opposite being decisive and pioneering from the critical point of view. For Deleuze, Artaud is alone in having been an absolute depth in literature, and in having discovered vital body and the prodigious language of this body.13 It is the corporal dimension that is really at the centre of the distinction between Artaud' s depth and Carroll's surface. …

Offenbarung und Gewalt: Literarische Aspekte kultureller Krisen um 1800 (review)

Bernd Hamacher, Offenbarung und Gewalt: Literarische Aspekte kultureller Krisen um 1800. Munich: Wuhelm Fink, 2010. 437 pp. Since the invocation of the muse in the opening verse of Western literature's founding song, the authority of the divine has underwritten literary voice. Long after the cultural setting of the Iliad has passed into oblivion, poetic creativity maintains its reference to the divine. Indeed, even the historical moment commonly identified with a radical attack on divine authority - the Enlightenment - cannot do without such a legitimating instance. The foremost medium of divine inspiration in the eighteenth century, meanwhile, is not the dance of the muses, but the word of a transcendent God, who reveals himself in speech and in scripture. The literary ramifications of divine intervention form the subject of Bernd Hamacher's Offenbarung und Gewalt: Literarische Aspekte kultureller Krisen um 1800. In this study, Hamacher cuts a swath through the Age of Goethe, investigating the particular valence the act of revelation assumes in literary and philosophical texts. Hamacher's interest does not pertain to explicitly theological or religious debates, but to attitudes toward violence in the literary depiction of revelation. This study investigates a broad spectrum of canonical authors who articulate differing views toward the potential for violence intrinsic to revelation. In the course of the investigation, Hamacher shows how the semantic range of the concept itself was expanded beyond the act of supermundane intervention to include human modes of creativity and education. For authors from Lessing and Kant to Kleist and Goethe, revelation entails a rupture within ordinary modes of intelligibility - a rupture whose violence can either be subdued or embraced. Literature serves as a particularly apposite medium for reflection on the relationship between revelation and violence insofar as it is able to render the cosmos a world of signs and thus to relate the anodyne or destructive effects of revelation. Working with this rather capacious notion of revelation allows Hamacher to treat the entire canon of thinkers and writers around 1800. Such an ambition leads to chapters that vary radically in length and detail. The volume opens with a presentation of the analytic concepts foundational to Hamacher's study. In addition to a critical discussion of the recent work of the eminent Egyptologist Jan Assmann, Hamacher presents his argument for considering violence and revelation as disruptions within a given semiotic order, as rifts in the fabric of social communication. As the ensuing in-depth treatment of Lessing demonstrates, the nexus of revelation and violence enters the purview of this analysis primarily insofar as they become the subject of literature. Indeed, Hamacher aims in this chapter to demonstrate that Lessing's mature thought makes literature into the medium of revelation, thereby quelling any potential for violence. The location of revelation within the immanent sphere of human affairs also characterizes the developments that preoccupy the subsequent chapters. Brief treatments of such figures as Hamann and Herder are placed alongside lengthy engagements with Holderlin, Kant, and Fichte. …

Embodying the Countryside in ʿAiṭa Ḥaṣbawiya (Morocco)

As we left Safi and began driving along a stretch of country road on our way to Rabat, one of my female traveling companions asked me if I had a cassette of 'aiṭa on me. “Why?” I replied with a certain curiosity. “Oh …,” she continued, “I just feel like listening to it. I want to smell the soil (bghit nshdm t-trab), taste the countryside (bghit nduq l-ərubiya). ”I was struck by her answer, by how she had articulated the desire to listen to this genre of sung poetry by analogy to other senses. For her, listening to aiṭa meant to experience the countryside and, at the same time, to celebrate a rurality that for many Moroccans is an essential component of their identity. That day I did not have a cassette on me. However, the silence was soon broken by the opening verses of “Mal l-hbibi malu ‘lih” (what's wrong with my beloved, what's wrong with him); she and the others had begun singing, clapping, and rhythmically swaying their upper bodies as we continued to drive on that country road.

An operatic version of the Banting story

Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle. Thea Cooper, Arthur Ainsberg. St. Martin’s Press; 2010 Breakthrough is about the discovery of vital medical knowledge: insulin. Most CMAJ readers will know the Banting, Best, Collip, MacLeod

Not the Prologue of John

This article considers the history of the transmission of the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel and the ways in which the text was divided or not divided into segments by commentators (e.g. Ptolemy, Heracleon, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril, Philoxenus), liturgical systems and the scribes of early manuscripts (e.g. Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Syriac). There is then investigation of the division of the text in the period of print from 1495 (the first printing of Jn 1.1-14) to the present. It is found that systems that regarded Jn 1.1-5, 1-14, or 1-17 as a unit preceded those that regarded 1.1-18 as a unit and that these earlier analyses each have distinct exegetical advantages over the common modern position of viewing 1.1-18 as a unit. The reasons for the currently preferred division and its exegetical consequences are explored with the conclusion that Jn 1.1-18 should not be regarded as the prologue of the Fourth Gospel.

Effects of acutely lowering intraocular pressure on the results of multifocal visual evoked potential testing

There have been many reports in the literature on the apparent reversal of optic nerve cupping in patients with glaucoma after lowering intraocular pressure (IOP) on clinical examination, as well as improvement in visual field testing, and increased nerve fibre layer thickness on optical coherence tomography. No studies to date have looked at improvement of multifocal visually evoked potentials (mfVEP) after lowering IOP. This was a prospective study of twenty consecutive patients with elevated IOP seen in the glaucoma department of Wills Eye Institute. Patients who met the inclusion criteria for this study had a complete eye examination including IOP measurement and underwent testing with mfVEP, Heidelberg Retinal Tomograph (HRT) and static achromatic automated perimetry with SITA-Standard 24-2 program Humphrey visual field (HVF) studies at baseline and 2 h post-IOP reduction. A minimum of 30% IOP reduction was required. IOP changes were then compared with various parameters of mfVEP, HRT and HVF using Spearman rank correlation coefficients. The Spearman rank correlation values between change in IOP versus various parameters were calculated: Accumap severity index (ASI), 0.37 (p = 0.14); Accumap superior hemifield, 0.049 (p = 0.85); Accumap inferior hemifield, 0.030 (p = 0.91); HVF mean deviation, 0.081 (p = 0.76); HRT rim area, 0.17 (p = 0.51); HRT cup area, -0.006 (p = 0.98). Weak positive but insignificant correlations were seen for all parameters except cup area. This pilot study failed to confirm statistically significant correlations between IOP reduction and changes in Accumap, HVF and HRT measures, although positive correlations were seen for most measures.