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“... on at least one military recruitment broadside during the Napoleonic Wars, but they are spoken by Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son over the usurping John’s poisoned corpse. Even without the undercutting produced by a knowledge of its dramatic context, the play’s final couplet contains a big ‘if’: ‘Naught shall make us rue/If England to ...”

“... of the struggles of a Christian without God to find a cause; while the gentle and well-meaning Sir Richard Rees, who had known Orwell very well, did write a book about Orwell as ‘almost a saint’. If one must say that biographies are about character rather than about the lives people led, then at least it is prudent to adopt, as philosophers would say, a ...”

“... major European writer or artist. It is crammed with curios and choice anecdotes, all the way from Richard III’s hump to an oiled arm in a Mapplethorpe photograph probing a gaping anus. In a work which ranges effortlessly across the major arts, we are treated to learned disquisitions on Boethius, Hildegard of Bingen, Pico della ...”

“... his life’. In 1909, however, he spoke in a way that probably expresses his displeasure not with Wagner but with himself and his own poetic practices at the time: Tristan and Isolde And the fatalistic horns The passionate violins And ominous clarinet; And love torturing itself To emotion for all there is in it, Writhing in and out Contorted in ...”

“... music owed much (but what, exactly?) to Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Berlioz, Dvořák and Wagner; many of his first and foremost English admirers had names like Jaeger, Richter, Schuster and Speyer; his work was widely performed in Italy, Russia and the United States; in Germany, Gerontius and the First Symphony were ecstatically received, and ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... on the page. The excuse for its first appearance is that it leads into a discussion about Richard III’s ugliness, which compelled him to make his essential self a not-self and absolutely strong; whereas Don Giovanni, introduced for contrast, has an existential self, and ‘the existential drive evolves into an infinite series’ – hence the list ...”

“... gulf between the brother and sister. As if specially designed to be Elisabeth’s nemesis, Lou met Wagner when she was 21, sparklingly clever, bare-footed, free-spirited, free-thinking (though sexually abstinent) and instantly desirable to every man who came across her. She met Paul Rée and proposed that the two of them find a third and spend a winter ...”

“... a hefty apparatus of allusion, with various mythically transcendent loves, including those in Wagner, in a Zulu legend, and that of the invented Jane Ferguson, a young dead writer whose journal and unpublished novel have come into the hands of André Brink (who shows himself stealing inspiration from them). Eventually Philip and Melissa discover that ...”

“... Though he served the lyric stage conscientiously, Hofmannsthal also found in his partnership with Richard Strauss release from an artistic impasse of the kind described in his Letter to Lord Chandos: instead of being constrained to devise drama that was like ‘a tone-poem lacking music’, he now had music itself at his disposal. Auden may have ordered ...”

“... and aural impressions; in the ballet is attained the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk about which Wagner dreamed and about which every artistically gifted person dreams.’ For Diaghilev, the ballet was not just a case of pretty symmetries and eloquent arms: it was to be the greatest and most modern tapestry in the world, an exercise in pure wonderment. ‘I ...”

“... against composers who exploited rhetoric to manipulate emotions, Satie wrote in 1923 that the ‘Wagner dictatorship was master of all and odiously dominated public taste’. The emotional inner life of the characters in Wagner’s operas is described by harmonic tension and its eventual release. But Satie, and ...”

“... Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed with at least a presumption of happiness ever after. There are cross-currents and undercurrents that make Meistersinger’s libretto subtle in ways that the librettos of operas usually aren’t ...”

“... view of the period, which takes the idea of an English Renaissance to be elitist and aestheticist. Richard Halpern​ knows that European tragedy has often followed the Greeks. His Eclipse of Action starts with an account of the Oresteia and ends with Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a viscerally shocking play which reworks atrocities from tragic tradition. As turning ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”