Revue

London West End revue constituted a particular response to mounting social, political, and cultural insecurities over Britain’s status and position at the beginning of the twentieth century. Insecurities regarding Britain’s colonial rule as exemplified in Ireland and elsewhere, were compounded by growing demands for social reform across the country — the call for women’s emancipation, the growth of the labour, and the trade union movements all created a climate of mounting disillusion. Revue correlated the immediacy of this uncertain world, through a fragmented vocabulary of performance placing satire, parody, social commentary, and critique at its core and found popularity in reflecting and responding to the variations of the new lived experiences. Multidisciplinary in its creation and realisation, revue incorporated dance, music, design, theatre, and film appropriating pre-modern theatre forms, techniques, and styles such as burlesque, music hall, pantomime, minstrelsy, and pierrot. Experimenting with narrative and expressions of speech, movement, design, and sound, revue displayed ambivalent representations that reflected social and cultural negotiations of previously essentialised identities in the modern world. Part of a wide and diverse cultural space at the beginning of the twentieth century it was acknowledged both by the intellectual avant-garde and the workers theatre movement not only as a reflexive action, but also as an evolving dynamic multidisciplinary performance model, which was highly influential across British culture. Revue displaced the romanticism of musical comedy by combining a satirical listless detachment with a defiant sophistication that articulated a fading British hegemonic sensibility, a cultural expression of a fragile and changing social and political order.

In the 1920s and 1930s Noël Coward mastered and defined the art of the revue sketch - short and often topical or satirical stage pieces, many of which were a lead-in to his famous songs. He wrote these sketches for the top revues of the 1920s and 1930s, including London Calling! (1923) and Cochrane's Revue of 1931. This volume collects Coward's best and most witty pieces, including Rain Before Seven, the only sketch he performed with Gertrude Lawrence, and the hilarious parody, Some Other Private Lives, in which Coward burlesques his own famous play, Private Lives. Also included are short one-act plays never before published. The collection includes an Introduction by Coward scholar Barry Day, setting the work in the context of its time and its dramatic form. A forgotten area of Coward's writing is now back in print.

This series presents for the first time the complete Opern-Revue, a collection of 38 fantasies for solo guitar that include some of the world's most beloved operatic themes. Expertly arranged by the virtuoso guitarist and composer J. K. Mertz, Opern-Revue represents one of the most expansive collections of its kind from the nineteenth century. The present edition provides facsimile reproductions of the original Haslinger first editions, allowing the guitarist direct access to the scores published in Mertz's time. Opern-Revue provides the modern guitarist with a vast repertoire of concert works based on the music of Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Weber, Meyerbeer, Rossini, and many others. Wagner and Offenbach, two composers less common in nineteenth-century guitar music, are represented in arrangements by several of Mertz's successors. The DGA Editions Opern-Revue series commemorates the bicentennial birthday anniversary of J. K. Mertz with these volumes.

This study of six early twentieth-century periodicals serves to refine the traditional image of the inter-war journal as the pre-eminent vehicle of artistic and intellectual renewal. Every periodical has its own history but general themes are clearly identified. Traces emerge of a common commitment to the internationalisation of the arts and we find early and unexpected discussion of Freud, Chaplin and Joyce in Brussels and Berlin, jazz in Vienna and Brussels, Ezra Pound in the Netherlands and Belgium. In contrast to this internationalisation are the ambitions of the various editors to play a significant role in their national cultures. This tension between national and international influences was in the first instance stimulating and innovative. Later, as a result of political and socio-economic developments, the newly achieved openness and exchange were gradually diminished and finally disappeared as did the periodicals themselves.

Quarterly accession lists; beginning with Apr. 1893, the bulletin is limited to "subject lists, special bibliographies, and reprints or facsimiles of original documents, prints and manuscripts in the Library," the accessions being recorded in a separate classified list, Jan.-Apr. 1893, a weekly bulletin Apr. 1893-Apr. 1894, as well as a classified list of later accessions in the last number published of the bulletin itself (Jan. 1896)