Vexilla Regis

The Choral-Orchestral Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams: Autographs, Context, Discourse combines contextual knowledge, a musical commentary, an inventory of the holograph manuscripts, and a critical assessment of the opus to create substantial and meticulous examinations of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s choral-orchestral works. The contents include an equitable choice of pieces from the various stages in the life of the composer and an analysis of pieces from the various stages of Williams’s life. The earliest are taken from the pre-World War I years, when Vaughan Williams was constructing his identity as an academic and musician—Vexilla Regis (1894), Mass (1899), and A Sea Symphony (1910). The middle group are chosen from the interwar period—Sancta Civitas (1925), Benedicite (1929), Magnificat (1932), Five Tudor Portraits (1935), Dona nobis pacem (1936)—written after Vaughan Williams had found his mature voice. The last cluster—Thanksgiving for Victory (1944), Fantasia (Quasi Variazione) on the ‘Old 104’ Psalm Tune(1949), Sons of Light (1950), Hodie (1954), The Bridal Day/Epithalamion (1938/1957)—typify the works finished or revisited during the final years of the composer’s life, near the end of the Second World War and immediately before or after his second marriage (1953).

The cross pervaded the whole of Anglo-Saxon culture, in art, in sculpture, in religion, in medicine. These new essays explore its importance and significance.

Viladesau focuses on poetry and the visual arts as he seeks to understand 'The Beauty of the Cross' as it developed in theology and art from the early Christian era through the middle ages.

The transition from Latin to vernacular languages in the late Middle Ages and the dramatic rise of a new readership produced a huge bulk of translations, particularly of religious literature in its various genres. The solutions are so multifarious that they defy any attempt to outline general theories. This is particularly visible when the same text is translated or rewritten at different times and in different languages or genres. Through a minute analysis of texts this book aims at highlighting lexical, syntactic and stylistic choices dictated not only by the source but also by new readers and patrons, or by new destinations of the works. Established categories such as 'literalness' and 'fidelity' are thus questioned and integrated with these other factors which, while being more 'external', do nonetheless impinge on the very idea of 'translation', and consequently on its assessment. Far from being a mere transfer from one language to another, a medieval translation verges on a form of creative writing, and as such its study becomes a fascinating investigation into the very process of textual production.

The famed series of Trinity College and Johns Hopkins lectures in which the Nobel Prize winner explored history, poetry, and philosophy. While a student at Harvard in the early years of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot immersed himself in the verse of Dante, Donne, and the nineteenth-century French poet Jules Laforgue. His study of the relation of thought and feeling in these poets led Eliot, as a poet and critic living in London, to formulate an original theory of the poetry generally termed “metaphysical”—philosophical and intellectual poetry that revels in startlingly unconventional imagery. Eliot came to perceive a gradual “disintegration of the intellect” following three “metaphysical moments” of European civilization—the thirteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries. The theory is at once a provocative prism through which to view Western intellectual and literary history and an exceptional insight into Eliot’s own intellectual development. This annotated edition includes the eight Clark Lectures on metaphysical poetry that Eliot delivered at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1926, and their revision and extension for his three Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1933. They reveal in great depth the historical currents of poetry and philosophy that shaped Eliot’s own metaphysical moment in the twentieth century.

This Companion provides an overview of the composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896). Sixteen chapters by leading scholars investigate aspects of his life and works and consider the manner in which critical appreciation has changed in the twentieth century. The first section deals with Bruckner's Austrian background, investigating the historical circumstances in which he worked, his upbringing in Upper Austria, and his career in Vienna. A number of misunderstandings are dealt with in the light of recent research. The remainder of the book covers Bruckner's career as church musician and symphonist, with a chapter on the neglected secular vocal music. Religious, aesthetic, formal, harmonic, and instrumental aspects are considered, while one chapter confronts the problem of the editions of the symphonies. Two concluding chapters discuss the symphonies in performance, and the history of Bruckner-reception with particular reference to German Nationalism, the Third Reich and the appropriation of Bruckner by the Nazis.

It is the variation in plainsong, its living quality, that these essays address.