Mozart and l'impresario

In May 1856, less than a year after opening, Jacques Offenbach’s Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens mounted a production of Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor entitled L’Impresario. Originally written in 1786 as a play with music consisting of no more than an overture and four numbers, Der Schauspieldirektor posed problems for would-be performers throughout the nineteenth century. Attempts to turn it into a one-act comic opera included adding numbers from Cimarosa’s L’impresario in angustie (1791), and from operas by Dittersdorf and others (1814). Louis Schneider’s solution for Berlin (1845) lengthened the opera by adding in songs and romances from elsewhere in Mozart’s own output. This served as the basis for Offenbach’s version a decade later, when Léon Battu and Ludovic Halévy wrote a completely new libretto to turn the Singspiel into an opéra bouffe for Offenbach’s troupe. L’Impresario enhanced the status of the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens when previously its activities had barely been considered seriously by the press, and also contributed significantly to the enshrinement of Mozart in Paris in his centenary year. Offenbach’s cast, selected from recent Conservatoire graduates, avoided the comic duo who had ensured the troupe’s earlier success in an attempt to sustain an image of the work to equal that of Don Giovanni or Le nozze di Figaro. In complicating the relationship between composer and entrepreneur both on and off the stage, L’Impresario brought Mozart into Offenbach’s theatrical world and invited operatic collusion between what was emerging as high and low art: the reception of Mozart and operetta

The Relationship of ‘Ο ΝΟΜΟε to the Life of the Christian According to St. Paul\u27s Letter to the Romans

What relationship the law has for the Christian is no new problem for the Church. Moses, Christ, and Paul dealt with the issue, yet this enigma confronted theologians of the past and continues to confront theologians today. Among contemporary Lutheran theologians the question has revolved around the propriety of using the law as a guide for the Christian\u27s life: the so-called third use of the law. This concern underlies the present thesis. In Paul, who grappled with God\u27s law, is the chief answer to the dilemma. Paul\u27s letter to the Christians in Rome has provided a most systematic discussion of the place of the law

Wagner and Paris: The Case of Rienzi (1869)

The French reception of Wagner is often based on the two pillars of the 1861 Tannhäuser production and that of Lohengrin in 1891. Sufficient is now known about he composer’s earliest attempt to engage with Parisian music drama around 1840 to be able to understand his work on Das Liebesverbot, Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, his editorial and journalistic work for Schlesinger, and his emerging relationship with key figures in Parisian musical life, Meyerbeer most notably. A clearer picture is also beginning to emerge of Wagner’s position in French cultural life and letters in the 1850s.Wagner’s position in Paris during the 1860s, culminating in the production of Rienzi at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1869, is however complex, multifaceted and little understood. Although there were no staged versions of his operas between 1861 and 1869, the very existence of a successful Parisian premiere for an opera by Wagner in 1869 – given that there would be almost nothing for two decades after 1870 – is remarkable in itself. The 1860s furthermore saw the emergence of a coherent voice of Wagnérisme, the presence of French Wagnéristes at the composer’s premieres all over Europe and a developing discourse in French around them. This may be set against a continuing tradition of performing extracts of Wagner’s operas throughout the 1860s, largely through the energies of Jules Pasdeloup, who – as director of the Théâtre-Lyrique – was responsible for the 1869 Rienzi as well.These competing threads in the skein of Wagner-reception in the 1860s are tangled in a narrative of increasingly tense Franco-German cultural and political relationships in which Wagner, his works and his writings, played a key role. The performance of Rienzi in 1869 is embedded in responses to the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866, the republication of Das Judenthum in der Musik in 1869 and the beginnings of the Franco-Prussian war<br/

The Impact of Vaccine Hesitancy on the Polio Vaccine in South Asia

A disease that paralyzes hundreds of children each year, polio is incurable but also entirely preventable through vaccination. Though part of the reason some children are not reached for immunization is that they are in areas too volatile for healthcare workers to access, vaccine hesitancy is increasingly being recognized as an important player. The objective of this study is to ascertain the degree to which vaccine hesitancy affects polio vaccine campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the countries in South Asia where polio continues to be endemic, to assess the drivers behind hesitancy in this region, and to present recommendations for how these challenges might be overcome. To best assess vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan and Afghanistan and evaluate its causes, this study integrates two research methods: articles and reports from participating NGOs and governments, and formal and informal interviews with experts in this field. Articles and reports were selected with the purpose of either helping to construct an idea of the emotional and social environments in these countries or to provide reference for what research has been done on vaccine hesitancy in other regions or on a more global scale. The first finding of this study is that vaccine hesitancy is the exception rather than the rule in almost every setting, but that in order to achieve the global eradication of polio, hesitancy must eventually be addressed. This study further finds that while confidence (trust in the safety of the vaccine and the motives of its providers) has historically been the leading cause of hesitancy by a wide margin and continues to account for most incidences of hesitation today, complacency (not deeming the risk of disease to outweigh the effort or perceived risk of immunization) will be a growing problem in the future as demand for the polio vaccine falls— ironically, as the campaign’s success grows and there are fewer observable cases. Finally, this study makes several recommendations for how vaccine hesitancy can be addressed in Pakistan and Afghanistan, taking into consideration current drivers, future risks, and decision-making psychology

The roles of absorptive capacity and cultural balance for exploratory and exploitative innovation in SMEs

This study investigates whether balanced forms of organizational cultures moderate the effects of potential and realized absorptive capacities (ACs) to simultaneously generate exploratory and exploitative innovations. Using empirical survey data collected from 138 small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we applied partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM) combined with mediation and moderation analyses to test our hypotheses. Our results show that the effects of potential AC on organizations' exploratory and exploitative innovations are fully mediated by the organizations' realized AC. The positive effects of realized AC on innovation are contingent on the overall cultural balance of the organization, which, however, does not affect the strong link between potential AC and realized AC. We thus provide novel empirical insights into the multi-dimensional nature of AC and the importance of cultural equilibrium for both exploratory and exploitative innovation, which is of particular importance for ambidextrous SMEs facing dynamic markets

Using pivots to explore heterogeneous collections: A case study in musicology

In order to provide a better e-research environment for musicologists, the musicSpace project has partnered with musicology’s leading data publishers, aggregated and enriched their data, and developed a richly featured exploratory search interface to access the combined dataset. There have been several significant challenges to developing this service, and intensive collaboration between musicologists (the domain experts) and computer scientists (who developed the enabling technologies) was required. One challenge was the actual aggregation of the data itself, as this was supplied adhering to a wide variety of different schemas and vocabularies. Although the domain experts expended much time and effort in analysing commonalities in the data, as data sources of increasing complexity were added earlier decisions regarding the design of the aggregated schema, particularly decisions made with reference to simpler data sources, were often revisited to take account of unanticipated metadata types. Additionally, in many domains a single source may be considered to be definitive for certain types of information. In musicology, this is essentially the case with the “works lists” of composers’ musical compositions given in Grove Music Online (http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo), and so for musicSpace, we have mapped all sources to the works lists from Grove for the purposes of exploration, specifically to exploit the accuracy of its metadata in respect to dates of publication, catalogue numbers, and so on. Therefore, rather than mapping all fields from Grove to a central model, it would be far quicker (in terms of development time) to create a system to “pull-in” data from other sources that are mapped directly to the Grove works lists