Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer; 5 September 1791 – 2 May 1864) was a German opera composer, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Mozart and Wagner". With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors, he gave the genre of grand opera 'decisive character'. Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra. They set a standard which helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century.

Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Meyerbeer began his musical career as a pianist but soon decided to devote himself to opera, spending several years in Italy studying and composing.  His 1824 opera Il crociato in Egitto was the first to bring him a Europe-wide reputation, but it was Robert le diable (1831) which raised his status to great celebrity. His public career, lasting from then until his death, during which he remained a dominating figure in the world of opera, was summarized by his contemporary Hector Berlioz, who claimed that he 'has not only the luck to be talented, but the talent to be lucky.'  He was at his peak with his operas Les Huguenots (1836) and Le prophète (1849); his last opera (L'Africaine) was performed posthumously.  His operas made him the most frequently performed composer at the world's leading opera houses in the nineteenth century.

At the same time as his successes in Paris, Meyerbeer, as a Prussian Court Kapellmeister (Director of Music) from 1832, and from 1843 as Prussian General Music Director, was also influential in opera in Berlin and throughout Germany. He was an early supporter of Richard Wagner, enabling the first production of the latter's opera Rienzi. He was commissioned to write the patriotic opera Ein Feldlager in Schlesien to celebrate the reopening of the Berlin Royal Opera House in 1844, and he wrote music for certain Prussian state occasions.

Apart from around 50 songs, Meyerbeer wrote little except for the stage. The critical assaults of Wagner and his supporters, especially after Meyerbeer's death, led to a decline in the popularity of his works; his operas were suppressed by the Nazi regime in Germany, and were neglected by opera houses through most of the twentieth century. In the 21st century, however, the composer's major French grand operas have begun to reappear in the repertory of numerous European opera houses.

Early years
Meyerbeer's birthname was Jacob Liebmann Beer; he was born in Tasdorf (now a part of Rüdersdorf), near Berlin, then the capital of Prussia, to a Jewish family. His father was the wealthy financier Judah Herz Beer (1769–1825) and his mother, Amalia (Malka) Wulff (1767–1854), to whom he was particularly devoted, also came from the moneyed elite. Their other children included the astronomer Wilhelm Beer and the poet Michael Beer. He was to adopt the surname Meyerbeer on the death of his grandfather Liebmann Meyer Wulff (1811) and italianize his first name to Giacomo during his period of study in Italy, around 1817.

Judah Beer was a leader of the Berlin Jewish community and maintained a private synagogue in his house which leaned towards reformist views. Jacob Beer wrote an early cantata for performance at this synagogue. Both Judah Herz Beer and his wife were close to the Prussian court; when Amalia was awarded in 1816 the Order of Louise, she was given, by Royal dispensation, not the traditional Cross but a portrait bust of the Queen. The Beer children were provided with a fine education; their tutors included two of the leaders of the enlightened Jewish intelligentsia, the author Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn and Edmund Kley, (later a reform movement rabbi in Hamburg) to whom they remained attached into their maturity. The brothers Alexander von Humboldt, the renowned naturalist, geographer and explorer, and the philosopher, linguist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt were close friends of the family circle.

Beer's first keyboard instructor was Franz Lauska, a pupil of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and a favoured teacher at the Berlin court. Beer also became one of Muzio Clementi's pupils while Clementi was in Berlin. The boy made his public debut in 1801 playing Mozart's D minor Piano Concerto in Berlin. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: 'The amazing keyboard playing of young Bär (a Jewish lad of 9), who carried off the difficult passages and other solo parts with aplomb, and has fine powers of rendition even more rarely found in one of his age, made the concert even more interesting'.

Beer, as he still named himself, studied with Antonio Salieri and the German master and friend of Goethe, Carl Friedrich Zelter.  Louis Spohr organised a concert for Beer at Berlin in 1804 and continued his acquaintance with the lad later in Vienna and Rome. A portrait of Jacob commissioned by the family at this time shows him 'confidently facing the viewer, his hair romantically dishevelled... his left hand rests on the keyboard, and his right hand grasps a musical manuscript... plac[ing] its subject in the tradition of the young Mozart'. Beer's first stage work, the ballet Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen (The Fisherman and the Milkmaid) was produced in March 1810 at the Court Opera in Berlin. His formal training with the Abbé Vogler at Darmstadt between 1810 and 1812 was, however, of crucial importance, and at around this time he begins to sign himself 'Meyer Beer'. Here, with his fellow students (among whom was Carl Maria von Weber), he learned not only the craft of composition but also the business of music (organising concerts and dealing with publishers). Forming a close friendship with Weber and other pupils, Meyerbeer established the Harmonischer Verein (Musical Union), whose members undertook to support each other with favourable press criticism and networking. On 12 February 1813 Beer received the first of the string of honours he was to accumulate throughout his life when he was appointed 'Court Composer' by Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt. He was also in close contact with Ludwig van Beethoven as he played timpani at the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in December 1813. Beethoven complained that Meyerbeer was "always behind the beat". But nonetheless, Beethoven saw musical potential on the young Beer.

Throughout his early career, although determined to become a musician, Beer found it difficult to decide between playing and composition. Certainly, other professionals in the decade 1810–1820, including Moscheles, considered him amongst the greatest virtuosi of his period. He wrote during this period numerous piano pieces, including a concerto and set of variations for piano and orchestra, but these have been lost. To this period also belongs a Clarinet Quintet written for the virtuoso Heinrich Baermann (1784–1847) who remained a close friend of the composer.

Career

In Italy
Despite performances of his oratorio Gott und die Natur (God and Nature) (Berlin, 1811) and his early operas Jephtas Gelübde (Jephtha's Vow) (Munich, 1812) and Wirth und Gast (Landlord and Guest) (Stuttgart, 1813) in Germany, Meyerbeer had set his sights by 1814 on basing an operatic career in Paris. In the same year, his opera Die beiden Kalifen (The Two Caliphs), a version of Wirth und Gast, was a disastrous failure in Vienna. Realizing that a full understanding of Italian opera was essential for his musical development, he went to study in Italy, enabled by the financial support of his family. He arrived in Italy at the beginning of 1816, after visits to Paris and London, where he heard Cramer play. In Paris, he wrote to a friend, 'I go from museum to museum, library to library, theatre to theatre, with the restlessness of the Wandering Jew'.

During his years in Italy Meyerbeer became acquainted with, and impressed by, the works of his contemporary Gioachino Rossini, who by 1816, at the age of 24, was already director of both major opera houses in Naples and in the same year premiered his operas The Barber of Seville and Otello. Meyerbeer wrote a series of Italian operas on Rossinian models, including Romilda e Costanza (Padua, 1817), Semiramide riconosciuta (Turin, 1819), Emma di Resburgo (Venice, 1819), Margherita d'Anjou (Milan, 1820) and L'esule di Granata (Milan, 1821). All but the last two of these had libretti by Gaetano Rossi, whom Meyerbeer continued to support until the latter's death in 1855, although not commissioning any further libretti from him after Il crociato in Egitto (1824). During a visit to Sicily in 1816, Meyerbeer noted down a number of folksongs, and these in fact constitute the earliest collection of folk music of the region. In a birthday greeting from Rossi's wife in 1817 occurs the earliest use discovered of Meyerbeer's adopted forename 'Giacomo'.

Recognition
The name Giacomo Meyerbeer first became known internationally with his opera Il crociato in Egitto—premiered in Venice in 1824 and produced in London and Paris in 1825; incidentally, it was the last opera ever written to feature a castrato, and the last to require keyboard accompaniment for recitatives. This 'breakthrough' in Paris was exactly what Meyerbeer had been aiming for over the past ten years; he had been carefully preparing for it, developing contacts, and fully reaped his reward.

In 1826, shortly after the death of his father, Meyerbeer married his cousin, Minna Mosson (1804–1886). The marriage which may have been 'dynastic' in its origins turned out to be stable and devoted; the couple were to have five children, of whom the three youngest (all daughters) survived to adulthood. In the same year, following the death of Carl Maria von Weber, Weber's widow asked Meyerbeer to complete her husband's unfinished comic opera Die drei Pintos. This was to cause him much trouble over future years, as he found the material insufficient to work on. Eventually, in 1852 he settled the matter with Weber's heirs by handing them Weber's drafts and cash compensation. (The opera was later completed by Gustav Mahler).

With his next opera Meyerbeer became virtually a superstar. Robert le diable (with libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne), produced in Paris in 1831, was one of the earliest grand operas. The libretto, originally planned in 1827 as a three-act opéra comique for the Opéra-Comique theatre, was refashioned after 1829 in a five-act form to meet the requirements of the Paris Opéra. Its revised characterisation as a 'grand opera' placed it in succession to Auber's La muette de Portici (1828) and Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829) in this new genre. The composer undertook further work on the opera in early 1831 adding ballet episodes, including the "Ballet of Nuns", which was to prove one of the opera's great sensations, becoming an early example of the ballet blanc genre. He also rewrote the two major male roles of Bertrand and Robert to suit the talents of Nicolas Levasseur and Adolphe Nourrit, respectively. At the invitation of Nourrit, Cornélie Falcon made her debut at the age of 18 at the Opéra in the role of Alice on 20 July 1832, and she made a vivid impression on the public, which included on that night Auber, Berlioz, Halévy, Maria Malibran, Giulia Grisi, Honoré Daumier, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. On hearing her in the role, Meyerbeer himself declared his opera at last 'complete'.

The success of the opera led to Meyerbeer himself becoming a celebrity. In January 1832 he was awarded membership of the Légion d'honneur. This success – coupled with Meyerbeer's known family wealth – inevitably also precipitated envy amongst his peers. Berlioz – who had commented that 'Meyerbeer not only had the luck to be talented, he had the talent to be lucky' – wrote 'I can't forget that Meyerbeer was only able to persuade [the Opéra] to put on Robert le diable ... by paying the administration sixty thousand francs of his own money'; and Frédéric Chopin lamented 'Meyerbeer had to work for three years and pay his own expenses for his stay in Paris before Robert le diable could be staged....Three years, that's a lot – it's too much.' King Frederick William III of Prussia who attended the second performance of Robert le diable, swiftly invited him to compose a German opera, and Meyerbeer was invited to stage Robert in Berlin. Within a few years the opera had been staged with success all over Europe, and also in the USA.

The fusion of dramatic music, melodramatic plot, and sumptuous staging in Robert le diable proved a sure-fire formula, as did the partnership with Scribe, which Meyerbeer would go on to repeat in Les Huguenots, Le prophète, and L'Africaine. All of these operas held the international stage throughout the 19th century, as did the more pastoral Dinorah (1859), making Meyerbeer the most frequently performed composer at leading opera houses in the nineteenth century.

Between Paris and Berlin

1832–1839

Letellier describes Meyerbeer's mature life as 'a tale of two cities...His artistic triumph and legendary status were achieved in Paris...but he never abandoned Prussia, especially his home city of Berlin'. His wife Minna was based in Berlin (she did not enjoy Paris) as was his beloved mother; and he had a series of Royal duties from the Prussian court, stemming from his appointment as Court Kapellmeister in 1832. For these reasons his life from 1830 onwards is characterised by travel between these two centres.

In Paris Meyerbeer had been asked by Louis Véron, the director of the Opéra, for a new work. At first, he attempted to persuade Véron to accept the opéra-comique Le portefaix to a libretto by Scribe, which he had been contracted to compose in early 1831; but Véron insisted on a full five-act piece. Together with Scribe, Meyerbeer reviewed many subjects before deciding, in 1832, on Les Huguenots. The contract which Meyerbeer signed with Véron contained a penalty clause if the work was not delivered by the end of 1833. When the time came and the opera was not ready, Véron claimed his 30,000 francs under this clause; Meyerbeer was perhaps unique amongst composers in being able to pay this. In fact, Véron refunded the money under a further agreement, when the opera was delivered in late 1834; but Veron himself was replaced as director of the Opera by Henri Duponchel before Les Huguenots was premiered on 29 February 1836. It was an immediate and immense success, its splendid staging and effects exceeding even those of Fromental Halévy's La Juive, which had premiered the previous year. Berlioz called the score "a musical encyclopaedia", and the singing, especially of Nourrit and Falcon, was universally praised. Les Huguenots was the first opera to be performed at the Opéra more than 1,000 times (the 1,000th performance being on 16 May 1906) and continued to be produced up to 1936, more than a century after its premiere. Its many performances in all other of the world's major opera houses give it a claim to being the most successful opera of the 19th century.

However, in Berlin Meyerbeer faced many problems, including the enmity of the jealous Gaspare Spontini, who since 1820 had been Court Kapellmeister and director of the Berlin Hofoper. Complaints were made in the Berlin press about the delay of the Berlin premiere of Robert le diable (which finally took place in June 1832), and Meyerbeer's music was decried by the critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab. There was no sign of the German opera expected from Meyerbeer. Moreover, reactionary censorship laws prevented the production of Les Huguenots in Berlin (and indeed in many other cities of Germany). Nevertheless, Meyerbeer, who (as he wrote to a friend) 'years ago...swore to myself never to respond personally to attacks on my work, and never under any circumstances to cause or respond to personal polemics', refused to be drawn on any of these matters.

Meanwhile, in Paris Meyerbeer began to seek new libretti, initially considering Le prophète by Scribe, and Le cinq mars by Henri Saint-Georges and eventually settling on Scribe's Vasco da Gama (later to become L'Africaine), which he contracted to complete by 1840. However, Meyerbeer had envisaged that the main role in L'Africaine would be written for Falcon; after the catastrophic failure of her voice in 1837, he turned instead to Le prophète.

On 20 August 1839, Meyerbeer, whilst relaxing at Boulogne in the company of Moscheles, met for the first time with Richard Wagner, who was en route to Paris. Their ensuing relationship (see below) was to have major repercussions for the careers and reputations of both. At this meeting Wagner read to Meyerbeer from the libretto of Rienzi, and Meyerbeer agreed to look through the score, which indeed he subsequently recommended for performance at Dresden.

The 1840s

By the end of 1841, Meyerbeer had completed the first draft of Le prophète, but refused to stage it because the then director of the opera, Leon Pillet, wished to cast his mistress, Rosine Stoltz, in the part of Fidès, the hero's mother. (Berlioz characterised Stoltz as 'la Directrice du Directeur'). Meyerbeer insisted on Pauline Viardot for the role. Meyerbeer lodged the score with a Parisian lawyer, and refused to countenance any production until his wishes were met. Only in 1849 was the Opéra willing to agree to his conditions. Meyerbeer was unique in his time in having the wealth and influence to impose his will as a composer in this way.

In the meantime, the situation in Prussia was changing. Following the death of Frederick William III, the new regime of Frederick William IV was far more liberal. Spontini was dismissed, and the Berlin premiere of Les Huguenots was arranged (20 May 1842). On the instigation of Alexander von Humboldt, Meyerbeer was installed later in the year as Prussian Generalmusikdirektor and director of music for the Royal Court. Meyerbeer wrote a number of works for court occasions, and also provided music, at the King's request, for the first staging in Berlin in 1856 of his brother Michael's play Struensee (based on the life of Johann Friedrich Struensee), which had also been proscribed under the previous regime.

In 1843 the Berlin Opera house burned down. The creation of the new building gave a new opportunity to commission a German opera from Meyerbeer. The subject of the opera, Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (A Silesian Encampment), was an episode in the life of Frederick the Great. As this patriotic opera 'needed' Prussian creators, Meyerbeer arranged that whilst the trusted Scribe would write the libretto, Rellstab would translate it and take the credit (and the royalties). This had the added advantage of winning over the formerly hostile Rellstab. Meyerbeer had hoped to have Jenny Lind (for whom he had written the part) sing the lead role of Vielka, but the opera premiered on 7 December 1844 without her (although she did appear in subsequent performances). The libretto was revised by Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer to a Bohemian background as Vielka for a production in Vienna (1847). (In a further incarnation, the music was later used by Meyerbeer for a revamped libretto by Scribe featuring Peter the Great, and produced as an opéra comique in Paris (L'étoile du nord, 1854)).

With the continuing delays in the production of Le prophète and L'Africaine, Meyerbeer was now becoming subject to increasing sniping in Paris. In 1846 Meyerbeer began work on a new project with Scribe and Saint-Georges, Noëma, but in the following year Pillet was sacked from the opera and the direction was resumed by Duponchel. As a consequence, Meyerbeer was at last able to stage Le prophète with a cast to his liking, (including Viardot as Fidès), and it premiered on 16 April 1849. Again Meyerbeer's new opera was an outstanding success – despite the unusual feature of the lead female role being the hero's mother, rather than his lover. Amongst those at the 47th performance in February 1850 was Richard Wagner, now an impoverished political exile; the success of a work so fundamentally against his own operatic principles was one of the spurs to his spiteful anti-Jewish denunciation of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850).

Last years

Increasing ill health (or possibly hypochondria) now began to restrict Meyerbeer's output and activities. The death of his beloved mother in 1854 was also a blow. However, the success of L'étoile du nord in 1854 demonstrated that he could still pack the theatres. Following this he began on two new projects, an opera by Scribe based on the biblical story of Judith, and an opéra comique, Le pardon de Ploërmel, (also known as Dinorah, the title given to the Italian version performed at London) to a libretto by Jules Barbier. The latter premiered on 4 April 1859 at the Opéra Comique in Paris; the former, like many previous projects, remained only as sketches. The death of Scribe in 1861 was a further disincentive to Meyerbeer to proceed with his operatic work in progress. In 1862, in accordance with his original contract with Scribe, he paid Scribe's widow compensation for not completing Judith.

Nevertheless, Meyerbeer's last years saw the composition of a good deal of non-operatic music, including a Coronation March for William I of Prussia, (1861), an overture for the 1862 International Exhibition in London, and incidental music (now lost) to Henry Blaze de Bury's play La jeunesse de Goethe (1860). He composed a few settings of liturgical material, including one of the 91st Psalm (1853); and also choral works for the synagogue at Paris.

Meyerbeer died in Paris on 2 May 1864. Rossini, who, not having heard the news, came to his apartment the next day intending to meet him, was shocked and fainted. He was moved to write on the spot a choral tribute (Pleure, pleure, muse sublime!). A special train bore Meyerbeer's body from the Gare du Nord to Berlin on 6 May, where he was buried in the family vault at the Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee.

L'Africaine was eventually premiered after Meyerbeer's death at the Salle Le Peletier on 28 April 1865 in a performing edition undertaken by François-Joseph Fétis.

Personality and beliefs

Meyerbeer's immense wealth (increased by the success of his operas) and his continuing adherence to his Jewish religion set him apart somewhat from many of his musical contemporaries. They also gave rise to rumours that his success was due to his bribing musical critics. Richard Wagner (see below) accused him of being interested only in money, not music. Meyerbeer was, however, a deeply serious musician and a sensitive personality. He philosophically resigned himself to being a victim of his own success: his extensive diaries and correspondence – which survived the turmoil of 20th-century Europe and have now been published in eight volumes – are an invaluable source for the history of music and theatre in the composer's time.

Meyerbeer's personal attachment to Judaism was a mature personal decision – after the death of his maternal grandfather in 1811 he wrote to his mother: 'Please accept from me a promise that I will always live in the religion in which he died'. In his diaries he noted significant family events including birthdays, not by their Gregorian calendar occurrence, but by their Jewish calendar dates. Moreover, he regularly suffered from (and/or imagined) anti-Jewish slights throughout his life, warning his brothers frequently in his letters against richess (Yiddish for 'Jew-hatred'). Writing to Heinrich Heine in 1839, he offered the fatalistic view:I believe that richess is like love in the theatres and novels: no matter how often one encounters it...it never misses its target if effectively wielded...[Nothing] can grow back the foreskin of which we are robbed on the eighth day of life; those who, on the ninth day, do not bleed from this operation shall continue to bleed an entire lifetime, even after death.

It was probably a similar fatalism that led Meyerbeer never to enter public controversy with those who slighted him, either professionally or personally, although he occasionally displayed his grudges in his Diaries; for example, on hearing Robert Schumann conduct in 1850: 'I saw for the first time the man who, as a critic, has persecuted me for twelve years with a deadly enmity.'

In his mature operas, Meyerbeer selected stories which almost invariably featured as a major element of storyline a hero living within a hostile environment. Robert, Raoul the Huguenot, Jean the prophet, and the defiant Vasco da Gama in L'Africaine are all 'outsiders'. It has been suggested that 'Meyerbeer's choice of these topics is not accidental; they reflect his own sense of living in a potentially inimical society.'

Meyerbeer's relationship with Heine displays the awkwardness and prickliness of the social personae of both parties. Meyerbeer, apart from any of his personal feelings, needed Heine onside as an influential personality and writer on music. He genuinely admired Heine's verse, and made a number of settings from it. Heine, living in Paris from 1830, was always equivocal about his loyalties between Judaism and Christianity, and always short of money, asked Meyerbeer to intervene with Heine's own family for financial support and frequently took loans and money from Meyerbeer himself. He was not above threatening Meyerbeer with blackmail by writing satirical pieces about him (and indeed Meyerbeer paid Heine's widow to suppress such writings). And yet, at Heine's death in 1856, Meyerbeer wrote in his diary: 'Peace be to his ashes. I forgive him from my heart for his ingratitude and many wickednesses against me.'

Music and theatre

Music

Meyerbeer did not operate on the basis of any theory or philosophy of music and was not an innovator in harmony or musical form. In the words of John H. Roberts: "He had a rich fund of appealing if somewhat short-breathed melody, commanded an increasingly rich harmonic vocabulary, and was a master of brilliant and novel orchestral effect. But he had very limited skill in thematic development and even less in contrapuntal combination."

All of his significant music is for the voice (opera and songs) and this reflects his detailed grounding in Italian opera. Throughout his career he wrote his operas with specific singers in mind and took great care to temper his writing to their strengths; but at the same time he seemed little interested in expressing the emotions of his characters, preferring to use his music to underline the larger-scale machinations of the plot. In this way he was close to the ideas of his teacher Vogler, himself renowned for his dramatic depictions of nature and incidents in keyboard music, who wrote in 1779 that: "writing beautifully is easy; expression is not too difficult; but only the genius of a great painter...can choose for each picture agreeable and natural colours that are particular to it." Indeed, Meyerbeer's devotion to the voice often led him to ignore the dramatic cohesion of his operas; typically, he would write far too much music and the scores of his operas would have to be drastically cut during rehearsals. (The lengthy overture to Le prophète had to be cut in its entirety, surviving only in a piano arrangement by Charles-Valentin Alkan.)

The first signs of Meyerbeer breaking with the Italian traditions in which he had trained are in Il crociato in Egitto. Amongst other notable features of the opera were its lavish orchestral forces (extending to two onstage military bands in the final act). The grandiosity of the work reflected the need to make an impact on the sophisticated and technologically advanced stages of London and Paris, for which it was extensively rewritten. Meyerbeer's contribution was revealed at this stage to be the combination of Italian vocal lines, German orchestration and harmony, and the use of contemporary theatrical techniques, ideas which he carried forward in Robert and his later works. However Meyerbeer's background in the Italian operatic traditions can be clearly seen as late as 1859 in the 'mad scene' in Dinorah (the virtuoso aria Ombre légère).

Typical of Meyerbeer's innovative orchestration is the use in Robert le diable of dark-toned instruments – bassoons, timpani and low brass, including ophicleide – to characterise the diabolical nature of Bertram and his associates. At one point the arrival of a character is announced by a combination of three solo timpani and pizzicato double-basses. Similar adventurousness is shown in Les Huguenots where the composer uses a solo bass clarinet and solo viola d'amore to accompany arias. For Le prophète, Meyerbeer considered using the newly invented saxophone. Becker suggests that Meyerbeer in all his grand operas often: 'created a deliberately 'unbeautiful' sound.....with unusual orchestration designed to express ...content rather than produce a sensuous sound' and opines that this explains much of the criticism he received from German writers on music.

Theatre

Meyerbeer's concern to integrate musical power with all the resources of contemporary theatre anticipated in some ways the ideas of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. Becker writes:
Wagner's idea of music drama...was originally developed by way of grand opera...his ideas could never have been realised in their particular form without the pioneering development[s]...that Meyerbeer's operas were the first to demand.

Meyerbeer was always concerned to intensify the theatricality of his operas, even when new ideas emerged at a relatively late stage in the music's composition. An example of his receptiveness was the addition of the provocative "Ballet of the Nuns" in the third act of Robert le diable, at the suggestion of Duponchel. The set for the ballet was an innovative and striking design by Duponchel and Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri. Duponchel had also introduced technical innovations for the staging, including 'English traps' for the sudden appearance and disappearance of the ghosts. (Meyerbeer was led in fact to complain that the spectacle was too much and was pushing his music into the background). In Le prophète, the skating ballet, which created a great sensation, was composed after rehearsals had begun, in order to capitalise on the new craze for roller skates. The theatre was also able to use new electrical lighting effects to create a powerful sunrise, and to depict the conflagration which ends the opera.

Meyerbeer's large choral 'tableaux' also made a major contribution to the overall dramatic effect; the composer particularly sought opportunities to write such large-scale crowd scenes, and preferred libretti which offered such possibilities. Crosten writes: 'These massive developed sections are the chief glory of the Meyerbeerian opera, for they are not only big in volume but big in their structural design'.

Mention should also be made of Meyerbeer's intense concern with the business of opera, which indeed had formed part of his studies under Vogler. This gave him the background not only to deal with complex contractual issues and to negotiate with publishers but extended to wooing the press and 'marketing' in general. Indeed, he was probably the originator of the 'press conference' at which journalists were fed refreshments and information. This marketing and commercialisation of opera was reinforced by Meyerbeer's Paris publisher Maurice Schlesinger who had established his fortune on the back of Robert, and even persuaded Honoré de Balzac to write a novella (Gambara) to promote Les Huguenots. Schlesinger's publication of Franz Liszt's Reminiscences de Robert le diable sold out on the day of issue and was immediately reprinted. Such manoeuvres did little to endear Meyerbeer to his fellow artists, and indeed engendered envious comments of the sort already quoted from Berlioz and Chopin.

Reception

Musical influence

Meyerbeer had no pupils and no direct 'school'. Yet as his works spanned the golden age of grand opera, clear traces of his influence can be found in the grand operas of Fromental Halévy, Gaetano Donizetti, Giuseppe Verdi and others. After 1850, Huebner notes a continuing tradition of operas at Paris where 'principals appear with chorus at the end of an act and where private intrigue conjoins a well-articulated public dimension in the plot' and cites amongst others Charles Gounod's La nonne sanglante (1854), Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet and operas by Jules Massenet, amongst them Le roi de Lahore (1877) and Le Cid (1885). The line of succession was however virtually washed away in the tide of Wagner in Paris after 1890 (see below). The influence of Meyerbeer has also been detected in the operas of Antonín Dvořák and other Czech composers, and in the operas of Russian composers including Rimsky-Korsakov and the young Tchaikovsky, who thought Les Huguenots 'one of the greatest works in the repertoire'.

Themes from Meyerbeer's works were used by many contemporary composers, often in the form of keyboard paraphrases or fantasies. Perhaps the most elaborate and substantial of these is Franz Liszt's monumental Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam", S. 259 (1852), for organ or pédalier, based on the chorale of the Anabaptist priests in Le prophète and dedicated to Meyerbeer.  The work was also published in a version for piano duet (S. 624) which was much later arranged for solo piano by Ferruccio Busoni.

Liszt also wrote piano works based on Robert le diable, notably the Réminiscences de Robert le diable  subtitled Valse infernale.  He also transcribed two pieces from L'Africaine, as "Illustrations de l'opéra L'Africaine". Frédéric Chopin and Auguste Franchomme jointly composed a Grand duo concertant on themes from the opera, for cello and piano, in 1832, and the Italian pianist and composer Adolfo Fumagalli composed an elaborate fantasy on the opera for left hand alone as his Op. 106. Other pieces based on the opera included works by Adolf von Henselt and Jean-Amédée Méreaux. Similar works, of varying musical quality, were churned out by composers for each of the further operas in attempts to cash in on their success.

Critical reception

Meyerbeer's operas consistently enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, and the verdict of (the then pro-Meyerbeer) Wagner in 1841, when the Paris Opéra was vainly awaiting Le prophète and L'Africaine, was not atypical:The Paris Opéra lies dying. It looks for its salvation to the German Messiah, Meyerbeer; if he keeps it waiting much longer, its death agonies will begin...It is for that reason...that one only sees Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots turning up again when the mediocrities are forced to withdraw.

However, dissenting voices were heard from critics. Not all of these however were on musical grounds. Berlioz for example raised the issue of the inhibiting effects of Meyerbeer's success (which he felt particularly as one who struggled to get his works performed): "The pressure [Meyerbeer] exerts on managers, artists and critics, and consequently on the Paris public, at least as much by his immense wealth as by his eclectic talent, makes all serious success at the Opéra virtually impossible. This baneful influence may still be felt ten years after his death: Heinrich Heine maintains he has 'paid in advance'."

Mendelssohn disapproved of Meyerbeer's works on moral grounds, believing Robert le diable to be 'ignoble'.

Schumann's attack on Les Huguenots was clearly a personal diatribe against Meyerbeer's Judaism: 'Time and time again we had to turn away in disgust...One may search in vain for a sustained pure thought, a truly Christian sentiment...It is all contrived, all make believe and hypocrisy!...The shrewdest of composers rubs his hands with glee.'

Wagner's disciple Theodor Uhlig followed Schumann's Judaeophobic line in his 1850 review of Le prophète:
'To a good Christian [it] is at best contrived, exaggerated, unnatural and slick, and it is not possible that the practised propaganda of the Hebrew art-taste can succeed using such means.' Uhlig's phrase 'the Hebrew art-taste' was to be used by Richard Wagner to spark off his attack on Meyerbeer, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music) (see below).

In 1911, the composer Charles Villiers Stanford cited Meyerbeer's music as an example of the dangers he believed lay in improvising at the piano without a clear plan, (although there is in fact no evidence to suggest Meyerbeer worked in this way), writing: 'Man of genius though he was, as any man who wrote the fourth act of the Huguenots must have been, Meyerbeer is a sign-post of this danger of trusting to the pianoforte as a medium of inspiration.'

Wagner's campaign against Meyerbeer

The vitriolic campaign of Richard Wagner against Meyerbeer was to a great extent responsible for the decline of Meyerbeer's popularity after his death in 1864. This campaign was as much a matter of personal spite as of racism – Wagner had learnt a great deal from Meyerbeer and indeed Wagner's early opera Rienzi (1842) was facetiously called by Hans von Bülow 'Meyerbeer's best opera'. Meyerbeer supported the young Wagner, both financially and in helping to obtain the premiere productions of both Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman at Dresden.

Wagner's early correspondence with Meyerbeer, up to 1846, is described by historian David Conway as "cringingly obsequious". However, from the early 1840s, as Wagner developed Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, his ideas on opera increasingly diverged from Meyerbeerean standards; even in 1843 Wagner had written to Schumann condemning Meyerbeer's work as 'a striving after superficial popularity'. During 1846 Meyerbeer turned down Wagner's application for a loan of 1,200 thalers, and this may have marked a turning point.

In particular, after 1849, Wagner resented Meyerbeer's continuing success at a time when his own vision of German opera had little chance of prospering. After the May Uprising in Dresden of 1849, Wagner was for some years a political refugee facing a prison sentence or worse should he return to Saxony. During his period of living in exile, he had few sources of income and little opportunity of getting his own works performed. The success of Le prophète sent Wagner over the edge, and he was also deeply envious of Meyerbeer's wealth. In reaction he published, under a pseudonym, his 1850 essay Jewishness in Music. Without specifically naming Meyerbeer, he interpreted the popular success of the latter as the undermining of German music by alleged Jewish venality and willingness to cater to the lowest tastes, and attributed the supposed poor quality of such 'Jewish music' to Jewish speech and song patterns, which 'though the cultured son of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they shew an impertinent obstinacy in cleaving to him'.

In his major theoretical statement, Opera and Drama (1852), Wagner objected to the music of Meyerbeer, asserting its superficiality and incoherence in dramatic terms; this work contains Wagner's well-known put-down of Meyerbeer's operas as 'effects without causes'. It also contains the sardonic crack that '[Rossini] never could have dreamt that it would someday occur to the Bankers, for whom he had always made their music, to make it for themselves'. Jewishness in Music was reissued in 1869, (after Meyerbeer's death) in an extended form, with a far more explicit attack on Meyerbeer. This version was under Wagner's own name – and as Wagner had by now a far greater reputation, his views obtained far wider publicity. These attacks on Meyerbeer (which also included swipes at Felix Mendelssohn) are regarded by Paul Lawrence Rose as a significant milestone in the growth of German anti-Semitism.

As Wagner prospered, it became second nature for him, his wife Cosima and the Wagner circle to deprecate Meyerbeer and his works, and Cosima's Diaries contain numerous instances of this – (as well as recording a dream of Wagner's in which he and Meyerbeer were reconciled). Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben, circulated amongst his friends (and published openly in 1911), contains constant sniping at Meyerbeer and concludes with Wagner receiving the news of Meyerbeer's death, and his companions' gratification at the news. The downgrading of Meyerbeer became a commonplace amongst Wagnerites: in 1898, George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite, commented that: "Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyone could have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously."

Thus as Wagner's stock rose, Meyerbeer's fell. In 1890, the year before the Paris premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin, there were no Wagner performances at the Paris Opéra, and 32 performances of Meyerbeer's four grand operas. In 1909, there were 60 Wagner performances, and only three of Meyerbeer's (Les Huguenots being the sole work performed).

Reevaluation

Meyerbeer's costly operas, requiring grand casts of leading singers, were gradually dropped from the repertoire in the early 20th century. They were banned in Germany from 1933, and subsequently in subject countries, by the Nazi regime because the composer was Jewish, and this was a major factor in their further disappearance from the repertory.

One of the first serious post-war studies of Meyerbeer and grand opera was Crosten's 1948 book Grand Opera: An Art and a Business which laid out the themes and standards for much subsequent research. A major contribution to the revival of interest in Meyerbeer was the work of the scholar Heinz Becker, leading to the complete publication, between 1960 and 2006, of Meyerbeer's complete diaries and correspondence in German, which are an important source for musical history of the era. The English scholar Robert Letellier has translated the diaries and undertaken a wide range of Meyerbeer studies. The establishment of a 'Meyerbeer Fan Club' in America also stimulated interest.

Most importantly the operas themselves have been revived and recorded, although despite the efforts of such champions as Dame Joan Sutherland, who took part in performances of, and recorded, Les Huguenots, they have yet to achieve anything like the huge popular following they attracted during their creator's lifetime. Recordings are now available of all the operas from Il crociato onwards, for many of the earlier Italian operas, and for other pieces including his songs and the incidental music for Struensee.

Amongst the reasons often adduced for the dearth of productions in the 20th century were the scale of Meyerbeer's more ambitious works and the cost of mounting them, as well as the alleged lack of virtuoso singers capable of doing justice to Meyerbeer's demanding music. However, successful productions of some of the major operas at relatively small centres such as Strasbourg (L'Africaine, 2004) and Metz (Les Huguenots, 2004) showed that this conventional wisdom can be challenged. Since then, there have been highly successful new productions of Les Huguenots at major opera houses in France, Belgium and Germany. The Paris Opera opened a new production of Les Huguenots in September 2018, the first time since 1936 for the opera to be performed there. In December 2012, the Royal Opera House in London premiered its first performance of Robert le diable in 120 years. In 2013, Meyerbeer's original version of L'Africaine in a new critical edition by Jürgen Schläder was performed by Chemnitz Opera under the original title Vasco de Gama. The production was a success with audiences and critics and won the poll of German critics award presented by Opernwelt magazine annually as "Rediscovery of the year" in 2013. The critical edition was also used for a high-profile new production at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in October 2015. From 2015 onwards, new productions of Le prophète began to appear at some European opera houses.

On 9 September 2013 a plaque to mark Meyerbeer's last residence was put up at Pariser Platz 6a, Berlin.

Selected honours and awards
1813 – Awarded title of Court and Chamber composer to Louis II, Grand Duke of Hesse.
1836 – Created Knight in the Order of Leopold, by Royal Order of King Leopold I.
1842 – Awarded Pour le Mérite for sciences and arts (Prussia).
1842 – Awarded Order of the Oak Crown by King William II of the Netherlands.
1842 – Created Knight of the Order of the Polar Star by King Oscar I of Sweden.
1850 – Awarded Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy by the University of Jena.

On film
Vernon Dobtcheff played the role of Giacomo Meyerbeer in the 1983 film Wagner.

See also

 List of operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer

Notes

References
Citations

Sources

 Attwood, William G. (1999). The Parisian Worlds of Frédéric Chopin. New Haven: Yale University Press.
 Becker, Heinz (1958). Der Fall Heine-Meyerbeer: Neue Dokumente revidieren ein Geschichtsurteil. Berlin: De Gruyter
 Becker, Heinz (1980). 'Meyerbeer [Meyer Beer], Giacomo [Jakob Liebmann]'. In Sadie, Stanley, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 12, 246–256. London: Macmillan

 Berlioz, Hector, tr. and ed. David Cairns.(1969), The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz. London: Victor Gollancz
 Brzoska, Matthias (1998). Concert at Bochum on Meyerbeer Fan Club website (accessed 8 July 2012]
 Brzoska, Matthias (2003). 'Meyerbeer: Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots ' in Charlton (2003), pp. 189–207.
 Brzoska, Matthias (2004). Remarks about Meyerbeer's Le prophète on Meyerbeer Fan Club website (accessed 8 July 2012)

 Carlson, Marvin (1972). The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press. .
 Carnegy, Patrick (2006). Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. New Haven: Yale University Press. .
 Čerkášina, Marina (1998). 'Meyerbeer und die russischer Oper' in: Döhring, Sieghart and Arnold Jacobshagen. Meyerbeer und das europäische Musiktheater: 442–257. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. .
 Charlton, David, editor (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.  (hardcover);  (paperback).

 Crosten, William Loran (1948). French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business. New York: King's Crown Press.
 Everist, Mark (1994). 'The Name of the Rose: Meyerbeer's opéra comique, Robert le Diable', in Revue de musicologie, vol.80 no.2, pp. 211–250.
 Fétis F-J. (1862). Biographie universelle des musiciens (in French), second edition, volume 3. Paris: Didot. View at Google Books.

 Heine, Heinrich, tr. C. G. Leland (1893). The Works of Heinrich Heine, vol. 4 (The Salon). London: William. Heinemann.
 Huebner, Steven (2003). 'After 1850 at the Paris Opera: institution and repertory', in Charlton (2003), pp. 291–317
 Kaufman, Tom, "A Few Words About Robert le Diable" on the "Meyerbeer Fan Club" website, Retrieved 26 June 2012

 Kelly, Thomas Forrest (2004). First Nights at the Opera. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

 Newman, Ernest (1976). The Life of Richard Wagner (4 vols.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Pospíšil, Milan (1998). 'Meyerbeer und die tschechischen Oper des 19. Jarhunderts' in: Döhring, Sieghart and Arnold Jacobshagen. Meyerbeer und das europäische Musiktheater: 407–41. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. .
 Roberts, John H. (2003). 'Meyerbeer: Le Prophéte and L'Africaine; in: Charlton (2003), pp. 208–232
 Rose, Paul Lawrence (1996). Wagner: Race and Revolution. London: Faber and Faber .
 Rosenblum, Myron (1980). 'Viola d'amore'. In Sadie, Stanley, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 19. London: Macmillan
 Schumann, Robert, tr. and ed. Henry Pleasants (1965).The Musical World of Robert Schumann. London: Gollancz
 Shaw, George Bernard (1981). Shaw's Music: The Complete Musical Criticism, edited by Dan H. Laurence. 3 vols. London: The Bodley Head. .
 Spohr, Louis, tr. and ed. Henry Pleasants. (1961). The Musical Journeys of Louis Spohr. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
 Stanford, Charles Villiers (1911). Musical Composition: A Short Treatise for Students. New York: Macmillan
 Thomson, Joan (1975). 'Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Jew and his Relationship with Richard Wagner', in Musica Judaica 1/1, pp. 55–86
 Todd, R. Larry (2003). Mendelssohn – A Life in Music. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. .
 Wagner, Richard, tr.and ed. Robert Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton (1973). Wagner Writes from Paris: Stories, Essays and Articles by a Young Composer. London: Allen and Unwin
 Wagner, Richard, tr. and ed. Stanley Spencer and Barry Millington (1987). Selected Letters of Richard Wagner. London: Dent
 Wagner, Cosima, tr. Geoffrey Skelton (1980) Diaries, 2 vols. London: Collins
 Wagner, Richard tr. Andrew Gray, (1992) My Life. New York: Da Capo Press.
 Wagner, Richard, tr. W. Ashton Ellis (1995a). Opera and Drama. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press.
 Wagner, Richard, tr. W. Ashton Ellis (1995b). Judaism in Music and other Writings. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press.
 Walker, Alan (1988). Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847. London: Faber and Faber. .
 Wolff, Stéphane (1962). L'Opéra au Palais Garnier (1875–1962). Paris: l'Entr'acte. Paris: Slatkine (1983 reprint): .

External links

List of Meyerbeer works at the Index to Opera and Ballet Sources Online
 Guide to the Giacomo Meyerbeer Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York
 Conway, David, "Meyerbeer the Jew" (On website dedicated to Jewish musicians) (accessed 7 December 2017).
 Meyerbeer Fan Club site at meyerbeer.com
 Meyerbeer cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library

Recordings of Meyerbeer's operas as listed on operadis-opera-discography.org.uk/

1791 births
1864 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century German composers
19th-century German male musicians
Burials at Schönhauser Allee Cemetery, Berlin
General directors of the Berlin State Opera
19th-century German Jews
German male classical composers
German opera composers
German Romantic composers
Honorary Members of the Royal Philharmonic Society
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Jewish classical composers
Jewish opera composers
Recipients of the Legion of Honour
Male opera composers
Music directors of the Berlin State Opera
Composers from Berlin
Richard Wagner

Giacomo Meyerbeer


Chaos is when something unpredictable or random happens. It may refer to several different things:

 Chaos magic, a branch of occultism
 Chaos (mythology), the concept in classical creation stories
 Randomness, a lack of intelligible pattern or combination
 Chaos theory, a branch of mathematics and physics
 Chaos (genus), a type of giant amoeba
 19521 Chaos, a Trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt object in space
 K-os, Canadian musician
Chaos an American hip hop Recoring artist

Related pages
 Anarchy
 Confusion
 Disorder
 Order

Chaos


Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke (19 February 1893 – 6 August 1964) was an English stage and film actor whose career spanned nearly 50 years. His theatre work included notable performances in productions of the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw, and his film work included leading roles in several adapted literary classics.

Early life
Hardwicke was born in Lye, Worcestershire (now West Midlands) to Edwin Webster Hardwicke and his wife, Jessie (née Masterson). He attended Bridgnorth Grammar School in Shropshire. He intended to train as a doctor but failed to pass the necessary examinations. He turned to the theatre and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

Military service
Hardwicke enlisted at the outbreak of the First World War. He served with the London Scottish from 1914 to 1921 as an officer in the Judge Advocate's branch of the British Army in France. He was one of the last members of the British Expeditionary Force to leave France. According to the Daily Mirror 1 January 1934, Hardwicke was one of the officers who escorted The Unknown Warrior from France.

Career

Stage

Hardwicke made his first appearance on stage at the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1912 during the run of Frederick Melville's melodrama The Monk and the Woman, when he took over the part of Brother John. During this year, he was at Her Majesty's Theatre understudying, and subsequently appeared at the Garrick Theatre in Charles Klein's play Find the Woman, and Trust the People. In 1913, he joined Benson's Company and toured in the provinces, South Africa, and Rhodesia. During 1914 he toured with Miss Darragh (Letitia Marion Dallas, d. 1917) in Laurence Irving's play The Unwritten Law, and he appeared at the Old Vic in 1914 as Malcolm in Macbeth, Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, the gravedigger in Hamlet, and other roles.

After serving in the British Army in WWI, he resumed his acting career. In January 1922, he joined the Birmingham Repertory Company, playing a range of parts from the drooping young lover Faulkland in The Rivals to the roistering Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.

He played many classical roles on stage, appearing at London's top theatres, making his name on the stage performing works by George Bernard Shaw, who said that Hardwicke was his fifth favourite actor after the four Marx Brothers. As one of the leading Shavian actors of his generation, Hardwicke starred in Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, The Apple Cart, Candida, Too True to Be Good, and Don Juan in Hell, making such an impression that at the age of 41 he became the youngest actor to be knighted (this occurred in the 1934 New Year's Honours; Laurence Olivier subsequently took the record in 1947 when he was knighted at the age of 40). Other stage successes included The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Antigone and A Majority of One, winning a Tony Award nomination for his performance as a Japanese diplomat.

In 1928, whilst appearing with Edith Day, Paul Robeson and Alberta Hunter in the London production of Show Boat, he married actress Helena Pickard.

In December 1935, Hardwicke was elected Rede Lecturer to Cambridge University for 1936, he took as his subject "The Drama Tomorrow". In the late 1930s, he moved to the U.S., initially for film work. In the early 1940s, he continued his stage career on tours and in New York.

In 1944, Hardwicke returned to Britain, again touring, and reappeared on the London stage, at the Westminster Theatre, on 29 March 1945, as Richard Varwell in a revival of Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts' comedy Yellow Sands, and subsequently toured in this on the continent. He returned to America late in 1945 and appeared with Ethel Barrymore in December in a revival of Shaw's Pygmalion, and continued on the New York stage the following year. In 1946, he starred opposite Katharine Cornell as King Creon in her production of Jean Anouilh's adaptation of the Greek tragedy Antigone.

In 1948, he joined the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre to play Sir Toby Belch, Doctor Faustus, and Gaev in The Cherry Orchard, but according to critic and biographer W.A. Darlington, "it was about this time that he confessed to a friend that he was finding the competition in London too hot for him", and he moved permanently to the U.S. In 1951–52, he appeared on Broadway in Shaw's Don Juan in Hell with Agnes Moorehead, Charles Boyer and Charles Laughton.

Film and television work
Hardwicke's first appearance in a British film was in 1931, and from the late 1930s, he was in great demand in Hollywood. He played David Livingstone opposite Spencer Tracy's Henry Morton Stanley in Stanley and Livingstone in 1939, and also played the evil Frollo in the remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Charles Laughton the same year. In 1940, he played Mr. Jones in a screen version of Joseph Conrad's novel Victory. He starred as the unfortunate Ludwig von Frankenstein in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) alongside Lon Chaney Jr. as Frankenstein's monster and Bela Lugosi as Ygor.

Hardwicke played in films such as Les Misérables (1935) with Fredric March and Charles Laughton, the first ever three-strip Technicolor film Becky Sharp (1935), King Solomon's Mines (1937), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), The Winslow Boy (1948), Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) with James Stewart, and Olivier's Richard III (1955). He was featured as King Arthur in the comedy/musical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), singing Busy Doing Nothing in a trio with Bing Crosby and William Bendix, and as the Pharaoh Sethi in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 film The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston as Moses.

He appeared in a 1956 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled Wet Saturday in which he portrayed Mr. Princey, an aristocratic gentleman who tries to cover up a murder to avoid public scandal. On 6 March 1958, he guest-starred on the TV series The Ford Show starring Tennessee Ernie Ford.

In 1961, he co-starred with Gertrude Berg in the Four Star Television situation comedy, Mrs. G. Goes to College (retitled The Gertrude Berg Show at mid-season). The series was cancelled after one season.

Radio
In 1945, Hardwicke played Sherlock Holmes in a BBC Radio dramatisation of The Speckled Band, opposite Finlay Currie as Dr. Watson. Years later, Hardwicke's son Edward played Watson in the acclaimed Granada series.

Hardwicke played the titular role in a short-lived revival of the Bulldog Drummond radio program on the Mutual Broadcasting System, which ran 3 January 1954 to 28 March 1954.

Personal life
In 1928, he married the English actress Helena Pickard. They divorced in 1948; their son was actor Edward Hardwicke. His second marriage, which produced a son, Michael, and likewise ended in divorce, was to actress, Mary Scott (1921–2009), from 1950 to 1961.

A lifelong heavy smoker, he suffered from emphysema and died 6 August 1964 at the age of 71 in New York from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Hardwicke's body was flown back to England; after a memorial service he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north London, where his ashes were scattered.

Legacy
Hardwicke left two volumes of memoirs: Let's Pretend: Recollections and Reflections of a Lucky Actor, 1932 and A Victorian in Orbit: as told to James Brough, 1962. He is commemorated by a sculpture by Tim Tolkien at Lye, commissioned by the Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council. The memorial takes the form of a giant filmstrip, the illuminated cut metal panels illustrating scenes from some of Hardwicke's better-known roles, which include The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Things to Come, and The Ghost of Frankenstein. Unveiled in November 2005, it is located at Lye Cross where he lived as a child. Thorns School and Community College in neighbouring Quarry Bank has renamed its drama theatre in his honour as the Hardwicke Theatre.

Hardwicke has a motion pictures star and a television star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Filmography

 Nelson (1926) as Horatio Nelson (film debut)
 Dreyfus (1931) as Capt. Alfred Dreyfus
 Rome Express (1932) as Alistair McBane
 The Ghoul (1933) as Broughton
 Orders Is Orders (1934) as Brigadier
 Bella Donna (1934)
 Nell Gwyn (1934) as Charles II
 The Lady Is Willing (1934) as Gustav Dupont
 Jew Süss (1934) as Rabbi Gabriel
 The King of Paris (1934) as Max Till
 Les Misérables (1935) as Bishop Bienvenu
 Becky Sharp (1935) as Marquis of Steyne
 Peg of Old Drury (1935) as David Garrick
 Things to Come (1936) as Theotocopulos
 Tudor Rose (1936) as Earl of Warwick
 Laburnum Grove (1936) as Mr Baxley
 Green Light (1937) as Dean Harcourt
 King Solomon's Mines (1937) as Allan Quartermain
 On Borrowed Time (1939) as Mr Brink
 Stanley and Livingstone (1939) as David Livingstone
 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as Frollo
 The Invisible Man Returns (1940) as Richard Cobb
 Tom Brown's School Days (1940) as Dr. Thomas Arnold
 The Howards of Virginia (1940) as Fleetwood Peyton
 Victory (1940) as Mr Jones
 Sundown (1941) as Bishop Coombes
 Suspicion (1941) as General McLaidlaw
 Valley of the Sun (1942) as Lord Warrick
 The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) as Ludwig Frankenstein/Henry Frankenstein
 Invisible Agent (1942) as Conrad Stauffer
 Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942) as Admiral Bowen
 Forever and a Day (1943) as Mr Dabb
 The Moon Is Down (1943) as Col. Lanser
 The Cross of Lorraine (1943) as Father Sebastian
 The Lodger (1944) as Robert Bonting
 Wilson (1944) as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
 Wing and a Prayer (1944) as Admiral
 Three Sisters of the Moors (1944, short) as Reverend Bronte
 The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) as Monsignor at Tweedside
 The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) as Narrator
 Sentimental Journey (1946) as Jim Miller
 Beware of Pity (1946) as Albert Condor
 Nicholas Nickleby (1947) as Ralph Nickleby
 The Imperfect Lady (1947) as Lord Belmont
 Ivy (1947) as Police Inspector Orpington
 Lured (1947) as Julian Wilde
 Tycoon (1947) as Alexander
 A Woman's Vengeance (1948) as James Libbard
 Song of My Heart (1948) as Grand Duke
 I Remember Mama (1948) as Mr Hyde
 The Winslow Boy (1948) as Arthur Winslow
 Rope (1948) as Henry Kentley
 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949) as Lord Pendragon / King Arthur
 Now Barabbas (1949) as Governor
 The White Tower (1950) as Nicholas Radcliffe
 You Belong to My Heart (1951) as Bernand
 The Desert Fox (1951) as Karl Strolin
 The Green Glove (1952) as Father Goron
 Caribbean Gold (1952) as Captain Francis Barclay
 Botany Bay (1953) as Gov. Phillips
 Salome (1953) as Tiberius Caesar
 The War of the Worlds (1953) as Commentary (voice)
 Bait (1954) as Prologue Speaker
 Richard III (1955) as King Edward IV of England
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Season 1 Episode 40: "Wet Saturday") (1956) as Mr. Princey
 Diane (1956) as Ruggieri
 Helen of Troy (1956) as Priam
 Gaby (1956) as Mr. Edgar Carrington
 The Vagabond King (1956) as Tristan
 The Power and the Prize (1956) as Mr Carew
 The Ten Commandments (1956) as Sethi
 Around the World in 80 Days (1956) as Sir Francis Cromarty
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Season 2 Episode 33: "A Man Greatly Beloved") (1957) as "John Anderson"
 The Story of Mankind (1957) as High Judge
 Baby Face Nelson (1957) as Doc Saunders
 Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962) as Fergusson
 The Pumpkin Eater (1964) as Mr. James - Jo's father (final film role)

 ''Twilight Zone'' (Season 5 Episode 8: "Uncle Simon") (Nov 14,1963) as Uncle Simon

References

Bibliography
 Let's Pretend: Recollections and Reflections of a Lucky Actor, foreword by Sir Barry Jackson, (1932) Grayson & Grayson

External links

 Hardwicke Archive in the British Library Manuscripts Collections

1893 births
1964 deaths
Actors awarded knighthoods
Male actors from Worcestershire
Alumni of RADA
English male film actors
English male stage actors
English male television actors
Knights Bachelor
People educated at Bridgnorth Endowed School
People from the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley
Golders Green Crematorium
20th-century English male actors
British expatriate male actors in the United States
British Army personnel of World War I
London Scottish officers
Military personnel from Worcestershire
Deaths from emphysema

Cedric Hardwicke


There is No Authority But Yourself is a Dutch film directed by Alexander Oey documenting the history of anarchist punk band Crass. The film features archive footage of the band and interviews with former members Steve Ignorant, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher. As well as reflecting on the band's past the film focusses on their current activities, and includes footage of Rimbaud performing with Last Amendment at the Vortex jazz club in Hackney, a compost toilet building workshop and a permaculture course held at Dial House in the spring of 2006.

The title of the film is derived from the final lines of the Crass album Yes Sir, I Will; "You must learn to live with your own conscience, your own morality, your own decision, your own self. You alone can do it. There is no authority but yourself."

There is No Authority But Yourself premiered at the Raindance Film Festival at the Piccadilly Circus, London Trocadero in October 2006 and was part of the Official Selection film programme at the Flipside film festival in May 2008

External links

 Raindance Film Festival film entry
 Trailers and movie download
 YouTube–There is no authority but yourself

2006 films
Dutch documentary films
Documentary films about punk music and musicians
Crass
Documentary films about anarchism
2006 documentary films

There Is No Authority But Yourself


Mangalore is a city in the state of Karnataka, India. It is the capital city of Dakshina Kannada district. It is a port city. It is located on the Arabian Sea. It is the largest city in the Tulu Nadu region.

People in Mangalore speak many languages like Kannada, Tulu, Konkani and Beary.

Cities in Karnataka

Mangalore


Raymond Oliver (27 March 1909 – 5 November 1990) was a French chef and owner of Le Grand Véfour restaurant in Paris, one of France's great historical restaurants. Oliver detested nouvelle cuisine, preferring the rich ingredients favored by the chefs in his native Gascony.

Oliver, who was born in Langon in the Bordeaux region of France, was the son and grandson of cooks. His maternal grandmother gave him his first instruction in cooking as a boy, and he began his apprenticeship as a chef under his father at the age of 15.

For more than 35 years, he was the owner of Le Grand Vefour on the Rue de Beaujolais in the Palais-Royal district. His celebrity clientele ranged from statesmen like Winston Churchill and Andre Malraux, to writers including Albert Camus and Georges Simenon, to the industrialists and financiers Henry Ford and David Rockefeller. The Aga Khan, and Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco were among his appreciative clients, as were Jean Cocteau and Colette.

During World War II, Oliver operated a hotel in the French Alps, organized a Resistance cell, and hid Allied airmen who had been shot down on bombing missions. He sheltered an 11-man American bomber crew until the liberation and was later decorated by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1948, he purchased Le Grand Vefour, a restaurant dating to 1784. Six years after Oliver bought the restaurant, it was awarded the prized third star by the Michelin Guide (France's atlas to good dining), one of only a handful of kitchens that were so honored at that time.

Oliver published La Cuisine, a detailed technical cookbook, in 1967 and hosted a popular cooking show on television called Art et magie de la cuisine. He also served as one of the eleven judges at the Judgment of Paris.

See also

 List of wine personalities
 The Gentleman from Epsom (film, 1962)

References

Further reading

External links

1909 births
1990 deaths
Businesspeople from Bordeaux
French chefs
Head chefs of Michelin starred restaurants
Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery

Raymond Oliver


Sparta was a Greek city-state. It is the capital of the Laconia prefecture. It is in the south of Peloponnese peninsula. During antiquity, it was extremely powerful. Today, it is a small city. 16,726 people lived there according to the 2001 census.

It was also known as Lacedaemon.

The word Spartan is used to describe somebody who lives a simple life or somebody who suffered a lot without crying or showing that they suffered. It can also mean a life of simplicity, without anything fancy or costly.

Sparta is in the mountainous region of Laconia. This is in the south-east of the Peloponnese. Ancient Sparta was built on the banks of the Evrotas River. The river flows through a valley with mountains on each side. To the west is the Taygetus Range (highest point 2407 m) and to the east is the Parnon Range (highest point 1935 m).  Because the ancient Spartans had such good natural defenses, they did not need city walls.

Ancient Sparta
In Ancient Greece, Sparta was a city-state with a very strong army and a government that was well led.  Sparta was known as one of the strongest city-states in Greece.  Only the strongest survived in Sparta, male or female.  The Spartans killed weak children.  If they believed that a baby was too weak, they left it out to die of exposure beside a slope on Mount Taygetus.  This place was called the Apothetae, which meant 'the place of rejection'.

Sparta had a government with checks and balances.  The executive branch was led by two kings.  The legislative branch was led by the citizens. and the judicial branch was controlled by the elders.  There was also a committee of five men who were in charge of the education process that young boys and girls went through.  Boys and girls were taken from their parents at the age of 7.  Boys went to live in barracks with other boys their age.  Girls went to school to learn gymnastics, wrestling, and other activities, so they could become strong, healthy mothers for future soldiers.

Laconophilia

Laconophilia is love or liking of Sparta and of the Spartan culture. Sparta was often admired when it ruled. Long ago, "Many of the noblest and best of the Athenians always considered (thought) the Spartan state nearly as an ideal theory realised in practice".  Many Greek philosophers, especially Platonists, would often describe Sparta as a good state, strong, brave, and free.

Sparta was also seen as a model of social purity by Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Adolf Hitler thought Sparta was very good. He said in 1928 that Germany should be like them by making smaller "the number allowed to live". The Spartans had created "the first racialist state".

Customs
Young Spartans boys were taken from their homes at the age of seven to begin a military life.  The Spartans became soldiers at age 20, citizens at age 30, and retired at age 60. Men trained hard to become warriors of the Spartan army.  Women were encouraged to keep healthy so that they could produce healthy, fit babies to grow up to be strong.  Spartans saw little moral value in the concept of childbirth; unless the child was fit to become a Spartan, he would die.

Spartan men married when they were 30 years old. Plutarch writes of the strange custom of the Spartans for their wedding night:
The custom was to capture women for marriage...The...'bridesmaid' took charge of the captured girl.  She first shaved her head...then dressed her in a man's cloak and sandals, and laid her down alone on a mattress in the dark.  The bridegroom...first had dinner...then would slip in...lift her and carry her to the bed.  The husband kept on visiting his wife in secret for some time after the marriage.  Only Spartans did these customs. Some people think that the cutting off of the wife's hair was a ceremony that showed she was going into a new life.

History
Sparta conquered the people of Messenia and Lakonia (the surrounding countryside) at around 680560 BC. These people became known as the helots. They were not slaves: they were serfs. They had a lower position in society, like serfs in mediaeval Europe.

Helots spent their lives farming their Spartan masters kleros (land granted to Spartan citizens). The Spartan poet Tyrtaios says helots were allowed to marry and keep half the fruits of their labor. At most times, the helots outnumbered their Spartan masters 10 to 1. They rebelled often, but they were never able to overthrow their oppressors.

Once a Spartan reached the age of 20, he or she would then become a homoios.  A homoios was a member of the ruling class (a citizen).  Both men and women were citizens.  Sparta was an unusual society for women's rights, because women were considered to be equal.

The Spartan army used the phalanx formation.  This contributed to the many battles Sparta won.  Their most famous loss is the Battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans held off a large Persian army for a week.

References

Cities in Greece
Ancient Greek cities
Former city-states

Sparta


Extremadura is an autonomous community of Spain. Its capital city is Mérida. The provinces Cáceres and Badajoz are a part of Extremadura. Extremadura is bordered by Portugal to the west. To the north, it borders Castile and León. To the south, it borders Andalusia. To the east, it borders Castile-La Mancha.

Extremadura


A cypress knee is a distinctive structure forming above the roots of a cypress tree of any of various species of the subfamily Taxodioideae, such as the bald cypress.  Their function is unknown, but they are generally seen on trees growing in swamps. Some current hypotheses state that they might help to aerate the tree's roots, create a barrier to catch sediment and reduce erosion, assist in anchoring the tree in the soft and muddy soil, or any combination thereof.

Knees are woody projections sent above the normal water level, roughly vertically from the roots, with a near-right-angle bend taking them vertically upward through water. One early assumption of their function was that they provided oxygen to the roots that grow in the low dissolved oxygen (DO) waters typical of a swamp, acting as pneumatophores: mangroves have similar adaptations. There is little actual evidence for this assertion; in fact, swamp-dwelling specimens whose knees are removed continue to thrive, and laboratory tests demonstrate that the knees are not effective at depleting oxygen in a sealed chamber. Even though there is no expert consensus on their role, the supposition that they are pneumatophores is repeated without comment in several introductory botany textbooks.

Another more likely function is that of structural buttressed support and stabilization. Lowland or swamp-grown cypresses found in flooded or flood-prone areas tend to be buttressed and "kneed," as opposed to cypresses grown on higher ground, which may grow with very little taper.

Trees that develop these "knees" include:
 Glyptostrobus
 Bald cypress
 Pond cypress
 Ahuehuete
 Metasequoia

See also

References

External links
Christopher H. Briand. "Cypress Knees: An Enduring Enigma." Arnoldia. 2000-2001.Vol. 60(4). p. 19-20, 21-25. An extensive review of the published literature concerning cypress knees.

Cupressaceae
Plant roots

Cypress knee


Pumice is a term for a lightweight volcanic rock.

It is a solidified frothy lava, created when highly-heated, pressured molten rock is shot out from a volcano. Its light weight is due to air spaces, which are caused by fast cooling and loss of pressure. The loss of pressure makes bubbles by lowering the boiling point of the lava (like the bubble-creation when a carbonated drink is opened). The  cooling then freezes the bubbles in the matrix.

Uses
Most famously, pumice stone has been used as a skin-scraper. It is used in  pedicure to remove excess skin from the bottom of the foot, and on calluses (tough areas of skin).

It has also been used to make lightweight blocks for building, and as a powdered ingredient in polishing.

Igneous rocks

Pumice


Geraldine Peacock  was the first chair of the Charity Commission.

Career
Geraldine was appointed Chief Charity Commissioner and the Charity Commission's first Chair-designate in 2004, with the remit of making the Commission 'fit for purpose' to implement the new Charities Act (which, among other things, replaced the role of Chief Charity Commissioner with those of Chair and Chief Executive). She left the Commission in July 2006, having laid firm foundations for the Charities Bill and with the Commission charged and invigorated to implement it.

Before joining the Charity Commission Geraldine was CEO of two major charities, Guide Dogs for the Blind and the National Autistic Society, and Chair of ACEVO (Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations), Futurebuilders and Groundbreakers.

Geraldine is on the board of Social Finance, a patron of Autism Speaks, the Rainbow Trust Children's Charity and the Community Development Finance Association (CDFA).

Geraldine sits on the Board for Social Enterprise at Harvard Business School, where she lectures on the MBA programme. She is an associate fellow at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, sits on the Said Business School Board at Oxford, and is also a visiting fellow at the Centre for Charity Effectiveness, Cass Business School, London.

Awards
The Charity Awards 2002, winner of the Outstanding Achievement Award.

References

External links
Charity Commission UK
Social Finance

Living people
Academics of Bayes Business School
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
Year of birth missing (living people)

Geraldine Peacock


A hook gauge or needle gauge is a measuring device used by crocheters and knitters to test the sizes of particular crochet hooks and knitting needles.  Hook gauges are usually made of plastic or aluminum and have sizing holes from 2mm to 11mm diameter.  A hook gauge also functions as a ruler to test the size of a test swatch of handmade fabric.Stoller, p. 23.

Sizing conventions
A hook gauge is the most reliable way to determine the actual size of a tool.  Even though most hooks and needles have metric sizing, tool dimensions vary slightly between different manufacturers.  Non-metric sizing conventions also change over time.  For instance, different sizing charts rate a 4.0mm hook as either a U.S. G/6 or an F/5.

Importance of accurate sizing
U.S. textile craft terminology employs the word gauge in two different ways: as hook gauge in reference to the sizing tool, or as a standalone term gauge to describe the number of stitches in a standard sized sample of work, usually 4" or 10cm. UK terminology refers to the latter as tension.  Craft patterns include a gauge or tension measurement and good practice among crafters is to achieve the correct gauge on a sample swatch before embarking on the full project.

As one crochet guidebook explains:
Whenever you are following a crochet pattern you will notice that a gauge is included.  This is an all-important guide to obtaining the proper size of the square or garment you are working on.  If you don't get the proper gauge, the item will not fit properly and you may run out of yarn before finishing.
Several factors affect fabric gauge, including hook or needle size, although sometimes a crafter may change tool size deliberately in order to achieve a certain gauge.  Accurate needle and hook sizing reduces the number of variables that affect these decisions.  Additionally, if substitute tools are needed during the course of the project a hook gauge can determine whether a given tool is appropriate in advance of actual work.

Notes

References
 Susan Cottrell & Cindy Weloth, The New Granny Square, New York: Lark/Chapelle, 2006.
 Edie Eckman, The Crochet Answer Book, North Adams, Massachusetts: Storey Publishing, 2005.
 Debbie Stoller, Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker New York: Workman Publishing, 2006.

External links

Crochet
Knitting
Dimensional instruments

Hook gauge


Cliff Johnson (born 1953) is an American game designer, best known for the puzzle video games The Fool's Errand (1987) and 3 in Three (1990). Both games use visual puzzles and a metapuzzle structure. Both won GAMES Magazines Best Puzzle Game of the Year.

Biography
Johnson was born August 14, 1953, in Hanover, New Hampshire, the only child of Norman and Leatrice Johnson. He attended Bristol Eastern High School in Connecticut, where he started making Super 8 movies. In 1972, he had jobs "building monsters" for five different amusement parks. He later attended University of Southern California's film school, where he became a teaching assistant in animation and created some of the Monty Pythonesque animations for Nickelodeon's television series Out of Control.

In 1984, using his first computer, a Macintosh 512K, he learned to program and created the game The Fool's Errand, which in 1987 won "Best Puzzle Game of the Year" from GAMES Magazine and was declared "Best Retro Game Ever" by British GamesTM magazine.)

From 1990 to 1995, he directed the *FunHouse* production group for Philips Media, and from 1996 to 2001, he consulted with Mattel, Warner Bros. and Disney for online puzzles and treasure hunts.

In 2002, Johnson designed a $100,000 Challenge for the book Mysterious Stranger by street magician David Blaine. It was solved in 2004.

Authored games
The Fool's Errand (1987) — GAMES Magazine'''s Best Puzzle Game of the YearAt the Carnival (1989) — Macworld Game Hall of Fame inductee, Brain Teaser categoryDisney's Cartoon Arcade (1990)3 in Three (1990) — MacUser's Best Game of the Year; GAMES Magazine's Best Puzzle Game of the YearHanna Barbera's Cartoon Carnival (1993)Merlin's Apprentice (1994)Labyrinth of Crete (1995)The Fool and His Money (2012)

 Other contributed works
 Game Design: Disney's The Hunt for the Lost Toy, website contest, 1996
 Game Design: Of Light and Darkness: The Prophecy, 1998
 Treasure Hunt Design: David Blaine's Mysterious Stranger book, 2002

 References

External links

Johnson's official website (click on the image at the upper right to see his biography timeline)Inside Mac Games'', March 31, 2003, "Cliff Johnson's April Fool's Treasure Hunt"

1953 births
Living people
American video game designers
Puzzle designers
USC School of Cinematic Arts alumni
People from Hanover, New Hampshire
People from Bristol, Connecticut

Cliff Johnson (game designer)


A microbial cyst is a resting or dormant stage of a microorganism, usually a bacterium or a protist or rarely an invertebrate animal, that helps the organism to survive in unfavorable environmental conditions. It can be thought of as a state of suspended animation in which the metabolic processes of the cell are slowed down and the cell ceases all activities like feeding and locomotion. Encystment also helps the microbe to spread easily, from one host to another or to a better environment. When the encysted microbe reaches an environment good for its growth and survival, the cyst wall breaks down by a process known as excystation.

Unfavorable environmental conditions  trigger the making of a cyst. These include the lack of nutrients or oxygen, extreme temperatures, lack of moisture and presence of toxic chemicals, which are not good for the growth of the microbe.

Composition of the cyst wall
Different organisms have cyst walls made of different things. The cyst walls of bacteria are formed by the thickening of the normal cell wall with added peptidoglycan layers. The walls of protozoan cysts are made of chitin, a type of glycoprotein. Nematode cyst walls are made of chitin reinforced by collagen.

References

Microbiology

Microbial cyst


Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Chinese: 三影堂摄影艺术中心), is a non-profit art centre in Beijing established in 2007 by photographers RongRong and inri. Three Shadows is the first contemporary art space dedicated exclusively to photography and other lens-based art in China. A converted auto repair yard, the 4,600 square meter complex includes 880 square meters of gallery space and was designed by renowned artist and architect Ai Weiwei.  Three Shadows is situated in the art district of Caochangdi, on the outskirts of Beijing.

History

Three Shadows was founded in June 2007 by RongRong, from China, and inri, from Japan.

Mission
Three Shadows supports and facilitates exhibitions, education programs, publications, programs for artists, and independent events and engagements.  Its mission is to:
 Explore and showcase contemporary Chinese photography
 Rediscover important photographic works from the past and give them the place they deserve in the history of photography in China
 Initiate a dialogue between China and the international art scene in order to establish China's presence in the global photography world
 Serve as an independent mechanism to introduce contemporary photography to the general public
 Influence and facilitate the development of China's contemporary photography

Notable programs and events

The Caochangdi PhotoSpring
The Caochangdi PhotoSpring is working in a three-year partnership with Les Rencontres d'Arles Photography Festival to show the Arles' programs  outside France for the first time. The aim of the Caochangdi PhotoSpring is to build a platform for photography in the art district through an annual event where photographers, photography collectors and the public can meet to have access to high quality works. For the first time, twenty Caochangdi galleries will join forces to celebrate photography from China and abroad with Caochangdi PhotoSpring.

Artist in Residence Program
Three Shadows has an Artist-in-residence program to provide international photographers, artists, curators, and academics with an opportunity to live and work in China. Such artists have been among others Nirmala Karuppiah, Ken Kitano and Sascha Weidner.

Library
The multilingual Three Shadows art library holds close to 4,000 volumes.

References

External links
 Official website of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre

Contemporary art galleries in China
Culture in Beijing
Buildings and structures in Beijing
Tourist attractions in Beijing
Art museums and galleries in China
Photography in China
Photography museums and galleries
Art galleries established in 2007
2007 establishments in China
Museums in Beijing

Three Shadows Photography Art Centre


Totternhoe Stone is a relatively hard chalk outcropping in the middle of the Lower Chalk in the Chiltern Hills in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, England.  Geologically, it is located in the upper part of the Cenomanian stage of the Cretaceous.

Unusually among chalks, it is sufficiently strong for use as a building stone, and has been used as such in these localities, notably in Woburn Abbey, Luton parish church and several smaller local churches.  It weathers rather badly in external use, but when used as internal carved decoration, it has remained in good condition for centuries.  Old decorative carving is to be found in St Albans Abbey and in the altar screen of Westminster Abbey.

The Totternhoe Stone is underlain by the argillaceous Chalk Marl.  Above is the less argillaceous Grey Chalk.  The bed varies in thickness from 0.5 to 5 metres.  The stone, although fine-grained, is siliceous, and partial cementing with silica accounts for its relative hardness.  It forms a distinct escarpment at several locations at the base of the Chiltern ridge, notably at Totternhoe, Bedfordshire , where it is at its thickest.  In addition to use as a building stone, in the past it was used in the manufacture of a hydraulic lime, and in cement manufacture at three cement plants.

Quarrying
The stone has been quarried north of Totternhoe village in the county of Bedfordshire.

It was quarried at Totternhoe Knolls, and to the east of the Knolls there were underground mines for the stone.  The area from where the medieval tunnels were dug is now designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) called Totternhoe Chalk Quarry, as an example of chalk grassland. It is managed as a nature reserve by the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire.

In recent times the stone has been quarried in an area between the Knolls and the mines. This has been designated an SSSI called Totternhoe Stone Pit, as a Geological Conservation Review site.

The Stone is quarried by a family-run business, H.G Clarke and Son. This was started in 1920 by Herbert G.Clarke. It was then passed to his son Stanley W.Clarke and is now being run by his son Angus J.Clarke. H.G Clarke and Son are the main suppliers of this rare English stone.

References

Further reading
 E. Roberts, "Totternhoe stone and flint in Hertfordshire churches", Medieval Archaeology, XVIII, 66-89, 1974.
 J. Curran, The Story of Totternhoe Quarries, Church End Publishing, 2005, OCLC .

External links
 Bedfordshire and Luton Geology Group, Totternhoe Stone.
 H.G Clarke and Son, Totternhoe – Clunch Stone.
Interview of H.G Clarke & Son with Anglia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GCYfpJxzJg

Limestone
Building stone
Geology of England
Stratigraphy of the United Kingdom
Geography of Bedfordshire
Chiltern Hills

Totternhoe Stone


Michael Devitt (born 1938) is an Australian philosopher currently teaching at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in New York City. His primary interests include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His current work involves the philosophy of linguistics, foundational issues in semantics, the semantics of definite descriptions and demonstratives, semantic externalism, and scientific realism.

Education
Devitt's secondary education (1952–1957) was at Bradfield College in Berkshire, England, where he completed 3 "A" Levels and 9 "O" Levels. He then studied at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia between 1958–1961, taking his qualifying exam at the end of that time.

His higher education began at the University of Sydney in 1962, where he studied philosophy and psychology. He graduated in 1966 with First Class Honours and a University Medal in philosophy. He continued on as a post-graduate research student until 1967, when he moved to Harvard University and studied under Quine. He received his MA in 1970 and his PhD in 1972.

Academic positions
Following the completion of his coursework at Harvard, Michael Devitt returned to Sydney in 1971 and began his teaching career as a lecturer in the Philosophy department. He was prominent in the 'Sydney philosophy disturbances'. He was made a senior lecturer in 1977 and associate professor in 1982, and by 1985 was named as Head of Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy. He continued teaching at the University of Sydney until 1987, after which he returned to the United States and accepted an appointment of Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1988. He remained in Maryland until 1999, when he became a Professor (later Distinguished Professor) at the CUNY Graduate Center. There he served as the Executive Officer of the Philosophy Program from 1999–2002. He continues to teach there as a Distinguished Professor as of 2012.

In addition to his tenured or tenure-track positions, Michael Devitt has held numerous non-tenured positions at the University of Nottingham, Macquarie University, Australian National University, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Harvard University, and The Women's College, University of Sydney.

Philosophical work
Devitt is a proponent of the causal theory of reference. He claims that repeated groundings in an object can account for reference change. However, such a response leaves open the problem of cognitive significance that originally intrigued Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege.

Devitt, along with Georges Rey, is also a critic of the transcendental argument against eliminativism, and defends this position against claims that it is self-refuting by invoking deflationary semantic theories that avoid analysing predicates like "x is true" as expressing a real property. They are construed, instead, as logical devices so that asserting that a sentence is true is just a quoted way of asserting the sentence itself. To say, "'God exists' is true" is just to say, "God exists". This way, Rey and Devitt argue, in so far as dispositional replacements of "claims" and deflationary accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism is not self-refuting.

Publications
Designation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, xiii, 311 pp.
Realism and Truth. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984, ix, 250 pp. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 2nd edn revised, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, xii, 327pp. Reprinted "with a new afterword," Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, xii, 371pp.
Language and Reality (1987 – with Kim Sterelny). MIT Press: ; ; ; Blackwell Publishing ; .
Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program for Semantic Localism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, x, 338pp.
 "Meanings Just Ain't in the Head." Method, Reason and Language: Essays in honour of Hilary Putnam, George Boolos, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1990), pp. 79–104. Reprinted in Cro(Pran in Filozofskim Istrazivanjima 45 (1992), pp. 425–45.
"A Shocking Idea about Meaning." Revue Internationale de Philosophie, a special issue devoted to Hilary Putnam, in press.
"The Metaphysics of Truth." In The Nature of Truth, Michael Lynch, ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (2001).
Putting Metaphysics First. Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 346

Notes

References
J. Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, Sydney, 2003, ch. 11

External links
Devitt's Website
Devitt's archive on CUNY Philosophy Commons
Michael Devitt's Curriculum Vitae

1938 births
Living people
20th-century Australian philosophers
21st-century Australian philosophers
Academics of the University of Nottingham
Analytic philosophers
CUNY Graduate Center faculty
Epistemologists
Metaphysicians
Philosophers of language
Philosophers of science
University of Sydney alumni
Academic staff of the University of Sydney
Harvard University alumni

Michael Devitt


Midori Days is an anime about a girl who falls in love so badly that when she wakes up she's somehow attached to her love interest's (seiji) right hand. This anime is about how these two adjust to their strange new relationship.

High school boy Seiji Sawamura is really quite a nice guy, but he's got a bad reputation and the nickname Mad Dog, earned by copious street fighting, often in pursuit of justice. His right hook is so deadly that it's got its own nickname-The Devil's Right Hand. Other students avoid him and he can not get a girlfriend. In fact, 20 girls have turned him down. But unknown to him, he has had a secret admirer for the past three years-quiet goody-two-shoes Midori Kasugano, who is so paralyzed by her shyness that she could not possibly tell him how she feels. Then, in the tradition of Minami's Sweetheart (*DE) and The Eternity You Desire, Midori falls into a coma, while Seiji finds that instead of a right hand, he now has a living glove puppet-compare to Puppet Master Sakon. A tiny, living and speaking Midori is attached to the end of his arm and reveling in his undivided attention. The situation is awkward and embarrassing but the pair find they really do like each other, even when things are switched for an episode and Seiji becomes Midori's left hand. The result is a very silly show that still manages to convey how paralyzing shyness can be and how enforced intimacy can reveal unsuspected aspects of a person's character. Based on the manga by Kazuro Inoue in Shonen Sunday, itself a surreal cartoon version of the perennial surrogate parenting and reluctant roommates genres of live-action Japanese television

References

Anime

Midori Days


A movie trailer (also called a preview or coming attraction) is a short showing of a future (not yet released) movie. They are shown in a theater before the current movie starts. They are often later shown in advertisements for DVD releases, and broadcasts of the movie on television.

Movie terminology

Trailer (movie)


Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion or irrelevant thesis) is the informal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question. "Ignoratio elenchi" can be roughly translated by ignorance of refutation, that is, ignorance of what a refutation is; "elenchi" is from the Greek , meaning an argument of disproof or refutation. (Some sources give by ignorance of the issues or even by ignoring the issues as a translation of ignoratio elenchi.)

Aristotle believed that an ignoratio elenchi is a mistake made by a questioner while attempting to falsify a respondent's argument. He called it an ignorance of what makes for a refutation. For Aristotle, ignoratio elenchi amounts to ignorance of logic. In fact, Aristotle goes so far as to say that all logical fallacies can be reduced to what he calls ignoratio elenchi.

Modern use limits this term much more narrowly to the kind of mistake described in the first paragraph above.

Red herring
Similar to ignoratio elenchi, a red herring is an argument, given in reply, that does not address the original issue.  Critically, a red herring is a deliberate attempt to change the subject or divert the argument. This is known formally in the English vocabulary as digression which is a neutrally connotated "Red herring".  The actual problem is eclipsed by the process of re-focusing on something else.

Examples
Bill Maher on Scarborough Country

Maher: It's arbitrary, isn't it? If you had been born in Pakistan, you wouldn't be believing in Jesus Christ.  You would have been told another fairy tale and you would have been believing that.

Scarborough: Well, Bill, that's your opinion.

Whether Maher's argument is his opinion or not is irrelevant and does not address the argument made.

"Baseball player Mark McGwire just retired. He's such a nice guy, and he gives a lot of money to all sorts of charities.  Clearly, he will end up in the Hall of Fame."
The conclusion is ignoratio elenchi, since friendliness and charity are not the main qualifications for induction into the Hall of Fame.

"I should not pay a fine for reckless driving. There are actual dangerous criminals on the street, and the police should be chasing them instead of harassing a decent tax-paying citizen like me."
The existence of worse criminals is a secondary issue which has no bearing on whether the driver deserves a fine for recklessness.  If the speaker were deliberately attempting to divert the issue, this would be an example of a red herring. While the argument about how the police should spend their time may have merit, the question of whom the police should prioritize pursuing and the question of what should be done with those the police have caught are separate questions.

"The prime minister's tax policies may be popular, but I suspect he had an affair and is paying the woman to keep quiet. The media should investigate that! "
A red herring, the unrelated alleged affair, attempts to change the subject away from the popular policies.  However, if the original discussion were of the prime minister's public integrity (encompassing both popularity and conduct), this argument could be perfectly valid. Such as if a politician's election campaign revolved around family values. Then an argument about such an affair would be valid, as it is in direct conflict with a family values platform.

References

Other websites
 About.com: Fallacies of relevance
 Nizkor Project: Red Herring
 Fallacy Files: Red Herring
 Infidels.org: Ignoratio elenchi
 The Art of Controversy: Diversion   (bilingual with the original German) by Arthur Schopenhauer
 Red herring in political speech
 Ignoratio Elechi on TV Tropes

Red Herring
Logical fallacies

nl:Drogreden#Ignoratio elenchi

Ignoratio elenchi


Quidditch is a fictional sport in the Harry Potter books written by J. K. Rowling. Quidditch is a team game played by witches and wizards. It is played on flying brooms. There are seven players per team (three Chasers, two Beaters, a Keeper, and a Seeker). The game has many rules. Chasers shoot the Quaffle (the ball) into the other team's goal to score points. The Keeper tries to stop the Quaffle from getting through the goal. Players dodge Bludgers, balls that are charmed to hit players. Players called Beaters hit Bludgers away with bats. The game ends when the Seeker player catches a winged ball called the Snitch. The team of the Seeker who caught the Snitch gets 150 points. In 2005 a real sport called muggle quidditch was started at Middlebury College.

References

Harry Potter
Sports

Quidditch