André Charles Prosper Messager (; 30 December 1853 – 24 February 1929) was a French composer, organist, pianist and conductor. His compositions include eight ballets and thirty opéras comiques, opérettes and other stage works, among which his ballet Les Deux Pigeons (1886) and opéra comique Véronique (1898) have had lasting success; Les P'tites Michu (1897) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1919) were also popular internationally.

Messager took up the piano as a small child and later studied composition with, among others, Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré. He became a major figure in the musical life of Paris and later London, both as a conductor and a composer. Many of his Parisian works were also produced in the West End and some on Broadway; the most successful had long runs and numerous international revivals. He wrote two operatic works in English, and his later output included musical comedies for Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps.

As a conductor, Messager held prominent positions in Paris and London, at the head of the Opéra-Comique, the Paris Opéra, the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Although as a composer he is known chiefly for his light works, as a conductor he presented a wide range of operas, from Mozart to Richard Strauss, and he acquired a reputation as a conductor of Wagner. In Paris he conducted the world premieres of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Massenet's Grisélidis and Charpentier's Louise.  At Covent Garden, he gave the British premieres of operas by Saint-Saëns and Massenet.

Messager's music became known for its melodic and orchestral invention, musical craftsmanship, and characteristically French elegance and grace. Although most of his works have been infrequently revived, historians of music consider him the last major figure in French opéra comique and opérette.

Life and career

Early years

Messager was born at Montluçon, Allier, in central France on 30 December 1853, the son of Paul-Philippe-Émile Messager, a prosperous local tax collector, and his wife Sophie-Cornélie, née Lhôte de Selancy. He recalled, "You would not find any musicians among my ancestors. When very young I learned the piano; but later on my intentions to become a composer met with such opposition from my father". At the age of seven he was sent as a boarder to a Marist school where he continued his interest in the piano.

Towards the end of the 1860s disastrous stock-market speculation brought Messager's family financial ruin and they could no longer afford to keep him at the Marist school. They dropped their objection to music as a profession, viewing a post as a church organist as a respectable and steady career. He was awarded a bursary to study at the École Niedermeyer in Paris, an academy known for its focus on church music. This was at the time of the Paris Commune (1871), and to escape the violence in the city the school was temporarily evacuated to Switzerland. Messager studied piano with Adam Lausset, organ with Clément Loret, and composition with Eugène Gigout, Gabriel Fauré and (after leaving Niedermeyer's school) Camille Saint-Saëns. The musicologist Jean-Michel Nectoux comments that after his studies Messager developed into one of the finest orchestrators of the period.

Fauré and Messager quickly moved from being master and pupil to being firm friends and occasional collaborators. In 1874 Messager succeeded Fauré as organiste du chœur (choir organist) at Saint-Sulpice, Paris, under the principal organist, Charles-Marie Widor. In 1876 he won the gold medal of the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique with a symphony, the work being warmly received when performed by the Concerts Colonne at the Théâtre du Châtelet in January 1878. He won further prizes for his cantatas Don Juan et Haydée and Prométhée enchaîné.

In 1879 Fauré and Messager travelled to Cologne to see Wagner's Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, and later to Munich for the complete Ring cycle, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Tannhäuser; in 1888 they went to Bayreuth for Die Meistersinger and Parsifal. They frequently performed as a party piece their joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth (c. 1888). This short, skittish piano work for four hands burlesques motifs from The Ring. The two composers had a more serious collaboration, their Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (1881).

First successes

In 1878 Messager was appointed conductor at the Folies Bergère, and he began his career composing for the stage with two short ballets, Fleur d'oranger (1878) and Les Vins de France (1879). In 1880 a former manager of the Folies, M. Comy, was appointed to run the new Eden Théâtre in Brussels. At his invitation, Messager resigned from the Folies in 1880 and became conductor of the Eden. He returned to Paris in 1881 as organist of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis church, and from 1882 to 1884 he was organist and choirmaster at Ste Marie-des-Batignolles, a small church in the north west of Paris, where his assistant was another young composer, Claude Terrasse.

Messager's career took a new turn in 1883 when the composer Firmin Bernicat died leaving an unfinished opérette, François les bas-bleus. Messager was invited to complete it; he orchestrated the entire work and composed between twelve and fifteen numbers. It was staged in November 1883 at the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques and was an immediate critical and popular success. It was later produced in London and New York. In 1883, while deputising for Saint-Saëns as the soloist at a concert in Le Havre, Messager met a young woman, Edith Clouette, whom he married in the same year. Fauré played the organ at the ceremony, and composed a mildly cynical song, "Madrigal", as a wedding present. There was one child of the marriage, Jean André Emile Charles (1886–1952).

In December 1883 Messager and Emmanuel Chabrier gave the first performance of the latter's Trois valses romantiques at the Société Nationale de Musique. The concert also included the premiere of the two-piano version of España, arranged by Messager. Messager and Chabrier were close friends until the latter's death in 1894. Both were known for their comic operas and opérettes, but Chabrier's one serious opera, Gwendoline, appealed strongly to Messager, who vowed to conduct it in Paris, which he later did. He also prepared a piano reduction of the orchestral parts for the vocal score of the work.

Following the success of François les bas-bleus Messager accepted simultaneous invitations to compose a ballet for the Opéra and an opérette for the Folies-Dramatiques. The opérette, La Fauvette du temple, first performed on 17 November 1885, confirmed Messager's early reputation. It ran well into the following year in Paris, and he was able to sell the British rights immediately, though the work was not staged in London until 1891. The ballet, Les Deux Pigeons, which became one of Messager's best known works, took longer to reach the stage. It was put into rehearsal at the Opéra, but the staging, which showed a tree being struck by lightning in a storm scene, was considered a fire hazard by the police, and the production was temporarily shelved.

A month after the opening of La Fauvette du temple the Bouffes-Parisiens premiered Messager's opéra comique La Béarnaise, with Jeanne Granier in the title role. It ran for three months and was successfully produced in Britain the following year with a cast including Florence St. John and Marie Tempest, running for more than 200 performances. The Times said of this production that it gave Messager a secure footing in London, which led to important results later in his career. A production of La Béarnaise in New York followed in 1887, under the title Jacquette.

In 1886 Les Deux Pigeons was finally produced at the Paris Opéra and was a box office triumph. It was Messager's last popular success for four years. His attempt at a more serious opera, Le Bourgeois de Calais (1888), was not well received. Richard Traubner remarks in Operetta: A Theatrical History on its "boring historical plot, bad lyrics, and a banal score"; a contemporary critic wrote, "That Le Bourgeois de Calais will have a successful career there is not the faintest chance, for all the patriotic bolstering in the world could not make it an attractive piece." Messager followed this with a musical fairy tale, Isoline (1888), which was slightly better received, and a three-act opérette, Le Mari de la reine (1889), which failed, although Messager thought it "the best of my flops".

Fin de siècle

Messager's fortunes revived in 1890 with La Basoche, produced with much success at the Opéra-Comique. The critic who had pronounced so unfavourably on Le Bourgeois de Calais wrote of the new piece, "an exceptionally pleasing work ... a dainty piece which cannot fail to obtain widespread popularity."  An English-language version was produced in London in 1891 by Richard D'Oyly Carte. The theatrical newspaper The Era said, "The Basoche is more than a success; it is a triumph", but the piece had only a modest London run of three months.  A New York production was given in 1893 but was not a success.

Messager was a dandy and a philanderer. The musical historian D. Kern Holoman describes him as "given to immaculately tailored suits emphasizing his thin frame, careful grooming with particular attention to his mustaches, fine jewelry, and spats ... a witty conversationalist with an inexhaustible store of anecdotes and bons mots" and a womaniser. In the early 1890s Edith Messager, tired of her husband's infidelities, divorced him. Shortly afterwards she became ill; her condition deteriorated, and Messager visited her daily. By the time of her death in 1892 the two had become close again, and Messager felt her loss deeply.

In 1892 Messager's career as a conductor began to advance when he was invited to conduct Die Walküre at Marseille. As a composer the early 1890s brought him mixed fortunes. Madame Chrysanthème, staged at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1893, was a setting of Pierre Loti's story of a betrayed geisha, a theme that later inspired Puccini's Madama Butterfly; it was politely rather than enthusiastically received. Mirette, produced by Carte at the Savoy Theatre in 1894, was Messager's first opera written expressly for the London stage and was the only original Savoy opera by a French composer. To assist him in what was for him (at the time) an unfamiliar idiom, Messager enlisted the help of the songwriter Dotie (Alice Maude) Davis (1859–1938), known professionally as Hope Temple. She became Messager's second wife in 1895. According to Bernard Shaw, Messager, concluding from the reception of La Basoche in London that it was unwise to offer the British public anything too intelligent, decided that the new opera was going to be as commonplace as possible. It ran for 41 performances, was withdrawn and revised, and then ran for another 61 performances. Messager vetoed any production in Paris. His next opera, a serious work, Le Chevalier d'Harmental (1896), was unsuccessful, and for a while he and his new wife withdrew to the English countryside near Maidenhead, Berkshire.

From 1897 Messager's career revived. He later recalled that he had received by post an unsolicited libretto:

This was the opérette Les P'tites Michu, which was presented to great acclaim at the Bouffes-Parisiens. Its 1905 English adaptation in London ran for 401 performances. Soon afterwards he was appointed musical director of the Opéra-Comique, and in the commercial theatre had another outstanding success with Véronique (1898).

In 1898 Messager's only child from his second marriage, Madeleine Hope Andrée (d. 1986) was born. From that year to 1904 Messager's work at the Opéra-Comique left him little time for composition, particularly after 1901, when he also spent May to July at the Royal Opera House in London. He turned down W. S. Gilbert's offer of a collaboration, and wrote only two stage works between 1898 and 1914. His international fame as a composer nevertheless grew, with productions of Les P'tites Michu and Véronique in countries including Britain, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and the US. Unusually for the London stage at the time, Véronique was given in French in 1903. An English translation was staged the following year and ran for 496 performances. Messager conducted the first nights of both productions. The English version was staged in New York the following year, running for 81 performances.

Twentieth century
At the Opéra-Comique, Messager conducted the premieres of Massenet's Grisélidis and Charpentier's Louise, and gave the first French performances of operas as contrasted as Hansel and Gretel and Tosca. But by far the best known of his premieres was Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). Messager encouraged the composer to complete the opera and worked closely with him in getting the orchestration ready for the premiere. In gratitude Debussy dedicated the work to Messager. Holoman writes, "his championing of Pelléas et Mélisande alone would have earned him a place in music history." Debussy regarded Messager as the ideal conductor. Before the premiere he had trusted him to "make his dream into a reality"; after it he praised him for knowing "how to awaken the inner sound world of Pelléas with tender delicacy". After Messager's commitments obliged him to leave Paris for London, Debussy found the performances much less satisfactory. As a conductor, Messager won praise on both sides of the English Channel. The English music critic Francis Toye wrote that, good though Arturo Toscanini's conducting of Pelléas et Mélisande was at La Scala in Milan, Messager's was still better. The Parisian critic Pierre Lalo said of Messager:

From 1901 to 1907 Messager was one of the directors of the Grand Opera Syndicate, which ran the annual seasons at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, featuring the leading singers of the day, including Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso. Much of his time was spent on administration, and he had limited scope for conducting. From 1901, for two years, Messager had an affair with the Scottish soprano Mary Garden, whom he met at the Opéra-Comique and conducted when she took over the title role of Louise. She also appeared in a revival of his Madame Chrysanthème. His first appearance as a conductor at Covent Garden was in 1902 for the first performance of Princess Osra by Herbert Bunning.  He next conducted there in 1904 in the British premiere of Saint-Saëns's Hélène, followed in 1905 by Carmen, Don Giovanni, Faust, the world première of Franco Leoni's L'oracolo, Orphée et Euridice and Roméo et Juliette; in his final year, 1906, he conducted Armide, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Faust, the British premiere of Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, and Roméo et Juliette. In 1906 he also introduced to Covent Garden his ballet Les Deux Pigeons. Despite his reputation as a Wagnerian, he yielded the baton for Wagner performances to Hans Richter, widely regarded as the world's foremost exponent of Wagner's music.  In 1906 Messager and the London Symphony Orchestra travelled to Paris to play a programme of English music at the Châtelet Theatre, including works by Sullivan, Parry and Stanford. When he left Covent Garden in 1907, the directors found it necessary to appoint two people to fill his place: Neil Forsyth as general manager and Percy Pitt as musical director.

In 1907 Messager returned to composition. His "comédie lyrique" Fortunio was presented at the Opéra-Comique with great success. In the same year he was appointed joint director of the Paris Opéra, responsible for the artistic direction, with Frederick Broussan, formerly director of the Lyons Opera, taking charge of administration. The partnership lasted until 1913, but its success was hampered by shortage of funds and internal disputes. Messager decided on a policy of making the Opéra "more genuinely French". He revived Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, for the first time in Paris since 1767, and presented unusual French repertoire including Fauré's Pénélope. Foreign opera was not neglected; Messager gave Paris its first complete Ring cycle, presented a Russian season starring Félia Litvinne and Feodor Chaliapin, and conducted the French premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome.  At the invitation of the Emperor Wilhelm II, Messager and Broussan took the Opéra company to Berlin in 1908. Relations between the two co-directors were not always harmonious; after the French government refused Messager's resignation on at least one occasion, he finally announced it in November 1913, a year before his term of office was due to expire. He consented to return in January 1914 to conduct Parsifal – its first performance in Europe outside Bayreuth. His conducting of the work won critical praise.

On the strength of his experience as a Wagnerian, Messager was appointed conductor of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in 1908. It was at the time, and for many years, the most prestigious symphony orchestra in France, and Messager was determined that it should enjoy the international prestige of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras. Alongside the main orchestral repertoire of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and French classics, Messager conducted major choral works by J. S. Bach, Handel, Schumann and Berlioz, as well as introducing early French music such as that of Janequin. In the 1913–14 season, he conducted a chronological cycle of Beethoven's symphonies and his Missa solemnis, as well as Verdi's Requiem, for the Italian composer's centenary. Messager took the orchestra outside Paris to Lille, Lyon and Antwerp during these years. During the First World War he took the orchestra on tour to Argentina (1916), Switzerland (1917), and the US and Canada (1918–19), giving concerts in more than 50 cities. After their concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in October 1918, the orchestra and Messager received a prolonged ovation that was typical of their reception as the tour progressed. At the end of that tour Messager retired from his post.

Messager was criticised for performing the music of Wagner during the war, but he maintained that German music represented the noble side of the enemy nation's nature. Like Fauré, Messager refused to have anything to do with the National League for the Defence of French Music (La Ligue Nationale pour la Defense de la Musique Française), led by Saint-Saëns, which sought to boycott German music.

In 1914 Messager composed Béatrice, described as a "légende lyrique", based on the 1911 play The Miracle. The premiere was in Monte Carlo. The work was performed in Paris in 1917 but was not successful. In 1915 Messager joined with other musicians in contributing compositions to King Albert's Book to raise money for "the relief of the suffering Belgian people"; the other composers included Debussy, Elgar, Mascagni and Saint-Saëns.

In 1919 Messager's operetta Monsieur Beaucaire was premiered in Birmingham prior to a long run in the West End. The composer, who generally conducted British premieres of his works, was suffering from sciatica and could not even be in the audience for the first nights in either city. The work received its Paris premiere at the Théâtre Marigny in 1925, and it ran for 143 performances on Broadway. Later in 1919 Messager resumed the musical directorship of the Opéra-Comique for the 1919–20 season, conducting among other works the first complete performance in France of Così fan tutte.

Last years
In the 1920s, Messager kept pace with the change in fashion in musical theatre, consciously absorbing the styles of musical comedy, lightening his orchestration, but maintaining a Gallic flavour, mostly avoiding American dance-rhythm influences. He collaborated with Sacha Guitry on the musical comedies L'Amour masqué (1923) and Deburau (1926), starring Yvonne Printemps. The former was a considerable success in Paris, but in London the official censor, the Lord Chamberlain, declared it "unfit for the English public", and banned C. B. Cochran's planned production starring Printemps and Guitry. In Messager's late stage works his lighter touch was balanced by echoes of the nineteenth century, with hints of Fauré and, particularly, Chabrier's L'Étoile. Fauré, by 1923 too frail and deaf to go to the theatre, was lent a copy of the score of L'Amour masqué and wrote to Messager, "Your wit is the same as always – it never grows old – and so are your charm and very personal brand of music that always remains exquisite even amid the broadest clowning". Fauré died the following year, and Messager dedicated the music of Deburau to his memory.

In 1924 Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Messager to conduct the Paris premieres of Auric's ballet Les Fâcheux and Poulenc's Les Biches. In 1928 Messager played a key role in establishing important updates to copyright law, though he was on the losing side of the case. He sued the BBC for breach of copyright for broadcasting his works without his consent. He lost because he had assigned his British performing rights to George Edwardes, whose estate had given the BBC permission for the broadcast. The case established that as the broadcasting rights had not been specifically reserved, the Edwardes estate's rights included them.

After a short illness Messager died in Paris on 24 February 1929 aged 75. He was interred in the Passy Cemetery near the graves of Debussy and Fauré. His last completed work, the opérette Coups de roulis, was running in Paris when he died. A contemporary critic commented, "Its tuneful melodies show that the veteran composer had lost nothing of the qualities that made Véronique such a success. Throughout his life Messager remained without a peer as a composer of light music."

Honours and awards
Messager was elected President of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in 1926, the first composer to hold this office. In the same year he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1927 he was appointed Commander of the Légion d'honneur. In his native town of Montluçon, the music academy, opened in 2009, is named in his honour. In 2003, to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, Messager was the subject of a large exhibition at the Musée des musiques populaires de Montluçon, recounting his biography and illustrating his works in the various genres. Among the comité d'honneur of the exhibition were the composer's three grandchildren, and the singers Susan Graham, Dame Felicity Lott and Mady Mesplé, the conductors Sir John Eliot Gardiner, John Nelson and Michel Plasson, and the director Jérôme Savary.

Music

In his 1991 study of Messager, John Wagstaff writes that the composer's music is notable for its fine orchestration, easy-flowing melody, and skilfully written music, dance-like in character. Unlike his teacher Fauré, Messager enjoyed orchestrating. He said that musical ideas came to him "already clothed in the appropriate instrumental shades", and after the concentrated effort of composing his scores he found it relaxing to work on "the handling of instruments, the balancing of different sonorities, the grouping of colours and the structuring of effects". He remarked that composers who had their music orchestrated by assistants presumably did not care if their helpers lacked "that indefinable sixth sense which would indicate the right combination of sonorities to carry out the original intentions of the composer". To Messager, passages often depended for their significance or flavour on the orchestral writing alone.

Gervase Hughes, in a study of French opérette, comments that Messager's only technical defect was "one all too common to many composers of operetta – too close an adherence to repetitive rhythmic figures and four-bar rigidity", although such was Messager's "innate artistry that criticism on that score would be academic pedantry". One of the composer's distinguishing characteristics was a liking for chromaticism; this appealed to a younger generation of composers. His "Eh que ne parliez-vous?", from La Basoche, was quoted note-for-note by Poulenc in Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Although Messager greatly admired Wagner, and was a celebrated conductor of his music, he distanced himself from Wagnerian influences in his own compositions. In Madame Chrysanthème he made use of leitmotifs, and included other references to Wagner, but such examples are rare in his works.

Unlike some older contemporaries such as Saint-Saëns and Massenet,  Messager remained open to new ideas and idioms throughout his life, and his style evolved to match the spirit of the times. His biographer and former pupil Henry Février commented that from classic opéras comiques, such as La Basoche, Messager's later works, such as Les P'tites Michu and Véronique, show a difference in style, "bringing an altogether fresher approach to the genre." Towards the end of his career Messager successfully moved to "comédie musicale", the French form of musical comedy.

Ballets apart, Messager composed thirty works for the stage; they fall into several different, or sometimes overlapping, genres; the most numerous are opéras comiques (9), opérettes (7) and comédies musicales (3). The composer remarked late in his career:

Early stage works

Although Messager called some of his early stage works opéras comiques they have, Gervase Hughes suggests, more in common with opérette than their composer acknowledged. Nevertheless, Messager introduced adventurous modern harmonic details in his early pieces, and strove to raise the artistic standards of opérette to that of opéra comique while retaining the essential panache of the genre. Hughes finds the first stage works uneven in quality but La Fauvette du temple (1884) to contain two fine expressive duets as well as waltzes and polkas with "an Offenbach lilt". Hughes judges the next two scores, La Béarnaise and La Fauvette (both 1885), less satisfying but nonetheless at least as good as anything by Messager's older contemporaries Planquette, Serpette and Lecocq.

Wagstaff writes that the composer's most enduring work is the ballet score Les Deux Pigeons (1886). The piece is based on the fable The Two Pigeons by Jean de La Fontaine. The music is best known in the five-movement suite arranged from the full score, which includes the "Entrée de tziganes".  Messager revived the ballet in 1906 in London and in 1912 in Paris in a shortened, two-act version. In 1961 John Lanchbery revised this for Frederick Ashton's new version of the ballet, with a closing reconciliation scene from earlier music and a passage transcribed from Véronique. This was first given at Covent Garden, is revived regularly by the Royal Ballet and has been staged by such other companies as CAPAB and Australian Ballet.

Isoline (1888), a musical fairy story ("conte des fées"), is neither an opérette nor an opéra comique. Writing in 1908, Fauré called it "one of the most poetic, most expressive works that have been written in France in the last twenty years", but it made little impact. The score remained in obscurity until 1930 when Reynaldo Hahn staged the ballet section of the work at Cannes. The whole piece was revived at the Opéra-Comique in 1958; it failed again, but the ballet, unencumbered by the portentousness of the libretto, which weighs down the rest of the piece, has remained in the repertory.

1890s stage works

The decade began well for Messager with the artistic and commercial success of La Basoche (1890). Février in his André Messager: Mon Maître, Mon Ami calls it "the last of the great nineteenth-century French comic operas" ("le dernier des grands opéras-comique français du XIX siècle") and considers it of the greatest importance not only in Messager's career but in the history of French musical theatre. Hughes says it has a good claim to be the composer's masterpiece. The musicologist James Harding rates it "the best Messager had written to date ... one of his finest works". When the work was given in London, a year after its Parisian premiere, the reviewer in The Times called it, "A work of great beauty and charm", although "the influence of Die Meistersinger is felt to an extent that is almost absurd both in the bright overture and again in the procession of the guild, but elsewhere the music is as original as it is charming".

With Madame Chrysanthème (1893), a four-act "lyric comedy" with no spoken dialogue, Messager reached a turning point in his development. The crux of the plot was the same as that later used by Puccini for Madama Butterfly (1904): a young Japanese geisha wooed and then abandoned by a foreign sailor. Messager's treatment of the story was praised for its sensitivity – reviewers in the Parisian press applauded him for raising opérette to the level of "comédie lyrique" – but he was a self-critical artist, and he felt he had strayed too far in the direction of opera and away from his chosen genre. Harding suggests that the unusual seriousness of the score may be connected with the recent illness and death of Edith Messager. Both Hughes and Harding comment that Messager's score is subtler than Puccini's, but add that the almost total eclipse of Madame Chrysanthème by Madama Butterfly may be partly due to the relative effectiveness of their libretti. After this, Messager consciously simplified his style, greatly reducing the harmonic subtleties that had been characteristic of his earlier works.

The works from the middle of the decade were unsuccessful financially and artistically. Le Chevalier d'Harmental (1896), classed by Hughes as Messager's first true opéra comique ("in a somewhat pretentious style") was a failure, and an unpretentious opérette in the same year, La Fiancée en loterie, fared no better. After these disappointments Messager finished the 1890s with two considerable successes. Traubner describes Les P'tites Michu (1897) as "a sensational hit", and Harding calls it the best of Messager's opérettes so far (classing Le Basoche as opéra comique, as did its composer). The plot was not strikingly original: critics commented that its story of babies switched at birth was already very familiar from Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Traubner describes the piece as "one of those unusual works that begin well enough and gets better and better". Setting a scene in the market of Les Halles was not innovative, but Messager's chorus for the marchands and marchandes was out of the ordinary, and Traubner also singles out the duet for the Michus in Act 1: "clever, lilting ... pulsating with an elegance and grace that other operetta composers have failed to obtain". He also judges the finales as outstanding, including a waltz number that in other hands would be predictable but is turned by Messager into something much more symphonic.

The final work from the decade was Véronique. Messager described it as an opéra comique, but commentators have classed it as a mixture of opérette and opéra comique. The score contains two of the composer's best known numbers, the "Swing duet" ("Poussez, poussez l'escarpolette") and the "Donkey duet" ("De ci, de la"). When the work was revived at the Proms in London in the 1960s, the music critic of The Times commented, "Charming as it can prove in the theatre, the music alone is a little thin, with none of the piquancy that – thanks perhaps to Gilbert – redeems Messager's famous English contemporary Sullivan ... but Véronique has plenty of pretty things". It became and has remained the composer's most performed musical theatre piece.

20th century

Messager's work running opera houses in Paris and London limited his composing between Véronique and the period after the First World War. Fortunio (1907) was a rare example in his oeuvre of a sung-through opera. Eight decades later the critic Edward Greenfield described it as "a long-buried jewel of a piece ... an improbable cross between musical comedy and Tristan und Isolde". From 1919 onwards Messager composed no more opéras comiques. Among his post-war stage works, Monsieur Beaucaire, a "romantic operetta" (1919), was his second work to an English libretto. French critics were inclined to look down on "Messager's English operetta" as over-sweet and sentimental to suit Anglo-Saxon tastes. Harding comments that the composer was successful in his attempt to produce an English flavour: one number is "pure Edward German" and there is much pastiche throughout the score. Despite the critics the piece ran well not only in Britain and the US, but also in France, with more than 300 performances in Paris and a long life in French provincial theatres.

Of Messager's 1920s comédies musicales the best known is L'Amour masqué (1923). The Théâtre Édouard VII where it was premiered had a small orchestra pit, and Messager developed a new style of orchestration to deliver his desired musical effects with a small number of players. Harding comments that the piece was up-to-date enough to include a tango, "a beautifully written example with luscious harmonies that by contrast show up the threadbare nature of most other efforts of the time".

Non-stage works and role in French music

Messager wrote songs for solo voice with piano throughout his career. Like Fauré, he was fond of the poetry of Armand Sylvestre, and from "La Chanson des cerises" in 1882 to the cycle Amour d'hiver in 1911 he set thirteen of Sylvestre's poems. Others whose verse he set ranged widely, from Victor Hugo to Frederic Weatherly (author of among other things "Danny Boy").

In his old age Messager said that he would have liked to write more concert works, but had never had the opportunity. The Symphony in A, written when he was 22, is on the normal classical plan with sonata form in the first and last movements, a songlike theme in the adagio and a scherzo third movement. Looking back he described it as "très classique". In notes to a 1992 recording of the piece, Xavier Deletang comments that although the influence of Mendelssohn and possibly Schumann may be discernible, the work reveals a mastery of instrumentation and a quintessentially French flavour, particularly in the wind parts. The two main subjects of the Allegro con moto first movement are strongly contrasted, with the opening string theme followed by a chorale-like theme for the winds.

When Messager was elected to membership of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1926 the influential musical journal Le Ménestrel remarked that this conferred on his chosen genre – opérette – official status and recognition; but his fame as a composer of light music has tended to obscure his considerable standing in contemporary serious musical circles. It was said of him that he had "seen all, heard all, and remembered all". The leading composers of the time valued his friendship and advice. Fauré called him "familiar with everything, knowing it all, fascinated by anything new". Messager's younger colleague, the composer Reynaldo Hahn, wrote, "I do believe that no musician has ever loved music as much as André Messager did. In any case, it would be impossible to have a greater musical curiosity than he did, up to the end of his life, too." Like Fauré, Messager wrote musical criticism for Le Figaro and other publications in the first decades of the 20th century. Unlike Fauré, who was known for his kindly reviews, Messager was frequently severe. His views carried weight: some of his criticisms were reported in the international press.

In 1908 Fauré wrote of Messager, "There are not many examples in the history of music of an artist with such a complete education, of such profound knowledge, who consents to apply his gifts to forms regarded, nobody knows why, as secondary". Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians says of Messager, "His style may be described as enlightened eclecticism; his music was characteristically French, and more specifically Parisian, in its elegance and gaiety." In his book Composers of Operetta, Hughes comments that Messager combined "a flow of spontaneous melody worthy of Offenbach with a flair for economic workmanship at least the equal of Lecocq's" and in much of his music "a measure of Massenet's fluent grace, Saint-Saëns's aristocratic elegance, even Fauré's refined subtlety". He observes that Messager spanned an entire era: "Auber, Rossini and Meyerbeer were still alive when he began his studies, yet he survived the First World War and witnessed the rise and decline of "les Six". ... For forty years he carried aloft the torch kindled by Adolphe Adam in 1834; after his death it soon flickered out".

Conductor

The wide range of Messager's musical sympathies was noted by Le Menéstral, which said that he "has served Wagner, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel and Stravinsky when their works were still struggling for recognition". He was widely admired as a conductor. He avoided extravagant gesturing on the podium; Harding records, "His manner was precise and undemonstrative. The baton flicked neatly here and there in a way that meant little to the audience behind him but conveyed volumes to the orchestra". The music critic Pierre Lalo wrote that under Messager's direction, Parsifal, without losing any of its grandeur, "assumed a French clarity, and a sobriety, nobility and order ... even the most famous Bayreuth conductors have not always been able to do this." Not everyone shared Lalo's view; some audience members equated undemonstrativeness with dullness: Reynaldo Hahn commented, "[Messager] is not a master of the theatre ["chef du théâtre"], being too exclusively musical; he sets too much store by detail without feeling the spirit of the public behind him, and does not understand the variable musical flow that makes one hold one's breath, sigh and wait." Nevertheless, Hahn admired Messager as an orchestral conductor:
 André Messager is the most French of conductors; I mean that in this art he embodies sharpness. Grace and clarity are not uniquely French qualities: they are frequently found among the Italians and even some Germans. But sharpness is a French virtue, and nothing but French. M. André Messager has it to an exceptional degree, and it shows in how he writes, orchestrates, dresses, talks, and plays the piano. But it is when he conducts the orchestra that what one might call his organic sharpness shows itself most forcefully.

Recordings
In 1918 Messager conducted recordings in New York, with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, of Les Chasseresses and Cortège de Bacchus from Sylvia by Delibes, Sérénade and Mules from Impressions d'Italie by Charpentier, the Bacchanale from Samson et Dalila and the Prelude to Le Déluge, both by Saint-Saëns, and 4½-minute extracts from Capriccio espagnol by Rimsky-Korsakov and Le Rouet d'Omphale by Saint-Saëns. In Wagstaff's 1991 study of Messager, the list of recordings of the composer's music runs to 40 pages; 24 of his works are represented in the list of recordings up to that date.

Complete operas
Complete recordings exist of several of Messager's stage works. There are three complete sets of Véronique – a 1953 mono recording for the Société française du son conducted by Pierre Dervaux, a 1969 stereo EMI recording conducted by Jean-Claude Hartemann, and a 1998 recording sung in English, conducted by J. Lynn Thompson. Other complete sets include L'Amour masqué (1970; conductor, Raymond Legrand), La Basoche (1960; Tony Aubin), Coups de roulis (1963; Marcel Cariven), Fortunio (1987; John Eliot Gardiner), Isoline (1947; Louis Beydts), Monsieur Beaucaire (1958; Jules Gressier), Passionnément (1964; Jean-Paul Kreder; and 2021; Armando Noguera); and Les p'tites Michu (2019; Pierre Dumoussaud).

Individual numbers
Singers who have recorded individual numbers by Messager include role creators such as Jean Périer (Véronique), Lucien Fugère (La Basoche), Pierre Darmant and Yvonne Printemps (L'Amour masqué), Koval (Passionnément), Marcelle Denya (Coups de roulis), and Maggie Teyte (Monsieur Beaucaire), as well as other contemporaries – Aino Ackté, Emma Eames, and John McCormack – whose recordings have been reissued on compact disc. Singers of the next generation who recorded Messager numbers included Georges Thill and Ninon Vallin. More recent examples include Mady Mesplé, Susan Graham, and Felicity Lott.

Non-operatic recordings
Of Messager's non-operatic works, his Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville, written jointly with Fauré, has been recorded by, among others, Harmonia Mundi, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe (1989). Messager's other collaboration with Fauré, the Wagner send-up Souvenirs de Bayreuth, has been recorded by piano duettists including Kathryn Stott and Martin Roscoe (1995, Hyperion), and, in an orchestral arrangement, by the orchestra of the Bayreuth Festival. A suite from Les Deux Pigeons has been recorded several times, for example by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Hugo Rignold (1948) and by Charles Mackerras (1958); in 1993 Decca recorded the complete score with the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera conducted by Richard Bonynge. His ballet-pantomime Scaramouche was recorded by the Toulon Opera orchestra under Guillaume Tourniaire (2018). The Symphony in A has been recorded by the Orchestre Symphonique du Mans, conducted by José-André Gendille (2001).

List of works

Stage works (except ballets)

Ballets
Single act, except where shown
Fleur d'oranger 1878
Les Vins de France 1879
Mignons et vilains 1879
Les Deux Pigeons (2 acts) 1886
Scaramouche (2 acts) 1891 (with Georges Street)
Amants éternels 1893
 Le Procès des roses 1896
Le Chevalier aux fleurs 1897 (with Raoul Pugno)
Une aventure de la Guimard 1900

Orchestral
Symphony in A major 1875
Loreley, ballade for orchestra, c. 1880

Chamber and instrumental
3 valses, piano 4 hands (1884)
"Souvenirs de Bayreuth", piano 4 hands, with Gabriel Fauré, c. 1888
For solo piano (1889):
Impromptu, Op.10
Habañera, Op.11
Menuet, Op.12
Mazurka, Op.13
Caprice polka, Op.14
Valse, Op.15
"Pavane des fées"
Trois pièces, violin and piano (1897): Barcarolle, Mazurka, Sérénade
Solo de concours, clarinet and piano (1899)

Choral
Don Juan et Haydée (Byron), cantata,  c. 1875
Prométhée enchaîné (Georges Clerc), cantata, c. 1877
Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville, with Gabriel Fauré, 1881, for choir with solo violin and harmonium; orchestral accompaniment added 1882.

Songs
For solo voice with orchestral accompaniment
Sérénade (Louis Legendre), written for the play Colibri, 1889
For solo voice with piano accompaniment
"Regret d'avril" (Armand Silvestre) (1882)
"Chanson de ma mie" (Théodore de Banville) (1882)
"Mimosa" (Armand Silvestre) (1882)
"Nouveau printemps" (Heinrich Heine, translated by Georges Clerc), 5 songs (1885), dedicated to Fauré
"Gavotte" – danse chantée (Théodore de Banville) (1887)
"Chanson mélancolique" (Catulle Mendès) (1889)
"La Chanson des cerises" (Armand Silvestre) (1889)
"Neige rose" (Armand Silvestre) (1889)
"Fleurs d'hiver" (Armand Silvestre) (1889)
"O canto do Paris n'America" (unnamed) (1890)
"À une fiancée" (Victor Hugo) (1891)
"Arioso" (Paul Burani) (1891)
"Ritournelle" (Henry Gauthier-Villars) (1894)
"Chanson d'automne" (Paul Delair) (1894)
"Chant d'amour" (Armand Silvestre) (1894)
"Le Bateau rose" (Jean Richepin) (1894)
"Douce chanson" (Émile Blémont) (1894)
"Notre amour" (Armand Silvestre) (1896)
"Aimons nous" (Emile Blémont) (1897)
"Curly Locks" (Frederic Weatherly) (1897)
"Amour d'hiver" (Armand Silvestre), 6 songs (1911)
"Pour la patrie" (Victor Hugo) (1914)
"La Paix de blanc vêtue" (Léon Lahovary) (1922)
"Va chercher quelques fleurs" (Louis Aufauvre) (1922)

Source: Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; L'académie nationale de l'opérette; and Wagstaff: André Messager.

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

Volume II:
Volume III:

Further reading

External links

 List of stage works by Messager at The Guide to Light Opera and Operetta
 List of works by Messager at the Index to Opera and Ballet Sources Online

 Video feature on The Two Pigeons at The Royal Ballet
 Video feature on Solo de concours

1853 births
1929 deaths
Burials at Passy Cemetery
Commanders of the Legion of Honour
French ballet composers
French male conductors (music)
French conductors (music)
French male classical composers
French opera composers
Male opera composers
French operetta composers
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Music directors (opera)
Directors of the Paris Opera
People associated with Gilbert and Sullivan
People from Montluçon
Pupils of Camille Saint-Saëns

André Messager


Count Iosif Vladimirovich Romeyko-Gurko (;   — ), also known as Joseph or Ossip Gourko, was a prominent Russian field marshal  during the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878).

Biography
Of Belarusian extraction, Gurko was educated in the Imperial Corps of Pages, entered the hussars of the Imperial Guard as a sub-lieutenant in 1846, became captain in 1857, adjutant to Alexander II of Russia in 1860, colonel in 1861, commander of the 4th Hussar Regiment of Mariupol in 1866, and major-general of the emperor's suite in 1867.

He subsequently commanded the grenadier regiment, and in 1873 the 1st Brigade, 2nd Division, of the cavalry of the Imperial Guard. Although he took part in the Crimean War, being stationed at Belbek, his claim to distinction is due to his service in the Turkish war of 1877. He led the spearhead of the Russian invasion, took Tarnovo on July 7, crossed the Balkans by the Haim Boaz pass—which debouches near Hainkyoi—and, despite considerable resistance, captured Uflani, Maglizh and Kazanlak; on July 18 he attacked Shipka, which was evacuated by the Turks the following day. Thus within 16 days of crossing the Danube, Gourko had secured three Balkan passes and created a panic at Constantinople.

He then made a series of successful reconnaissances of the Tundzha valley, cut the railway in two places, occupied Stara Zagora () and Nova Zagora (), checked the advance of Suleiman Pasha's army and returned again over the Balkans. In October he was appointed commander of the allied cavalry, and attacked the Plevna line of communication to Orhanie with a large mixed force, captured Gorni-Dubnik, Telish and Vratsa and, in the middle of November, Orhanie itself. Pleven was isolated, and after its liberation in December Gourko led his troops amidst snow and ice over the Balkans to the fertile valley beyond. He liberated Sofia and decisively defeated Suleiman Pasha at the Battle of Philippopolis and occupied Adrianople. The armistice at the end of January 1878 stopped further operations. With the help of Carol I of Romania and a few other Russian commanders such as : Michael Nikolaevich and Iosif Vladimirovich Gourko, the Russian Empire managed to break free Romania, Serbia and Montenegro. After a Russian victory the Treaty of Berlin was signed.

In 1879–1880, Gurko was a governor of St. Petersburg, and from 1883 to 1894 Governor-General of Poland, where he enforced the Russification policies of Alexander III.

He died in 1901, near the city of Tver.

Honour
Gurko was made a count and decorated with the 2nd class of St. George, Order of the Cross of Takovo and other orders.

Gurkovo town in South-central Bulgaria and General Yosif V. Gurko Street in Sofia, Bulgaria are named after him.

Notes

Sources

1828 births
1901 deaths
People from Veliky Novgorod
People from Novgorodsky Uyezd
Russian people of Belarusian descent
Members of the State Council (Russian Empire)
Governors-General of Warsaw
Russian military personnel of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878)
Recipients of the Order of the White Eagle (Russia)
Recipients of the Order of Saint Stanislaus (Russian)
Recipients of the Order of St. George of the Second Degree
Recipients of the Order of St. George of the Third Degree
Recipients of the Order of the Cross of Takovo
Battle of Shipka Pass

Iosif Gurko


Edgar Street is a football stadium in Hereford and was the home of Hereford United Football Club from the club's formation in 1924 until December 2014, when the club was wound up. It is now the home of Hereford FC, a phoenix club formed to replace the former club. It is the largest football stadium in the county of Herefordshire and is located on the edge of Hereford city centre, adjacent to the former cattle market (now a shopping centre). The name of the stadium directly derives from the name of the street where it is located, which is also the A49.

History
The site has been used as a stadium since the late 19th century, although the year in which it was opened has not been widely recorded. The stadium was originally owned by the Hereford Athletic Ground Company and was also used by amateur football side Hereford City. In those days the ground's official name was Edgar Street Athletic Stadium, there was a running track around the pitch which explains the curious curved "dead" areas behind each goal in front of the terraces. Even in the early days Hereford United struggled financially and the landlord obligingly reduced the rent to help the club. In 1931 the stadium was purchased by Hereford City Council for £3,000, and in 1952 United secured a lease on the stadium for the first time.

Although now showing its age, the ground's history does have some notable landmarks, such as the installation of floodlights in March 1953, before many large clubs. In 1974, following the most recent major development seen at Edgar Street, it was the only one outside the First Division with two cantilever-roof stands. At  the ground had, until the advent of new stadia, one of the widest pitches in the Football League. The extreme width of the pitch was created when the old running track was turfed over.

Due to the club's financial crisis in 1997, the lease was handed over to developers. In 2000 an electronic scoreboard was put up at the Blackfriars Street End, using funds bequeathed to the club by a supporter.

On 19 February 2015, Herefordshire County Council rejected a proposal by Worcestershire-based Redditch United to play at Edgar Street. Later that same week, on 24 February, the council confirmed that Hereford FC, a phoenix club formed following Hereford United's demise, had been granted a lease allowing them to play at Edgar Street.

The stadium's record attendance is 18,114 when Hereford United played against Sheffield Wednesday in the 1957–58 FA Cup Third Round.

Hereford FC's record attendance for a home game at Edgar Street was 4,683, for a 1–0 win in the FA Vase semi-finals against Salisbury on 13 March 2016, until the club's FA Cup first round match against Portsmouth in November 2022 attracted a crowd of 4,912. It hosted Hereford FC's televised FA Cup second round replay against Fleetwood Town in December 2017. The 2020–21 FA Trophy semi-final between Hereford FC and Woking was also played here, although it took place behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Hereford won 1–0 to make the final.

Stands

Merton Stand

The Merton Stand, on the eastern side of the ground is the only all-seater stand in the ground and was built in 1968. It currently has a capacity of 1818. Initially it was flanked on either side by standing areas known as the Cowsheds, but when the club progressed into the Football League the stand was extended to cover the entire length of the pitch. The Merton Stand is the nominated family stand and includes the director's and press boxes, with matchday sponsors also seated in this stand. In front of the stand lie the dugouts next to the players' tunnel. All of the club facilities, such as offices, changing rooms, boardroom and corporate hospitality are located underneath the stand. The result of this is a number of windows at pitch level.

Meadow End
The Meadow End is located at the northern end of the ground and is traditionally populated with the club's most vocal supporters. It is a fully covered terrace and has a distinctive curve to its shape. The flat area in front of the terracing enables supporters to stand directly behind the perimeter wall of the pitch, very close to the action. It has a capacity of 1,400. Located behind this end is the substantial Merton Meadow car park.

The pitch's distinctive downhill slope is in the direction of the Meadow End, which has seen some memorable goals over the years, most notably the goals scored by Ronnie Radford and Ricky George in the 1972 FA Cup victory over Newcastle United.

Len Weston Stand

The Len Weston Stand on the western side of the ground, is a narrow two-tiered stand and was built in 1974, replacing the previous wooden grandstand, which was moved to a field near Risbury in the county. The stand has a total capacity of 1996, comprising 936 seats and a further 1,060 standing. It extends the entire length of the pitch and was named after the former president and benefactor of the club, Len Weston and the stand is now sponsored by Weston's Cider.

The stand is unusual in that the lower tier is terraced and the upper tier seated. The upper tier contains just five steep rows of seating but offers perhaps the best view in the ground as it is higher than the Merton Stand, and also closer to the pitch so supporters may not be able to see the front of the pitch, but seating is narrow. The view from the terracing on the lower tier can be obscured by a number of supporting pillars, but also has the benefit of being very close to the touchline. The proximity of the A49 road immediately behind the stand limited the amount of room to build the stand, hence the relatively small number of rows of seating. Ticket allocation is split between home and away supporters with the Meadow End side allocated to home supporters.

Blackfriars Street End
A terrace situated to the behind the southern goal, the stand was split between home supporters to the east, and away supporters to the west.
The stand was popular amongst supporters but had to close its terracing due to health and safety concerns in 2009, then from 2010 to 2012 it adopted temporary seating to accommodate bigger sides in League Two.

External links
 Official Hereford FC website

References

Hereford United F.C.
Football venues in England
Welsh Cup final venues
Buildings and structures in Hereford
Sports venues in Herefordshire
English Football League venues
Hereford F.C.

Edgar Street


Frankly A Cappella: The Persuasions Sing Zappa is a 2000 album by the singing group The Persuasions. Frank Zappa heard them over the phone while they were singing in a record shop on the East Coast and flew them out to L.A. to record their first LP, in 1969, for Zappa's label. The album was the brainchild of Rip Rense, a friend of Zappa, as a tribute to the late composer. Rense executive produced and worked with lead singer/arranger Jerry Lawson on selecting the tracks and guest artists, who included Zappa alums Bruce Fowler, Robert Martin, Mike Keneally. Gary Mankin and Lawson co-produced the music, and Gail Zappa had final approval of the project. All arrangements by Jerry Lawson. The album is the first of several in which The Persuasions paid tribute to the songs of a specific group or artist.

Rense also conceived of and produced The Persuasions on "Persuasions of the Dead" (2011), a two-disc Grateful Dead tribute album for the Zoho Roots label.

Track listing
Songs composed by Frank Zappa.

"Lumpy Gravy"
"Any Way the Wind Blows"
"Electric Aunt Jemima"
"The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing"
"Interlude"
"Cheap Thrills"
"Hotplate Heaven at the Green Hotel"
"Love of My Life"
"You Are What You Is"
"Interlude 2"
"Harder Than Your Husband"
"Find Her Finer"
"Interlude 3"
"My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Momma"
"Tears Began to Fall"
"Mystery Track"

Doo-wop albums
2000 albums
Frank Zappa tribute albums

Frankly a Cappella


JAL (Just Another Language) is a Pascal-like programming language and compiler that generates executable code for PIC microcontrollers.  It is a free-format language with a compiler that runs on Linux, MS-Windows and MS-DOS (OSX support). It is configurable and extendable through the use of libraries and can even be combined with PIC assembly language.

History
JAL was originally created by Wouter van Ooijen and released as free software under the GNU General Public License in 2003. In 2006, Stef Mientki initiated the development of a new version, JALV2, which was programmed by Kyle York and beta tested by an international user group.

Sample code
 -- JAL 2.3
 include 16f877_bert--define the variables
 var byte resist--define the pins
 pin_a0_direction = input--variable resistor
 pin_d7_direction = input--switch
 pin_c2_direction = output--pwm led--enable pulse width modulation
 PWM_init_frequency (true, true)

 forever loop--convert analog on a0 to digital
    resist = ADC_read_low_res(0)

    -- run measurement through flash memory
    program_eeprom_write(2000,resist)
    program_eeprom_read(2000,resist)

    -- run measurement through data memory
    data_eeprom_write(10,resist)
    data_eeprom_read(10,resist)

    -- if the switch is pressed return random value
    if pin_d7 == high then
       resist = random_byte
    end if--send resistance to PC
    serial_sw_write(resist)
    delay_100ms(1)
    -- set actual PWM duty cycle
    PWM_Set_DutyCycle (resist, resist)

 end loop

References

External links
JALv2 Compiler home page
Open Source JAL Libraries
JAL Homepage

Procedural programming languages
Programming languages created in 2003

JAL (compiler)


Ernst Jandl (; 1 August 1925 – 9 June 2000) was an Austrian writer, poet, and translator. He became known for his experimental lyric, mainly sound poems (Sprechgedichte) in the tradition of concrete and visual poetic forms.

Poetry

Influenced by Dada he started to write experimental poetry, first published in the journal Neue Wege ("New Ways") in 1952.

He was the life partner of Friederike Mayröcker. In 1973 he co-founded the Grazer Autorenversammlung in Graz, became its vice president in 1975 and was its president from 1983 to 1987.

His poems are characterized by German language word play, often at the level of single characters or phonemes.  For example, his famous univocalic poem "ottos mops" (in English, "otto's pug") uses only the vowel "o". Of course, poems like this cannot easily be translated into other languages.

Most of his poems are better heard than read.  His lectures were always known as very impressive events, because of the particular way he pronounced his poems. Poems like "schtzngrmm" (his version of the word "Schützengraben" which describes the trenches of the World War I)  can be understood only if read correctly. It is an experimental poem in which he tells the sounds of war only with combinations of letters, which sound like gunfires or detonating missiles.

He translated Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley's The Island, and John Cage's  Silence.

Some other of his best-known poems are "lichtung" (also known as "lechts & rinks", in English "light & reft") and "kneiernzuck".

An example of a short poem, written in English:

three wives
i never remember my second wife
i never remember my third wife
i always remember what i always remember
ain't ever even had a first wife

Awards
 1969: Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden with Friederike Mayröcker for "Five Men"
 1974: Georg-Trakl-Preis (see Georg Trakl)
 1976: Literature Prize of the City of Vienna
 1978: Austrian Prize for Literature
 1980: Mülheim Dramatists Prize
 1982: Anton Wildgans Prize
 1982: Manuscripts Prize of Styria
 1984: Georg Büchner Prize (see Georg Büchner)
 1984: Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature
 1985: Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik
 1986: Gold Medal of Vienna
 1987: Kassel Literary Prize for Grotesque Humour
 1988: German Cabaret Award
 1989: Frankfurt Hörspielpreis
 1990: Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
 1990: Peter-Huchel-Preis
 1993: Kleist Prize
 1995: Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis (see Friedrich Hölderlin)
 1995: Medal of the Province of Styria
 1996: Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria

Poems
"Ottos Mops" 20 November 1963
"Laut und Luise" 1966
"sprechblasen" 1968
"der künstliche baum" 1970
"idyllen" 1989
"Aus dem wirklichen Leben" 1999
Reft and Light (Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 2000); translated from the German by various American poets,

Books
 lechts und rinks. gedichte, statements, peppermints; Luchterhand, , in a poor translation: "light and reft. poems, statements, peppermints"
 laut und luise; Luchterhand,
 Interpretationen, Gedichte von Ernst Jandl; Reclam,
 ernst jandl, aus dem wirklichen Leben: gedichte und prosa, with 66 drawings by Hans Ticha, Büchergilde Gutenberg 2000,

Notes

References

External links

Writing is the food of the gods  Friederike Mayröcker's poem about her companion at signandsight.com
Ernst Jandl at UbuWeb sound files to download and discussion of his concrete poetry at UbuWeb
author page at Lyrikline.org, with audio, text (German, one translation into English).

1925 births
2000 deaths
Anton Wildgans Prize winners
Writers from Vienna
Burials at the Vienna Central Cemetery
Kleist Prize winners
Georg Büchner Prize winners
Recipients of the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
Recipients of the Grand Austrian State Prize
Recipients of the Grand Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria
20th-century Austrian poets
Austrian male poets
Members of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
German-language poets
20th-century Austrian male writers
Visual poets

Ernst Jandl


Fredrick Kenneth Hare,  (February 5, 1919 – September 3, 2002) was a Canadian climatologist and academic, who researched atmospheric carbon dioxide, climate change, drought, and arid zone climates and was a strong advocate for preserving the natural environment.

Biography
Born in Wiltshire, England, he received a Bachelor of Science in 1939 from King's College London. During World War II, he was a meteorologist with the UK Air Ministry, and joined McGill University as an assistant professor after the war. In 1950, he received a PhD in Geography from the Université de Montréal.

Scientific career
Hare was Dean of Arts and Science at McGill starting 1962 before returning to England in 1964. He was Master of Birkbeck College from 1966 to 1968, during which he served as president of the Royal Meteorological Society.

In 1968, he accepted the position as fifth president of the University of British Columbia, which he served until he resigned on January 31, 1969. He joined the University of Toronto (U of T) becoming a Professor of geography and physics in 1974. From 1974 to 1979 he was director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the U of T. From 1979 until 1986 he was Provost of Trinity College. From 1988 to 1995 he was the sixth Chancellor of Trent University. From 1992 until his death in 2002, he chaired Canada's national Climate Program Planning Board.

Research interests and advocacy
Hare's research interests included atmospheric carbon dioxide, climate change, drought, and arid zone climates. He was a strong advocate of protecting the natural environment and served on a wide variety of commissions and committees on subjects that included acid rain, desertification, heavy metals, nuclear reactors (and their waste products), ozone, greenhouse gases and climate change. He was on the Research and Development Advisory Panel of Atomic Energy of Canada and conducted studies on nuclear waste management in Sweden and France.

Hare considered that the most pressing environmental challenge facing Canada is climate change caused by excessive use of fossil fuels. He advocated effectively managed nuclear power as a viable alternative. Throughout his life Hare was a tireless public speaker and writer about these issues.

Awards and honours
Hare received the Massey Medal in 1974. In 1978 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 1987.

In 1987, he was presented with the Sir John William Dawson Medal, for important contributions of knowledge in multiple domains, from the Royal Society of Canada in which he was a Fellow. The same year, he was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal by the American Geographical Society.

In 1989, he received the Order of Ontario and the International Meteorological Organization Prize from the World Meteorological Organization. He was awarded honorary degrees by 11 universities.

References

1919 births
2002 deaths
Masters of Birkbeck, University of London
Alumni of King's College London
British emigrants to Canada
Canadian climatologists
Canadian university and college faculty deans
Canadian university and college chancellors
Chancellors of Trent University
Companions of the Order of Canada
Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada
Academic staff of McGill University
Members of the Order of Ontario
People from Wiltshire
Presidents of the Royal Meteorological Society
Presidents of the University of British Columbia
Recipients of the Cullum Geographical Medal
Université de Montréal alumni
Academic staff of the University of Toronto
Massey Medal recipients

Kenneth Hare


French toast is a breakfast food made by soaking bread in eggs.

Milk, sugar or cinnamon are commonly added.  The dish is often topped with powdered sugar, butter, fruit, syrup, or other items.  According to what is popular in local cuisine, many of the spices that are added to bread or egg dishes are in cooking.

In the United Kingdom, it is sometimes known as Eggy Bread. It is a Christmas time dessert in Portugal and Brazil called rabanada. And is an Easter dessert in Spain called torrijas.

Breakfast foods
Breads
Egg dishes

French toast


François Perroux (December 19, 1903 in Saint-Romain-en-Gal – June 2, 1987 in Stains) was a French economist. He was named Professor at the Collège de France, after having taught at the University of Lyon (1928 – 1937) and the University of Paris (1935 – 1955). He founded the Institut de Sciences Economiques Appliquées in 1944. He was an outspoken supporter of corporatism.

He was terribly critical of the leading financial and economic policies toward the Third World during the half-century of his career. He said that they took insufficient account of the originality, culture, and concrete situations of the countries concerned, and were too quantitative, too Western in concept, and too centered on the interests of the rich industrialised countries. He counselled the peoples of the Third World to build upon their cultures, their social organisations, and their resources, so as to better the internal coherence of their economies and reduce the effects of domination by the exterior.

In the field of Regional Economics, one of his main contribution's was the concept of poles de croissance or 'growth poles'. It implied that Government policies aimed at the regeneration of a specific local region were critically dependent upon the Input-Output linkages associated with the industry. A 'pole de croissance' is an industry, or group of related industries, that have growth rates above the national average and the capacity to generate growth through the impact of strong input-output linkages.

Sources
Association des Amis de François Perroux, Journée François Perroux, published around early 2008; retrieved July 2009.

Notes

1903 births
1987 deaths
People from Rhône (department)
20th-century  French  economists
Regional economists
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy

François Perroux


Warship was a popular British television drama series produced by the BBC between 1973 and 1977.

The series was about life on board a Royal Navy warship, the fictional HMS Hero. It was mainly filmed aboard the Leander-class frigate HMS Phoebe.

Four Leander class frigates played the role of HMS Hero. They were HMS Phoebe, HMS Dido, HMS Hermione and HMS Jupiter. All the crews of these warships were given HMS Hero cap tallies for filming purposes.

The creator of the series was a serving Royal Navy officer, Ian Mackintosh. He wrote three books based on episodes of the series. They were simultaneously published in hardback and paperback. The books were:
 Warship (published in 1973);
 HMS Hero (published in 1976);
 and Holt RN (published in 1977).

The opening music of the series was a march played by the Royal Marines, called Warship, and written by Anthony Isaac. It is still played by Royal Marine bands.

Related pages
 Ian Mackintosh
 HMS Hero
 HMS Phoebe (F42)
 HMS Dido (F104)
 HMS Hermione (F58)
 HMS Jupiter (F60)
 Leander class frigate
 Royal Navy
 Royal Marines
 Fleet Air Arm
 Frigate

Other websites
 Warship Episode Guide
 British Film Institute site on Warship
 Royal Navy leaflet on Warship, from the HMS Phoebe Association website
 Comments on Warship by series Director Michael Briant
 Webpage (at Home > Scriptwriting > Warship) about Michael J Bird's scripts for Warship
 HMS Phoebe Association website
 HMS Dido Association website
 HMS Jupiter Association website
 HMS Hermione Association website
 Ian Mackintosh's Royal Navy service record on Opsromm.org

Royal Navy
Naval transport
Ships
English-language television programs

Warship (TV series)


Joe Jacob (born 1 Aprile 1939) is a politeecian in the Republic o Ireland, an a member o the Irish pairlament in Dublin, representin the pairty Fianna Fáil.  He represents the Wicklow consteetuency in Dáil Éireann.

1939 births
Livin fowk
Fianna Fáil politeecians
Local cooncillors in Coonty Wicklow
Members o the 25t Dáil
Members o the 26t Dáil
Members o the 27t Dáil
Members o the 28t Dáil
Members o the 29t Dáil
Meenisters o State o the 28t Dáil
Fowk frae Kilrush
Politeecians frae Coonty Clare
Teachtaí Dála

Joe Jacob


The Itinerarium Alexandri ("The Journey of Alexander") is a 4th-century Latin itinerarium, a travel guide in the form of a listing of cities, villages (vici) and other stops, on a journey with the intervening distances given.

The text describes Alexander the Great's journey of conquest to the Empire of the Persian. The book contains a description of Alexander's life from his ascendance to the Macedonian throne to his conquests in India. The content of the texts draws heavily on the Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian and it has similarities to the Alexander Romance.

The work is dedicated to the Roman Emperor Constantius II. The author is unknown but it is suspected to have been composed in 340 by Julius Valerius, who wrote Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis.

Bibliography

 Heckel, Waldemar, John Yardley, Alexander the Great: Historical Texts in Translation, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, , p. xxvi. xxvi.
 Iolo Davies: Alexander's itinerary (itinerary of Alexandria). An English translation. In: Ancient History Bulletin 12, 1998, p. 29-54.
 Raffaella Tabacco: Itinerarium Alexandri. Testo, apparato Critico, introduzione traduzione, e commento. Turin 2000th
 Raffaella Tabacco: Itinerarium Alexandri.  Critical review of studies and research perspectives, in "Bulletin of Latin Studies" XVII, 1987, pp. 77–120
 Michael H. Dodgeon: The Roman eastern frontier and the Persian wars: AD 226 - 363, Volume 1 Page 385

Roman itineraries
Ancient Roman geography
Foreign relations of ancient Rome
History of navigation
Travel books
Geography books
Ancient Greek military books
Roman-era Greek historiography
4th-century Latin books
Works of unknown authorship
Historiography of Alexander the Great

Itinerarium Alexandri


An Alphyn, also known as awfyn or alfin in older writings, is a rare heraldic creature. It is much like a heraldic tyger, but stockier and with tufts of hair covering its body, and also has a thick mane and long thin tongue. Another notable characteristic is its knotted tail, reminiscent of Celtic design and similar to that of the griffin. Sometimes it is depicted as having an eagle's or dragon's talons on its forelegs, other times they are cloven, like a goat's. Occasionally all four feet are depicted as having the claws of a lion. In English heraldry, the Alphyn was used as a heraldic badge of the Lords de la Warr, and also appeared on the guidon held by the knight in the Milleflour Tapestry in Somerset.

In England's second printed book, William Caxton's "Game and Playe of the Chesse" the chessmen now known as bishops are described instead as Alphyns, representing judges: "The Alphyns ought to be made and formed in manere of Juges syttynge in a chayer wyth a book open to fore their eyen."

See also
 Attitude (heraldry)
 Charge (heraldry)
 History of England

References

Heraldic beasts
Mythological hybrids

Alphyn


Ota (c. 874 – between 899 and 903; also Oda, Uota, Uta) was Queen consort of the East Franks by marriage to Arnulf of Carinthia. She was the mother of Louis the Child. By birth she was probably a member of the Conradine Dynasty.

Life

Possible Conradine ancestry
Very little is known of Ota. She was probably born in Velden in 873/4. She is often thought to have been the daughter of Berengar, Count of Hesse and thus a member of the Conradine Dynasty. This view has been questioned by Donald Jackman, who has found no evidence that Ota was a member of the Conradines.

Marriage to Arnulf of Carinthia
In 888, aged about sixteen, Ota married Arnulf of Carinthia, who was king of East Francia. There is no evidence that Ota was crowned. If Ota was a Conradine, then the marriage was intended to win Arnulf support in Bavaria and Lorraine.

For the first few years of their marriage, the couple had no children together. Arnulf thus asked at an imperial assembly held at Forcheim that his two illegitimate sons, Zwentibold and Ratold, born to different mothers, should be recognised as his heirs. Yet in 893 Ota gave birth to Arnulf's legitimate heir, Louis the Child. She was not, as is sometimes conjectured, the mother of Glismut, the wife of Conrad the Elder: Glismut was the mother of Conrad I of Germany, who was born c. 890.

Ota's name features in her husband's documents at the beginning and towards the end of his reign, when she intervened in privileges for the abbey of Kremsmünster and the monastery of Altötting, and for the Bishopric of Worms and the Bishopric of Freising.

Accusation of adultery
The most notable incident involving Ota occurred in June 899. According to the Annals of Fulda, she was accused of adultery: "Then a scandal, and worse, a crime, unheard of for many years, was published about Queen Ota; that she had yielded her body to a lustful and wicked union". Ota was called to defend herself at an assembly in Regensburg. The accusation of adultery against a queen was not as "unheard of" as the Annals of Fulda suggest however: Richardis, wife of Charles the Fat, was accused of adultery just twelve years earlier. Ota (like Richardis before her) protested her innocence, and "cleared herself of the accusation [...] with the help of seventy-two oath-helpers before the judgement of the leading men who were present". Arnulf was already ill when this accusation was made. In fact, it may be that the accusation of adultery was made because Arnulf was ill.

Decline and death
Arnulf died in late 899. Ota's son, Louis (aged six), became king after his father's death, but Ota was not involved in his regency. Louis was placed in the guardianship of Hatto I, Archbishop of Mainz, Bishop Adalbero of Augsburg, and several major nobles. Ota disappears from history; she is spoken of as dead by 903, and is believed to have withdrawn to the lands of her family. She bequeathed her property to the church.

Ota was buried in St. Emmeram's Abbey in Regensburg.

Notes

References
T. Reuter, 'Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota,' in idem, Medieval polities & modern mentalities, ed. J.L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 217–230 (first published in German, 2002).
Annales Fuldenses, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SS rer Germ 7 (Hannover, 1891), accessible online at Monumenta Germaniae Historica (in Latin)
Annals of Fulda, trans. T. Reuter (Manchester, 1992).
K-F. Werner, 'Die Nachkommen Karls des Großen bis um das Jahr 1000 (1.–8. Generation),' in W. Braunfels and P. Schramm, eds., Karl der Große Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. 4 (Düsseldorf, 1967).
A. Krah, 'Uta (Oda, Ota),' in Lexikon des Mittelalters (LexMA), vol. 8 (Munich, 1997).
D. Jackman, The Conradines. A Study in Genealogical Methodology (Frankfurt, 1999).
Die Urkunden Arnulfs, ed., P. Kehr (Berlin 1940), accessible online at: Monumenta Germaniae Historica (in Latin).
Die Urkunden Ludwig des Kindes, ed., T. Schieffer (Berlin, 1960), accessible online at: Monumenta Germaniae Historica (in Latin)

External links
Oda Ostfraenkische Koenigin (in German)

870s births
10th-century deaths
Year of birth uncertain
Year of death uncertain
Carolingian dynasty
Holy Roman Empresses
Frankish queens consort
Burials at St. Emmeram's Abbey
9th-century women from East Francia
9th-century Italian nobility
9th-century Italian women

Ota (wife of Arnulf of Carinthia)


Dipropylene glycol is a mixture of three isomeric chemical compounds, 4-oxa-2,6-heptandiol, 2-(2-hydroxy-propoxy)-propan-1-ol, and 2-(2-hydroxy-1-methyl-ethoxy)-propan-1-ol. It is a colorless, nearly odorless liquid with a high boiling point and low toxicity.

Uses
Dipropylene glycol finds many uses as a plasticizer, an intermediate in industrial chemical reactions, as a polymerization initiator or monomer, and as a solvent. Its low toxicity and solvent properties make it an ideal additive for perfumes and skin and hair care products. It is also a common ingredient in commercial fog fluid, used in entertainment industry fog machines.

References

Cosmetics chemicals
Monomers
Plasticizers
Diols
Glycol ethers

Dipropylene glycol


Autodesk Revit is a building information modelling software for architects, landscape architects, structural engineers, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) engineers, designers and contractors. The original software was developed by Charles River Software, founded in 1997, renamed Revit Technology Corporation in 2000, and acquired by Autodesk in 2002. The software allows users to design a building and structure and its components in 3D, annotate the model with 2D drafting elements, and access building information from the building model's database. Revit is 4D building information modeling application capable with tools to plan and track various stages in the building's lifecycle, from concept to construction and later maintenance and/or demolition.

Company history
Charles River Software was founded in Newton, Massachusetts, on October 31, 1997, by Leonid Raiz and Irwin Jungreis, key developers of PTC's Pro/Engineer software for mechanical design, with the intent of bringing the power of parametric modeling to the building industry (PTC had previously tried and failed to market its recently acquired Reflex software to the construction sector). With funding from venture capitalists Atlas Venture and North Bridge Venture Partners, Raiz and Jungreis hired several software developers and architects and began developing Revit in C++ on the Microsoft Windows platform. In 1999 they hired Dave Lemont as CEO and recruited board members Jon Hirschtick, founder of SolidWorks, and Arol Wolford, founder of CMD Group.

The company was renamed Revit Technology Corporation in January 2000. Autodesk, best known for its AutoCAD line of products, purchased Revit Technology Corporation for US$133 million in 2002. The purchase allowed more research, development and improvement of the software.

With their Revit platform, Autodesk is a significant player in the BIM market together with Tekla Structures, Trimble, Bentley Systems and the Nemetschek group (owner of Graphisoft's BIM application ArchiCAD, plus solutions including Allplan and Vectorworks), among others.

Product history

Inception
From the outset, Revit was intended to allow architects and other building professionals to design and document a building by creating a parametric three-dimensional model that included both the geometry and non-geometric design and construction information, which is also known as building information modeling or BIM (1975 Eastman C.). At the time, several other software packages—such as ArchiCAD and Reflex—provided a three-dimensional virtual building model, and let the user control individual components via parameters (parametric components). Two key differences in Revit were that users created parametric components in a graphical "family editor" rather than a programming language, and the model captured all relationships between components, views, and annotations so that a change to any element automatically propagated to keep the model consistent. For example, moving a wall updated neighboring walls, floors, and roofs, corrected the placement and values of dimensions and notes, adjusted the floor areas reported in schedules, redrew section views, etc.—so that the model remained connected and all documentation was coordinated. The concept of bi-directional associativity between components, views, and annotations was a distinguishing feature of Revit for many releases. The ease of making changes inspired the name Revit, a contraction of Revise-Instantly. At the heart of Revit is a parametric change propagation engine that relied on a new technology, context-driven parametrics, that was more scalable than the variational and history-driven parametrics used in mechanical CAD software. The term parametric building model was adopted to reflect the fact that changes to parameters drove the whole building model and associated documentation, not just individual components.

Version 1.0 and beyond
Revit version 1.0 was released on April 5, 2000. The software progressed rapidly, with version 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, and 4.1 released in August 2000; October 2000; February 2001; June 2001; November 2001; and January 2002, respectively.

The software was initially offered only as a monthly rental, with no option to purchase. Licensing was controlled by an entirely automatic process, an innovation at a time when human intervention and manual transmission of authorization codes was required to buy other types of design software.

Autodesk released several versions of Revit after 2004. In 2005 Revit Structure was introduced, then in 2006 Revit MEP. After the 2006 release Revit Building was renamed Revit Architecture.

In 2011 Dynamo was released in beta form allowing first glimpses of directly programming the behavior of hosted components through a drag and drop node interface. This is similar to the way the visual programming language Grasshopper 3d works on objects in Rhinoceros 3D.

In 2012 Revit LT became the newest version of Revit on the market. It was a feature limited or Lite version of Revit which excluded features such as rendering and multi-user environments. In 2013, Autodesk began introducing rental licensing for some of its products, including Revit.

Since Revit 2013 the different disciplines have been rolled into one product, simply called Revit.

Autodesk sells several packages or 'industry collections'; Revit is included in the AEC Collection.

Revit is available in multiple language localizations: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

With the release of Revit 2016, Autodesk dropped support for 32-bit Windows.

Features

Modeling
The Revit work environment allows users to manipulate whole buildings or assemblies (in the project environment) or individual 3D shapes (in the family editor environment). Modeling tools can be used with pre-made solid objects or imported geometric models. However, Revit is not a NURBS modeller and also lacks the ability to manipulate an object's individual polygons except on some specific object types such as roofs, slabs, and terrain or in the massing environment.

Revit includes categories of objects ('families' in Revit terminology). These fall into three groups:
System families, such as walls, floors, roofs, ceilings, major finishes, and even furniture built inside a project
Loadable families/components, which are built with primitives (extrusions, sweeps, etc.) separately from the project and loaded into a project for use
In-place families, which are built in-situ within a project with the same toolset as loadable components

An experienced user can create realistic and accurate families ranging from furniture to lighting fixtures, as well as import existing models from other programs. Revit families can be created as parametric models with dimensions and properties. This lets users modify a given component by changing predefined parameters such as height, width or number in the case of an array. In this way a family defines a geometry that is controlled by parameters, each combination of parameters can be saved as a type, and each occurrence (instance in Revit) of a type can also contain further variations. For example, a swing door may be a Family. It may have types that describe different sizes, and the actual building model has instances of those types placed in walls where instance-based parameters could specify the door hardware uniquely for each occurrence of the door.

Although Revit software comes with a range of families out of the box (OOTB), they are limited, so users may find a need to build their own families or buy them from online stores.

Because of copyright issues in project work, fully 3D-modeled Revit project models are rarely for sale. Indeed, as most projects are site-specific and bespoke, the demand for existing models is light anyway. However, new practices or students of Revit may want to refer to completed models. There are a few sources for these, including websites such as BIMGallery and GrabCad.

Multiuser collaboration
Since version 3.0 Revit enables multiple users to work on the same building model. The workflow is similar to the use of a version control system in software engineering, that allows multiple developers to reliably collaborate on a common code base. Each Revit user works on a local copy of the design, periodically checking in the work into the central repository. New user starts with creating a local copy of this repository. When a user starts modifying some building elements, these elements get automatically locked, preventing others from modifying them. The locks are maintained in the central repository. The elements stay locked until the "borrower" checks in her work and releases the locks. Patented technology called "worksharing" allows Revit to minimize the set of elements being locked while allowing change propagation engine to update as many elements as needed, including the elements that are not locked. Revit typically avoids merge conflicts during check-in.

In early Revit versions the central repository has been a folder on LAN. This option is still available and appropriate for co-located design team. Since 2013 Autodesk also offers hosted cloud-based central repositories for Revit as a service.

Rendering
When a user creates a building, model, or any other kind of object in Revit, they may use Revit's rendering engine to make a more realistic image of what is otherwise a very diagrammatic model. The user accomplishes this either by using the premade model, wall, floor, etc., tools, or making their own models, walls, materials, etc. Revit 2010 comes with a plethora of predefined materials, each of which can be modified to the user's desires. The user can also begin with a "Generic" material. With this, the user can set the rotation, size, brightness, and intensity of textures, gloss maps (also known as shinemaps), transparency maps, reflection maps, oblique reflection maps, hole maps, and bump maps, as well as leaving the map part out and just using the sliders for any one (or all or none) of the aforementioned features of textures.

Cloud-based rendering with the experimental plug-in dubbed Project Neon, located on Autodesk Labs is in the beta phases and allows for the user to render their images through their Autodesk account instead of locally through their own computers. Revit models may also be linked directly into Autodesk 3ds Max (release 2013 and later) for more advanced rendering and animation projects with much of their material and object information maintained.

See also
 Comparison of computer-aided design software
 Industry Foundation Classes
 Virtual design and construction

References

Further reading
  xvi, 480 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm.

External links

Autodesk products
BIM software
Building information modeling
Computer-aided design software for Windows
Windows-only proprietary software

Autodesk Revit


Maria Christina Röhl, (1801-1875), was a Swedish artist. She was a sketch artist and drew portraits of many famous people. In Sweden, her name is spelled as Maria Röhl.

Her paintings are displayed at the national museum at in Stockholm, and in the royal library, there are one thousand eight hundred of her portraits.

She was born in a rich family, but in 1822, her parents died, and she became poor. She then thought that she would become a teacher, but the artist Christian Forsell taught her to draw portraits of people like an artist.

She made portratis of friends of the rich family she lived with, and soon, it had become popular to go to her when you wanted to have a picture of yourself. This was before photography, and it was cheaper than having your portrait painted in oil.

The king made her a court-painter in 1843, and in 1843-1846, she studied in Paris. She worked as a portrait-drawer for thirty years. Eventually, however, the new art of photography led to less assignments for her.

References

1801 births
1875 deaths
Swedish artists
People from Stockholm

Maria Röhl


In economics a competitive advantage is something that allows someone or a company to beat their rivals. This includes:

 Low cost: I have better resources. I can make things at a lower cost. I sell things at a lower price than others.
 Differentiation: The product I create is different, better, or both.
 Focus: The product I create is targeted to a specific person.

Related pages
 Comparative advantage

Economics

Competitive advantage


In software engineering, architecture tradeoff analysis method (ATAM) is a risk-mitigation process used early in the software development life cycle.

ATAM was developed by the Software Engineering Institute at the Carnegie Mellon University. Its purpose is to help choose a suitable architecture for a software system by discovering trade-offs and sensitivity points.

ATAM is most beneficial when done early in the software development life-cycle, when the cost of changing architectures is minimal.

ATAM benefits
The following are some of the benefits of the ATAM process:
 identified risks early in the life cycle
 increased communication among stakeholders
 clarified quality attribute requirements
 improved architecture documentation
 documented basis for architectural decisions

ATAM process
The ATAM process consists of gathering stakeholders together to analyze business drivers (system functionality, goals, constraints, desired non-functional properties) and from these drivers extract quality attributes that are used to create scenarios. These scenarios are then used in conjunction with architectural approaches and architectural decisions to create an analysis of trade-offs, sensitivity points, and risks (or non-risks). This analysis can be converted to risk themes and their impacts whereupon the process can be repeated. With every analysis cycle, the analysis process proceeds from the more general to the more specific, examining the questions that have been discovered in the previous cycle, until such time as the architecture has been fine-tuned and the risk themes have been addressed.

Steps of the ATAM process
ATAM formally consists of nine steps, outlined below:
Present ATAM – Present the concept of ATAM to the stakeholders, and answer any questions about the process.
Present business drivers – everyone in the process presents and evaluates the business drivers for the system in question.
Present the architecture – the architect presents the high-level architecture to the team, with an 'appropriate level of detail'
Identify architectural approaches – different architectural approaches to the system are presented by the team, and discussed.
Generate quality attribute utility tree – define the core business and technical requirements of the system, and map them to an appropriate architectural property.  Present a scenario for this given requirement.
Analyze architectural approaches – Analyze each scenario, rating them by priority.  The architecture is then evaluated against each scenario.
Brainstorm and prioritize scenarios – among the larger stakeholder group, present the current scenarios, and expand.
Analyze architectural approaches – Perform step 6 again with the added knowledge of the larger stakeholder community.
Present results – provide all documentation to the stakeholders.

These steps are separated in two phases: Phase 1 consists of steps 1-6 and after this phase, the state and context of the project, the driving architectural requirements and the state of the architectural documentation are known. Phase 2 consists of steps 7-9 and finishes the evaluation

See also
ilities
Architecture-centric design method
Multi-criteria decision analysis
ARID
Software architecture analysis method, precursor to architecture tradeoff analysis method
Architectural analytics

References

External links
 Reduce Risk with Architecture Evaluation
 ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation

Software architecture
Enterprise architecture

Architecture tradeoff analysis method


Wire rope consists of several strands laid (or 'twisted') together like a helix. Each strand is likewise made of metal wires laid together like a helix. Initially wrought iron wires were used, but today steel is the main material used for wire ropes.

History & materials
Modern wire rope was invented by the German mining engineer Wilhelm Albert in the years between 1831 and 1834 for use in mining in the Harz Mountains in Clausthal, Lower Saxony, Germany. It was quickly accepted because it was better than ropes made of hemp or to metal chains, such as had been used before.

Wilhelm Albert's first ropes consisted of wires twisted about a hemp rope core, six such strands then being twisted around another hemp rope core in alternating directions for extra stability. Earlier forms of wire rope had been made by covering a bundle of wires with hemp.

In America wire rope was later manufactured by John A. Roebling, forming the basis for his success in suspension bridge building. Roebling introduced a number of innovations in the design, materials and manufacture of wire rope.

Manufacturing a wire rope is similar to making one from natural fibres. The individual wires are first twisted into a strand, then six or so such strands again twisted around a core. This core may consist of steel, but also of natural fibres such as sisal, manila, henequen, jute, or hemp. This is used to cushion off stress forces when bending the rope.

Construction & specification
The specification of a wire rope type, including the number of wires per strand, the number of strands, and the lay of the rope, are is documented using a commonly accepted coding system, with abbreviations. For example, the rope shown in the figure "Wire rope construction" is designated:

6x19 FC RH OL FSWR

Each of the sections of the wire rope designation described above is variable. There are therefore a large number of combinations of wire rope that can be specified in this manner. The following abbreviations are commonly used to specify a wire rope.

Other websites
 Modern history of wire rope

Hardware (mechanical)
Ropework

Wire rope


Wrangler may refer to:

 Wrangler (profession), a handler of animals, especially horses and cattle, or a professional who searches for and/or handles animals (or other products) for film productions
 Jeep Wrangler, a type of motor vehicle
 Goodyear Wrangler, a commercial line (family) of automotive tires for SUVs / 4x4s
 Wrangler (jeans), a brand of jeans
 Wrangler (TV series), a 1960 Western program starring Jason Evers
 Wrangler (University of Cambridge), a student who has completed the final year of the mathematical tripos with first-class honours
 Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon, a documentary about Jack Wrangler
 Data wrangler, a professional in computing who transforms raw data to a clean format
 Wrangler (band), an electronica musical band founded by Stephen Mallinder
 Ruger Wrangler, a single-action rimfire revolver
 "Wrangler Jane" Thrift, a character on the TV series F Troop.

Sports
 Arizona Wranglers, a former USFL football team
 Austin Wranglers, an arena football team
 Calgary Wranglers,  the AHL minor league affiliate of the Calgary Flames hockey team.
 Las Vegas Wranglers, an ice hockey team in the ECHL
 Luray Wranglers, a summer baseball team in rural Virginia
 Wichita Wranglers, a minor league baseball team in the Texas League

People with the surname
 Jack Wrangler (1946-2009), porn actor

See also
 Henry II, Duke of Bavaria or Henry the Wrangler (951-995)
 The Senior Wrangler, a member of the faculty of Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of novels
 Render wrangler, a systems engineer in charge of a render farm
Wrangle (disambiguation)
Wrangel (disambiguation)
Rangel (disambiguation)
Rangle, a falconry term
 Tape Wrangler, a tape-dispensing product

Wrangler


Alan Percy (c.1480-1560) was an English churchman and academic, Master of St John's College, Cambridge, and later Master of Trinity College, Arundel which he surrendered to Henry VIII in 1545.

Life
He was third son of Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland and Maud, daughter of William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke. He is not known to have been educated at a university, but was vicar of Giggleswick, Yorkshire, from 1508 to 1517. On 6 May 1515 he received the rectory of St. Anne, Aldersgate, London, which he held till 1518.

The new foundation of St. John's College, Cambridge, chose him as their second master on 29 July 1516, probably with an eye to his Lancastrian connections and family influence, But he resigned the mastership two years later on 1 November 1518; the college granted him a small pension and some residence privileges. On 2 April 1520 Henry VIII gave him a house and garden at Stepney, Middlesex, and he gave up claims on the college the following year.

With other preferments he pursued a clerical career. On 25 October 1521 he became rector of St. Mary-at-Hill, London, which he held for the rest of his life. In 1526 Thomas Boleyn, Viscount Rochford presented him to the rectory of Mulbarton, Norfolk. He became Master of the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity at Arundel, where he succeeded the musician Edward Hygons at some point between 1535 and 1539. The College might have escaped the Dissolution of the Monasteries, since in the early 1540s it had been granted property from Hayling Priory, and other land from the dissolved St John's Priory at nearby Poling and Shipley. But an eventual dissolution of the College was prompted at court by Henry Lord Maltravers; and a late stage Percy joined with the two fellows in surrendering it to the king on 12 December 1545.

Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk gave him the rectory of Earsham, Norfolk, in 1558; he had also been rector of Stanley Regis, Gloucestershire from 1551. Percy died in May 1560, and was buried in the old chapel of St. John's College, where there were a brass and a marble tomb to his memory.

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References

1480 births
1560 deaths
16th-century English Anglican priests
Masters of St John's College, Cambridge
People associated with the Dissolution of the Monasteries
Younger sons of earls
Alan
16th-century scholars
16th-century English educators

Alan Percy