Fidelio is Beethoven's only complete opera and one of the most admired, and problematic, in the repertoire. This Opera Handbook explores the fascinating musical and dramatic elements within the work as well as the debt to the traditions of French opera in the late eighteenth century and the French Revolution. Winton Dean offers a comparison of the opera's first (1805) and final (1814) versions. Essays by Michael Tusa and Joseph Kerman consider its musical idiom and the challenges Beethoven faced as an instrumental composer trying his hand at opera. A final chapter examines the opera's...

Opera And Ideas is a study of the connections between music and intellectual history. Through lucid analysis of six operas and two song cycles, Paul Robinson shows how operas give musical and dramatic expression to ideas about the self, society, and history.

Infinite-dimensional Clifford algebras and their Fock representations originated in the quantum mechanical study of electrons. In this book, the authors give a definitive account of the various Clifford algebras over a real Hilbert space and of their Fock representations. A careful consideration of the latter's transformation properties under Bogoliubov automorphisms leads to the restricted orthogonal group. From there, a study of inner Bogoliubov automorphisms enables the authors to construct infinite-dimensional spin groups. Apart from assuming a basic background in functional analysis and...

This study presents the first examination of the influence of ideas of honour on the causes, conduct and ending of wars from Ancient Greece to the present day.

Paul Robinson begins with a theoretical examination of the concept of honour, to clearly explain the many contradictions and tensions inherent within honour systems. He then shows how honour has often contradictory and paradoxical effects on the conduct of war and illustrates this through seven case studies: Classical Greece; Ancient Rome; mediaeval Chivalry; Elizabethan England; the American Civil War; the British...

Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov (18561929) was a key figure in late Imperial Russia, and one of its foremost soldiers. At the outbreak of World War I, his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, appointed him Supreme Commander of the Russian Army. From 1914 to 1915, and then again briefly in 1917, he was commander of the largest army in the world in the greatest war the world had ever seen. His appointment reflected the fact that he was perhaps the man the last Emperor of Russia trusted the most. At six foot six, the Grand Duke towered over those around him. His fierce temper was a matter of legend....