Richard Beacham

‘Bearers of the Flame’ Music, dance, design, and lighting, real and virtual – the enlightened and still luminous legacies of Hellerau and Dartington

The first phrases are presented by a solo bass singer, followed by a very quietly sung choral passage. Then the chorus suddenly roars out the final word, ‘Licht!!’ – with the blazing forth of a tumultuous orchestral accompaniment. It was, quite literally, a ‘show-stopper’, at its first and subsequent performances. On the 27th of March, 1808, to mark his seventy-sixth birthday, Haydn attended a commemorative performance of the oratorio composed ten years earlier. It was his last public appearance, and attended by a vast, and adoring crowd. Haydn, seated in a chair, was carried into the hall to the sound of trumpet fanfares. The audience cheered ‘Vivat Haydn’ while his former student, Beethoven, welcomed his master, kissing his hand. The performance was attended by Vienna’s leading nobility, and conducted by Antonio Salieri. At the moment just described, all stood to applaud the composer, who, overcome with emotion and rising with difficulty, gestured upwards . . . ‘It came from there!’. . . .1 a d o l p h e a p p i a

Otium, Opulentia and Opsis: Setting, Performance and Perception Within the mise-en-scène of the Roman House

By the period of the late Republic / early Principate, the typical Pompeian town house was divided into two distinct and, to a significant extent, functionally separate realms. The first consisted of the fauces and/or vestibulum , leading on to the atrium , tablinum and adjacent rooms. The provision of a peristyle, an architectural entity widely found in the Greek world, evoked both the Greek peristyle house, but also the Hellenic shrines and palaces in which it figured, associations in turn imported into sumptuous Roman rural villa architecture. Houses were one of the major “media” that defined the social position, moral qualities, and ideological superiority of their elite Roman owners while dynamically and performatively giving visible expression of these in public life. They provided the necessary mise-en-scene within which crucially important distinctions of social rank could be made visible, manipulated and enacted. Keywords: atrium ; Mise-en-scene ; peristyle; Roman house; tablinum ; vestibulum

Playing Around with Plautus, or “How Can I be Expected to Act with All These People Looking at Me?”

There is a nicely surreal moment in Plautus’ play, Pseudolus (lines 613–15), when Pseudolus has disguised himself, and, as he confides in an aside to the audience, is setting out to trick another character, Harpax.1 Upon meeting the disguised Pseudolus, Harpax says in an aside to the audience, ‘This man is bad news!’ Pseudolus responds, also in an aside to the audience, ‘The gods are on my side! This guy’s a regular anvil on which I’ll hammer out a heap of hoaxes today!’ Harpax, overhearing, then says in another aside to the audience, ‘Why is he talking to himself?’