The layout of the complex of fourth-century buildings begun by the Emperor Constantine I to enclose the tomb of Christ and the site of the crucifixion in Jerusalem is now reasonably well understood, as a result of excavations and restoration work undertaken over the last half century [Fig. 3.1]. The rock-cut tomb, detached from its parent rock, was enclosed by a small chapel or aedicule, around which was constructed a timber-roofed rotunda surrounded on all but the east side by an ambulatory with a timber gallery. The rotunda was entered on the east from a peristyled courtyard, which enclosed the rock of Calvary or Golgotha and other sites associated with the Passion. To the east of this stood a five-aisled basilica, also with galleries and with its apse on the west built over the spot where Helena was supposed to have found the relic of the True Cross. The basilica in turn was separated from the city’s colonnaded cardo by an atrium, propylaeum and steps.

This complex of buildings survived in more or less the same form until September 1009, when most of it was demolished by the Muslim governor of Ramla, Yārūkh, on the orders of the deranged Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim, at a time when other Christian buildings in Palestine were also being attacked and destroyed. Rebuilding seems to have begun very soon afterwards. The Malkite Christian writer Yaḥyā ibn Sa‘īd al-Anṭākī relates, for instance, that in 1011 al-Mufarrij of the Jarrāḥ tribe seized Ramla during a revolt of the Arabs in Palestine. He appointed a new patriarch, Theophilus from Hibal in Wādī Mūsa, and encouraged the Christians to start rebuilding the Church of the Resurrection, even paying towards the work himself until his death in August 1013. When Theophilus died in 1020 he was succeeded as patriarch by Nicephorus (1020–36), a former joiner in al-Ḥākim’s palace; but because of local Muslim opposition, Nicephorus returned to Cairo and sought from al-Ḥākim a sijill granting protection to the Christian community, the restoration of the church’s endowments and ‘the cessation of all hostility against those of them who pray in the precincts of the church called the Resurrection [al-Quyāma] and of its court’.

IN THE LATE FOURTEENTH CENTURY, Egidius de Murino wrote an elementary treatise on how to compose a motet. The first step, he told his readers, was to select a tenor appropriate for the theme of the motet:

After that, Egidius says, the tenor is arranged into phrases and given rhythm (a process he calls ‘ordering and coloring’), and the other parts are added – contratenor first, if there is one, then triplum and motetus. The upper-voice texts, according to this account, are added only at the end, by dividing the music and the words and combining them ‘as well as you can’.

It is important to remember that Egidius is writing for beginners, so he takes each stage in turn, while the experienced poet-composer would surely work on several levels simultaneously. The choice of a specific tenor may reflect not only a general sense of subject matter, but also the knowledge of certain key words, if not entire lines, of the upper-voice texts, or specific melodic features that the composer intends to work out in the polyphonic framework. In perhaps an extreme (but not unique) case, Anna Zayaruznaya makes a convincing argument that the composer of Colla / Bona had already written the texts and worked out the periodic structure of the motet before choosing the tenor and giving it a repetition pattern that is at odds with its upper voices. Moreover, a motet that borrows a tenor used in another motet creates a further dialogue that goes beyond general subject matter to include various aspects of structure, text, and music. The ways in which a composer might work out tenor choice and other aspects mentally resist the kind of clear linearity Egidius's description gives us.

Eusebius set a high bar for the building of churches when he wrote to Paulinus, the bishop of Tyre: ‘shall I call you a new Bezalel, the master builder of a divine tabernacle, or a Solomon, king of a new and far nobler Jerusalem, or a new Zerubbabel, who adorned the temple of God with the glory that was far greater than the old?’ This idea of the church replacing or surpassing the Temple, the new city as outdoing the old, is inherent in the relations between Jerusalem and Constantinople. With the establishment of Christianity as an imperially sponsored religion and the building by the Constantinopolitan emperors of the Holy Sepulchre complex on the purported site of Christ’s anastasis (resurrection), there was no drive to reconstruct the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount. Christ prophesied after all that it would be destroyed (Matt. 24.1–2). In the late seventh century, the Temple site was claimed for Islam with the building of the Qubbat as-Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock, and when Jerusalem was recovered for Christianity from the Muslims in 1099, it was here that a new Christian focus developed. It was known as the Templum Domini, identified as being (or at least being on the site of) the Temple in which the infant Christ had been presented to Simeon forty days after his birth (Luke 2.22–38).

Constantinople itself, however, had no heritage connected with either the Old or the New Law. It had, then, two principal ways of establishing its religious legitimacy and prestige as the centre of Christianity in the world. One was by building outstandingly beautiful and richly ornamented buildings to the glory of God, which perhaps symbolically surpassed the Temple. The other was by taking holy relics and reinstalling them in Constantinople, thus physically embedding sanctity in the capital city, and then developing the sites with liturgical rites.

Sacred tradition was reinforced through the veneration of relics. Those of St James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, were honoured in both Jerusalem and Constantinople: in Constantinople, from the sixth century in a centralised chapel adjacent to the Church of the Virgin Chalkoprateia; and in Jerusalem, from the twelfth century in a similarly centralised building near the Dome of the Rock, linked with the Presentation and hence with the Virgin.

Henry James asserted that the corruptive influence the ‘visitors’, as he described Quint and Miss Jessel, wield over the children in The Turn of the Screw was intended to inspire ‘a vision of evil’. He shrouded this phrase in ambiguity quite on purpose, believing that this haunting vision would have the greatest impact if it were left solely to the reader to construct within his or her own imagination. The vision haunted Britten and librettist Myfanwy Piper in a somewhat different way in the course of their 1954 adaptation of the story, prompting consideration of what form the evil should take and how it could be presented on stage. With the decision to incorporate James's elusive ghosts into the cast they invested the vision with movement and speech (see J. P. E. Harper-Scott for further discussion of the implications of ‘realising’ the ghosts in Chapter 16). The question of how successfully Piper realised James's conception of the supernatural was one that she would ponder long after the opera's premiere. The ‘vision’, she concluded, would always be subjective and her task was to instil a notion of the danger and tragedy of something that was beyond understanding. Part of the opera's success would rely on acquainting a mid-twentieth-century audience with the allure of the ghost story that flourished in James's time. His readership regarded the supernatural, whether in fiction or in everyday life, as ‘both fearful and terrible and ardently desired; it was a spooky sense that there was more to the world than the everyday, and an intimation that reality might be transfigured by something above and beyond.’ Bly's ghosts had enthralled Britten since his late teens, but his interest in what James termed the ‘vision of evil’ extended further.

Supernatural poetry and prose could also denounce conflict. It contained subject matter that appealed to the composer's own fervent pacifistic convictions. The vision could accentuate the horror of revolution (seen in the setting of Wordsworth's nightmarish vision of massacre in Nocturne, 1958) or meaningless slaughter (described by the ghosts of dead soldiers in Wilfred Owen's poetry in War Requiem, 1962), where both the realism of battle and its inevitable aftermath are evoked.

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962) is widely viewed as one of the twentieth century's commemorative masterpieces, a work that emerged from the long shadow of World War II. Yet Britten's immediate and heartrending response to the horrors of the conflict, only weeks after the cessation of fighting in Europe, is his song cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, op. 35 (1945). Famously, Britten completed the cycle between 2–19 August of that year at Snape. Little known, however, is that on 15 August 1945 – thirteen days after the first song, ‘Oh my blacke Soule!’, was dated, and four days before the extant final song of the cycle, ‘Death, be not proud’ was autographed – a heretofore unheard ‘Epilogue’, a completed and fully notated song of some forty bars, received three final strikes: a pencil line starting in the upper leftmost corner and cutting downward across the autograph manuscript of each of its three pages. A setting of text from Donne's Meditation XVII that contains the iconic lines ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls’, the song was never included in Britten's final score, its plaintive utterance never heard on the concert stage. Neither sent to the publisher nor given a single performance, the pencil draft manuscript sits virtually unseen in the archival vault of the Britten–Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, protected from decay yet essentially silent to the world.

In the wake of the 2013 Britten Centenary year celebrations, uncovering a piece of Britten's music that has never been heard or discussed in the secondary literature is, I might suggest, an infrequent occurrence that we will ever decreasingly experience. Despite its catalogue entry in the Britten– Pears Library, the ‘Epilogue’ has never been discussed in Britten scholarship. The song's existence is merely documented in Stephen Banfield's Sensibility and English Song, Stewart R. Craggs's Benjamin Britten: A Bio-Bibliography, Peter J. Hodgson's Benjamin Britten: A Guide to Research, in the classified list of works in Michael Kennedy's Britten and in the chronology of John Evans, Philip Reed and Paul Wilson's A Britten Source Book. Yet in the first three volumes of Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, where the editors Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke highlight The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and letters from that period, there is no reference to the ‘Epilogue’ whatsoever.

IN SEPTEMBER 1914, one month after the outbreak of hostilities and only days after allied victory in the Battle of the Marne had prevented the central powers from taking Paris, the front page of the nationalist, right-wing periodical Écho de Paris featured the first in a series of five polemical articles by the elderly doyen of French music and academician of the Institut de France. The articles, entitled Germanophilie, were a violent attack on the domination of French artistic life by German music, especially that of Wagner. In the first, the 79-year-old Saint- Saëns lamented the ‘absurd Germanophilia’ that had dominated the French music scene for far too long and with detrimental effects on France's own musical traditions. In instalments published over the following weeks, he set about persuading his readers of the urgent need to prioritise French music over that of the enemy, calling for a ban on performances of Wagner within Parisian theatres and concert halls for the duration of the war.

Saint-Saëns's articles appeared in print shortly after French President Raymond Poincaré made an address to the members of the Institut de France, emphasising the importance of a home-front war effort in the fight against Germany and urging the academicians to use their pens and their words in defence of their country. The wartime press was an important outlet for written or ‘academic’ propaganda, which aimed to rally the nation behind the French soldiers and influence public opinion against the opposition. It was also a forum for intellectuals and academicians eager to convince the masses of the justness of the cause for which they were fighting. As Chapter Two has explored in more detail, the written word was one of the earliest forms of wartime propaganda and one which dominated the activities of many of the private organisations whose activity preceded government rationalisation. It was also largely a pursuit of the elderly, because the younger male population of France had been conscripted.

It is a privilege to be invited to participate in a tribute to Andrew because it is an opportunity to thank him for risking the Crécy Matterhorn with an amateur climber, or as he might prefer, tackling a bustling city with a guide (book) less companion. In the seven years of collaboration on Crécy 1346, years in which he delighted in the treacle of prosopography, and allowed internal deadlines to glide past with impunity, what was constant and indeed marks all his work was, and remains, the sincerity of his devotion to the trade of historian: a trade made noble through scrupulous research and meticulous presentation of evidence. Virtuous though such efforts are, their value is tested by how well they are expressed to his audience. In my opinion, Andrew's writing is of the highest rank, thus combining the skill of the artist with that of the artisan.

As we were writing Crécy 1346, Robert Hardy and Matthew Strickland were simultaneously writing their surely classic: Warbow. In a small bar in France, Hardy turned to me and said, “we're two amateurs working with two of England's finest historians.” At that, I ordered another two glasses and it is a very great pleasure to be able to record that conversation here.

Most of this volume will be dedicated to architectural and political history, in the designs, sculptures and patronage of buildings. In this opening chapter we will give some context to the architectural studies that follow, in a reminder of other forms – some far less grand and costly than the buildings, and far more widespread – in which the Holy Sepulchre and its relics were made pervasively present throughout Europe. We will see the ambiguities that inform these other representations, between the Jerusalems of earth and heaven, of past, present and future, of interior and exterior space.

This is a book of artistic rather than social history. Our focus will be largely (but not exclusively) on high-status buildings and artefacts, on their use, and on the ways in which they are likely to have guided, enriched and enlivened the liturgies and devotions of those who encountered them. How accessible and how often were these buildings and artefacts to people of what classes or education – and how much that ‘public’ mattered to the patrons – are questions underlying every page of the present chapter; and we will occasionally, here and later in the book, have good reason to articulate and address them. But on the page we will for the most part ask what the artefacts seem designed to effect or to make possible in unspecified individuals present ‘on their own’ within, before or in contact with them. At the book’s end, in the Epilogue, we will detach ourselves from these envisioned individuals and re-immerse them in the groups, crowds, processions and services in which priests and laity converged on Jerusalem, the earthbound version of the destination to which the elect were living out their lifelong pilgrimage.

The recovery – at the distance of many miles and centuries – of such sensibilities will never be more than tentative. Buildings, mosaics, reliquaries and oil-flasks do not speak for themselves. During the course of this chapter we will look at a handful of small objects, all linked more or less directly with the Holy Sepulchre and all seemingly designed to engage their users intensely; and we will ask if architectural recollections of the Sepulchre may have presupposed analogous sensibilities and offered analogous rewards.

‘I have defeated you, Solomon.’ Robin Griffith-Jones summarises the context and arguments, well known to scholars, which clarify Justinian’s boast over H. Sophia; and then asks if the kontakion of 562 in praise of the church was drawing a distinction between the Tabernacle and the Temple that has not generally been seen. Cecily Hennessy, Antony Eastmond and Robin Milner-Gulland now take us to Orthodoxy north of the Holy Land; David Phillipson and Emmanuel Fritsch southwards to the Ethiopian Church and Roha/Lālibalā.

Cecily Hennessy explores the sacred topography associated with St James, the Lord’s brother, in Jerusalem and Constantinople. The relics of St James, with those of Simeon and Zacharias, were taken to Constantinople in the sixth century, where the Chalkoprateia church, which housed the Virgin’s girdle, was rebuilt by Justin II (565–78) to include a chapel to James. The lower level of this chapel, with a painting of the murder of Zacharias, was rediscovered in 1953.

The cultural repression of Poland began slowly to thaw after Stalin's death in 1953. Within a year, for instance, Witold Lutosławski was contemplating a commission offering him the chance – his first since the onset of World War II – to compose and then to hear publicly performed experimental music. His response to this opportunity was a work that could scarcely have been further removed from the socialist realist mandate for upbeat folklorism fulfilled by his then most recent major pieces, the neo-classical and tonal Concerto for Orchestra (1950–54) and Dance Preludes (1954). Earlier scholarship on this departure has tended to sideline its idiosyncratic utilization of dodecaphony as a transitional road-not-taken in Lutosławski's development of a modernist voice, albeit while noting the piece to be a particularly wellrealized example of the initial phase of Polish engagement with the postwar musical avant-garde. More recently, Lisa Cooper Vest has identified its function (see previous chapter) as an expedient calling card, at home and abroad, for a musician feted as Poland's next leading composer, thanks in part to its combination of cautious innovation and expressive tendencies looking back to the recent musical past – the core elements of what Steven Stucky identified as the piece's ‘undogmatic and humanistic modernism’.

In another sense, however, the new piece would prove to be foundational Lutosławski. A quadrilateral equation of grief in which signifiers of lament, anger and violence calculate the unknown quantity – suffering – the music set a template for many Lutosławski pieces yet to come. The title of the work, in turn, indicates ways in which Lutosławski's first post-Stalinist composition could be conceived as an experiment in more than just a new compositional language. Its chief symbolic topic, mourning, was an experience with which Lutosławski had become horribly well acquainted by 1954. The music may also mark, as such, a turning point after which Lutosławski's works achieve a more strongly personal quality, the interpretation of which demands judicious analysis of both music and context – a complicated and controversial task for Lutosławski scholarship, as discussed shortly below. First, however: what should this defining piece be called?

In 1954, conductor and Lutosławski supporter Jan Krenz suggested to the composer that he write some music to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Bartók's death on 26 September 1955.