Within a fortnight of being awarded his conservatoire diploma, Myaskovsky travelled to Moscow to attend rehearsals for the premiere of Silence – the first performance of one of his larger-scale works. Once more, Krïzhanovsky had played a central role in events. Earlier in the year, he had been contacted by Konstantin Saradzhev, an Armenian violinist friendly with Glière since their student days at the Moscow Conservatoire. A pupil of the renowned virtuoso Jan Hřímalý, Saradzhev (1877–1954) graduated with a silver medal in 1898 and continued his training under Otakar Ševčik in Prague, but his interests increasingly turned to conducting. Between 1904 and 1908 he studied in Leipzig under Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922), one of the outstanding maestri of his generation. (Nikisch had strong professional ties to Russia and was a notable advocate of the music of Tchaikovsky.) On returning to Moscow, Saradzhev set out to establish himself as a prominent figure in the city's musical life. He made regular appearances as a soloist and chamber musician and won widespread respect for his efforts as chairman of the Orchestral Players’ Mutual Aid Society to improve musicians’ working conditions. In the same year, he was invited to form an orchestra and present a season of open-air summer concerts in Sokolniki, a district to the north-east of the city boasting an extensive municipal park that was a popular location for leisure outings. Although the venue was far from ideal, Saradzhev was determined to make the most of the opportunity: the concerts received complimentary notices and were well attended. A dapper man of diminutive stature, with a swarthy complexion and a shock of jet-black hair, Saradzhev's dandyish appearance belied a phenomenal capacity for hard work. When the invitation was renewed in 1910, he planned an ambitious series of thirty-one concerts over four months, in which he presented some fifty large-scale works and seventy-five shorter ones. Thirteen of these performances were premieres, reflecting his keen interest in modern music.

In preparation for a further season in 1911, he made a special trip to St Petersburg early in the New Year to consult Krïzhanovsky about works by younger local composers that he could consider programming. Krïzhanovsky introduced him to Myaskovsky, and he was sufficiently impressed by Silence as to give an undertaking to perform it at Sokolniki in May.

Parallels between trees, humans and other animals reinforced Darwin’s progressive Enlightenment belief that improvements in science and medicine would ensure much longer and more comfortable lives virtually free from disease. As a doctor fascinated by similarities between bestial and vegetable bodies, Darwin took a strong interest in tree lifecycles as the most anthropomorphic of plants, inspired by the potential for new remedies and opportunities to apply medical approaches to their study. At the same time, as his pleasure in ‘unchastised nature’ demonstrates, he was also encouraged by – and helped to foster – the new romantic aesthetic of tree representations in art which celebrated individuality and even character and quirkiness, rather than seeing trees merely as undifferentiated ranks in plantations.

Framing other features such as rivers and bold rocky outcrops, trees were often represented within depictions of sublime scenes on increasingly popular tourist itineraries such as the Derwent valley gorge at Matlock, Derbyshire, or the Manifold valley, in the Peak (District). On touring Derbyshire in 1772, William Gilpin (1724–1804) was impressed by the beauty of the dales, particularly the Dove and Derwent valleys, and he described the former as ‘a most romantic and delightful scene, in which the ideas of sublimity and beauty are blended in a high degree’. The striking qualities of Matlock High Tor were enhanced by its silvan decoration and the rich, varied colours and surfaces of the rock. Encouraged by authors such as Gilpin and Uvedale Price, the Picturesque movement celebrated striking and unusual features, including trees of venerable antiquity with gnarled and twisted trunks, which increasingly became objects of fascination in their own right. Artists such as Paul Sandby (1731–1809) and Joseph Wright (1734–1797) made strenuous efforts to move away from stylistic representation and to draw and paint trees in a more naturalistic manner, which shaped Darwin’s depictions of trees in his poetry and natural philosophy. While they removed or moved some trees, landscape gardeners such as Lancelot Brown, William Emes and Humphry Repton brought veteran specimens and old coppice and plantations into their designs and appreciated the differences between tree kinds, positioning outliers and examples seen as special or ‘exotic’ at key points in parks and garden.

As well as supporting agricultural improvement, Darwin believed that there were specific ways in which the sciences could be applied to increase productivity in farming. This belief was founded upon practical observations of midlands agriculture and industry, gardening and horticultural experiments and the reading of major studies on these and related subjects, such as vegetable physiology. Phytologia, Darwin’s study of agriculture and gardening, was divided into three parts which dealt firstly with the physiology of vegetation, secondly with the economy of vegetation and lastly with agriculture and horticulture, while an appendix contained details for an ‘improved construction of the drill plough’ he had made with a new design for a seed-box by Thomas Swanwick (1755–1814). The first part, on vegetable physiology, examined what Darwin referred to as the buds, absorbent and umbilical vessels, pulmonary arteries and veins, aortal arteries and veins, glands and secretions, organs of reproduction and muscles, nerves and brain of vegetables. The language utilised underscored his repeatedly asserted belief in analogies between animal and vegetable bodies, and therefore the relevance of his medical knowledge and experience for the study of agriculture and horticulture. In the introduction Darwin made this relationship explicit, declaring that his book was a ‘supplement’ to Zoonomia (which had itself been partly modelled on the Linnaean system) because it was ‘properly a continuation of the subject’. Some of the material had already appeared in the latter, while the production of Phytologia aided him in preparing the much expanded third edition of Zoonomia (1801).

The second part of Phytologia, on the ‘economy of vegetation’, developed from observations made in The Economy of Vegetation (1791) that hinged upon what Maureen McNeil has called Darwin’s notion of ‘interrelated’ or ‘interlocking’ economies of vegetable, human and natural worlds, which was similar to the emphasis upon the ‘interconnectivity of life systems’ advocated by his friend Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in his experiments on airs. He noted how vegetables replenished air and water and supported animal life; and, like animals, plants were distinctive organic entities with their own laws of motion which needed to be understood holistically in relation to their ‘total operations’ rather than in isolation.

VERSLOOT With reference to the problem of interpreting what can only be scarce evidence, and ideas of the ‘deconstruction’ of historical narratives, the evidence we can put together seems to me largely to be adding details to a traditional scheme that has been around for some time. Has that scheme changed fundamentally, or has it just become more precise? We are still talking about migrations, essentially. I find this quite comforting. Johan (Nicolay) is filling out the concept of migration, but not saying it is not there.

IJSSENNAGGER-VAN DER PLUIJM I agree with that, but there's still more to it. The focus has changed; the perspective is now more anthropological. Some of the papers do try to go beyond the traditional scope. It is not about trying to throw away an old image, or even just filling it out, but a different perspective that enables us to see new things. Many of the papers were about a wider world than Radbod’s.

NIJDAM I would make two points. It is important not to forget that Boeles's idea of a fourth-century break, and the proposition that the same Frisians had not always inhabited the region, was revolutionary and unpopular in the early twentieth century. Around that time, the Frisian Movement also made use of Radbod as a figure; they would not want to see him deconstructed as a Frankish duke. Things changed in the post-World War II period. Jos Bazelmans wrote on this in the De Vrije Fries (2002), being surprised that this question of a long continuity of the Frisians back into the Roman Period is no longer perceived as important to Frisian identity. Moreover, new insights have been gained in recent times. Hans and Gilles's location of Radbod in North-Holland/Texel (de Langen and Mol) poses the question of what his power was over the rest of Frisia. Meanwhile, the reaction to Ian (Wood)'s public lecture does show the continuing desire for information on origins.

IJSSENNAGGER-VAN DER PLUIJM The public may not always be happy with the answer.

HINES We have to respect the desire to ask the question; and responding with respect will mean giving an answer that is as accurate as we can, but not necessarily the answer that is wished for.

My introduction to the music of Delius took place while I was a schoolboy of about fourteen years of age. A copy of Eric Fenby's Delius in the Faber series of ‘The Great Composers’ lay among the books on music in my grammar school library at Buckhurst Hill, though I suspect its presence was due to my most enlightened and gifted music master, John Rippin. Such teachers make a lifetime of difference. After communicating an interest in this unfamiliar composer, I was plied with scores and records of numerous Delius works. I particularly remember being given a ten-inch LP recording of Anthony Collins's interpretation of The Walk to the Paradise Garden and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, recordings which I still hold dear. Before I was sixteen, however, I had come to know the Songs of Sunset (with John Shirley Quirk and the immortal Janet Baker), the Requiem, Paris (a work I have always loved for all its unevenness), the Dance Rhapsodies, A Village Romeo and Juliet, In a Summer Garden and The Song of the High Hills. Through Rippin’s careful tutelage, I read Eric Fenby's Delius As I Knew Him by which I became acquainted with A Song of Summer, Cynara, the Violin Sonata No. 3 and the Songs of Farewell. With John I made the pilgrimage to the grave at Limpsfield and I also had the chance to meet Fenby, just before he was about to fly out to Jacksonville in 1978 to receive an honorary degree and also at the Bracknell Festival where he appeared in the capacity of conductor. My last meeting with Fenby was just before I was about to begin my PhD in 1980. As a sales assistant in the Toys Department of John Lewis in Oxford Street, I encountered him one afternoon when he appeared with a grandson, looking for a small bicycle with stabilisers. After the transaction was completed, I think he was most bemused to confront an unassuming sales assistant interested in Delius, but who also recognised him as the composer's amanuensis! I shall never forget this kind man, and how he expressed such an interest in my own research (at that time, on Parry) on which I was about to embark.

Beginning and ending in two botanic gardens at Lichfield and Kew, as Erasmus Darwin did in The Economy of Vegetation, we will conclude by highlighting some of the main themes that have emerged in our analysis of his approaches to gardening, botany, horticulture, tree cultures and farming, especially as expressed in Phytologia. These include the role of critical personal observations, medical practice and family members, patients and friends in nurturing his ideas and the usage he made of his body as an experimental tool to investigate potential novel foodstuffs. Secondly, we will examine some of the short-term and longer-term impacts that his contributions to these endeavours had, including the stimulus his arguments concerning agriculture and the agency of animals and plants provided to writers and scientists such as his grandson Charles Darwin and the chemist Humphry Davy. Finally, we will take a stroll with Darwin through the royal botanic gardens beside the Thames, encountering George III and Queen Charlotte, exploring some of the international dimensions of his medico-botany and presenting an offering to Hygeia, Greek goddess of health, in her sacred grove.

Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (1791) captured the imagination of late Georgian society partly because of the combination of poetry and illuminating scientific notes. Of these, the long essays on botany attracted much attention. As his grandson Charles Darwin remarked, their author’s success ‘was great and immediate’; his grandfather made much money from the publication and there were various British and foreign editions. Contemporaries such as Horace Walpole hailed Darwin’s ‘most beautifully and enchantingly imagined’ creation, while Richard Lovell Edgeworth claimed that sections ‘seized hold of his imagination’ to such a degree that his ‘blood thrilled back through his veins’. The young poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley were initially excited and inspired, even if they later turned against Darwin’s style, while the older generation of poets, including William Cowper and William Hayley, were equally enthused.

The presentation of gardening, botany and horticulture in the epic poems and Phytologia had a major impact on how these endeavours were portrayed in literature and also helped to make picturesque botanical gardens more fashionable.

The foregoing chapters have focused on critics’ views about the development of composition, setting the opinions expressed about British music in the wider context of the development of music in general. In this chapter the focus shifts to the views and behaviour of concert-givers and audiences, again setting the provision and reception of native music in the wider context of the provision of music in general.

Music in general

The provision of concerts and recitals expanded considerably during the last twenty years of the century. When commentators used the term ‘renaissance’ they were more often referring to the growth in musical activity and in the public estimation of the art than to a rebirth of native composition. For example, in 1890 the Musical Times claimed that in all classes of society music was more highly esteemed than ever before, and that the growth in the scale of provision was evidence of ‘the great musical awakening which has taken place during the past few years’. This growth is well documented in studies of musicians, festivals, provincial concerts, brass bands, choral societies, etc. Even so, among critics there was a strong current of dissatisfaction mixed with the positive strain. Many critics saw the commercial pressure on the provision of music as a hindrance to artistic progress, and the appearance of flourishing concert life in London as deceptive.

Before the institution of the Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts in 1895, commentators had been concerned about the poor support given to orchestral concerts. As Cyril Ehrlich notes, personal patronage of music was very limited and there was no government support: all provision was subject to the open market. Much depended on the attitudes of leading personages; in Britain these ‘ranged from indifference to hostility.’ There were no permanent orchestras, and London’s concert halls were inadequate in size and closed for much of the year.

In central London at this time the main concert season was relatively short, from spring to summer. The Crystal Palace season began in October and, with a winter break, continued into the following year.

On 14 January, Coetmore embarked for her planned concert and recital tour of Australia and New Zealand. She and Moeran had spent a month or so together over Christmas and New Year, partly at Belsize Lane, partly in Devon with members of Coetmore's family and partly in Ledbury. According to a letter Moeran wrote to Percy Grainger dated 3 March, much of December and early January was spent dealing with the acquisition and occupation of lodgings in Cheltenham and selling Coetmore's Belsize Lane flat, with the attendant requirements to relocate its contents to storage or to Moeran's new lodgings. The fact that Coetmore had decided to sell the flat is significant, given that she had let it during her previous extended absence between December 1943 and September 1944. Although not conclusive, her action supports the assertion that she had no intention of returning for some considerable time. Equally significant is the equanimity with which Moeran seems to have accepted the fact of the sale of the flat. He clearly regarded it as a positive move, perhaps in that when Coetmore eventually returned, the two of them would then be able to find a home together that would accommodate each of their working needs. He had never settled into Coetmore's flat, and during the years of their marriage – except for July to December 1947 – he had stayed there only for infrequent short periods.

Songs from County Kerry

By the beginning of February, Coetmore's liner was approaching Port Said in Egypt, and Moeran was settled in his lodgings at Park House West in Cheltenham. He wrote to Herbert Murrill at the BBC, ‘thanks to good doctoring here, my insomnia & other disabilities have been disappearing and I am able to work much harder.’ It seems that Dr Hazlett's treatment regime was proving efficacious. Moeran also mentioned a collection of settings of Songs from County Kerry: the culmination of his folksong collecting trip in Ireland the previous year. However, when the set of songs was published in 1950, Moeran included a Composer's Note:

The importance of the theme of the double in Borges's work has long been recognised. His short piece entitled ‘El doble’ (The Double) within El libro de los Seres Imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings) describes this internationally widespread concept. He starts by referring to mirrors, water, and twins, friendship, and knowing oneself. Then he mentions the German doppelgänger; and the Scottish ‘fetch’, which comes to fetch men to lead them to their deaths. ‘Encontrarse consigo mismo es, por consiguiente, ominoso.’ (To meet yourself is, consequently, ominous.) He refers to various writers, including Stevenson and Poe; he says the Double is the hero's conscience in Poe's story ‘William Wilson’. Many of Borges's fictions have characters whose double is also present. In ‘La muerte y la brújula’ the reasoner and detective Lönnrot is trapped by the criminal he is trying to catch, his own double the Dandy Scharlach. In the story ‘Los teólogos’, Juan de Panonia and his accuser Aureliano are also doubles; these rival theologians in paradise become one person in the eyes of God. In ‘La forma de la espada’, the Irishman called ‘El Inglés’ is actually Moon, the betrayer; the hero becomes the traitor, but they both bear the same scar. He is a reflection of himself, his own double. In ‘Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva’ the two stories reflect each other, and all the main characters are doubles. Borges's grandmother commented on her destiny as an English woman exiled to the end of the earth; and Droctulft, we are told, was not a traitor, but an enlightened convert. All the main characters have been uprooted from their homeland and culture; they are all exiles.

Perhaps Borges's most famous piece about the double is about himself and his own alter ego, ‘Borges y yo’, published in the collection El hacedor. There are two protagonists: ‘Yo’ the private man, the narrator; and ‘Borges’, the public man, the Other. In this description of their daily life, the only literary character mentioned is Stevenson, the author of Jekyll and Hyde, the literary master of the topic of the double. ‘Me gustan los relojes de arena, los mapas, la tipografía del siglo XVIII, las etimologías, el sabor del café y la prosa de Stevenson.’

Bizet's departure for a summer trip coincided with the outbreak of war between Sardinia/Piedmont, supported by France, and the Austrians. Being away from the Villa meant that the walking party of three men and a dog heard little or nothing of the news. They were confident that the war would not reach them and that Frenchmen were not regarded in towns they visited as the enemy.

The Austrians were provoked into declaring war on April 27th, allowing Napoleon III to send a large French army to Italy, half arriving by sea at the port of Genoa and half marching over the Mont St Cenis pass to Turin. The first battle of the war, at Montebello close to the border of Lombardy, took place on May 20th. Ten days later French and Sardinian troops won another victory at Palestro. The theatre of action crossed Lombardy roughly along an easterly line from west of Milan to near Verona as the Austrians were driven back. Napoleon III brought in nearly 200,000 men, while the Sardinian strength was some 70,000. Together they outnumbered the Austrians (with 220,000). One of the principal concerns of Cavour, representing Sardinia/Piedmont, and Napoleon was the fear that Prussia might be drawn in on the Austrian side, so a speedy resolution was needed. After suffering heavy casualties, by July 11th both sides were ready to sign an armistice, although Italy was by no means yet free of hostilities.

In Genoa, Florence and Rome Bizet had sought out churches and museums and recorded, in Genoa at least, the buildings and paintings he saw, but the 1859 trip, like a similar excursion in 1858, was devoted more to the outdoors: walking, bathing and climbing. While Bizet was walking or bathing Didier was sketching the Italian landscape. The third member of the party was Camille-Adrien Pâris (1834–1901), also a landscape painter, probably a friend of Didier’s, but not a Prix de Rome prize-winner. In later years both Didier and Pâris exhibited paintings sketched or begun during these weeks on the road (see Plates II, III, IVa and IVb).

To be able to come to one's own conclusions about the messages of religious texts implies time and opportunity to consider and reflect on them; and preferably access to read and study them. In the late eighteenth century the complex language and theological concepts of Rational Dissenting sermons were often based on individual interpretation of Scriptures in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. This had largely confined their appeal to the educated, although Hugh Worthington, William Tayleur, and Theophilus Lindsey, for example, had been keenly aware of a need for dissemination of theological ideas to the lower classes. In the early nineteenth century this awareness persisted. The London Unitarian Tract Society aimed to reach out to the poor, devoting three tracts specifically for this audience: William's Return or Good News for Cottagers; a second tract by Richard Wright, the travelling missionary; and a third by Catharine Cappe, who was still actively involved in propagating Unitarian ideas. By 1820 the Newcastle Unitarian Tract Society was sending copies of its tracts to Sunderland, Liverpool, Leeds, and London. An article in The Monthly Repository recorded that The Christian Reflector and Theological Inquirer ‘was published in cheap numbers to furnish those who have not access to a variety of books with short expositions of Scripture’. That it was still being issued in 1821 clearly suggests that this need had not yet been met.

Richard Wright, son of a Norfolk labourer, travelled around the country preaching between 1806 and 1819. One of many of his published pamphlets stated his object as being:

Sold at 2d, its price made it accessible to the literate amongst the less skilled. Its length of fourteen pages suggests a serious attempt at simplifying a complex theological message, although it still required the reader to cross-reference the Scriptures. Wright's own preaching style was recorded by Robert Brook Aspland as ‘simple’, but, although he travelled extensively, ‘his great obstacle was the ignorance of the masses of the people’.

Moeran was on the cusp of greatness. He was an established composer, with the patronage of Hamilton Harty: one of the great musical personalities of the time. Numerous performances of his works were programmed for the first few months of 1925, and new music was flooding from his creative imagination. Plans were in train for a series of recitals at the Wigmore Hall featuring his chamber music and that of his friends and contemporaries. Moeran's rise to prominence during the previous two years had indeed been meteoric, and his was the name in town. The musical world lay at the feet of the thirty-year-old composer. On 2 January, he paid the one and a half guineas Country subscription for the musical club, again providing his parents’ house in Laverton as his home address. However, he continued to reside mostly in London, although towards the end of the previous year he had chosen not to renew his lease on John Ireland's former flat in Elm Park Mansions and had taken rooms at 162 Haverstock Hill, NW3, in Belsize Park. Meanwhile, Philip Heseltine had decided to move out of the city, and in mid-January he took a sub-lease on a cottage in Eynsford in Kent that was rented by pianist, composer and music publisher Hubert Foss from the local grocer Stanley Munn, whose shop was next door. Foss had lived in this cottage with his wife for some years, but their separation had caused him to seek other accommodation. During the years of the Foss residence, their home had been the centre of musical gatherings, where composers in whom he took an interest were invited to talk about and play their works. In leasing the cottage, Heseltine's intention was not only to continue Foss’s tradition but also to establish a creative commune where ‘open house’ was kept, and writers, painters, sculptors and other artistic members of 1920s London society, together with composers and musicians, were welcome to visit and remain as long as they liked. Regular visitors included Constant Lambert, Arnold Bax, Cecil Gray, Augustus John, Patrick Hadley, William Walton, Bernard van Dieren, Jack Lindsay, Nina Hamnett, John Goss and, for the first few months of Heseltine's tenancy, Moeran himself. However, this initially well-intentioned objective was rapidly overwhelmed by the increasingly hedonistic lifestyle indulged in by the cottage inhabitants both long- and short-term.