Schumann as Manfred
The most prominent composers in Germany during the 1850s-Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Schumann-all liked to be compared to Byron.1 Berlioz thought he bore a physical resemblance to the poet and, in his youth, sought connections between their lives: he searched out Byron's acquaintances while traveling in Italy, read the "burning verse" in a confessional in St. Peter's, and threatened suicide in melodramatic manner after being rejected by Camille Moke. Both his overture Le corsair and Harold en Italie celebrate the Byronic wanderer, as do the first two books of Liszt's Annees de pelerinage, written in Switzerland and Italy in the company of Marie d'Agoult.2 Liszt's Byronic habit of persuading married women to forsake their husbands was shared by Wagner, whose Dutchman exemplifies the wanderer's threat to female virtue.3 Byron was appealing because he was a man of action as well as words, demonstrated not only by his notorious exploits as a lover, but also through his engagement with politics, consummated in what many frame as his "sacrifice" for the Greek cause at Missolonghi.4 Schumann's similarity to Byron, however, manifested itself in a quite different manner. While Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were compared to the poet's own best hero-himself-Schumann's contemporaries aligned him with one of his fictional characters, Manfred. The comparison was significant, not least because presenting Schumann as Manfred served several purposes. It was a veiled means of discussing the composer's character and his failing health, of placing him within a particular historical context, and ultimately of questioning whether he belonged with the musicians "of the future" or with those of an earlier romantic generation. On a more general level, the comparison between Schumann and Manfred is an early example of the assimilation of the composer into the world of fiction-a tendency still very much apparent from his (and his wife Clara's) frequent appearances in films and novels today.
"The Voice Which Was My Music": Narrative and Nonnarrative Musical Discourse in Schumann's "Manfred"
Of all late-eighteenth-century musical genres, melodrama-with its coupling of declaimed speech and musical accompaniment-is surely the strangest.' Whereas song conveys poetry through music (and music through poetry), melodrama permits the spoken word a rhythm nd inflection not exclusively musical, while allowing music an autonomous nonverbal presence hat sometimes supports and sometimes competes with the words it accompanies. The experimental genre generated its fair share of controversy in nineteenth-century Germany, primarily because the relation between music This article is a revised version of a chapter f o my Narratives of "Incidental" Music in German Romantic Theater (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998). Portions of this work were presented previously at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory in 1997 in Phoenix, Arizona, and the conference Feminist Theory and Music 4 in 1997 in Charlottesville, Virginia. I wish to thank Brian Hyer, Leslie David Blasius, Susan C. Cook, Stephen Dembski, and John Wm. Schaffer for their valuable comments and encouragement.
Microwave source with enhanced radiation power based on orbitron MASERs
We have proposed the design of high power microwave source in a vacuum tube based on the theory of negative mass instability. The proposed source does not operate based on a slow-wave structure but instead makes use of accelerated charged particles. In our structure, an electron emitter injects the charged particles into to the cavity. Emitted particles move around the anode, which leads to electron acceleration and emission of electromagnetic waves with a specific frequency. In this paper, we have enhanced the output power and frequency of microwave source by variation of particles initial energy and the number of anodes incorporating their specific arrangement and applied voltages. Working at room temperature, compactness, wide bandwidth, and tunability of output frequency are among the advantages of the proposed source.