• Home
  • About
  • Reading Lists
    • Egypt
    • Great Books
    • Iran
    • Islam
    • Israel
    • Liberalism
    • Napoleon
    • Nationalism
    • The Nuclear Age
    • Science
    • Russia
    • Turkey
  • Digital Footprint
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pocket
    • SoundCloud
    • Twitter
    • Tumblr
    • YouTube
  • Contact
    • Email

Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Ludwig van Beethoven

The Daughter of Elysium

01 Sun May 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Society

≈ Comments Off on The Daughter of Elysium

Tags

An die Freude, Berlin Freedom Concert, brotherhood, Die Weihe des Hauses, El Himno de la Alegria, Friedrich Schiller, Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee, Leonard Bernstein, Ludwig van Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy, Opus 125, Rhodesia, sprezzatura, Symphony in D Minor, Theater am Kärntnertor, Tiananmen Square, Vienna, Wilhelm Furtwängler

Salve, amici! The fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony must be one of the most recognisable pieces in the repertoire of Western classical music. Set to the words of Friedrich Schiller’s An die Freude, the piece has become a secular benediction at public occasions and has been appropriated by all points on the political spectrum. Most famously, it was used by composer Leonard Bernstein to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall in his historic Christmas day Berlin Freedom Concert in 1989. In 1972, the Ode to Joy was adopted as the European anthem, and the music was set to different words as the national anthem of Rhodesia from 1974 to 1979. During the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chilean dissidents sang the anthem of protest and Chinese students played the movement over loudspeakers in Tiananmen Square in 1989; earlier in the 20th century, Protestants borrowed it for their hymn, Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, Marxists saw class struggle in it while the Nazis saw it as an expression of superior Germanic artistic genius. The Ninth has even penetrated popular culture, popular at the Olympics, football tournaments, on television, in video games, inspiring flash mobs, and seeing success even as a Spanish pop song, El Himno de la Alegria, in 1970.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Manuscript is sold for ?1.9 Million GBPThere have been dozens of interpretations of Beethoven’s last symphony, from its first performance on May 07, 1824, in Vienna, down to the present day. Hector Berlioz, the famous French composer, was intoxicated by Beethoven’s music and Claude Debussy, another French composer, called the masterpiece a “magnificent gesture of musical pride.” Richard Wagner wrote that “beyond this symphony there can be no progress, for there can follow from it immediately only the completed artwork of the future, the universal drama” – we are meant to understand that Wagner alone could produce such work. Richard Taruskin, American musicologist, called the fourth movement a “mounting wave – or better, a spreading infection – of Elysian delirium.” Maynard Solomon, a Beethoven biographer, heard a secular deity who transcended particlarisations of religious creed, “a fusion of Christian and Pagan beliefs, a marriage of Faust and Helen.” Not all interpretations were so flattering: Susan McClary, a musicologist at Case Western Reserve University, denounced the first movement as an example of horrifyingly violent masculine rage” and Dutch conductor Gustav Leonhardt called the Ode to Joy a puerile vulgarity.

There can be no definitive interpretation, of course. Wilhelm Furtwängler, widely considered to be one of the best conductors of the symphony, once said that trying to nail down Beethoven’s ideas any more precisely than that is like pinning a butterfly to an entomologist’s wall. “How one viewed the Ninth,” Jan Swafford, a biographer of the German genius, wrote perceptively, “depended on what kind of Elysium one had in mind” – hence the appropriation by humanists, Marxists, Nazis, and liberals alike.

Like many of Beethoven’s works, the Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125, as it is technically called, pushed the boundaries of music. It was the longest symphony ever composed until then and the first to use voices, hence the occasional reference to it as the Choral Symphony. Despite its composition in a minor scale, generally associated with melancholy, the Ode to Joy is filled with gaiety, striving, and power. Beethoven also became the first major composer in history to use the metronome – a mechanical device used by musicians to keep time as they play.

BeethovenWhat we hear when we listen to the Ninth today is not what the audience heard in the early 19th century or even how Beethoven wrote the symphony. Conductors take their artistic license with any piece, it is true, but there has been some controversy over the maestro’s time markings. Were one to strictly follow Beethoven’s instructions, the symphony would have a much greater tempo and lose some of its clarity and mystical profundity. Some historians have suggested that the composer’s metronome was broken, others have argued that given the smaller, less resonant halls of the time, the nature of orchestras and musical instruments, and playing style, the greater speed could have been accommodated. However, orchestras were not a professional affair in Beethovenian times and the faster beat would have made the piece much harder for the musicians as well as the vocalists. According to a contemporary source, the symphony took 65 minutes to perform in its entirety. Today, a complete performance of the Ninth ranges from a brisk 64 minutes (Arturo Toscanini, 1952) to a leisurely 79 minutes (Karl Böhm, 1981).

It is easy today to think of post-Napoleonic Vienna as the hotbed of cultural innovation, a paradise for aesthetes and elitists with sophisticated tastes. In truth, the Austrian capital was far from it. Frustrated by the conservative and popular – Italian – tastes of his fellow burgher, Beethoven wanted to release his grand creation in Berlin, one of Europe’s two great cultural capitals. It was only with the intervention of Vienna’s most prominent citizens that the German genius was persuaded to give his masterpiece to the Austrian capital, his second home since his mother had died in 1787. Dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, Beethoven presented his Ninth Symphony at the Theater am Kärntnertor barely six weeks after it had been written.

Kärntnertor TheatreIncredibly, it had been rehearsed completely only twice, that too by a group of largely amateur musicians.Given the challenging technical demands even for modern professional orchestras, one wonders what monstrosity amateurs might have played that May evening. Beethoven was his charming self, snapping at a soprano soloist who complained that a note was not possible, to “just learn it, the note will come.” Worse, there had been no time to have the score neatly printed – it had to be hurriedly copied by hand for the entire orchestra and Beethoven was not known for having neat and crisp original sheets for the copiers to duplicate. In the short time between the completion of the symphony in late March and its performance in early May, Beethoven also had to wrestle with the local authorities to allow him to perform at the Kärntnertor. The programme for the opening night involved not just the his new symphony but also the overture of his Die Weihe des Hauses and, more notably, sections of the religious Missa Solemnis. In those days, Austria had a law that forbade the performance of religious music at secular venues. It was only after one of Beethoven’s benefactors leaned on the chief of police that permission was granted.

Despite the lack of preparation and the chaos before the opening, Beethoven received a standing ovation from the crowds. One reviewer wrote that Beethoven had outdone everything that had been thought possible until then; another recognised the impossible demands the maestro had made on his vocalists and commented that the “singers did what they could.” A more effulgent critic declared that Beethoven, “a son of the gods,” had “brought brought the holy life-giving flame directly from heaven.” Yet not all were pleased – some commented that the symphony was too long and difficult to follow, calling the beginning of the famous fourth movement a horrible noise. Wagner would later describe it as Schreckenfanfare. Music lovers today would be astounded to learn that ultimately, Beethoven’s great Opus 125 was not an economic success in its day.

OrchestraWhat went into the Ninth? The year was 1824: Europe had just defeated Napoleon Bonaparte after nearly two decades of warfare that left five million dead. The brief whiff of liberalism was brutally stomped out at the Congress of Vienna as the people of Spain, Poland, Italy, and Greece found out by the time the Ninth opened. Nonetheless, the winds of liberalism and nationalism had started to blow in the continent and the world – more and more people were beginning to demand greater political and intellectual freedom. It was also the Romantic era, and poets like Giacomo Leopardi, ETA Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, George Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley had begun to do with words what Beethoven would transcend with music. There is no reason to suppose that Beethoven was apolitical: in fact, his scratching out the dedication of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, indicates that the composer was indeed politically aware and very much a liberal. Beethoven was by no means a modern democrat – in the liberalism of the early 19th century, he probably subscribed to the Platonic idea of philosopher kings. Yet the German composer had to pay lip service to the European nobility upon whose patronage he depended and for whom the French Revolution was too recent to tolerate overt proclamations of universal brotherhood.

Although Beethoven used no words, he had always held that music was a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. The call to universal brotherhood, certainly not new, was phrased as a secular hymn with all the pagan imagery one might expect in a classical bacchanalia or of the Romantics. Beethoven’s music sought to bring people together, as music lovers, as liberals, as thinkers, and as humans; ironically, the maestro’s music achieved what he himself rarely could in life.

Until next time, stammi bene.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony in D Minor, Opus 125:

 

This article first appeared in the May 2016 print edition of Swarajya as part of the column, Sprezzatura.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

An Emperor and his Symphony

18 Thu Jun 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Europe, France

≈ Comments Off on An Emperor and his Symphony

Tags

Allegro con brio, Anton Schindler, Döbling, Emanuel Schikaneder, Eroica, Ferdinand Ries, Finale: Allegro molto, Heiligenstadt, Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz, Ludwig van Beethoven, Marcia funebre: Adagio assai, Napoleon Bonaparte, Scherzo: Allegro vivace, Sinfonía Napoleónica, Sinfonia Eroica, Symphony No. 3

The most famous notes in musical history are perhaps the two E-flats that powerfully punctuate the beginning of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sinfonia Napoleonica, or the Eroica, as it is now known. Two hundred years ago today, the French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, were defeated near the small Belgian town of Waterloo by the combined forces of Britain and Prussia in the “damn nearest-run thing” of battles. With this defeat ended the Age of Napoleon, 16 years of war and reform. The powers of Europe, arrayed against France as the Seventh Coalition, heaved a sigh of relief – the Corsican tyrant would trouble them no more.

Jean-Antoine Gros - NapoleonIndisputably one of the greatest military generals in history, Napoleon has had more books written about him than any other world historical figure except Jesus. His personality evoked powerful emotions then as his memory does even today, a hero for many and a warmonger for others. Beethoven saw Napoleon as the embodiment of the Enlightenment and almost dedicated a symphony to him, changing his mind at the last moment after Napoleon crowned himself emperor in December 1804. Dedicated to the heroic endeavour instead, the Eroica would come to be considered as the most pivotal symphonic composition in Western music and a high point in the German musical maestro’s own career. In many ways a metonym for the Napoleonic era, the symphony’s interpretation has rarely been agreed upon and the bitter debates between musicians, historians, and other academicians are themselves worth a quick dekko. Later in life, Beethoven declared the Third Symphony as his best work and by far his personal favourite among his creations.

The Eroica is a grand composition that captures the personality Napoleon and Beethoven’s narrative ambitions very well. Just as its original subject changed the face of Europe, the Eroica changed our idea of what a symphony was. Bold and iconoclastic, Beethoven’s music violated almost every musical convention considered in good taste until then and marked, again like its intended subject, the beginning of a new period. Eroica has four movements, the Allegro con brio, the Marcia funebre: Adagio assai, the Scherzo: Allegro vivace, and the Finale: Allegro molto. As the Italian suggests, the first movement is fast with spirit and vigour, the second is slow and stately, the third is playful and picks up tempo again, and the symphony ends with a fast and cheerful movement. The energy of the Eroica is immediately apparent – three of the four movements are allegro, indicating a fast and stormy tempo that are cheerful, frisky, brisk, and spirited.

Why Beethoven wrote such a composition is itself a mystery. The maestro began jotting down notes for what would become his magnum opus some time in 1802 when he was recovering from depression in Heiligenstadt. Beethoven had even contemplated suicide at a point and written a will, which was found on his person upon his death. In it, he explains why he had thought of suicide but the love for his art eventually prevented him from taking the extreme measure. By October, he was feeling better and returned to Vienna and took up in a theatre to work on his opera while Emanuel Schikaneder produced a libretto for him as he had done for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. When spring came and Schikaneder failed to deliver, Beethoven moved to a small village near Wienerwald called Döbling on the Danube Canal. Here, he would compose his famous work through the spring and summer of 1803.

According to Anton Schindler, personal secretary and friend to Beethoven, the idea of dedicating a symphony to the French leader – Napoleon was First Consul then – came from Marshal Jean Bernadotte. As ambassador to the Austrian court, he frequently held salons that were frequented by the elite and distinguished of Vienna among whom Beethoven was one. In one of these salons, Bernadotte allegedly suggested that Beethoven compose the greatest symphony in honour of the greatest leader of the world. It is a nice tale but there are grievous doubts of its veracity for the simple fact that Bernadotte had been asked to leave Vienna within a few months of his arrival in 1798, a full five years before Beethoven even began work on the Eroica.

The Allegro con brio is the longest opening movement of any symphony written to date and dispenses with violins to carry the melody in favour of cellos. It can be interpreted to symbolise Napoleon’s highly successful early career, lasting until the invasion of Spain in 1806 for some and until the Russian misadventure in 1812 for others. This movement would, then, tell the stories of Auerstadt and Austerlitz, Friedland and Marengo, Rivoli and Wagram, and of Toulon and Vendémiaire. Over most of his career, it seemed that the Little Corporal could do no wrong – in the 63 engagements that spanned his career, Napoleon lost only seven.

Baron François Gérard - Napoleon at Austerlitz While it breaks with tradition is some ways, the allegro con brio is also influenced by that which came before it. For example, the similarity between the opening intervals of Beethoven’s Eroica and Mozart’s operetta Bastien et Bastienne are hard to miss. Yet the dissonant shifts Beethoven uses and Mozart avoids are also quite evident. The standard interpretation of these gritty shifts, particularly the horns that appear to come in early, is that they represent the tension and struggle in Napoleon’s early life. Bonaparte hailed from minor Italian nobility and never mastered the French language; his father had supported the Corsican revolutionaries against the French takeover of the island in 1765 and was out of favour after their defeat. Napoleon was given the opportunity to attend school first at École de Brienne and later at the École Militaire through French acquaintances of his mother, and ironically, on a royal scholarship. Although Napoleon’s star had been on the rise since his lifting of the siege of Toulon in 1793, it was not until 1796 and the Italian campaign that it had truly ascended. We see this development of the bold and ambitious yet still unassuming subject in the beginning characterised by fortissimo as the movement progresses.

Perhaps the most powerful musical play comes in the recapitulation section of the sonata – traditional sonata have three basic subdivisions, exposition, development, and recapitulation, though they may have an introduction or coda present too. Oftentimes, the recapitulation is a verbatim reproduction of the exposition and even Beethoven follows this rule in his first two symphonies. In the Eroica, however, subtle variations remove the earlier anxiety, aggression, and destruction to replace them with an assuredness and stability – the heroic, if you will. These bars could be interpreted to represent the string of successes Napoleon had in Italy, Egypt, back in France, and finally Europe. Napoleon was more established and secure now and he spent much time trying to rule and bring about reforms in addition to winning dashing victories.

Another theory behind why Beethoven might have dedicated a symphony to Napoleon is that the great German composer was considering a move to Paris. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Paris was the jewel of Western civilisation, unequalled in art, literature, music, fashion, cuisine, and splendour. It was only normal that someone of Beethoven’s talent would be drawn to such a bright constellation of talented artists. However, Napoleon’s self-coronation dampened Beethoven’s enthusiasm for the French emperor and he decided to remain in Vienna. This obviated the need of any grand gesture on his part towards the emperor for entry into the Paris elite. Furthermore, the outbreak of war between France and the Third Coalition, of which Austria was a part, in 1805 made the political climate inconducive to dedicating anything to Napoleon.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Willibrord MählerStill, this does not explain why Beethoven thought highly of Napoleon at all and some historians contend that it was at best an ambivalent relationship. This seems unlikely for several reasons. First, Beethoven’s use of “Luigi” on the coversheet of his symphony indicates a certain warmth and affection for the ruler of the French who was of Italian blood and could not speak French properly and even then with a strong Corsican accent. Napoleon’s parents were both minor Italian nobility, his father of Milanese ancestry and his mother from Florence. Second, Beethoven was heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy as a teenager and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Universal Human Rights seemed the fruition of that philosophy. Napoleon was the apotheosis of the French Revolution, bringing the Enlightenment to France and to Europe at the tip of a bayonet in line with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Third, Beethoven was personally struck by the Revolutionary promise of equality. He had fallen in love with Josephine Brunsvik, the younger daughter of the Hungarian Countess Anna Brunsvik, in the process of teaching her and her sister piano. Despite Beethoven’s acclaim, European society was not ready to accept the marriage of a noblewoman with a commoner and Josephine was married off to another nobleman, Josef Deym. Upon his sudden death in 1804, Beethoven approached Josephine once more and was rebuffed yet again.

The second movement is a drastic change from the first: sombre and restrained, it leaves the carefree and spontaneous air of the first movement behind. Close your eyes, and with the sedate tone of the funeral march, it is almost difficult not to visualise a rag-tag and humbled army marching back from the snowy depths of Russia. A funeral march in the middle of a symphony, though not unique, was certainly rare and raised a few eyebrows among the audience. This movement announces the death of the heroism of the previous movement, or at least its irredeemable and tragic costs. The march opens with a mournful oboe solo, which is then carried out by other sections. Beethoven has the string instruments replicate the drumbeats of a regular funeral march and thereby completely changed the texture of the piece. The string instruments playing sotto voce and the oboe together create a more emotional and personal expression of grief, as if to tell the listener that something dear to him, too, has been lost.

Some historians have suggested that the writing of his movement corresponds closest with Beethoven’s days in Heiligenstadt, reflecting these dark days and moods in the life of the composer as much as the fall of Napoleon, at least in Beethoven’s eyes. It is coincidental – inevitable? – that the Emperor’s trajectory eventually matched Beethoven’s music – his Spanish ulcer, the defeat of his Grand Armée in Russia and then in Leipzig, his exile to Elba, his return and eventual defeat at Waterloo, and his demise at St. Helena in May 1821. The timing of the composition and its correspondence with Napoleon’s career seems to imply that Beethoven had already written the movement even before Napoleon became emperor. This might explain why the funeral march does not sound disappointed, betrayed, or angry but sedate and stately. For Beethoven, his much admired Napoleon was still only a pawn in the grand narrative of History who could only show the way that others would have to tread for themselves.

Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon - Eylau, 1807After Beethoven’s disappointment with Napoleon in 1804, he decided to dedicate the symphony to his patron, Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz. At the first playing, a small, private gathering, the orchestra was as shocked as the audience with the tempo, intensity, and the several other peculiarities of the composition. Beethoven had to reassure them, telling them that they are fine musicians trained to produce beautiful sounds but that is not what he wanted for the Eroica. Beethoven wanted intensity and urgency, struggle, emotion, and harshness. The performances at the Lobkowicz manor allowed the maestro to make several changes and try out other bold ideas before the symphony was opened to the public. These trials did not always go well and often left the musicians and audiences quite confused. During the first performance, for example, Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s student, interrupted the playing to scold the horn player because it appeared that he had counted wrong and come in too early. Beethoven nearly boxed his ears and did not speak to him for a while after that!

The third and fourth movements are again upbeat and leaves the listeners wondering what is left to celebrate if the great Napoleon is dead. We must remember that the Eroica was first performed for a public audience in April 1805 and our interpretation of the second movement as the fall of Napoleon is post facto. Contemporarily, the funeral march represented only the death of an idea and so the joyous third movement was to announce the optimisitic message that ideas cannot be slain. This bears a parallel to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in that many of the laws that the French emperor had enacted were retained by his former subjects, particularly in the smaller German states. The idea of liberty lived on, as did the notion of human rights and the struggle to preserve those could be fought individually as well as institutionally. We were all subjects of Beethoven’s Eroica, we were all heroes. Hardly revolutionary to 21st century ears, but the Eroica‘s artist-as-hero militated against the artist-as-craftsman order of 19th century Europe.

The symphony was heard by the public for the first time in April 1805. The public reaction was as confused and mixed as that of the little private audiences at the Lobkowicz manor before whom Beethoven had perfected the symphony. Franz Joseph Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, was far more tolerant of the breaks with classical musical theory but thought the Eroica was too long, too bombastic, and would never become popular. Yet both teacher and student had a history of making acerbic comments about each other’s work and it is difficult to know how seriously to take Haydn’s comments. There is no doubt that Beethoven respected his teacher and Haydn saw great promise in his student despite their barbs at each other.

At Waterloo, the French experiment was stopped or at least delayed for a few years. Yet had Napoleon not been defeated at Waterloo, there would have been another coalition and another battle until he was removed from Europe’s political stage. It is impossible to constantly fight every Great Power in the world singlehandedly for over two decades and come out the victor. At the time when the pace of a horse was the fastest a man cold travel, Napoleon constantly surprised his opponents with his speed and impeccable use of artillery and deception. Europe’s monarchs and generals watched and learned, paying the price in blood and obliterated egos. That fateful day in Belgium, Napoleon faced his enemies with inadequately trained soldiers, weak internal lines of communications, a severe shortage of cavalry, poor positioning, and bad weather – and came within a whisker of carrying the day.

France, 1812To his critics, he will always be the Ogre of Corsica, the warmonger. Yet Napoleon Bonaparte waged peace as well as he waged war. He gave France the Louvre, the civil code that informally bore his name – the Code Napoléon – and instituted a meritocracy in France that saw talent rise from unexpected sections of society. Most of Napoleon’s generals came from humble backgrounds as did many of the civil servants, parliamentarians, and new intellectuals. Discriminatory trade guilds were abolished and equal rights of Jews was recognised. He brought reforms even in the lands he conquered, many of which lived long after he was gone. Napoleon was an excellent civil administrator too. He would surround himself with intelligent people and see their better ideas to fruition. He would himself constantly create drawings of streets, buildings, and neighbourhoods and send them to his engineers for consideration. A man of boundless energy, it is rumoured that the Emperor slept barely four hours a day. He was intensely curious too, and took along with him an enormous scientific team to Egypt in 1798. The results of the research done by the French on that trip alone put French scholarship a the forefront of Egyptology for decades.

The Eroica aptly describes Napoleon – bold, striving, curious, intelligent, and with a sense of urgency around him. It is of little wonder that a whole era is named after the French emperor, an honour of History that not even the mightiest of Roman princeps received. Like Napoleon, the Eroica lives on in admiration long after its creation. Beethoven would have been happy – as he always said, art must look to eternity.

*        *        *        *        *        *        *

Napoleon in media:

Film and TV – Napoléon (2002). A mini-series by A&E consisting of four episodes, each approximately 90 minutes in length.

– Austerlitz (1960). This is an approximately 150-minute long French film that covers Napoleon’s greatest victory – Austerlitz in December 1805, against the Austrians and the Russians. The first half focuses on Napoleon’s coronation and his reasons for becoming a monarch after the Revolution had just overthrown one noble house. The second half covers the preparations for war and battle itself. This is not a movie for those not well-versed in Napoleonic history already or those who do not understand French!

– Waterloo (1970). As the name suggests, this movie is about Napoleon’s final days as emperor and last three battles. On June 16, French forces engaged with the Prussians and English at Ligny and Quatre Bras, defeating them both. Two days later, the forces meet at a small Belgian town called Waterloo.

– Eroica (2003). This is a movie that focuses solely on Beethoven’s first private performance of the Napoleonica at the Lobkowicz manor about an hour and a half from Vienna.

– Immortal Beloved (1994). An excellent movie about the life of Ludwig van Beethoven, though some of the history is disputed.

Podcast – The Napoleon Bonaparte Podcast. A 59-episode, 60-hour podcast with J. David Markham, an amateur historian and president of the International Napoleon Society, and Cameron Reilly, founder of The Podcast Network and a Napoleon Bonaparte enthusiast.

Books – Napoleon Bonaparte. An essential reading list for those further interested in the Emperor and his times.


This post first appeared on Swarajya on June 18, 2015.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Chirps

  • Iran resumes uranium enrichment up to 20% at Fordow: bbc.in/38akZug | Yeah, how has that walking out of th… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
  • Along the LoAC, India is clumsier in 2020 than it was in 1962: bit.ly/3o8z29g | Or at least, a sparrow wou… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
  • נובי גוד שמח קמראדים 🙂 youtube.com/watch?v=W_6Vs8… 2 weeks ago
  • US authorises sanctions in case of Chinese interference in selection of next Dalai Lama: bit.ly/37T5lTR |… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 weeks ago
  • Israel and UAE work together to terminate UNRWA: bit.ly/3hmx5U2 | One small step for Bibi and the Zayeds,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 weeks ago
Follow @orsoraggiante

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 213 other followers

Follow through RSS

  • RSS - Posts

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • The Mysterious Case of India’s Jews
  • Polarised Electorates
  • The Election Season
  • Does Narendra Modi Have A Foreign Policy?
  • India and the Bomb
  • Nationalism Restored
  • Jews and Israel, Nation and State
  • The Asian in Europe
  • Modern Political Shibboleths
  • The Death of Civilisation
  • Hope on the Korean Peninsula
  • Diminishing the Heathens
  • The Writing on the Minority Wall
  • Mischief in Gaza
  • Politics of Spite
  • Thoughts on Nationalism
  • Never Again (As Long As It Is Convenient)
  • Earning the Dragon’s Respect
  • Creating an Indian Lake
  • Does India Have An Israel Policy?
  • Reclaiming David’s Kingdom
  • Not a Mahatma, Just Mohandas
  • How To Read
  • India’s Jerusalem Misstep
  • A Rebirth of American Power

Management

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com
Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: