Welsh Journals

CONFLICT AND COEXISTENCE: Nationalism AND DEMOCRACY IN MODERN EUROPE. ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF HARRY HEARDER. Edited by Robert Stradling, Scott Newton and David Bates. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1997. Pp. vi, 228. £ 45.00. When work began on this collection of essays in honour of Harry Hearder, late Professor of Modern History at Cardiff, friends and colleagues intended it as a surprise Festschrift to a scholar who was 'extraordinarily kind, and always encouraging in the teaching environment an inspiration and guide to generations of students'. In the face of Hearder's sharply deteriorating health it was, however, decided to tell him of the project, and its progress pleased him during his last days. It is clear, both from the list of subscribers included at the back of the volume and from David Bates's appreciation of this native of Devon who served in Italy (the country in whose history he specialized) during the Second World War, that he stood well among those who knew him as a supervisor and colleague. Outside academic life his commitment to the Labour party and the United Nations Association testified to his opposition to oppression and tyranny. This collection of eight essays is linked under the theme of 'democracy and nationalism', in reflection of the scholar's interests. Meirion Hughes's rich opening essay argues that the vacillations. of Rossini's reputation from its high point in the 1810s and 1820s is to be understood with reference to German attempts in the first half of the nineteenth century to create a national music and assume the musical leadership of Europe. The shifting significance-and power-given to different subjects by the patriotic project (a general theme of the book) is here illustrated by the pains taken by Beethoven's biographer, Anton Schindler, to deny that the 1822 meeting of Rossini and his 'Romantic Hero' had ever taken place, Wagner's increasingly magnanimous attitude to the Italian composer, and the ceremonial return to his homeland, eighteen years after his death, of the less than fully successful composer von Weber (a critic of Rossini) 'in the sanctification of death'. Even Rossini's body was brought home for ceremonial reburial, in Santa Croce in Florence in 1887. The tone then changes with Nick Carter's piece of careful diplomatic history, an article which adds to Hearder's own work for his 1954 University of London doctorate on Malmesbury's foreign policy. Malmes- bury's inability to understand Italian national aspiration was a common failing among English contemporaries. It was his personal friendship with Louis Napoleon that set him apart, clouding his judgements during his attempts to make peace in 1859.