This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

Through pinpointing how Churchill’s perceptions of aerial bombardment evolved across his political career, this chapter highlights the ambivalence and incongruence that dogged his bombing policy from its earliest days: ultimately arguing that his vacillating approach towards the Allied bombing campaign – and his eventual calculated detachment from it – was not out of character. The chapter begins by establishing his preliminary beliefs about aerial bombardment; next, it traces how his bombing theory converted into destructive reality, from ‘aerially policing’ the British Empire in the 1920s to the Combined Bomber Offensive; finally, it examines how Churchill attempted to reconcile his incriminating role in the German firestorms with a war-scarred Britain after 1945.

Clara and Robert Schumann moved to Dresden in 1844, and resided there until 1850. Little is known about their social life in Dresden, although Schumann scholars have refuted both the notion of Dresden as a culturally underdeveloped town and the perception that Clara and Robert lacked artistic innovation during their residency there. Indeed, they initiated and participated in a number of spontaneous private visits, meals, soirées, organized musical circles, matinees and trios in their own or friends’ homes; walks and outings in the countryside; sociable visits to restaurants and coffee houses; and public events. All these served the shared purpose, albeit in different forms, of communication about and through music. By illuminating facets of the Schumanns’ private and semi-public life in Dresden from the perspective of interpersonal communication, this chapter offers insights into how Clara and Robert Schumann communicated with their contemporaries through physical meetings, letters, visual components (such as drawings and lines of poetry) in album leaves, and musical material, together with a discussion of how these communications influenced their artistic outlook. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on the blurred boundaries between private, semi-private and public domains, especially as these levels of communication were merged in the Schumanns’ lives.