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Musical London will scarcely have recovered from its state of bewilderment over Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben before the second performance. The first impression is that Strauss's artistic position is not altered by this work. His great strength is his mastery over tones; he has chosen most happily when he calls his work a “Tone-Poem.” Whatever one may think of Ein Heldenleben as music, one must admit the newness, the power, and the extreme beauty of the sounds that proceed from the Straussian orchestra. Strauss's weakness lies in the fact that he is so often content with commonplaces as the germs of his inspiration. He is like a cook who can serve up mutton with such art that he does not always take the trouble to look out for venison. The work is divided into six sections; each, according to the Queen's Hall programme, duly labeled “The Hero,” “His Enemies,” and so on.

This traces the primary sources of information about a real pirate, John Gow, who became the basis for a work attributed to Defoe, An Account of the Conduct and Proceedings of the Late John Gow (1725), as well as providing the starting point a century later for Scott's The Pirate (1821), in which the thrills enjoyed by eighteenth-century readers at pseudo-factual accounts of rogues and robbers (such as pirates) are superseded by the excitements of the Romantic hero of the nineteenth century, well born but troubled, anomic, a hero like Byron's in The Corsair, a hero ambiguously good and evil but repeatedly imitated, becoming banal, hardly bad at all.

The chapter examines two 1980s children’s television series – Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All (hereafter Odysseus) and Ulysses 31 – which reworked the myths of the Greek hero Odysseus which derive from Homer’s Odyssey, an epic poem. The discussion demonstrates how each programme was shaped by contemporary culture, particularly film, television and animation. In particular, they combined: innovative storytelling techniques (e.g. Odysseus was a Jackanory-style story to camera, written and performed by Tony Robinson with Richard Curtis as co-writer) with creative use of the mode of television and televisual animation (e.g. Ulysses 31 was created by key names in animation and anime: Jean Chalopin, Bernard Deyriès, Nagahama Tadao) and detailed knowledge of The Odyssey and wider Greek myth. The series provide contrasting localised (British) and international (Franco-Japanese) production contexts, but in the UK both programmes were first broadcast in 1985-1986 via the newly created children’s programming format, Children’s BBC, known affectionately as the ‘Broom Cupboard’, in which a studio-presenter addressed child-audiences directly. Odysseus and Ulysses 31 therefore offered sustained engagements with the myths of Odysseus for UK-based children in this decade.

As Brünnhilde’s articulations shifted from expressing defiance of Wotan, she then spoke of how she has “always loved” Siegfried. The judgment served as a falsification of what she was feeling and what she was up to in Walküre. In this situation, her love is concentrated towards Wotan, and is then furthered unto Siegmund, which then results in her realization of the highest and noblest form of life—being a hero. That being said, it can be stated that she was in love not with Siegfried himself, but with the notion of Siegfried’s resolution of being The Hero. This chapter observes how Brünnhilde has been able to cultivate her determination and willingness to love through the empathic love which she has imparted through her plan of protecting Sieglinde and her son, and how this love was also intensified because of her caring nature.

Like his better-known work, these adventure films point to Sirk’s love affair with American populist art, which he took very seriously. All are genre films about men who find themselves in positions of leadership in times of turmoil, characters whom one might conventionally regard as heroes. And they’re all played by Rock Hudson who brings to them a distinct and very human vulnerability.

A secret group modeled on the Freemasons call themselves the Heroes of America and sabotage the Confederacy from their headquarters-the Grand Council of the Heroes-near the state capitol. Violence erupts among warring factions in Raleigh and the Heroes are suppressed.

This chapter focuses on Dmitry Shostakovich's behaviour as a member of the Stalin Prize Committee (KSP). Shostakovich started attending meetings of the Music Section in March 1947. When the plenary sessions of the KSP began in April, Shostakovich and Nikolai Myaskovsky clashed over the latter's former student, Yevgeny Golubev, whose oratorio The Immortal Heroes (Geroi bessmertnï) was under discussion. This chapter first considers the conflicting accounts of Shostakovich's criticism of Golubev before discussing what his colleagues deemed to be Shostakovich's undiplomatic behaviour in various instances, including his stance regarding Anatoly Aleksandrov's opera Bela. It then examines Shostakovich's removal from the KSP in February 1948 and his reinstatement in December 1951. It argues that Shostakovich's interventions at the KSP reflect his fiery public temperament that went against professional etiquette or delicacy as well as hypocrisy or tedium.

This chapter analyzes and critiques the comparative method of three scholars who advocated the (virtual) nonexistence of Jesus: Bruno Bauer, Thomas L. Brodie, and Richard Carrier. It exposes an assumption of antiquity that has been carried over and accentuated in modern times: that the historical connotes the “real” or “true”; thus to be historical is to be true. If something is thereby not historical, but a combination of mythic motifs, it is not real.

This chapter reflects on how we can use myths to explore and illuminate the inner landscape through which we journey, and in which we are, inevitably, often lost. It describes the Untermyer Gardens in Yonkers, New York, and its centerpiece: the Walled Garden, or “Garden of Eden.” A brainchild of Samuel Untermyer and designed by William Welles Bosworth, the Untermyer Gardens also features the Lion's Gate and the Tree of Knowledge. In the same way that Untermyer and Bosworth grew a garden by mythologizing a place, we can start to “grow a soul,” as anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff once put it, by mythologizing our lives. The trek through the gardens invites us to consider our inner journeys where ancient myths entwine with our own life stories. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about the patterns in ancient mythology, offering as examples Prometheus and Jason. These ancient myths resonate not just in our popular culture but as metaphors in our own lives.

This chapter describes Bob Fosse’s work on the shows Redhead and The Conquering Hero. At Gwen Verdon’s insistence, Fosse was hired as both choreographer and director of Redhead, a musical comedy murder mystery. Working closely with the authors, Fosse shaped Redhead into a dazzling star vehicle with the pace and fluidity of a show fully staged by one person. This success was followed by The Conquering Hero, on which Fosse felt that his contributions as director-choreographer were sufficiently integral to the show’s creation that he sought, and received, Dramatists Guild recognition as an author. But this time, his relationship with his collaborators was combative, and he was dismissed while the show was in out-of-town tryouts. Fosse’s experience on The Conquering Hero demonstrated that the control he increasingly sought was not always easily negotiated.

This chapter treats the transformation of classical myth into children’s pleasure reading by Nathaniel Hawthorne (A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, 1851 and Tanglewood Tales, 1853) and Charles Kingsley (The Heroes, 1855), with attention to earlier handbooks and collections and to contemporary reservations about myth as suitable reading for children. Both authors use the fairy tale as a model and assume a natural affinity between children and the time in which the myths originated, but they also differ significantly. In Hawthorne’s Romantic vision, myth is archetypal and universal, equally suited to girls and boys, and conducive to free and imaginative play in an American setting; in Kingsley’s progressive vision, myth belongs to a childlike historical moment and serves as a prelude to the different sorts of education that await his boy and girl readers and as a vehicle for Christian and British values.

This chapter continues tracing the ascension of Barbara’s career as she proves the extent of her versatility as an actress. Director Louis J. Gasnier, disregarding Barbara’s vamp typecasting, casts her in “human” roles inThe Hero (1923) andPoor Men’s Wives (1923); her success in these films confirms his instincts. Sawyer arranges additional contracts for Barbara, beginning with a supporting role inSouls for Sale (1923) and a cameo appearance inMary of the Movies (1923). Plot synopses, production information, and details relating to critical reception are presented for all films discussed. This chapter also sets the stage for a developing scheme that will, if successful, enable Barbara to live openly with her son, Sonny, as an unwed mother without scandal decimating her career. The chapter closes with Barbara befriending actress ZaSu Pitts, a woman who will play a significant role in Sonny’s life.

This chapter examines how situationally induced heroism contributes to objectification—the phenomenon of experiencing other human beings as objects rather than integrated wholes of psyche and soma, worthy of respect and even reverence. It considers the ways in which who we are and what we are often collide to bring more evil into the world, and how they turn otherwise ordinary people into “heroes of the moment.” It suggests that atypical circumstances can ignite what Phillip Zimbardo terms “the heroic imagination” within an ordinary person.

The survival of the Underground after 1989 rests on the collective memory it has shaped in relation to establishments. This relational pair is the convention that holds the Underground together: the pathway of underground-establishment is continuous, the communist era being articulated into the multi-temporal meaning and use of establishment. This chapter addresses the nature of transformation in the Underground after 1989—although the ecology embraces change and technology, the musical material remains the same. The Plastic People of the Universe have now become the oft-quoted rock group of the Czech Underground, symbolizing Eastern bloc communist oppression, Cold War logics of liberty and freedom, and music’s borderless humanity. The Plastics maintain this legacy in local and foreign discourse while performing repertoire from their forty-five years of ensemble history. Yet the chapter also points to how new musical practices and meanings have grown in the Merry Ghetto, suggesting an Underground Renaissance. The contemporary Underground festival U Skaláka functions as an environment to reaffirm these articulations between musicking and forms of freedom, politics and historical identity. Continuing to play and to listen to Underground music nowadays provides conditions for Undergrounders to continue living within their cultural ecology and thus helps us to understand self-reflexive notions of the political during communism as not ending with 1989 but rather adapting to different forms of creative and political suppression in contemporary times.