1.
Libretto
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A libretto is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or musical. The term libretto is also used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as the Mass, requiem and sacred cantata. Libretto, from Italian, is the diminutive of the word libro, sometimes other language equivalents are used for libretti in that language, livret for French works and Textbuch for German. A libretto is distinct from a synopsis or scenario of the plot, in that the libretto contains all the words and stage directions, while a synopsis summarizes the plot. The relationship of the librettist to the composer in the creation of a work has varied over the centuries, as have the sources. In the context of a modern English language musical theatre piece, Libretti for operas, oratorios and cantatas in the 17th and 18th centuries generally were written by someone other than the composer, often a well-known poet. Metastasio was one of the most highly regarded librettists in Europe and his libretti were set many times by many different composers. Another noted 18th-century librettist was Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote the libretti for three of Mozarts greatest operas, as well as for other composers. Eugène Scribe was one of the most prolific librettists of the 19th century, providing the words for works by Meyerbeer, Auber, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi. The French writers duo Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy wrote a number of opera and operetta libretti for the likes of Jacques Offenbach, Jules Massenet. Arrigo Boito, who wrote libretti for, among others, Giuseppe Verdi and Amilcare Ponchielli, the libretto is not always written before the music. Some composers wrote their own libretti, Richard Wagner is perhaps most famous in this regard, with his transformations of Germanic legends and events into epic subjects for his operas and music dramas. Hector Berlioz, too, wrote the libretti for two of his works, La Damnation de Faust and Les Troyens. Alban Berg adapted Georg Büchners play Woyzeck for the libretto of Wozzeck, sometimes the libretto is written in close collaboration with the composer, this can involve adaptation, as was the case with Rimsky-Korsakov and his librettist Belsky, or an entirely original work. In the case of musicals, the music, the lyrics, thus, a musical such as Fiddler on the Roof has a composer, a lyricist and the writer of the book. In rare cases, the composer writes everything except the dance arrangements - music, lyrics and libretto, Other matters in the process of developing a libretto parallel those of spoken dramas for stage or screen. A famous case of the latter is Wagners 1861 revision of the original 1845 Dresden version of his opera Tannhäuser for Paris, since the late 19th century some opera composers have written music to prose or free verse libretti. The libretto of a musical, on the hand, is almost always written in prose
2.
Manchuria
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Manchuria is a modern name, first created by the Japanese, given to a large geographic region in Northeast Asia. Depending on the context, Manchuria can either refer to a region that falls entirely within the Peoples Republic of China, the definition of Manchuria can be any one of several regions of various size. These are, from smallest to largest, Northeast China, consisting of Heilongjiang, Jilin and this is the area referred to as Manchuria in the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions. Inner Manchuria, the above, plus parts of modern Inner Mongolia, The above, plus Outer Manchuria, the area from the Amur and Ussuri rivers to the Stanovoy Mountains, in Russian administrative terms, Ussuri krai, southern Harbin oblast, Primorskiy kray. The above, plus Sakhalin Island, which is included on Qing dynasty maps as part of Outer Manchuria even though it is not explicitly mentioned in the Treaty of Nerchinsk. The island was included in Manchuria on maps made by the Japanese Shogunate. Despite of lines on maps and empiress political claims, the island was inhabited by Ainu people until the Soviet Union enforced a policy after 1945. Three centuries and a half must now pass away before entering upon the act of the Manchu drama. During the ensuing two hundred years the Nü-chêns were scarcely heard of, the House of Ming being busily occupied in other directions and it may be noted here that Manchuria is unknown to the Chinese or to the Manchus themselves as a geographical expression. The present extensive home of the Manchus is usually spoken of as the Three Eastern Provinces, namely, Shêngking, or Liao-tung, or Kuan-tung, Kirin, and Heilungchiang or Tsitsihar. — Herbert A. Giles, China and the Manchus,1912 Manchuria is a translation of the Japanese word Manshū, the Manchu and Chinese languages had no such word as Manchuria and the word has imperialist connotations. According to Bill Sewell, it was Europeans who first started using the name Manchuria to refer to the location, the historian Gavan McCormack agreed with Robert H. G. The Japanese had their own motive for deliberately spreading the usage of the term Manchuria, the historian Norman Smith wrote that The term Manchuria is controversial. Professor Mariko Asano Tamanoi said that she should use the term in quotation marks when referring to Manchuria, in his 2012 dissertation on the Jurchen people to obtain a Doctor of Philosophy degree in History from the University of Washington, Professor Chad D. In the 18th-century Europe, the later known as Manchuria was most commonly referred to as Tartary. However, the term Manchuria started appearing by the end of the century, in current Chinese parlance, an inhabitant of the Northeast, or Northeast China, is a Northeasterner. In China, the term Manchuria is rarely used today, and this usage is seen in the expression Chuǎng Guāndōng referring to the mass migration of Han Chinese to Manchuria in the 19th and 20th centuries. The name Guandong later came to be used more narrowly for the area of the Kwantung Leased Territory on the Liaodong Peninsula and it is not to be confused with the southern province of Guangdong
3.
Niuzhuang
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Yingkou is a prefecture-level city of Liaoning province, Peoples Republic of China. It is a city of the Bohai Sea, and is the location of the mouth of the Liao River. Yingkou was historically known as Newchwang in postal romanization, it was one of the Treaty Ports opened under the Treaties of Tianjin of 1858, in fact, the actual town of Newchwang was about thirty miles upstream of Liao He, within todays county-level city of Haicheng. After the treaty had been signed, the British found that the river near Newchwang was too shallow for their ships, instead, the treaty port was moved to the area nearer to the river mouth where todays Yingkou is located. To avoid confusion between the two locations, careful English writers of the early 20th century would sometimes use Newchwang for Yingkou, meanwhile, Newchwangcheng was adopted by the government as the inland towns name to distinguish it from the coastal city. To the west is the Liaodong Bay of the Bohai Gulf, bordering prefecture cities are, Anshan, Dalian, and Panjin. The citys metro area is located 166 km from the capital of Shenyang,204 km from Dalian,84 kilometres from Anshan. The city is located at latitude 39° 55−40°56 N and longitude 121° 56−123°02 E, at its greatest width, the city spans 111.8 km from north to south and 50.7 km from east to west. The total area of the city is 5,365 km2, the city has a total coastline of 96 km. Yingkou has a humid continental climate with strong monsoonal influences. Though the climate is tempered by the citys location on the Bohai Gulf, winters are long, windy, cold but dry. The monthly 24-hour average temperature ranges from −8.5 °C in January to 25.0 °C in July, precipitation is somewhat enhanced by the coastal location, with a majority of the annual rainfall occurring in July and August alone. With monthly percent possible sunshine ranging from 51% in July to 68% in three months, the city receives 2,774 hours of sunshine annually. China Minmetals Industrial Park Yingkou Economic & Technological Development Zone, so far, five key industries have been formed, which are steel, chemical industry, mineral processing, logistics, textile and garment industry. The city is home to the basketball club Liaoning Flying Leopards of the Chinese Basketball Association, the club brought forth several players of Chinas national basketball team. It plays its games at the Benxi Gymnasium. As a result, Yingkou city is undergoing substantial expansion. From its current urban area of 54 km2, Phase One of the Coastal Base project is under way and is adding a further 44 km2 of industrial, Phase Two will add a further massive 157 km2
4.
Chinese language
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Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language, the varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin, followed by Wu, Min, and Yue. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. Standard Chinese is a form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six languages of the United Nations. The written form of the language, based on the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is the spoken language and official in Hong Kong and Macau. It is also influential in Guangdong province and much of Guangxi, dialects of Southern Min, part of the Min group, are widely spoken in southern Fujian, with notable variants also spoken in neighboring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia. Hakka also has a diaspora in Taiwan and southeast Asia. Shanghainese and other Wu varieties are prominent in the lower Yangtze region of eastern China, Chinese can be traced back to a hypothetical Sino-Tibetan proto-language. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty, as the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have sought to promulgate a unified standard. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, in addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, and are often also sensitive border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, the earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty
5.
Julian calendar
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The Julian calendar, proposed by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, was a reform of the Roman calendar. It took effect on 1 January 45 BC, by edict, the Julian calendar gains against the mean tropical year at the rate of one day in 128 years. For the Gregorian the figure is one day in 3,030 years, the difference in the average length of the year between Julian and Gregorian is 0. 002%. The Julian calendar has a year of 365 days divided into 12 months. A leap day is added to February every four years, the Julian year is, therefore, on average 365.25 days long. It was intended to approximate the tropical year, as a result, the calendar year gains about three days every four centuries compared to observed equinox times and the seasons. This discrepancy was corrected by the Gregorian reform of 1582, consequently, the Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. Egypt converted on 20 December 1874/1 January 1875, turkey switched on 16 February/1 March 1917. Russia changed on 1/14 February 1918, Greece made the change for civil purposes on 16 February/1 March 1923 - the national day, which was a religious holiday, was to remain on the old calendar. Most Christian denominations in the west and areas evangelised by western churches have replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian as the basis for their liturgical calendars. However, most branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church still use the Julian calendar for calculating the date of Easter, some Orthodox churches have adopted the Revised Julian calendar for the observance of fixed feasts, while other Orthodox churches retain the Julian calendar for all purposes. The Julian calendar is used by the Berbers of the Maghreb in the form of the Berber calendar. In the form of the Alexandrian calendar, it is the basis for the Ethiopian calendar, during the changeover between calendars and for some time afterwards, dual dating was used in documents and gave the date according to both systems. In contemporary as well as texts that describe events during the period of change. The ordinary year in the previous Roman calendar consisted of 12 months, in addition, a 27- or 28-day intercalary month, the Mensis Intercalaris, was sometimes inserted between February and March. The net effect was to add 22 or 23 days to the year, some say the mensis intercalaris always had 27 days and began on either the first or the second day after the Terminalia. According to the later writers Censorinus and Macrobius, the ideal intercalary cycle consisted of ordinary years of 355 days alternating with intercalary years, alternately 377 and 378 days long. In this system, the average Roman year would have had 366 1⁄4 days over four years, Macrobius describes a further refinement whereby, in one 8-year period within a 24-year cycle, there were only three intercalary years, each of 377 days
6.
Harbin
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Harbin is the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang province in the northeastern region of the Peoples Republic of China. Holding sub-provincial administrative status, Harbin has direct jurisdiction over nine metropolitan districts, Harbin is the eighth most populous Chinese city and the most populous city in Northeast China. According to the 2010 census, the area made of seven out of nine urban districts had 5,282,093 inhabitants. Harbin serves as a key political, economic, scientific, cultural, Harbin, which was originally a Manchu word meaning a place for drying fishing nets, grew from a small rural settlement on the Songhua River to become one of the largest cities in Northeast China. Founded in 1898 with the coming of the Chinese Eastern Railway, having the most bitterly cold winters among major Chinese cities, Harbin is heralded as the Ice City for its well-known winter tourism and recreations. Harbin is notable for its ice sculpture festival in the winter. Besides being well known for its historical Russian legacy, the city serves as an important gateway in Sino-Russian trade today, in the 1920s, the city was considered Chinas fashion capital since new designs from Paris and Moscow reached here first before arriving in Shanghai. The city has been voted China Top Tourist City by China National Tourism Administration in 2004, on 22 June 2010, Harbin was appointed a City of Music by the UN. Human settlement in the Harbin area dates from at least 2200 BC during the late Stone Age, Wanyan Aguda, the founder and first emperor of the Jin dynasty, was born in the Jurchen Wanyan tribes who resided near the Ashi River in this region. In AD1115 Aguda established Jins capital Shangjing Huining Prefecture in todays Acheng District of Harbin, after Agudas death, the new emperor Wanyan Sheng ordered the construction of a new city on a uniform plan. The planning and construction emulated major Chinese cities, in particular Bianjing, Huining Prefecture served as the first superior capital of the Jin empire until Wanyan Liang moved the capital to Yanjing in 1153. Liang even went so far as to destroy all palaces in his capital in 1157. Wanyan Liangs successor Wanyan Yong restored the city and established it as a capital in 1173. Ruins of the Shangjing Huining Prefecture were discovered and excavated about 2 km from present-day Achengs central urban area, the site of the old Jin capital ruins is a national historic reserve, and includes the Jin Dynasty History Museum. The museum, open to the public, was renovated in late 2005, mounted statues of Aguda and of his chief commander Wanyan Zonghan stand in the grounds of the museum. Many of the artifacts there are on display in nearby Harbin. After the Mongol conquest of the Jin Empire, Huining Prefecture was abandoned, in the 17th century, the Manchus used building materials from Huining Prefecture to construct their new stronghold in Alchuka. The region of Harbin remained largely rural until the 1800s, with ten villages
7.
Nazism
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National Socialism, more commonly known as Nazism, is the ideology and practice associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party and Nazi Germany, as well as other far-right groups. Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying Germans as part of what Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race and it aimed to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous society, unified on the basis of racial purity. The term National Socialism arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, the Nazi Partys precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and anti-Semitic German Workers Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organisation, following the Holocaust and German defeat in World War II, only a few fringe racist groups, usually referred to as neo-Nazis, still describe themselves as following National Socialism. The full name of Adolf Hitlers party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the shorthand Nazi was formed from the first two syllables of the German pronunciation of the word national. The term was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a peasant, characterizing an awkward. It derived from Ignaz, being a version of Ignatius, a common name in Bavaria. Opponents seized on this and shortened the first word of the name, Nationalsozialistische. The NSDAP briefly adopted the Nazi designation, attempting to reappropriate the term, the use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, and so on was popularised by German exiles abroad. From them, the spread into other languages and was eventually brought back to Germany after World War II. In English, Nazism is a name for the ideology the party advocated. The majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics, far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements. Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms, a major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organisations that engaged in political violence after World War I. The Nazis stated the alliance was purely tactical and there remained substantial differences with the DNVP, the Nazis described the DNVP as a bourgeois party and called themselves an anti-bourgeois party. After the elections in 1932, the alliance broke after the DNVP lost many of its seats in the Reichstag, the Nazis denounced them as an insignificant heap of reactionaries. The DNVP responded by denouncing the Nazis for their socialism, their violence. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an attempted communist revolution in Germany, there were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical
8.
Degenerate music
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Degenerate music was a label applied in the 1930s by the Nazi government in Germany to certain forms of music that it considered to be harmful or decadent. The Nazi governments concern for degenerate music was a part of its larger, in both cases, the government attempted to isolate, discredit, discourage, or ban the works. Their ideas drew on decades of writing on music and on a debate on the relationship between music and mental illness. Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler were disparaged and condemned by the Nazis, in Leipzig, a bronze statue of Mendelssohn was removed. The regime commissioned music to replace his incidental music to A Midsummer Nights Dream, from the Nazi seizure of power onward, these composers found it increasingly difficult, and often impossible, to get work or have their music performed. Many went into exile, or retreated into internal exile, or ended up in the concentration camps, like degenerate art, examples of degenerate music were displayed in public exhibits in Germany beginning in 1938. Reichsmusikkammer Negermusik Reich Music Examination Office Cultural Bolshevism Low culture Swing Kids Anon, musiques interdites sous le IIIe Reich. Degenerate Music in Nazi Germany Degenerate Music at Guide to the Holocaust Database of Degenerate Music
