With its intense drama and marked eroticism, the story of Judith's slaying of Holofernes was often represented in baroque visual art and music. The overwhelming majority of musical representations are found in oratorios, with only three cantatas known to have been devoted to the subject. The oratorio's dramatic framework was suited for emphasizing Judith's multifaceted figure through character depiction, contrast and conflict, while the cantata's epic nature and lack of direct character intervention made staging conflict in that genre more difficult. Yet precisely because of these limitations, the cantata constitutes a revealing case study for exploring the strategies composers employed to give agency to Judith.

This article focuses on the baroque cantata settings of the Judith story by Sébastien de Brossard and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (both from about 1708, both based on a text by La Motte). To illustrate their differing perspectives on Judith, I employ the concept of focalization – used in literary theory to mean point of view or filtered perspective – as a theoretical framework. The well-known Judith paintings by Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi (the so-called Uffizi Judith) provide a lucid example of focalization through the differing perspectives of the two maidservants and offer a valuable methodological tool for understanding the two differing compositional approaches. Whereas Brossard follows La Motte's narrative dutifully by emphasizing swiftness of action at the expense of character depiction, Jacquet de La Guerre bypasses it through instrumental accompaniments and independent symphonies that give voice to Judith, despite a text that downplays her character.

François-André Danican Philidor's Ernelinde was one of the most famous French operas of the late eighteenth century. A subject of great controversy when it was first performed in 1767, the history of its reception has been obscured by judgments rooted more in the politics of the French literary world than in the work itself. The opera is shown in a new light by reconsidering Philidor's librettist, Antoine-Henri Poinsinet.

The terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have usually been thought of as having had rather limited significance, often being restricted in application to ‘picturesque’ or ‘realistic’ genres such as the romantic ‘character piece’ or ‘characteristic symphony’. Through a re-examination of Christian Gottfried Körner's 1795 essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’ and other contemporary texts, I argue that, on the contrary, these terms are conceptually fundamental to the classical German idealist project of defending music's dignity as a true and morally beneficial fine art. Although persistently misread during the twentieth century as a disguise for concerns with stylistic or thematic unity, the metaphor of ‘character’ was in fact a sophisticated hermeneutic tool and a means of equal discursive engagement for performers, composers and critics. It was only the rise of politically oriented criticism and Wagnerian polemics that undermined the legitimacy of the ‘characteristic’ – a concept that may have a better claim than ‘absolute music’ to be considered the leading idea of the classical and romantic eras in music aesthetics.

This article examines the process of fashioning an idea of ‘national’ music, by considering the social and political conditions that made such an idea possible at a particular historical moment. An early example, Scotland, is the focus here, and helps to show the type of discursive and active work involved in giving meaning to the idea of ‘Scottish music’ in a cultural sense. I argue that the poet and song collector Allan Ramsay played a central role in the years beginning around 1720. Before Ramsay's generation, there was only a limited sense of ethnic identity translating into poetic or musical style. Furthermore, Ramsay himself, in attempting to harness song and music as national cultural capital, also had to contend with the fact that Scotland was ethnically, culturally and linguistically split along the Highland–Lowland divide, and in other ways as well. Through his song collection A Tea-Table Miscellany and his follow-up publication of tunes for that collection, as well as through his involvement with Edinburgh's elite musical community, Ramsay helped transform Scotland's musical culture from a manuscript-based milieu organized around specific musical functions and occasions to one in which national origins helped validate music, and printed collections enshrined such groupings. Lastly, in addition to its direct influence, Ramsay's work helped shape the emergent discourse about national song indirectly: an extensive outgrowth of thought rooted partly in Ramsay's own ideas led to his being used as a negative example among collectors of ‘folk’ music from the later eighteenth century onward.