Why Eighteenth-Century Music? Thirty years ago, eighteenth-century music research represented a scholarly vanguard: the field was at the forefront in source studies, in performance practice, in investigating local music history and even in its willingness to think critically about the ways it had defined itself historically. These successes were in no small part responsible for a fundamental shift in musicological studies, even if this shift, fed by methodologies derived from literary and critical theory, was more apparent in writings on nineteenth-century music. Perhaps the field of eighteenth-century music studies was slow to reposition itself in this new intellectual environment. Or perhaps there was a feeling that this music ‘could look after itself’, that it is the common property of all musicologists. Whatever the reason, research into music of the eighteenth century was eclipsed in terms of the number of publications, conferences and doctoral dissertations.

To those of us who are not professional musicologists, music seems not just an inherently interdisciplinary topic, but a domain that, because it presents distinct challenges, has the capacity to help scholars think afresh about key issues. Music seems positively to demand interdisciplinary responses, because, for example, it insinuates itself into so much of human life. It involves a notable range of intricate, specialized skills, objects and social relationships. Music is highly technical, and not just in the obvious ways. Instrument making, like the dissemination of music in written form and the design of performance spaces, is ‘technical’ in requiring a range of technologies, occupations and techniques. Yet, however specialized the study of music has become, however much its study demands skills that are not widely dispersed, even in universities, ‘music’ appears as a fount of questions that are exceptionally wide-ranging. I use inverted commas to signal that this seemingly innocent term has to cover so much that containing it is as difficult as defining it.

The staging of tragédies en musique and related genres remains an elusive aspect of French baroque opera. Although scores and librettos supply some information (through scene rubrics and the sung text), several rare sets of prompt notes provide us with many more specific details. The prompt notes fall into two categories: those that illustrate a dramatic convention and those that illustrate individual artistic choices. Both make notable differences in dramatic effect. Choristers and dancers are almost exclusively blocked as a single, collective body while the entrance of soloists to instrumental music often determines the dramatic function of préludes and ritournelles, sometimes accompanying mute acting or conveying meaning when the stage is empty. The prompt notes show that the genre, generally thought of as tradition-bound, also elicited dramatic interpretations from those responsible for staging. An appendix provides a glossed list of the more than fifty prompt notes for a 1778 proposed production of Lully’s Armide.

Twentieth-century accounts of the life and musical activities of Ann Ford, later Mrs Thicknesse (1737–1824), have largely relied on the entry for her in the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography. The rediscovery of a fifty-four-page article on her in Public Characters (London, 1806) has led to a re-evaluation of other sources of information, including her semi-autobiographical novel The School for Fashion (London, 1800), the pamphlets published in the course of her dispute with the Earl of Jersey and her treatises on playing the English guitar and the musical glasses. These throw new light on her musical activities and help us to understand the context and significance of her public concerts in 1760 and 1761. Her public persona and her preference for soft, exotic instruments such as the viola da gamba, the archlute and the guitar are seen as embodying the cult of sensibility, at its height during her period of fame around 1760.

This article offers close readings of the part-song Die Beredsamkeit and the solo song Lob der Faulheit. The former seems to illustrate ‘eloquence’ on at least four levels by imitating the intonation of elevated speech, by invoking the so-called ‘learned style’ of music through the introduction of various contrapuntal procedures, by quoting some of the most elementary figures of musical rhetoric (such as the Halbzirkel and the tirata) and by constructing the whole of the work as a well-delivered oration consisting of introduction, statement, corroboration, refutation and reaffirmation. Lob der Faulheit, on the other hand, in which the singer finally proves unable to deliver the praise promised in the title, appears to be an extraordinarily sensitive representation of musical failure. The unnatural and forced character of the song is unmistakable in its intervallic and metric structure, and rises in the melody are invariably followed by precipitous falls. Beyond this straightforward musical illustration, the descending fourth that opens and closes the vocal line may also be programmatic in its seeming reference to the well-known contemporary saying, ‘es wird auf ein Lami hinaus laufen’ (it will run out on a Lami), a forecast of a bad end.

Period concepts and periodizations are constructions, or readings, and hence always subject to reinterpretation. Many recent scholars have privileged institutional and reception history over style and compositional history, and periodized European music according to the ‘centuries’; but these constructions are no less partial or tendentious than older ones. Recent historiographical writings addressing these issues are evaluated.

If we wish to construe the eighteenth century as a music-historical period, we must abandon the traditional notion that it was bifurcated in the middle. Not only did the musical Baroque not last beyond 1720 in most areas, but the years c1720–c1780 constituted a period in their own right, dominated by the international ‘system’ of Italian opera, Enlightenment ideals, neoclassicism, the galant and (after c1760) the cult of sensibility. We may call this the ‘central’ eighteenth century. Furthermore, this period can be clearly distinguished from preceding and following ones. The late Baroque (c1670–c1720) was marked by the rationalization of Italian opera, tragédie lyrique, the standardization of instrumental genres and the rise of ‘strong’ tonality. The period c1780–c1830 witnessed the rise of the ‘regulative work-concept’ (Goehr) and ‘pre-Romanticism’ (Dahlhaus), and the Europe-wide triumph of ‘Viennese modernism’, including the first autonomous instrumental music and a central role in the rise of the modern (post-revolutionary) world, symbolized by Haydn’s sublime in The Creation.

A tripartite reading of a ‘long’ eighteenth-century in music history along these lines seems more nearly adequate than either baroque/classical or 1700–1800 as a single, undifferentiated period.

Louis-Guillaume Pecour’s couple-dance called L’Allemande introduced in 1702 a mode of dancing that in some respects was different to anything that had been seen before on stage or at court in France, and that was to influence a number of dances for the theatre and ballroom in the following years. Particular characteristics of Pecour’s dance were its unusual arm positions, which seem to have indicated a specifically ‘Germanic’ character, and some sequences of steps which, although also occurring in other dances of the time, nevertheless seemed to reinforce some notion of ‘Germanic’ dancing. Some of these characteristics also appeared in dances devised in London after 1714 for the Hanoverian royal family, perhaps as a deliberate allusion to their German ancestry. This article examines the structure and form of Pecour’s L’Allemande, and the extent to which it, and some of the dances it influenced, may have represented a stereotype of ‘Germanic’ culture as something outlandish or uncultivated unless redeemed by an overlay of French choreographic sophistication.

Much recent writing concerning the early eighteenth-century sonata has focused on a subgenre that appropriates stylistic elements from more fully scored works. Thus several of J. S. Bach’s solo and trio sonatas signify the concerto in certain movements by adopting ritornello form and establishing instrumental roles of ‘soloist’ and ‘orchestra’, only to undermine the integrity of these roles during the course of a movement. These Sonaten auf Concertenart, and a number of similar examples by Bach’s German contemporaries, have been viewed as responses to Vivaldi’s solo concertos and especially his so-called ‘chamber concertos’, which feature similar kinds of role playing. This study, by re-examining the phenomenon of the sonata in concerto style from a number of perspectives, shows that the genre was more widespread and its origins and meanings more complex than previously recognized. Evidence for this revised view takes the form of generic titles on manuscripts and prints; music by German, Italian and French composers spanning much of the eighteenth century, from Molter to Mondonville to Mozart; some three dozen sonatas by Telemann, who exhaustively explored the genre over several decades and was perhaps its originator in Germany; and literary amalgamations of genre indicative of a broader eighteenth-century fascination with mixed types.

In 1739, two years before his death, Vivaldi sold a group of five psalms to the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. All but one of these psalms had been identified and located prior to May 2003, when the missing work, a Nisi Dominus in A major for three solo singers, five obbligato instruments and strings, turned up in Dresden as the unexpected by-product of a routine inspection. Like one of the other psalms belonging to the same group, the Beatus vir rv795, this new discovery, rv803, is attributed in its Dresden source to Baldassarre Galuppi. The misattribution appears to have been an act of deliberate falsification by the Venetian copyist Iseppo Baldan, who slipped the two Vivaldi compositions in to a large consignment of sacred vocal works, mainly by Galuppi, dispatched to the Saxon Hofkapelle in the late 1750s. The new Nisi Dominus is noteworthy for the high level of vocal virtuosity that all eight movements demand and for its use of rare instruments (viola d’amore, tenor chalumeau and violino in tromba marina) to lend added colour in individual movements. It is also a striking example of Vivaldi’s ‘late’ manner, which, although influenced by the galant style of younger composers, remains true to his personal idiom. At the same time, it rivals the oratorio Juditha triumphans as a showcase for the diverse talents of the Pietà’s female musicians.

Among the special features of Bachanalia: The Essential Listener’s Guide to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – a well-meaning effort, though badly misconceived, in my view – are author Eric Lewin Altschuler’s picks for ‘The Top Ten Fugues’, ‘The Top Ten Subjects’, ‘The Superstar Four’ and so on.

The Parisian premiere of Paisiello’s Nina, o sia la pazza d’amore on 3 September 1791 triggered a hostile reaction from French librettists and composers. Since the opéra comique on which Paisiello had based his opera remained in the active repertory of the Comédie-Italienne, Nina was considered an infringement of copyright legislation recently passed by the National Assembly. In the controversy that followed, matters involving intellectual property and opera aesthetics were linked to revolutionary struggle. At a time when clarity and transparency were identified as republican virtues in France, the carefully wrought balance between music and text that was associated with French operatic genres acquired new political resonance. Simultaneously, the perceived emphasis on sensual musical pleasure – at the expense of a coherent libretto – in Italian operas like Nina was eyed with suspicion, deemed a potential symptom of counterrevolution. In this way, the relative merits of French and Italian opera were superimposed on issues of revolution, reaction and national identity.

Mozart’s Milan concert on 12 March 1770 secured for him his first commission to write an opera seria for Italy. The works usually thought to have been performed on this occasion are Fra cento affanni, k88, Misero tu, k73A, and Misero me . . . misero pargoletto, k77. This article offers new evidence for redating Fra cento affanni and argues that neither it nor Misero tu was performed at the event. Instead, the case is made for a programme consisting solely of concert arias with texts from the libretto of Metastasio’s Demofoönte, presented together as a kind of truncated ‘opera in aria’. In support of this hypothesis, the compositional circumstances surrounding Se tutti i mali miei, k83, and Ah più tremar, k71, are reassessed and possible performances by the singers Giuseppe Aprile, Antonia Bernasconi, Guglielmo d’Ettore, Lucrezia Agujari and Carlo Niccolini discussed.

One of the joys of compiling a thematic catalogue is that a number of small mysteries crop up as one evaluates biographical and source material for the composer concerned. The journey often requires delving into the private life and works in intimate detail, and brings to light important information that in turn raises questions about the various influences or connections affecting the composer or style. But when this information is lacunar or based primarily upon circumstantial evidence, it provides only plausible suppositions that, while not entirely provable as incontrovertible fact, nonetheless dare the scholar to prove otherwise. Such is the circumstantial case for the meeting of two of the more remarkable composers of the second half of the eighteenth century, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Martin Kraus, who share nearly identical life spans and dates.

Haydn composed his ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 82–87, in 1785–1786 on commission from the Concert de la Société Olympique, whose orchestra gave the first performances, probably in 1787. This essay considers aspects of these first performances – the audience, the venue and the performers, about which there is all too little information and a certain amount of confusion.

In two earlier articles I have written of finding identical or very similar themes in two different compositions, either in two works of the same composer or in the work of two different composers. The conclusion presented was that such events are rarely meaningful, that citing a particular melodic affinity to assert some kind of relationship between the two compositions is almost always misguided. The amount of melodic duplication that may be found when comparing any two pieces (by any two composers from any two eras) is so considerable that one might conclude it is largely meaningless and accidental.