Some weeks ago I was chatting with a colleague, comparing notes about how we came to be academics. In the course of this very casual conversation – more than half of it the gossip and good-natured complaining that are the grist of workplace talk – she said something that brought me up short, and which I am still sorting out. Speaking of her ambitions as a singer, and of the decision to become a musicologist, she remarked, a little sadly, ‘It was the fork in the road, you know. . .’.

Charles Burney had high hopes for Naples. As he trekked ever southward in the summer of 1770, stopping along the way at Turin, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence and Rome, he imagined his approach to Naples as an ascent to a musical Parnassus: ‘My visits to other places were in the way of business, for the performance of a task I had assigned myself; but I came hither animated by the hope of pleasure. And what lover of music could be in the place which had produced the two Scarlattis, Vinci, Leo, Pergolesi, Porpora, Farinelli, Jommelli, Piccinni, Traetta, Sacchini, and innumerable others of the first eminence among composers and performers, both vocal and instrumental, without the most sanguine expectations?’. The recent account of a similar pilgrimage by Jérôme de Lalande had whetted Burney’s appetite for a city the Frenchman described as ‘the principal source of Italian music, of great composers, and of excellent operas’ (Voyage d’un François en Italie, 1769). Moreover, as he progressed down the peninsula he met musician after musician with ties to that Mecca of the south. And so he wrote of his arrival ‘about five o’clock in the evening, on Tuesday, October 16’: ‘I entered this city, impressed with the highest ideas of the perfect state in which I should find practical music’. His reverie, however, was short-lived. Indeed, he quickly formed an aversion to flesh-and-blood Neapolitan vocalists, instrumentalists, their performance practices, the audiences, even the gilding in the churches – in short, most of what he

Several compositions by Haydn from the 1790s appear to reflect, both directly and indirectly, the newly martial and patriotic atmosphere generated by the war with France. While this has long been recognized by music historians – in particular with reference to ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ – Haydn scholars have yet to describe or explain this trend adequately. Only Beethoven scholars have considered this music in any depth, portraying Haydn as the Viennese progenitor of the so-called heroic style. The paradox of this teleological Beethovenian reading of Haydn’s music from the 1790s is that the type of compositions that music historians have traditionally denigrated with the label ‘occasional works’ are portrayed as the ancestors of some of the most vaunted symphonic masterworks in the canon: historically situated music somehow creates the very pieces that supposedly instantiated the historically resistant ‘work concept’ in the period around 1800. Yet this paradox points to a growing tension within Haydn’s public identity and music in the 1790s – a tension between the emerging ideal of aesthetic autonomy and the reality of political appropriation during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, this very tension allowed Haydn and his music to enter political life and political discourse as never before, articulating a relationship between music and contemporary events that cannot adequately be described by the notion of the ‘occasional work’. Haydn’s emergence as a cultural hero, on a par with contemporary war heroes, and the attribution to his music of a sublime power analogous to worldly, even political, powers meant that his music could be heard as possessing a voice in its own right – a voice that could thus speak independently, and persuasively, on behalf of institutions and ideologies, rather than merely echoing them.

This article explores and contextualizes the thought of the religious author Richard Roach (1662–1730) from a musical perspective. Roach, a member of the Behmenist, millenarian Philadelphian Society in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, published little that relates directly to the subject of music, and has thus gone virtually unrecognized in this context. Nevertheless, in his more substantial religious oeuvre music emerges as a crucial component of his thought. In addition, his manuscript diaries and papers reveal their author’s interaction with some of Augustan London’s leading musical figures, and his participation in a previously unknown weekly musical meeting.

After reviewing the overall circumstances of Roach’s life and cultural milieu, the article outlines what can at present be established about his musical activities. As I demonstrate, evidence from the diaries clarifies the provenance of an early hymn collection, while other extant sources reveal an unsuspected connection between religious ‘enthusiasm’ and the reception in London of Italian opera. The integral place of music in Roach’s worldview is then related to aspects of his thought ranging from ‘spiritual gender’, eschatology and the Divine Magia to science and politics. Beyond this timely focus on a neglected individual, however, I draw attention to the continuing tendency to overlook contexts such as this one, in which music is a potentially important but not an obviously paramount ingredient. I suggest that conventional conceptions of an emerging ‘public sphere’ – secular, enlightened, rational – need to be modified to take account of supposedly marginalized, ‘enthusiastic’ religious groups such as the Philadelphians. Finally, the absorption of developing musical genres into the background of an age-old model of universal harmony is taken as an instance of the powerful historical interplay between change and continuity.

This is a study of eighteenth-century operatic representations of slavery in America, focusing primarily on two Italian comic works: Ranieri de’ Calzabigi’s libretto for Amiti e Ontario (1772) and its adaptation, Le gare generose, or ‘The Contests in Generosity’ (1786), set by Giovanni Paisiello. Significant changes between the two are interpreted in relation to these works’ original cultural and political contexts, reconstructed through the examination of contemporary dramatic, journalistic and other non-fictional literature. As an operatic theme, in the late eighteenth century, slavery challenges the long established assumption of the westward migration of progress and civilization.

In December 1798 the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with Naples as its capital, capitulated to the Republican armed forces of France under the direction of General Championnet. The establishment of the First Republic of Naples, the so-called Parthenopean Republic, was brief, lasting only until June 1799. Although fleeting, the Republic nevertheless exercised a profound effect on virtually every facet of contemporaneous society, especially music and theatre. In this essay I examine musical life during the first Republic of Naples (1798–1799), based upon surviving primary sources.

These sources include legal and civic documents, personal diaries and correspondence, employment rosters, newspapers (giornali), opera librettos and musical compositions. They illustrate the effects of the revolution on contemporary artistic practices, specifically with regard to those political and social uses of the operatic stage by the new regime that had consequences for repertory choice, production practices, theatrical management and the artists themselves. The bringing-together of these sources provides not only a detailed chronicle of contemporaneous events, but also significantly furthers present-day understanding of artistic practices during the Republic as well as providing a context for the policies enacted with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

Discussions of the recitative intervention from the solo baritone in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony usually focus on how his words might offer a commentary on the discourse of the symphony as understood in instrumental terms. This article seeks to interpret the baritone’s words as a call to song – song in its literal as well as idealized sense, as identified through strophic treatment and folk-like character. Beethoven’s borrowing of material from his own setting of Bürger’s Gegenliebe for his ‘Ode to Joy’ tune is taken as a sign of the composer engaging with Bürger’s advocacy of simple diegetic song, an advocacy that sits provocatively alongside the abstract idealism of Schiller’s An die Freude. Concentrating on the song-like aspects within the finale of the Ninth Symphony in this way might seem to magnify the effect of the silences and disjunctures within the movement. However, Johann Gottfried Herder (the poet and theorist of the lyric) embraced silence as one of the conditions of folk-like song, as Beethoven seems to have understood from his own settings of Herder’s poetry. A comparison between the Ninth Symphony finale and some of Beethoven’s actual settings suggests a new understanding of how the composer uses silence within the symphony. It also points up the radical nature of his balance between abstract and literal renditions of song in this work, a balance that even outstrips the Helen-Gretchen contrast in Goethe’s Faust for its subtlety and pervasiveness.

Schubert’s lifelong interest in literature, his close friendships with poets and his preference for lyric poetry in his prolific song settings suggest that his compositional language may be shaped as much by a literary imagination as by musical concerns. This article argues for a close correspondence between Schubert’s late instrumental style and Friedrich Schiller’s conception of the elegiac. In ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ Schiller describes the sentimental poet as having to contend with two conflicting objects, the ideal and actuality, and to represent their opposition either satirically or elegiacally: whereas satire rails against the imperfections of present reality, elegy expresses longing for an ideal that is lost and unattainable. Paradoxically, however, the poet’s longing must take place in a flawed present; the elegiac thus projects not only a disjunction between divided worlds, but also a cyclic temporality in which memory and desire, past and future, are both entwined with the immediacy of present experience. In both Schiller and Schubert, this paradoxical temporal sensibility is often represented by patterns of returning, repetition and circularity. A close reading of Schubert’s Moment musical in A flat major, d780/2, illustrates how Schiller’s conception of the elegiac might be put into analytical practice.

When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach became cantor in Hamburg in 1768, he was faced with a long musical tradition shaped by his ancestor Georg Philipp Telemann. Part of this tradition was the provision of compositions for the annual meeting of the captains of the militia, for whom Telemann had composed several oratorios and serenades. Even though Bach composed only two such Bürgerkapitänsmusiken, they are instructive pieces, showing the relationship between music, culture and politics in late eighteenth-century Hamburg, which at the time was a centre of political discourse. Questions of democracy, the relationship between government and the individual, and the possibilities of ‘patriotic education’ were discussed earlier in Hamburg than in other regions of Germany. It is especially the question of patriotism and of patriotic behaviour that informs Bach’s Bürgerkapitänsmusiken. An analysis both of the librettos (written by Christian Wilhelm Alers) and of Bach’s music shows how the ideas of enlightened patriotic discourse lurk behind these compositions and how they aim to depict an ideal political community.

From the nineteenth century onwards the stereotype of Haydn as cheerful and jesting has dominated the reception of his music. This study contributes to the recent scholarship that broadens this view, with a new approach: I set works by Haydn in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about melancholy, those of Edmund Burke, Francisco Goya, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Their conceptions of melancholy were dialectical, involving the interplay of such elements as pleasure and pain, freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and absorption. I consider the relevance of these dialectics to Haydn’s English songs, his dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos and two late chamber works. Musical melancholy arises, I argue, when the protagonist of a work – be it the vocal character in a song or the ‘composer’s voice’ in an instrumental work – exhibits an ironic distance from his or her own pain. The musical dialectics in these works prompt listeners, for their part, to take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication.

The outstanding (though still insufficiently recognized) development of Maltese sacred music in the mid-eighteenth century culminated in the works of Benigno Zerafa (1726–1804), a highly talented priest-composer who served as maestro di cappella at the Cathedral of St Paul at Mdina from 1744 to 1786. Zerafa’s entire collection of sacred vocal works, with one exception, was discovered in 1969 by the then-curator of the Archives of Mdina, Mgr Rev John Azzopardi. The collection, comprising, among others, masses, Credo settings, psalms, graduals, offertories, litanies, hymns, sequences, antiphons, Holy Week responsories and motets, was transferred to the archives of the cathedral, where it was professionally catalogued and shelved. One work, a recently discovered Requiem Mass for four voices and organ, is preserved in the Archivio Crypta Sancti Pauli (CSP) at Rabat. The compositions, numbering 148, are divided into two categories – (1) for voices and instruments (104), and (2) for voices and organ (44) – and range, in scoring, from works for eight, five, four, three and two voices, to others for solo voice. This essay aims to provide information on Benigno Zerafa’s life.

The purpose of this short essay is to announce a new research project, ‘The Aria in the Italian Libretto in London before 1800’, the aim of which is to list the incipits of all the arias included in Italian-language opera and oratorio librettos printed in London before the turn of the nineteenth century. The notion that an opera libretto may not be the stable text it appears on the page to be is no news to scholars working on opera and musical theatre, who understand perfectly well the possible nature and origins of the sources they use, especially the libretto. At least one hopes they do; but in the case of the last, do they? The seductive lure of the printed page is strong, a lure which has an almost irresistible pull for scholars when there is a score to ‘match’; it becomes even stronger when those working on canonic composers stray out of their chosen territory to look for ‘contemporaneous examples’ from the works of ‘minor composers’, or when there is no thematic catalogue to provide even a basic chart with which to navigate the treacherous waters of the output of even some major eighteenth-century ones. A libretto is, after all, not ‘music’, they say – ‘that’s all very well, but why aren’t you talking about the music?’ – so why worry? Just hurry on to the matching score to identify the ‘composer’s intentions’, and all will be well.

How do we use the information contained in treatises written by composers and performers? I examine here the light that might be thrown on C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard sonatas by the material contained in his celebrated Versuch über die wahre Artdas Clavier zu spielen.

The application of rhetoric to music had special significance in the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth century. The discipline of classical Greek oratory, originally dealing with how to make and execute a speech, formed the basis for the rules of composition and performance, especially in German-speaking lands. During this period the influence of rhetorical principles on all parameters of music was commonplace; not only did a vast number of treatises on rhetoric in music emerge, but the central educational programme taught in the Latin schools and the universities included both musica and rhetorica among the seven artes liberales. That rhetoric was also a fundamental part of Bach’s music-making is shown by the following testimony from Johann Abraham Birnbaum (1702–1748), Professor of Poetics and Rhetoric at Leipzig: ‘He so perfectly understood the resemblance which the performance of a musical piece has in common with rhetorical art that he was listened to with the utmost satisfaction and pleasure when he discoursed of the similarity and agreement between them; but we also wonder at the skilful use he made of this in his works’.

On 7–8 October 1791, about two months before his death, Mozart wrote to his wife: ‘Right after you left I played two games of billiards with Herr Mozart (who wrote the opera for Schikaneder’s theatre); then I sold my nag for 14 ducats; then I had Joseph summon Primus and bring me black coffee, with which I smoked a wonderful pipe of tobacco; then I orchestrated almost all of Stadler’s rondo’. In orchestrating the finale of the Clarinet Concerto under the influence of caffeine and nicotine, Mozart was very much a man of his age.

Daniel Leeson recently noted an intriguing thematic borrowing in the Act 1 trio of Le nozze di Figaro (No. 7, ‘Cosa sento!’). As Leeson demonstrated, Basilio’s theme, first introduced in bars 16–23, derives from Cherubino’s preceding aria, ‘Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio’. This veiled allusion echoes throughout the trio, most dramatically during the narrative in which the Count reveals the hidden page. The quotation of Cherubino’s theme, Leeson argued, supplies the stage director with precious information. It proves that Basilio has eavesdropped on the previous scene, and explains why Susanna reacts so sharply to his seemingly innocuous opening lines: ‘By singing a disguised version of Cherubino’s tune to Susanna, Basilio suggests a nasty perspective on what might have transpired in the previous scene. Any possible accusation against the Count has, by Basilio’s hidden musical threat, been redirected: the insinuation targets Cherubino as the recipient of Susanna’s favours.’