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. . .’.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’