In the world of historically informed performance (HIP) the word ‘authenticity’ is, if not exactly dead, certainly taboo (‘I know that we shouldn't use the A-word’), fenced in with qualifiers (‘Of course we can't be fully authentic’) or softened to clarify that of course HIP performances are aiming for something less than a full realization of the composer's intentions (‘This may be the way Mozart could have heard it’, or ‘This represents some of the practices of the time’). But at least for the most successful practitioners of HIP (epigones may be a different matter), authenticity discourse was always a significant but simplified version of one part of a more complex and even contradictory set of justifications for using old instruments and techniques. Indeed, HIP practitioners regularly invoke chapter and verse from the treatises or other primary sources in the same breath as claiming not to be interested in authenticity per se or not to be engaged in any kind of ‘reconstruction’. This discursive rupture may be more striking with music of the later seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the performance-practice sources are more numerous and the scores are more ‘complete’ by modern standards than those of much earlier music, whose performance has always been more frankly imaginative and conjectural.

The revival of early music performed on original instruments has resurrected the role of the violinist-conductor ‘maestro dei concerti’, one historical designation among many describing a conductor equipped with an instrument rather than a baton. Prior to this revival, one rarely saw an orchestra led without a baton, particularly if the orchestra was sizeable. Exceptions included a few historically minded ensembles – here I'd like to mention I Musici of Rome for the baroque repertory and, for a case involving a large symphonic orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic's 1996 New Year's Eve Concert, at which Lorin Maazel directed one of the popular Strauss encores from the violin. Yet the idea of having a violinist conduct a romantic symphony, let alone a nineteenth-century opera, seems hardly conceivable today. Such a lost practice, though common in the past, would be bound to baffle modern audiences.

In his 1720 poem ‘To the Musick Club’ Allan Ramsay famously called upon an incipient Edinburgh Musical Society to elevate Scottish vernacular music by mixing it with ‘Correlli's soft Italian Song’, a metonym for pan-European art music. The Society's ensuing role in the gentrification of Scottish music – and the status of the blended music within the wider contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment and the forging of Scottish national identity – has received attention in recent scholarship. This article approaches the commingling of vernacular and pan-European music from an alternative perspective, focusing on the assimilation of Italian music, particularly the works of Arcangelo Corelli, into popular, quasi-oral traditions of instrumental music in Scotland and beyond. The case of ‘Mr Cosgill's Delight’, a popular tune derived from a gavotte from Corelli's Sonate da camera a tre, Op. 2, is presented as an illustration of this process. The mechanics of vernacularization are further explored through a cache of ornaments for Corelli's Sonate per violino e violone o cimbalo, Op. 5, by the Scottish professional violinists William McGibbon and Charles McLean. The study foregrounds the agency of working musicians dually immersed in elite and popular musical traditions, while shedding new light on McGibbon's significance as an early dual master of Italian and Scots string-playing traditions.

Around 1800 a group of critics worried that new music was in danger of losing its social relevance. In their eyes music had become severed from the religious practices which had formerly provided its purpose and now exhibited a mercurial style that threatened its intelligibility, leading to a host of anxieties about its role in the contemporary world. This article argues that these concerns form the basis of an elegiac discourse of musical modernity, one resonating with broader philosophical concerns of the period. Taking Hoffmann's ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ as the central text, my narrative explores how he and others sought to rehabilitate modern music in the wake of a perceived social upheaval. This rehabilitation chiefly occurred at the hands of critics, who approached the complexities of new musical works by attempting to elucidate them through analysis. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony belongs in this narrative as a characteristic attempt to secure new music's meaning.

An unprecedented shift in the portrayal of Cupid took place in the Spanish mythological zarzuela during the years surrounding the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). For the first time ever, Cupid was depicted not as a god of chaste or erotic love, but as a god at war with other deities. And in every work, a female actor-singer, not a male performer, played the fiery but mournful character. In this article I first explore the cultural understanding of Cupid in early eighteenth-century Spain as articulated by Spanish mythographers of the era, and as seen in the earliest representations of Cupid in Spanish theatre. I then investigate the intersection of myth, allegory, war and music theatre in a case study – the zarzuela Las nuevas armas de amor (Love's New Weapons, 1711) – suggesting that in this work Cupid functioned as an allegorical representation of the Spanish king, and that the deity's struggles for power mirrored the monarch's plight during a time of great political instability. Moreover, I argue that the pre-existing local theatrical practice of cross-dressing allowed for the portrayal of a defeated and sobbing Cupid in the zarzuela.

Large-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century: Les deux chasseurs et la laitière (1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history of Les deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, like Les deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?

The connection of music to scientific exploration in late Enlightenment London can be considered from various perspectives, perhaps most evidently through the binary of amateur–professional. These two realms intersected within natural philosophical observation, a practice that often served concurrently as entertainment and as study. The development of scientific instruments for the observation of various phenomena appeared in both professional and amateur contexts, contributing to technological growth and research. Natural philosopher Tiberius Cavallo (1749–1809) and his 1788 article on musical temperament (‘Of the Temperament of Those Musical Instruments, in Which the Tones, Keys, or Frets, are Fixed, as in the Harpsichord, Organ, Guitar, &c’) provide a captivating example of amateur interest overlapping effectively with the professional domain; as an amateur musician and professional scientist, Cavallo observed equal temperament in both mathematical and aesthetic terms. Consideration of his work promotes a more nuanced view of London as a place where scientific and musical ideas could meet and be ‘instrumentalized’, emphasizing the city's status as a vibrant arena for the interaction of scientific exploration, artistic endeavour and professional identities. In this sense, Cavallo's work on temperament was not merely a scientific activity; it reflected technological change during a stimulating period of scientific and musical progress in late eighteenth-century London. For example, instrument builders were actively developing ways to improve pitch control and tuning stability, as witnessed by numerous British patents for harp mechanisms, the addition of flute keys and keyboard construction.

Although Fedele Fenaroli's partimento and counterpoint pedagogy has been the subject of a number of recent publications, several aspects of its organization and contents require further research. Thanks to the recent discovery of multiple manuscripts, I am able to elaborate on two of them in this article. First I deal with Fenaroli's partimento curriculum. As several manuscripts illustrate, Fenaroli appears to have maintained a progressive method consisting of four parts (or books) almost throughout his entire career. A partimento student had to work through the first three books successively, which served as Fenaroli's basic partimento course. When these three books had been satisfactorily assimilated, the student could proceed with book 4, which was clearly intended by Fenaroli as his advanced partimento course. Secondly, I engage with Fenaroli's views on dissonance treatment and place them in the broader context of eighteenth-century Neapolitan pedagogy, and thoroughbass and music theory treatises in general.