In a letter written in late August 1789 to the Parisian publisher Jean-Georges Sieber, Joseph Haydn either agreed or proposed that one of four new symphonies under negotiation ‘should be called The National Symphony’. In the end, Haydn never wrote any of the four symphonies for Sieber, yet the very notion of naming one of them in honour of the French nation at this particular juncture, six weeks after the fall of the Bastille, raises intriguing questions about the composer's political sympathies, his knowledge of recent events in France, the concept of the ‘national’ in contemporaneous discourse, the communal tone of the symphony as a genre and the strategy of marketing a new work by associating it with a term full of political implications. Reports of the French Revolution transmitted to Vienna in July and August 1789 had not sugar-coated the gravity or violence of the situation in Paris, making the proposed title all the more remarkable. While we can only speculate as to what form the ‘National’ Symphony might have taken, the idea itself points to the emerging potential of the symphony as a vehicle of political ideas.

The elevation of the Portuguese Royal Chapel to the rank of Patriarchal Church in 1716 was part of a larger process of ‘Romanization’ – that is, of assimilation and adaptation of Roman models within Portuguese music and culture. This involved the training of numerous chaplain-singers and young Portuguese composers in Rome, as well as the importation of chant books, ministers, singers and even the maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia, Domenico Scarlatti. According to the anonymous ‘Breve rezume de tudo o que se canta en cantochaõ, e canto de orgaõ pellos cantores na santa igreja patriarchal’ (Brief summary of all that is sung in plainchant and polyphony by the singers at the holy Patriarchal Church) – a document written at some point between 1722 and 1724 – the repertory of the Patriarchal Church was a varied mixture of works by thirty-two identified composers, mostly Italian and Portuguese, from a period ranging from the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Some of the repertory for Holy Week is also extant in three large choirbooks prepared by a copyist from the Patriarchal Church in 1735 and 1736 for use in the Ducal Chapel in Vila Viçosa. These include ‘modern’ additions to late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century pieces and also some curious reworkings, made with the purpose of adjusting older works to newly ‘Romanized’ performance conditions and aesthetic ideals. The sources examined in this article thus show that Portuguese ‘Romanization’, far from being a simple transplantation of ideas and practices from the centre to the periphery, was a dynamic process of acculturation and adaptation rooted in emerging forms of historical consciousness.

Between 1784 and 1809 more than forty composers dedicated works to Haydn, resulting in the largest group of offerings to a single composer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whilst Horst Walter has suggested that certain of these works reveal the ways in which composers received Haydn's style, a study of the larger collection of dedications illuminates the broader nature of Haydn's fame and the ways in which other composers and their publishers both contributed to and capitalized on that fame. Making Haydn into a kind of pseudo-patron, the title-pages, advertisements and dedicatory epistles for these works allow for an exchange of various types of capital ranging from the material to the symbolic, ultimately enabling both dedicator and dedicatee to improve their reputations in the eyes of the consuming public.

Among the many unique features of the vocal music of Johann Sebastian Bach is the use of what has been called ‘free’ or ‘modified’ da capo form in roughly a third of the movements that have an overall ternary design. Bach's reason for adopting this distinctive form, used in duets and choruses as well as arias, has been the subject of frequent speculation by scholars, who have found precedents in works by Alessandro Scarlatti and parallel examples in the music of Handel. Through close analysis of text and music in numerous examples, this study demonstrates that Bach's version of this design is a defining element of his style; although it resembles early types of sonata form, it is distinct from anything in the music of his predecessors and contemporaries. No single explanation can account for his use of it, but most examples demonstrate Bach's close attention to particular formal or rhetorical features of their poetic texts. I propose a new term, ‘through-composed da capo form’, for this design. Its prominence in Bach's music is a product of his emergence as a composer during a period when German poets and musicians were adopting new approaches derived from the Italian tradition of opera seria but had not yet reduced them to formulae.

This article investigates the theme of statuary animation within pantomime and language reform, particularly in Milan between the 1760s and the 1790s. Its focal point is a little-known work created by Florentine choreographer Gasparo Angiolini for the new Teatro alla Scala in 1782: his didactic ‘philosophical ballet’ La vendetta spiritosa, based on the Traité des sensations by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (in Venice the work was given as La vendetta ingegnosa o La statua di Condilliac [sic]). During the last decades of his career, informed by French linguistic theory and by Milanese writers such as the Verri brothers and Cesare Beccaria, Angiolini aimed to create an unmediated music-gestural language that could overcome linguistic and even political boundaries. The project had significant implications for the use of representative sound, both in music and in language. I examine the development of the impulse towards gestural mimesis and through-composition within scores for the danza parlante, including by Angiolini himself.

In his autobiographical sketch Joseph Haydn claims to have learned the ‘true fundamentals of composition’ from Nicola Porpora. Porpora (1686–1768) was a student of Gaetano Greco at the Conservatorio dei Poveri in Naples and later himself became a maestro at the Conservatorio di San Onofrio, where Francesco Durante also taught. That Haydn's teacher Porpora came from the centre of the partimento tradition, which has attracted increased scrutiny by music theorists in recent years, justifies examining Haydn's relationship with this long-standing pedagogical method and compositional practice. In this essay I analyse the sources that shed light on Porpora's relationship to the partimento tradition and on Haydn's relationship to Porpora. Focusing on partimento counterpoint, I examine several of Haydn's fugues in contrasting genres in order to illustrate how the principles of thoroughbass and partimento help to explain particular structural procedures in Haydn's music, as well as the compositional processes that produced them.

This article traces the financial profile of Johann Friedrich Fasch, Kapellmeister of Anhalt-Zerbst from 1722 to 1758, in order to gain a better understanding of how an early eighteenth-century German court musician tried to manage his money. Factors that contributed to his debt problems ranged from personal choices, matters of faith and the need to maintain a certain standard of living as director of music, to the varying degrees of financial support offered by his employers. The period during which he first began incurring debts – his student days in Leipzig – will be examined prior to viewing his professional career path through the lens of finance, beginning with Fasch's first official appointment in Gera in 1715 and ending with his death in Zerbst in 1758. Finally, understanding the extent to which Fasch's personal debts affected his productivity as a composer means not only dealing with the ‘Music-Wechsel’ that he organized and the contents of the court's ‘Concert-Stube’ music inventory from 1743, but also considering Fasch's overall work ethic and integrity as a musician.

In 1787 Artaria, Haydn's publisher in Vienna, issued three versions of The Seven Last Words: the original orchestral version, a quartet arrangement prepared by the composer and a keyboard arrangement sanctioned by him. A year later, in September 1788, Artaria issued three of the recent ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 84, 85 and 86, in an arrangement for quartet. While the quartet version of The Seven Last Words has always been accepted as part of the canon, the three quartet arrangements of the symphonies have been ignored. Sympathetic consideration of a range of evidence, including the bibliographical, historical and text-critical, suggests that Haydn may have been the author of these three quartets.