Recently I was advising a small group of students who were preparing to take the national exam that would qualify them for the position of music teacher at a secondary school. One part of the exam involves a comparative commentary on three musical works relating to a topic chosen by the candidate. Everyone involved in music education in France knows that the Music Department at the National Education Ministry (Inspection Générale de la Musique) has always been concerned with combatting social and cultural inequalities, and that classical music must be presented to younger generations with the least possible chronological and historical context in the name of cultural relativism. (This remarkable ideal, filtered through each successive stage of the educational system, sometimes inspires students to write that Louis XIV ordered Lully to compose operas in order to reduce the nobility to slavery – a radical reading of Norbert Elias indeed. But this is not my topic here.)

Quo vadis, eighteenth-century music analysis? This is the question I wish to pose in 2017, a year marking some notable anniversaries. It has been ten years since the appearance of Robert Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), a book that opened up a wide range of new perspectives on eighteenth-century music and simultaneously shook Anglo-American music analysis at a time when it was on the look-out for post-Schenkerian alternatives. Likewise, 2017 is the tenth anniversary of Giorgio Sanguinetti's presentation on Neapolitan partimenti at the European Music Analysis Conference in Freiburg, where he addressed an audience that was similarly looking for answers in a post-Riemannian vacuum (but already familiar with diverse approaches to schemata, or Satzmodelle). Thirdly, and on a personal note, 2017 also marks a decade since the publication of an article by Ludwig Holtmeier (‘Heinichen, Rameau, and the Italian Thoroughbass Tradition: Concepts of Tonality and Chord in the Rule of the Octave’, Journal of Music Theory 51/1 (2007), 5–49) that guided me through Fedele Fenaroli's partimenti by using the ‘rule of the octave’, a first encounter that profoundly and irreversibly affected the way I perform, hear, teach, conceptualize and contextualize eighteenth-century music. Finally, it should be said that all this happened fifteen years after Thomas Christensen described partimenti and ‘The Règle de l'Octave in Theory and Practice’ (Acta Musicologica 64 (1992), 91–117) in a forward-looking article that celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday in 2017.

It is well known that the instrumentation of eighteenth-century chamber music was highly flexible; composers frequently adapted their own works for a variety of instruments, and players often used whatever combinations they had available. One type of arrangement little used today but attested to in both verbal description and musical manuscripts of the period is that of trios and other chamber works adapted for two keyboard instruments. Players often executed such keyboard-duo arrangements on instruments with different mechanisms and timbres – for example, harpsichord and piano together – thus capturing something of the variety of timbres available in a mixed chamber ensemble.

Keyboard duos were often played by members of a single family, or by teachers and students together, a practice that allowed for the construction of a sense of ‘sympathy’ – mutual understanding through shared experience and sentiment – between the players. These players shared common physical gestures at the instruments, which reinforced the emotional content of the music; this fostered the formation of a sympathetic connection even as players retained their individual identities.

Gluck has been hailed as the ‘first truly international opera composer’, but his internationalism is always understood in strictly European terms. This article seeks to expand our understanding of Gluck's international scope beyond Europe and specifically into the French colonial Caribbean. Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) enjoyed the most vibrant theatrical tradition of the entire Caribbean in the eighteenth century, and three of Gluck's Paris operas that had premiered in the 1770s were given there in the 1780s. Performances of these works are examined in turn, with an emphasis on performance practices in the context of local conditions, both social and practical. Gluck's operas are seen to have reached a mixed, though segregated, audience that incorporated some free people of colour, including a small number of black people, and the first documented performance of a singer of colour in a Gluck opera is uncovered. Our understanding of Gluck's reach, reception and status is thus broadened and deepened in some significant ways, and some new areas of research are opened up.

While Rameau alluded to contemporary notions of musical expression in his theoretical writings, he devoted little effort to explaining how music acted on listeners expressively. This article reviews Rameau's writings to establish and clarify his beliefs about this process, finding that they less resemble what we would think of as the leading edge of contemporary thought – exemplified by Dubos, Estève and the Encyclopedists – than they do the earlier descriptions of Descartes and Malebranche. Following long-standing philosophical tradition, the latter privileged the passion wonder (admiration) as the structural basis for all passions. Rameau in turn staged his theoretical discoveries and responses to music in precisely the same way, as an initial, constitutive experience of wonder that then merged mimetically with subtler passionate responses. He assumed similar responses for those who listened to music. We can attribute Rameau's preference for an old-fashioned explanation of the passions to several factors. Notably, according to the principles of his theoretical system, he needed to isolate and describe music as an object that acted on the beholder's mind, whereas later writers concerned themselves more with the beholder's sensory and emotional responses. Moreover, Rameau's argument was an effective response to conservative music critics, who attacked him for introducing overly sensual elements into music.

Samuel Howard (?1710–1782) has long been a familiar inhabitant of the diligent footnotes of Handel biographers. A choirboy in the Chapel Royal, he was a member of Handel's chorus and the composer of much theatre music of his own; he later became organist of both St Bride's, Fleet Street and nearby St Clement Danes, Strand, where he was buried in 1782. His most significant and ambitious work is his fine orchestrally accompanied anthem ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made’, published posthumously in 1792 with an impressive title page detailing the performance of the work ‘at St Margaret's Church before the governors of the Westminster Infirmary, in the Two Universities, and upon many other Publick Occasions in different parts of the Kingdom’. This article confirms for the first time that this work originated as Howard's doctoral exercise; contemporary press reports and information in the University archives make clear that the composer's doctorate was linked to the provision of music for the Duke of Grafton's installation as Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1769. Surviving information about this event offers a glimpse of musical life in Cambridge on a comparable scale to the much better reported proceedings upon similar occasions in Oxford. This evidence then serves as a starting-point from which to consider Howard's later prominence as a director of high-profile public performances in London and the provinces.

William Bates, who died in 1778, was a prolific and, in his day, successful composer of stage music and concert songs performed in London in the 1760s and 1770s; but a scarcity of biographical information and uncertainties over his position vis-à-vis the new style introduced in the early 1760s by J. C. Bach and others have tended to disadvantage him in modern commentary. New facts about his life and background together with a recently discovered sale catalogue reveal him to have been a cultivated man of wide interests, with a sympathy for the ‘ancient’ style. His most substantial musical contribution, as regards its potential for modern revival, is a remarkable set of six concertos for strings with oboes, bassoons and horns (plus, in two concertos, trumpets and timpani) published in 1762. These concertos, related in style to contemporary overtures to stage works but making much greater use of concertante writing, form a high point in a peculiarly British tradition of concertos employing French horns. The cult of the horn in Georgian Britain that nourished this tradition is the subject of extended discussion.

We often read about the castrato Senesino's arrogant, self-absorbed personality, especially in relation to Handel and his London years. Concerns about Senesino's difficult character spread in London even before his arrival in September 1720. That this preoccupied the singer is shown in his correspondence with Giuseppe Riva, which reveals that Senesino was also apprehensive about working with the composer. Evidence shows that Senesino sought to control his debut through the choice of and involvement in a production of the opera Arsace. The selection of a libretto that exploits a subject drawn from British history, the poetic and dramaturgical revisions made by Rolli to the original text from 1715, and the changes and additions to Orlandini's original score all brought Senesino to the fore. That Senesino's voice stood as a strong argument in his rhetorical strategy may not be surprising; the aria type that he chose and the avoidance of ostentatious ornamentation are unexpected, however, and may reveal a more subtle plan of self-fashioning.

In the autumn of 1790 Mozart undertook the penultimate journey of his life to participate in the coronation of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt am Main. His attendance and performance at this significant imperial gathering were an investment designed to improve his fortunes. But Mozart's gamble failed. Though it was a key political event, and despite its significance as one of Mozart's final sojourns, not much more is known about the music of the Frankfurt coronation. This article offers a new understanding of Leopold II's imperial accession, positing the coronation as a vibrant context for music culture. Contrary to narratives that position Mozart's concert above all others, I argue that this was far from the case according to his contemporaries. During the coronation festivities the city hosted three theatre companies and many celebrated musicians, including Ludwig Fischer, Johann Hässler, Vincenzo Righini, Antonio Salieri and Georg Vogler, among others. Frankfurt was indeed filled with musicians who cooperated with and competed against one another in the hope of attracting substantial audiences comprised of the Empire's elite. Yet for Mozart, whose concert was poorly advertised and unfortunately timed, this competition proved too intense. By investigating the musical and political events of Leopold II's imperial coronation, I assert that Mozart's investment, which had the potential to alter his life forever, was unsuccessful in part because of a rumour that caused his desired audience to leave Frankfurt temporarily the very morning his performance took place.

Antonio Vivaldi's cycle of violin concertos dramatizing the four seasons marked a substantial shift in the way that the seasons were depicted in the arts. Moving away from religious and mythological allegory, they exemplify a growing interest in descriptive representation of nature's power and in humanity's complex physical and emotional relationship with elements beyond its control. Positing new connections to Arcadian reform ideals of verisimilitude, this article addresses important questions concerning Vivaldi's pairing of sonnets with concertos and the aesthetic factors behind his choice of narrative topics to depict in the music. The article also demonstrates how Vivaldi used diverse textures and sonorities to create powerful contrasts that heighten the emotional impact of the aural imagery while underlining recurring expressive and pictorial motifs throughout the cycle. These last aspects, in particular, provide a new understanding of the historical significance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons as a powerful demonstration of both the expressive potential of the concerto genre and the still underappreciated art of orchestration during the early eighteenth century.

Beethoven's sketch leaves are so numerous and at times so impenetrable that they are bound to throw up the occasional surprise when studied in detail. Around ten thousand such pages survive; they are generally difficult to decipher, and often more than one work appears on a single page. Nevertheless, few surprises will have been as unexpected as the identification of a fragment of a little-known Bach cantata amongst Beethoven's early sketches.

Giuseppe Sarti's opera buffa Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode was one of the great operatic successes of the late eighteenth century. First performed in Milan in September 1782, the opera was quickly taken up by theatres in other cities. In 1783 it began a long run at the Burgtheater in Vienna, where it had been performed more than sixty times by 1790. The opera was produced everywhere from Barcelona to Copenhagen, from Rouen to St Petersburg, in languages including German, French and Danish. By 1800 Fra i due litiganti had been given more than eighty productions across all of Europe.