In eighteenth-century England, painting, poetry and gardening were often labelled the ‘sister arts’. An increasing interest in English landscape scenes and an emerging taste for ‘nature tourism’ gave rise to the ‘picturesque’ movement. Contemporary writers seldom considered English music as part of this ‘sisterhood’, however, or treated music as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. When the picturesque was discussed in connection with music, eighteenth-century critics tended to use the concept to explain the tactics of novelty and surprise encountered in German instrumental music. Plays with regularity and expectation were analogous to the surprises and irregularities of picturesque ‘beauty spots’ – natural features studied and imitated by contemporary landscape gardeners. Accordingly, recent musicological studies of the picturesque have also preferred to emphasize its kinship with the unconventional or subversive formal schemas in instrumental music by German composers.

This article addresses the silent aporia in this discourse: the apparent absence of any participation in the picturesque movement by composers from England, the country most closely associated with this aesthetic. Focusing on the pictorialism and pastoralism of eighteenth-century English song texts and their musical treatment, this article reveals previously ignored connections between the veneration of national landscape and English vocal music. In consequence, the glee – a decidedly marginal genre in traditional eighteenth-century music historiography – emerges at the centre of contemporary aesthetic concerns, as the foremost musical vehicle for the expression of a distinctively English, painterly engagement with national landscapes.

The slow movement of Symphony No. 64 in A major, ‘Tempora mutantur’, has long intrigued Haydn scholars on account of its absent cadences and enigmatic form. The Latin title of the symphony is thought to be derived from the epigram by John Owen, a near-contemporary of Shakespeare, and it was used by Elaine Sisman to support her hypothesis that the slow movement formed part of Haydn's incidental music for Shakespeare's Hamlet. The enigma can be explained through an analysis informed by concepts native to eighteenth-century music theory. The absent cadences create instances of ellipsis, a rhetorical figure described by Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and the form plays with a familiar template codified by Heinrich Christoph Koch. This analysis leads to a different interpretation. Rather than suggesting the protagonist of Shakespeare's tragedy, the movement stages a fictive composer in an act of musical comedy not dissimilar to that in Symphony No. 60, ‘Il Distratto’. The title comes not from Owen but from a Latin adage that was incorporated by Owen into his epigram. This adage had been popular in Germany since the Reformation and was then applied by one eighteenth-century music theorist to describe changes of musical conventions.

In October 1799 Beethoven delivered manuscript copies of three new quartets (Op. 18 Nos 1–3) to Prince Lobkowitz. The following year, however, he revised Nos 1 and 2, writing a new slow movement for No. 2 in which little of the original material was retained. The original slow movement was discarded and is now lost, but many sketches for it survive in the sketchbook Grasnick 2. Although these sketches seem disjointed and fragmentary, they represent all seventy-four bars of a complete movement, with some lower parts also indicated for more than half the bars, enabling the movement to be reconstructed in much detail. This lost movement is of great interest, with some striking imitation and modulations in the two contrasting episodes, and an ending that reconciles the opening theme with the stormy second section. The movement is of particular importance since no other lost works completed by Beethoven that are of such substance are known from such a late date.