It was as a boy of twelve or thirteen that I played the harpsichord for the first time. My early experiences of ensemble playing with the instrument took place with my contemporaries, but primarily with my Dutch teacher at secondary school and his wife, Mr and Mrs Meijer. Both were amateur recorder players, and as a young amateur harpsichordist I would accompany them. At first I would diligently play the realized basso-continuo parts, such as the ones often found in twentieth-century editions. Sometimes it was clear that one could make changes to what was in the realizations, informed by one's own insights, but my insights were not formed at that stage and I did not know where to begin. Very soon I found these realized parts boring. One day, while drinking a glass of wine (one of my first), Mr Meijer asked me, ‘Have you noticed that under the realized part, there are often figures noted down? Do you dare to play from them?’. After many wrong chords, but in the company of kind people who had also made mistakes themselves, I began to understand the system of figures a little. We played together every Saturday, and very soon I found it more pleasant to play without the chordal realizations. Then one fine Saturday afternoon, I sat down at the harpsichord to find that Mr or Mrs Meijer had taped over the right hand of the realized continuo part with an empty staff! There was no more escaping it now: I was dragged back to the bass line and the figures. After many further Saturday afternoon sessions, the results became more acceptable.

Haydn's D major cello concerto has traditionally been associated with Anton Kraft, a performer in Haydn's orchestra at Eszterháza during the 1780s. Before Haydn's autograph came to light in the 1950s, many authorities had accepted apparent evidence that Kraft was the concerto's composer. Even after the autograph's rediscovery, the seeming connection of the concerto with Kraft appeared so compelling that it was widely assumed he participated in the compositional process. This article demonstrates that Kraft's connection with the concerto was actually fabricated in the 1830s. Contemporary reports show that the concerto was in fact composed for the distinguished virtuoso James Cervetto, who performed it in London in 1784. Both the distinctive characteristics of the concerto, often regarded by commentators as indications of compositional weakness, and also its exceptional technical challenges are here interpreted as responses to Cervetto's singular musical temperament and exceptional proficiency, communicated to Haydn through the commission.

Although the circulation and revision of Italian opera librettos is a well-known aspect of musical life in eighteenth-century Europe, the practice has hardly been touched upon with regard to the Italian oratorio of the same period. Librettist Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) worked in and theorized about both genres, yet his involvement with the oratorio has been little studied. This article addresses three editions of an oratorio libretto by Domenico Canavese. Following versions for Florence (1712) and Pistoia (1714), a third appeared in 1726 in conjunction with a Lenten performance at the Imperial Court Chapel in Vienna. An annotated copy of the 1712 edition from Zeno's library shows that he revised the text for the Viennese performance. His textual changes – some small, some radical – reveal practical, stylistic and dramaturgical concerns. A comparison of the annotated copy with the printed libretto for the 1726 performance and the principal musical source for the new setting by Giuseppe Porsile shows that Zeno's revisions were scrupulously followed.