Since the mid-eighteenth century the fandango has been regarded as the epitome of Spanish cultural identity. It became increasingly popular in instrumental chamber music, as well-known examples by Domenico Scarlatti, Antonio Soler and Luigi Boccherini show. To date, published musicological scholarship has not considered the role of solo violin music in the dissemination of the fandango or the shaping of a ‘Spanish’ musical identity. Now, eight rediscovered pieces – which can be dated to the period 1730–1775 – show that the violin was frequently used to perform fandangos, including stylized chamber-music versions. In addition to offering evidence of the violin's role in the genre, these pieces reveal the hybridization of the fandango with foreign musical traditions, such as the Italian violin sonata and French courtly dances, demonstrating hitherto overlooked negotiations between elite and popular culture in mid-eighteenth-century Spain. Analysis of these works’ musical features challenges traditional discourses on the ‘Spanishness’ of the fandango and, more broadly, on the opposition between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ music in eighteenth-century Spain.

Early in 1789 Charles Burney declined a chance to purchase the score of an unnamed Mozart opera, offered to him by Franz Anton Weber, the composer's uncle-in-law, in an unsolicited letter from Hamburg. For several years Weber had been active in supplying new Viennese repertory to northern cities such as Uppsala, Hanover and Hamburg, but in a career change, he decided to launch an itinerant opera troupe. Among the family members employed in this company was Franz Anton's daughter Jeanette, who, he claimed, had been a pupil of Mozart and Aloysia Lange. In the light of Burney's missed opportunity, my article revisits the well-researched story of Mozart reception at the King's Theatre in the late 1780s.

Winton Dean described Handel's 1740 ode L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato (hwv55), with its pastoral texts by Milton, as ‘perhaps the profoundest tribute Handel ever paid to the land of his adoption’. Yet for the first revival in January 1741, Handel prepared Italian-texted movements for this quintessentially ‘English’ ode in order to accommodate his star castrato that season, Giovanni Battista Andreoni. With the help of Paolo Rolli, a librettist long associated with Handel and a respected translator of Milton, Handel reset four English-texted arias and one accompagnato with Italian contrafacta and composed a completely new Italian accompagnato and bravura aria for Andreoni, to be performed before the very last chorus. While these Italian-texted movements in macaronic Handel revivals are often either neglected by Handel scholars or dismissed as unfortunate compromises, a textual and musical analysis of the accompagnato ‘L'insaziabil fantasia’ and the aria ‘Troppo audace’ reveals a quasi-operatic mini-scena that had personal and professional resonances for both Handel and Rolli – an artistic manifesto of sorts on moderation, ambition, imitation and freedom within the transnational mid-eighteenth-century European world of letters and music.

It is generally believed that when the Mozart family arrived in Vienna on 6 October 1762, they initially may have spent a night or two in the inn ‘Zum weißen Ochsen’ on Fleischmarkt, then moved for the remainder of their stay to lodgings on Tiefer Graben, either in a house belonging to Johann Heinrich Ditscher (Otto Erich Deutsch, 1961) or one belonging to Gottlieb Friedrich Fischer (Walter Brauneis, 1991). All modern Mozart biographies transmit either Deutsch's claim or Brauneis's, and many continue to state that the Mozarts stayed at ‘Zum weißen Ochsen’. We have been able to show that none of these claims has any merit, and no primary evidence supports them. The notion that the Mozarts stayed at ‘Zum weißen Ochsen’ can be traced back to an article published in 1860, where it is asserted without evidence; the idea was then popularized in a children's story about Wolfgang. The claim that the Mozarts lodged on Tiefer Graben is based on a fanciful interpretation of a mistranscribed street name in Schiedermair's 1914 edition of Leopold Mozart's letter of 19 October 1762.

Leopold actually wrote that the family lodged in ‘Fierberggaßl’. We argue that this refers to the still-existing Färbergasse, and that the Mozarts may have stayed in a house on that street (today the site of Färbergasse 3), with a long narrow wing fitting Leopold's description of their cramped quarters. We present other new details about this episode in Wolfgang's early life, including the identity of a customs official to whom he played a minuet on the violin, and the literary source of Leopold's remark that their lodgings were ‘1000 Schritt lang und 1. Schritt breit’. We also discuss the history of the house name ‘Zum rothen Säbel’, which is used incorrectly in the Mozart literature; at the time of the Mozarts’ visit in 1762, it referred to the house on Färbergasse in which – we argue – they actually stayed.