Charles Burney had high hopes for Naples. As he trekked ever southward in the summer of 1770, stopping along the way at Turin, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence and Rome, he imagined his approach to Naples as an ascent to a musical Parnassus: ‘My visits to other places were in the way of business, for the performance of a task I had assigned myself; but I came hither animated by the hope of pleasure. And what lover of music could be in the place which had produced the two Scarlattis, Vinci, Leo, Pergolesi, Porpora, Farinelli, Jommelli, Piccinni, Traetta, Sacchini, and innumerable others of the first eminence among composers and performers, both vocal and instrumental, without the most sanguine expectations?’. The recent account of a similar pilgrimage by Jérôme de Lalande had whetted Burney’s appetite for a city the Frenchman described as ‘the principal source of Italian music, of great composers, and of excellent operas’ (Voyage d’un François en Italie, 1769). Moreover, as he progressed down the peninsula he met musician after musician with ties to that Mecca of the south. And so he wrote of his arrival ‘about five o’clock in the evening, on Tuesday, October 16’: ‘I entered this city, impressed with the highest ideas of the perfect state in which I should find practical music’. His reverie, however, was short-lived. Indeed, he quickly formed an aversion to flesh-and-blood Neapolitan vocalists, instrumentalists, their performance practices, the audiences, even the gilding in the churches – in short, most of what he

This article explores and contextualizes the thought of the religious author Richard Roach (1662–1730) from a musical perspective. Roach, a member of the Behmenist, millenarian Philadelphian Society in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, published little that relates directly to the subject of music, and has thus gone virtually unrecognized in this context. Nevertheless, in his more substantial religious oeuvre music emerges as a crucial component of his thought. In addition, his manuscript diaries and papers reveal their author’s interaction with some of Augustan London’s leading musical figures, and his participation in a previously unknown weekly musical meeting.

After reviewing the overall circumstances of Roach’s life and cultural milieu, the article outlines what can at present be established about his musical activities. As I demonstrate, evidence from the diaries clarifies the provenance of an early hymn collection, while other extant sources reveal an unsuspected connection between religious ‘enthusiasm’ and the reception in London of Italian opera. The integral place of music in Roach’s worldview is then related to aspects of his thought ranging from ‘spiritual gender’, eschatology and the Divine Magia to science and politics. Beyond this timely focus on a neglected individual, however, I draw attention to the continuing tendency to overlook contexts such as this one, in which music is a potentially important but not an obviously paramount ingredient. I suggest that conventional conceptions of an emerging ‘public sphere’ – secular, enlightened, rational – need to be modified to take account of supposedly marginalized, ‘enthusiastic’ religious groups such as the Philadelphians. Finally, the absorption of developing musical genres into the background of an age-old model of universal harmony is taken as an instance of the powerful historical interplay between change and continuity.

In December 1798 the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with Naples as its capital, capitulated to the Republican armed forces of France under the direction of General Championnet. The establishment of the First Republic of Naples, the so-called Parthenopean Republic, was brief, lasting only until June 1799. Although fleeting, the Republic nevertheless exercised a profound effect on virtually every facet of contemporaneous society, especially music and theatre. In this essay I examine musical life during the first Republic of Naples (1798–1799), based upon surviving primary sources.

These sources include legal and civic documents, personal diaries and correspondence, employment rosters, newspapers (giornali), opera librettos and musical compositions. They illustrate the effects of the revolution on contemporary artistic practices, specifically with regard to those political and social uses of the operatic stage by the new regime that had consequences for repertory choice, production practices, theatrical management and the artists themselves. The bringing-together of these sources provides not only a detailed chronicle of contemporaneous events, but also significantly furthers present-day understanding of artistic practices during the Republic as well as providing a context for the policies enacted with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

Schubert’s lifelong interest in literature, his close friendships with poets and his preference for lyric poetry in his prolific song settings suggest that his compositional language may be shaped as much by a literary imagination as by musical concerns. This article argues for a close correspondence between Schubert’s late instrumental style and Friedrich Schiller’s conception of the elegiac. In ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ Schiller describes the sentimental poet as having to contend with two conflicting objects, the ideal and actuality, and to represent their opposition either satirically or elegiacally: whereas satire rails against the imperfections of present reality, elegy expresses longing for an ideal that is lost and unattainable. Paradoxically, however, the poet’s longing must take place in a flawed present; the elegiac thus projects not only a disjunction between divided worlds, but also a cyclic temporality in which memory and desire, past and future, are both entwined with the immediacy of present experience. In both Schiller and Schubert, this paradoxical temporal sensibility is often represented by patterns of returning, repetition and circularity. A close reading of Schubert’s Moment musical in A flat major, d780/2, illustrates how Schiller’s conception of the elegiac might be put into analytical practice.

When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach became cantor in Hamburg in 1768, he was faced with a long musical tradition shaped by his ancestor Georg Philipp Telemann. Part of this tradition was the provision of compositions for the annual meeting of the captains of the militia, for whom Telemann had composed several oratorios and serenades. Even though Bach composed only two such Bürgerkapitänsmusiken, they are instructive pieces, showing the relationship between music, culture and politics in late eighteenth-century Hamburg, which at the time was a centre of political discourse. Questions of democracy, the relationship between government and the individual, and the possibilities of ‘patriotic education’ were discussed earlier in Hamburg than in other regions of Germany. It is especially the question of patriotism and of patriotic behaviour that informs Bach’s Bürgerkapitänsmusiken. An analysis both of the librettos (written by Christian Wilhelm Alers) and of Bach’s music shows how the ideas of enlightened patriotic discourse lurk behind these compositions and how they aim to depict an ideal political community.

The purpose of this short essay is to announce a new research project, ‘The Aria in the Italian Libretto in London before 1800’, the aim of which is to list the incipits of all the arias included in Italian-language opera and oratorio librettos printed in London before the turn of the nineteenth century. The notion that an opera libretto may not be the stable text it appears on the page to be is no news to scholars working on opera and musical theatre, who understand perfectly well the possible nature and origins of the sources they use, especially the libretto. At least one hopes they do; but in the case of the last, do they? The seductive lure of the printed page is strong, a lure which has an almost irresistible pull for scholars when there is a score to ‘match’; it becomes even stronger when those working on canonic composers stray out of their chosen territory to look for ‘contemporaneous examples’ from the works of ‘minor composers’, or when there is no thematic catalogue to provide even a basic chart with which to navigate the treacherous waters of the output of even some major eighteenth-century ones. A libretto is, after all, not ‘music’, they say – ‘that’s all very well, but why aren’t you talking about the music?’ – so why worry? Just hurry on to the matching score to identify the ‘composer’s intentions’, and all will be well.

The application of rhetoric to music had special significance in the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth century. The discipline of classical Greek oratory, originally dealing with how to make and execute a speech, formed the basis for the rules of composition and performance, especially in German-speaking lands. During this period the influence of rhetorical principles on all parameters of music was commonplace; not only did a vast number of treatises on rhetoric in music emerge, but the central educational programme taught in the Latin schools and the universities included both musica and rhetorica among the seven artes liberales. That rhetoric was also a fundamental part of Bach’s music-making is shown by the following testimony from Johann Abraham Birnbaum (1702–1748), Professor of Poetics and Rhetoric at Leipzig: ‘He so perfectly understood the resemblance which the performance of a musical piece has in common with rhetorical art that he was listened to with the utmost satisfaction and pleasure when he discoursed of the similarity and agreement between them; but we also wonder at the skilful use he made of this in his works’.

On 7–8 October 1791, about two months before his death, Mozart wrote to his wife: ‘Right after you left I played two games of billiards with Herr Mozart (who wrote the opera for Schikaneder’s theatre); then I sold my nag for 14 ducats; then I had Joseph summon Primus and bring me black coffee, with which I smoked a wonderful pipe of tobacco; then I orchestrated almost all of Stadler’s rondo’. In orchestrating the finale of the Clarinet Concerto under the influence of caffeine and nicotine, Mozart was very much a man of his age.