In the inaugural issue of this journal James Webster offered us a thoughtful meditation on the hoary, and seemingly intractable, problem of configuring the eighteenth century so that it might constitute an intelligible subject of musicological research (‘The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?’, Eighteenth-Century Music 1/1 (2004), 47–60). Clearly, we have come a long way from the time when eighteenth-century music was oriented almost exclusively around the grand Olympian peaks of High Baroque and Viennese Classical styles. If these dominating polarities have not entirely disappeared from our view, they certainly seem to loom far less large in our remapped musical landscape. Indeed, I can think of no other century in music history whose stylistic contours have been so dramatically redrawn as those of the eighteenth century. Of course we would err in the other direction by depicting – to continue my geographical metaphor – only a flattened, homogeneous musical landscape in the eighteenth century, covered with galant-type foliage nurtured in the hothouse of Italian opera buffa. As Webster has convincingly argued, there are still major protruberances jutting out from the first and final thirds of the century that need somehow to be taken into account in our surveys. Still, there is no question that the revised topographies little resemble the one we learned (and still might teach) from our textbooks. Some major tectonic shifts have taken place in eighteenth-century musical studies, even if those shifts have yet to settle down fully into any figuration that enjoys consensus among music historians.

This article explores the relationship between Drury Lane’s most popular eighteenth-century masque, Comus (1738), and the contemporary fashions in politics, literature and recreation that informed it. On one level, the masque was a revival honouring Milton, the author of its libretto, in a manner consistent with his eighteenth-century reception: as a genius whose merit was just being recognized, and as a patriot hero whose incorruptibility mirrored the aspirations of those pledging allegiance to ‘British’ values.

On another level, however, the pastoral entertainment seems to have been mainly concerned with popular notions of female propriety and the challenges posed to those notions by the production’s star soprano, Kitty Clive. Titillation was assured by interpolated musical scenes which had little to do with the libretto but much to do with composer Thomas Arne’s mastery of the discursive techniques of ballad farce. The personality cult around Clive, the ‘Goddess of Mirth’, imposed upon the masque her most celebrated musical characterizations (both in the type of song and in the specific lyrics sung) to grant full voice to her flaunting of social codes.

The overwhelming success of Comus caused the masque to be reinvented as a public diversion at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens by its owner, John Tyers. A Milton statue was erected in the gardens to preside over ‘musical downs’, where instrumentalists played hidden behind bushes to the north of ‘The Temple of Comus’. Recontextualizing Comus at Vauxhall, Tyers created a site (nicknamed the ‘Rendezvous of Cupid’) in which lovers could further explore the transgressions of Mrs Clive’s musical scenes within a simulated pastoral myth.

Despite Rousseau’s condemnation of the ‘progress’ of civilization and his suspicions concerning the arts, he none the less articulates a redemptive role for aesthetic experience within modern life. In choosing music as his privileged aesthetic object, he suggests the possibility of an eighteenth-century aesthetic based on experience that anticipates later developments in romanticism and modernism. And by locating the possibility of redemption within aesthetic experience couched in terms of musical performance, he articulates a modern role for the work of art that looks forward to nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theory from the German Romantics to the Frankfurt School.

Handel’s Theodora (1750, libretto Thomas Morell), an oratorio about a Christian martyr, does not have the religious-political import of his other English oratorios or the literary-critical stature of his English secular dramas and odes. A ‘sport’ among Handel’s oratorios, until recently Theodora resisted whole-hearted appreciation and elicited widely differing summaries of its meaning. This is the first extended study to be published since the chapter in Winton Dean’s Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques of 1959. Drawing on guidelines proposed in the appendix ‘Approaches to Oratorio’, the article examines the libretto’s sources, dramatization and relation to the librettist’s interests; positions the work with regard to the religious ideas of its time, identifying its religious-historical standpoint; and describes its kinship with contemporary drama, fiction and aesthetics. Connoisseurs among Handel’s audience appreciated Theodora but ‘the Town’ did not. It is suggested that both Morell and Handel were aiming for inclusiveness, comprehensiveness and breadth of appeal, and in so doing produced a work – more ambiguous and conspicuously open to interpretation than the biblical oratorios – that demands the listener’s active and discriminating engagement.

In 1755 a small vocal instruction book dedicated to the King’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was published in Paris under the name of [Jean-Antoine] Bérard. His role in this work was challenged a year later by l’abbé Jean Blanchet, who published a greatly enlarged version of Bérard’s book, claiming that he was its true author. Up to now, the lack of definitive source material has prevented a resolution of this question. New evidence clarifies its puzzling aspects, enabling us to reach a plausible conclusion. Investigating this matter leads also to insights in other areas, including the original meaning of the term amateur, the first known presentation of diaphragm breathing in print, the quality of singing at the Paris Opéra, contemporary views on the overuse of embellishment and audience behaviour.

The theory of musical topoi (or topics) has emerged in recent decades as a powerful tool for the analysis of musical expression within tonal repertories. Largely originating in Leonard Ratner’s ground-breaking treatise Classic Music from 1980, it has since been considerably developed and extended by some of his students, especially Wye Allanbrook and Kofi Agawu. The theory has also stimulated considerable interest from music semioticians such as Robert Hatten, Márta Grabócz and Raymond Monelle, who find it a major resource for the investigation of extra-musical referentiality and meaning. Indeed, topical analysis may well be considered one of the success stories of modern musicology.

Three posthumous documents not taken into account in the secondary literature on Mozart may offer insight into the last few years of the composer’s life. While these reminiscences do not solve any mysteries, they could eventually help to shed new light on significant but as yet unresolved biographical questions.