Daniel Heartz was the first musicologist to link John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) with opéras comiques en vaudevilles, light musical theatre entertainments popular at the annual Paris fairs. Other scholars such as Edmond Gagey and Calhoun Winton had also suggested that French comédies en vaudevilles might have been models for Gay's ‘original’ new genre of the ballad opera, but were unable to find compelling evidence for their suspicions. This article shows that the music of Polly (1729), Gay's sequel to The Beggar's Opera, can finally provide a link between ballad operas and the comédies en vaudevilles, as four of the unidentified French airs in the opera can now be identified as popular French vaudevilles. I investigate the fruitful exchange between Paris and London in the early eighteenth century (despite prevailing anti-French sentiment in Britain), focusing on musical borrowings, translations and the performers who worked in both cities. We shall see that ballad opera and the comédies en vaudevilles share common ground, including vaudevilles finals, common tunes sung by actor-singers and the use of musical parody and double entendre. A closer examination of Gay's (and his contemporaries') knowledge of the comédies en vaudevilles illuminates previously unknown French contributions to eighteenth-century English popular musical theatre, and demonstrates the unique way in which French practices were appropriated in early eighteenth-century England.

Commentators have long sought models for the decision by Bach and his anonymous librettist to spread the Christmas Oratorio's narration over twelve days. None of the most commonly proposed models can be shown with certainty to have been performed over more than two days; it appears that the supposed tradition of multi-day Christmas oratorios is invented. In fact there were models for this feature of the Christmas Oratorio: Passion settings designed for or adapted to presentation over Holy Week or all of Lent. The practice is documented in five places concentrated in Saxony and Thuringia and involved both newly composed and older works in both liturgical and devotional contexts. A new source reveals a previously unrecognized performance of this kind, of Reinhard Keiser's Brockes setting in Erfurt. Bach is likely to have known of this performance and others of the type, and they were probably a significant influence on the organization and conception of his Christmas piece performed ‘die Heilige Weyhnacht über’ in 1734/1735.

The spread of Protestant Christianity to Indonesia and Sri Lanka in the early modern period involved large-scale translation projects and, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the publication of metrical psalms in languages spoken by local communities: Portuguese, Malay, Tamil and Sinhala. Selected psalms from the Genevan Psalter, as well as complete versions, were translated and published in South and Southeast Asia on several occasions in the eighteenth century, representing the earliest printing of Western staff notation in Jakarta and Colombo. These psalters were issued in numerous editions, and some were prefaced with a short explanation of the musical scale. Christian communities in Indonesia and Sri Lanka appear to have used the psalters regularly in religious devotions and services. This article explores the processes involved in the translation, production and distribution of these psalters, considering musical and cultural aspects of their adoption into local communities.

Music is routinely held to be in a privileged position to reflect a particular historical consciousness of time and human temporality. This notion appears itself to be historical, in that it arises from the ‘temporalization’ of time widely attested to have occurred in Western Europe during the eighteenth century. Accordingly, numerous commentators have argued that music becomes increasingly temporalized across the century. Yet if music may convey human temporality without mediation, it remains unclear to what extent ‘pre-temporalized’ works from the early eighteenth century may be taken as temporally significant, given that the notion of time is not supposed to be such an issue during this period. This essay examines the methodological issues attendant to the claim for music's intrinsic historical temporality through an examination of a piece that appears explicitly to thematize the idea of time: Handel's oratorio-cantata Il trionfo del Tempo, which exists in three different versions spanning the fifty years between 1707 and 1757. Although my reading raises questions about the epistemological security of any claim for music's (or indeed language's) expression of historical temporality ‘as it really was’, I argue that a hermeneutic engagement with this problem is both valuable and indeed necessary for understanding music of the period.