One of the first occasions I saw an opera lit (or partially lit) with candles was a staging of Rameau's Castor et Pollux at the Estates Theatre in Prague. Despite many imperfections, the effect – pardon the upcoming pun – was electric: the upward throw of light from the footlights, the sideways throw of light from the torchères and the variety of shadows created in the upper area of the proscenium were a revelation. Until recently, an often-given solution to historical theatre lighting was to invoke the Drottningholm candle (and related technologies), a device with a synthetic flame that hovers according to the heat generated by the light source, used at the baroque theatre outside Stockholm.

While recent studies have explored the significance of the Polish style in the music of Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach, and the importance of Polish dances in Dresden has long been recognized, the eighteenth-century German polonaise remains a largely neglected area of inquiry. The restoration of the library of the Singakademie zu Berlin in 2000 has made it possible to explore an important collection of mostly unica sources of music by Saxon composers from c1740 to 1763 amassed by the Meissen porcelain mosaic artist Carl Jacob Christian Klipfel (1727–1802). Klipfel's collection includes music by Johann Christian Roellig (born 1716), possibly the most prolific composer of polonaises in Dresden during this period and one of the earliest German composers to write mazurs (mazurkas) in instrumental works. The first-hand knowledge of the Polish style that musicians employed by the Saxon electoral court and Count von Brühl gained as a result of frequent journeys to Warsaw resulted in Dresden polonaises that are relatively un-‘Germanized’. This article examines the social and musical contexts of the polonaise in mid-eighteenth-century Dresden, including the repertoire of the annual Redouten (masked balls), then examines the polonaises and mazurkas of Roellig and his contemporaries, including Johann Georg Knechtel, Georg Gebel and Gottlob Harrer. A survey of the use of the polonaise in Redoutentänze, symphonies and partitas reveals significant differences in style and structure between these genres.

In his Magazin der Musik, Carl Friedrich Cramer reported that C. P. E. Bach's Fantasia in A major, h278 (1782), was composed during the agonies of gout. Tapping into a reported epidemic of this patrician malady among men of letters, Cramer's anecdote invoked rich associations of sequestered suffering, withdrawal from public life, the pleasures of the table, genius, sexual (im)potency and humour. Reflecting contemporary nerve-based theories of sensation, Cramer aligned different types of physical and mental pain with specific musical gestures. In so doing, he did more than indulge his hermeneutic imagination: he suggested a connection between Bach's solo keyboard music and the experience of embodiment. The seemingly abstract gestures of improvisation were linked dialectically to the corporeal. Behind the specifics of Cramer's reading is a conviction that this kind of music ‘knows’ about the body, as well as the mind, and that it moves between gestures suggestive of thinking, speaking, feeling and corporeal sensation. Analysis of the fantasia, and Bach's letters, supports Cramer's reading.

When Beethoven praised Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, he emphasized the multitude of musical styles and genres to be found in the opera, ranging from folk tunes to arias to hymn-like textures. The most extraordinary stylistic and generic allusions occur during the ‘Song of the Armoured Men’ in Act 2. This movement owes its extraordinary character to a ‘baroque’ accompaniment and a Lutheran-hymn quotation, the source and meaning of which continue to be discussed in Mozart research. While scholars have often suggested that Mozart took the hymn melody from Johann Philipp Kirnberger's Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik (where it is quoted without its text), Reinhold Hammerstein argues that because the composer also appears to have known the hymn's text, he must have encountered the melody elsewhere. This article, based on a study of Mozart's sketches for Die Zauberflöte and a close reading of Kirnberger's writings, supports the thesis that Mozart borrowed the hymn melody – and significant details of his setting of it in the ‘Song of the Armoured Men’ – from Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik.

This article examines various eighteenth-century sources to determine whether they confirm the present practice of calling a first-floor hall of the Fertőd (Eszterháza) palace the ‘music room’. While the answer is essentially negative, we learn that the neighbouring ceremonial hall was used by Empress Maria Theresia for a banquet with some music-making in 1773, and that two more spaces on the ground floor served regularly as the ‘summer music halls’. So where did the ‘real’, quality concerts take place? A whole body of documentary evidence clearly shows that the accademies took place in the opera house or Grosses Theater. Much of this evidence refers to the first opera house, which burnt down in 1779. The practice apparently continued in the new, bigger 1781 opera house, but by then the number of concerts would have been reduced substantially, owing to the Prince's growing addiction to opera. A survey of Haydn's last symphonies and concertos composed for domestic use confirms that regular concerts could not have taken place later than 1783 or, possibly, 1784. However, a long-neglected remark in a contemporary witness report provides direct proof of the inclusion of symphonies in the course of opera performances.

Mozart's bawdy canons and use of scatalogical parlance in his letters have been described as indicative of a personality given to crass expression. Moreover, his association with Emanuel Schikaneder's supposedly dissolute Theater auf der Wieden, a boisterous venue for German stage works, has been taken as further evidence of his profligate tendencies. A review of the original source materials reveals that these views are apocryphal, originating after Mozart's death and embellished in nineteenth-century commentary and scholarship. Examples of even raunchier canons, composed by musicians with connections to Mozart, Schikaneder and the Theater auf der Wieden, provide new insight into the genre. An examination of surviving bawdy Viennese canons in their social context, together with a reconsideration of the Mozart family letters and attitudes toward vulgarity in Viennese popular theatre, reveals that lewd expressions on the stage were relatively uncommon in this period, that Mozart's use of scatalogical language was relatively mild for the time and that accounts of the composer's debauchery in his last years have little evidentiary basis.