Mozart’s Milan concert on 12 March 1770 secured for him his first commission to write an opera seria for Italy. The works usually thought to have been performed on this occasion are Fra cento affanni, k88, Misero tu, k73A, and Misero me . . . misero pargoletto, k77. This article offers new evidence for redating Fra cento affanni and argues that neither it nor Misero tu was performed at the event. Instead, the case is made for a programme consisting solely of concert arias with texts from the libretto of Metastasio’s Demofoönte, presented together as a kind of truncated ‘opera in aria’. In support of this hypothesis, the compositional circumstances surrounding Se tutti i mali miei, k83, and Ah più tremar, k71, are reassessed and possible performances by the singers Giuseppe Aprile, Antonia Bernasconi, Guglielmo d’Ettore, Lucrezia Agujari and Carlo Niccolini discussed.

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.

Vienna, 21 August 1773: Mozart signs off a letter to his sister Nannerl in his usual jocular manner: ‘oidda – gnagflow Trazom neiw ned 12 tsugua 3771’. This ‘arseways’ spelling of his signature is an early example of Mozart's well-known fondness for jesting and playing with patterns – spatial, arithmetical, linguistic and musical. Mozart appears to have been especially committed to such games in the 1770s. This was a period when he was also involved with the more serious matter of advancing his career, in which the composition of the first six so-called ‘difficult’ yet also ‘popular’ keyboard sonatas, k279–284, played an integral part. This article reads certain inexplicable gestures in the first sonata, k279, as reflecting Mozart's preoccupation with witty expressions at this time, seemingly as part of his attempt to gain the favour of prospective patrons, publishers and employers. The idiosyncrasies of the sonata result from an intersection of the syntax of phrase-level patterning and large-scale form with the semiosis of musical topics, eliciting laughter or simply a smile. Mozart's communicative strategy is situated in a broader context of the compositional play, wit and humour discussed in late eighteenth-century theory and aesthetics. It also allows us to revisit several implications arising from Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu's Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music of 2008, including the importance of ‘context’ for successful communication, the susceptibility of eighteenth-century artefacts to present-day misreading and the problem of Kenner, Liebhaber and audiences in general.

Several compositions by Haydn from the 1790s appear to reflect, both directly and indirectly, the newly martial and patriotic atmosphere generated by the war with France. While this has long been recognized by music historians – in particular with reference to ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ – Haydn scholars have yet to describe or explain this trend adequately. Only Beethoven scholars have considered this music in any depth, portraying Haydn as the Viennese progenitor of the so-called heroic style. The paradox of this teleological Beethovenian reading of Haydn’s music from the 1790s is that the type of compositions that music historians have traditionally denigrated with the label ‘occasional works’ are portrayed as the ancestors of some of the most vaunted symphonic masterworks in the canon: historically situated music somehow creates the very pieces that supposedly instantiated the historically resistant ‘work concept’ in the period around 1800. Yet this paradox points to a growing tension within Haydn’s public identity and music in the 1790s – a tension between the emerging ideal of aesthetic autonomy and the reality of political appropriation during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, this very tension allowed Haydn and his music to enter political life and political discourse as never before, articulating a relationship between music and contemporary events that cannot adequately be described by the notion of the ‘occasional work’. Haydn’s emergence as a cultural hero, on a par with contemporary war heroes, and the attribution to his music of a sublime power analogous to worldly, even political, powers meant that his music could be heard as possessing a voice in its own right – a voice that could thus speak independently, and persuasively, on behalf of institutions and ideologies, rather than merely echoing them.

In 1814, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his short story, Die Automate. The story concerns the dealings of two friends and a fortune-telling automaton, the Turk, whose prophetic utterances seem to reveal a supernatural and psychic ability. Although the story first appeared in the Allegemeine musikalische Zeitung, it has been mostly overlooked by music scholars. In addition to the lengthy passages dealing with artificial intelligence, the story includes an extensive discussion of music performance and music instruments. The instruments they discuss – machines capable of bringing forth the voice of nature – perhaps appear as fantastical creations of Hoffmann’s imagination. However, he refers to real instruments that played an established role in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture. This period saw the frenzied production of many novel and bizarre instruments such as the euphon, aiuton, aenomochord, xänorphica and the harmonichord. Though these instruments are all but forgotten today, they testify to a widespread preoccupation with timbre and instrumental sonority. The consolidation of the orchestra as a concept, musical body and institution in the eighteenth century went hand in hand with the notion that individual instrumental sonorities had distinct expressive characters. By the early nineteenth century, this idea manifested itself in two distinct traditions: an orchestral one, in which composers increasingly took advantage of the ever-growing palette of instruments, giving rise to the modern concept of orchestration and the romantic symphony, and an instrument-oriented one, in which musicians, scientists and inventors attempted to capture ‘ideal sonorities’ (usually timbres resembling the human voice) in specially designed instruments. These creations offer a missing link between idealist aesthetics of the period and musical practice. Though ultimately ephemeral, they represent a kind of ‘absolute’ music that was founded purely in ethereal sonorities rather than in musical formalism.

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.

Period concepts and periodizations are constructions, or readings, and hence always subject to reinterpretation. Many recent scholars have privileged institutional and reception history over style and compositional history, and periodized European music according to the ‘centuries’; but these constructions are no less partial or tendentious than older ones. Recent historiographical writings addressing these issues are evaluated.

If we wish to construe the eighteenth century as a music-historical period, we must abandon the traditional notion that it was bifurcated in the middle. Not only did the musical Baroque not last beyond 1720 in most areas, but the years c1720–c1780 constituted a period in their own right, dominated by the international ‘system’ of Italian opera, Enlightenment ideals, neoclassicism, the galant and (after c1760) the cult of sensibility. We may call this the ‘central’ eighteenth century. Furthermore, this period can be clearly distinguished from preceding and following ones. The late Baroque (c1670–c1720) was marked by the rationalization of Italian opera, tragédie lyrique, the standardization of instrumental genres and the rise of ‘strong’ tonality. The period c1780–c1830 witnessed the rise of the ‘regulative work-concept’ (Goehr) and ‘pre-Romanticism’ (Dahlhaus), and the Europe-wide triumph of ‘Viennese modernism’, including the first autonomous instrumental music and a central role in the rise of the modern (post-revolutionary) world, symbolized by Haydn’s sublime in The Creation.

A tripartite reading of a ‘long’ eighteenth-century in music history along these lines seems more nearly adequate than either baroque/classical or 1700–1800 as a single, undifferentiated period.

This article establishes a dialogue between twenty-first-century music theory and historical modes of enquiry, adapting the new Formenlehre (Caplin, Hepokoski/Darcy) to serve a historically oriented hermeneutics. An analytical case study of the first movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 92 (1789) traces the changing functional meanings of the opening ‘caesura prolongation phrase’. The substance of the exposition consists largely of things functionally ‘before-the-beginning’ and ‘after-the-end’, while the recapitulation follows a logic of suspense and surprise, keeping the listener continually guessing. The analysis calls into question Hepokoski and Darcy's restriction of the mode of signification of sonata-form movements to the narration of human action. The primary mode of signification of the recapitulation is indexical: it stands as the effect of a human cause. This account matches late eighteenth-century concepts of ‘genius’.

The pervasiveness of thoroughbass in eighteenth-century German musical pedagogy is illustrated by the way that it extends from continuo realization exercises and chorale harmonizations to complete fugues. This article seeks to demonstrate how partimento fugue can be construed as the missing link between thoroughbass exercises and fully fledged keyboard fugues, by expanding on ideas first advanced by William Renwick. Through an examination of partimento fugues from J. S. Bach’s Precepts and Principles, Handel’s Lessons for Princess Anne, the Langloz manuscript and Heinichen’s Der General-Bass in der Composition, this study outlines a progression from basic realization exercises, in which the emphasis lies on the recognition and execution of continuo figures, to advanced recomposition assignments in which the performer is expected to project a rich contrapuntal texture from a simple figured-bass line, a task which is crucially dependent on the ability to memorize and reuse thematic material. The pedagogical value of partimento fugues also hinges on the acquisition of commonplace patterns such as the scalar descent and the harmonization of a chromatic line in alternating thirds and sixths. Although these patterns are often merely implied, they are found repeatedly in specific musical contexts, suggesting that they may function as generative melodic lines from which the composer derived both the harmonic progression and the underlying bass line, in a striking reversal of the standard compositional paradigm proposed by eighteenth-century theorists such as Niedt. Finally, the occurrence of these formulas in thoroughbass exercises, as well as in masterpieces such as J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, points to their ubiquitous character and demonstrates that they were part of a common language shared by many German composers of the period, thus emphasizing the need for an increased familiarity with the German partimento repertory and its conventions.

In his autobiographical sketch Joseph Haydn claims to have learned the ‘true fundamentals of composition’ from Nicola Porpora. Porpora (1686–1768) was a student of Gaetano Greco at the Conservatorio dei Poveri in Naples and later himself became a maestro at the Conservatorio di San Onofrio, where Francesco Durante also taught. That Haydn's teacher Porpora came from the centre of the partimento tradition, which has attracted increased scrutiny by music theorists in recent years, justifies examining Haydn's relationship with this long-standing pedagogical method and compositional practice. In this essay I analyse the sources that shed light on Porpora's relationship to the partimento tradition and on Haydn's relationship to Porpora. Focusing on partimento counterpoint, I examine several of Haydn's fugues in contrasting genres in order to illustrate how the principles of thoroughbass and partimento help to explain particular structural procedures in Haydn's music, as well as the compositional processes that produced them.

Eighteenth-century composers wrote many passages in which a treble line rises from scale degrees 1 or 3 up to 5, while the bass descends chromatically from 1 down to 5. The diverging lines reach an octave by way of an augmented-sixth interval. These passages represent a voice-leading schema analogous to those introduced by Robert O. Gjerdingen in his book Music in the Galant Style. Following Gjerdingen's use of Italian words to refer to some of his schemata, I propose the word ‘Morte’ for this schema and survey its use by musicians, who relied on it not only as an intensely expressive gesture that could effectively enhance the most tragic moments of a work but also as a compositional building-block: an ornate half cadence that they found especially useful in transitional passages and development sections.

In its opening representation of chaos and subsequent depiction of the creation of light, Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation famously begins with two forays into the musical sublime. But the work thereafter devotes itself to recalling the sublime, in the double sense of rescinding the sublime and of making it a matter of memory rather than of practice. This process is already under way in the depiction of light; its progressive advance may be measured in such ensuing episodes as the depictions of the first sun- and moonrise and Adam and Eve’s climactic hymn of praise, ‘Von deiner Güt’’. The withdrawal of the sublime gradually becomes coextensive with the creation itself and the place of humanity in the order of creation, reflecting (and refashioning) a historically specific understanding not only of the sublime but also, and more weightily, of the conditions of possibility for knowing the world and defining the human. Despite its forceful articulation in The Creation, however, this was an understanding already well on its way to becoming obsolete by the end of the eighteenth century.

When the French critic Bernard Germain Lacépède identified minor harmony with inner pain, restlessness and torment (La poétique de la musique, 1785), he was recognizing what had evolved as a lopsided dichotomy within the tonal system: rather than viewing major and minor as equivalent, mutually defining opposites, later eighteenth-century musicians often viewed the latter as a site of disturbing associations and thus potentially problematic as the foundation for large-scale instrumental compositions. Against this backdrop, it is notable that Haydn ended most of his later minor-key works in major, and in the finales of his quartets Op. 76 Nos 1–3 he exploits modal reversal as a special theme by having each begin in minor before undergoing an artfully contrived switch to major. Because the tonality of two of these quartets was major to begin with, Nos 1 in G and 3 in C, this entailed a double reversal: from major to minor as the finale began, from minor to major at a crucial moment prior to the end. The finale of Op. 76 No.1 surpasses the others of this group in tonal range, intricate play of symmetries and palpable connections to its preceding movements. Crowning it is a coda that turns the movement’s stark opening unison into a cheerful rustic tune. Thus opening theme and coda, although diametrically opposed in topic and imagery, are heard to share the same underlying identity. The result may be read as a vividly evoked musical subject whose vicissitudes trace a path from darkness to light, from turmoil and confusion to a state of pastoral joy and contentment.

This article moves the search for the ‘ period listener ’ into new terrain, bringing literary sources into play. The argument unfolds as a case study of the writings of Jean Paul, arguably the most radical, and most radically critical, among the early romantics. The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate that literary sources, carefully decoded through philosophical analysis, can enhance and sharpen the knowledge provided by the kinds of sources upon which music historians traditionally rely.

‘Meta-operas’, that is, operas portraying the world of opera and its protagonists (such as impresarios, music directors, librettists and virtuosi), became increasingly common during the eighteenth century. Most of the scholarly literature on meta-opera, however, concentrates on the operas' poetic texts, their librettos. Scholars have dealt with these operas about operas almost as though they were spoken dramas, without taking into account the many ways in which metatheatrical practices and conventions are made more complex by the presence of music.

What do meta-operatic scores look like? Are they similar to other ‘ordinary’ scores of the same time, or do their metatheatrical techniques set them aside as special? Considering a number of eighteenth-century works, this article points out how specific musical means can contribute to the overall effect of meta-operatic plots: the stratified nature of meta-narratives is, in fact, mirrored in the scores when realistic music is performed on stage. On these occasions, the presence of more than one layer of musical performance (of music and ‘music’) can be detected in the score. Furthermore, the presence of realistic music allows for a highly flexible treatment of standard operatic practices, and a number of passages work across conventional oppositions such as recitative/closed number, ‘real-life’/‘performed’ and ‘spoken’/‘sung’. Meta-operas, therefore, offer a special perspective on the presence of realistic music in opera.

This article examines the process of fashioning an idea of ‘national’ music, by considering the social and political conditions that made such an idea possible at a particular historical moment. An early example, Scotland, is the focus here, and helps to show the type of discursive and active work involved in giving meaning to the idea of ‘Scottish music’ in a cultural sense. I argue that the poet and song collector Allan Ramsay played a central role in the years beginning around 1720. Before Ramsay's generation, there was only a limited sense of ethnic identity translating into poetic or musical style. Furthermore, Ramsay himself, in attempting to harness song and music as national cultural capital, also had to contend with the fact that Scotland was ethnically, culturally and linguistically split along the Highland–Lowland divide, and in other ways as well. Through his song collection A Tea-Table Miscellany and his follow-up publication of tunes for that collection, as well as through his involvement with Edinburgh's elite musical community, Ramsay helped transform Scotland's musical culture from a manuscript-based milieu organized around specific musical functions and occasions to one in which national origins helped validate music, and printed collections enshrined such groupings. Lastly, in addition to its direct influence, Ramsay's work helped shape the emergent discourse about national song indirectly: an extensive outgrowth of thought rooted partly in Ramsay's own ideas led to his being used as a negative example among collectors of ‘folk’ music from the later eighteenth century onward.

The staging of tragédies en musique and related genres remains an elusive aspect of French baroque opera. Although scores and librettos supply some information (through scene rubrics and the sung text), several rare sets of prompt notes provide us with many more specific details. The prompt notes fall into two categories: those that illustrate a dramatic convention and those that illustrate individual artistic choices. Both make notable differences in dramatic effect. Choristers and dancers are almost exclusively blocked as a single, collective body while the entrance of soloists to instrumental music often determines the dramatic function of préludes and ritournelles, sometimes accompanying mute acting or conveying meaning when the stage is empty. The prompt notes show that the genre, generally thought of as tradition-bound, also elicited dramatic interpretations from those responsible for staging. An appendix provides a glossed list of the more than fifty prompt notes for a 1778 proposed production of Lully’s Armide.

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.

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.