Quo vadis, eighteenth-century music analysis? This is the question I wish to pose in 2017, a year marking some notable anniversaries. It has been ten years since the appearance of Robert Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), a book that opened up a wide range of new perspectives on eighteenth-century music and simultaneously shook Anglo-American music analysis at a time when it was on the look-out for post-Schenkerian alternatives. Likewise, 2017 is the tenth anniversary of Giorgio Sanguinetti's presentation on Neapolitan partimenti at the European Music Analysis Conference in Freiburg, where he addressed an audience that was similarly looking for answers in a post-Riemannian vacuum (but already familiar with diverse approaches to schemata, or Satzmodelle). Thirdly, and on a personal note, 2017 also marks a decade since the publication of an article by Ludwig Holtmeier (‘Heinichen, Rameau, and the Italian Thoroughbass Tradition: Concepts of Tonality and Chord in the Rule of the Octave’, Journal of Music Theory 51/1 (2007), 5–49) that guided me through Fedele Fenaroli's partimenti by using the ‘rule of the octave’, a first encounter that profoundly and irreversibly affected the way I perform, hear, teach, conceptualize and contextualize eighteenth-century music. Finally, it should be said that all this happened fifteen years after Thomas Christensen described partimenti and ‘The Règle de l'Octave in Theory and Practice’ (Acta Musicologica 64 (1992), 91–117) in a forward-looking article that celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday in 2017.

This article investigates the theme of statuary animation within pantomime and language reform, particularly in Milan between the 1760s and the 1790s. Its focal point is a little-known work created by Florentine choreographer Gasparo Angiolini for the new Teatro alla Scala in 1782: his didactic ‘philosophical ballet’ La vendetta spiritosa, based on the Traité des sensations by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (in Venice the work was given as La vendetta ingegnosa o La statua di Condilliac [sic]). During the last decades of his career, informed by French linguistic theory and by Milanese writers such as the Verri brothers and Cesare Beccaria, Angiolini aimed to create an unmediated music-gestural language that could overcome linguistic and even political boundaries. The project had significant implications for the use of representative sound, both in music and in language. I examine the development of the impulse towards gestural mimesis and through-composition within scores for the danza parlante, including by Angiolini himself.

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.

Employing the term ‘point of audition’ to describe the spatial position musical works imply for their listeners, this article examines the use of technologies for extending the senses to define new points of audition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Popular literature on natural philosophy promoted magnifying instruments as windows onto distant or hidden realms and as tools for acquiring knowledge. On the operatic stage and in writers' metaphorical musings, kindred sensory extensions were imagined for hearing. These contexts connected (magic) mirrors and magnifying instruments to their musical analogues: muted tone and keyboard fantasizing. The development of these associations in opera and literature made it possible for instrumental music to position listeners as eavesdroppers upon unknown realms. Such a point of audition is shown to be implied by the Adagio un poco mosso of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. By examining material practices and discourses surrounding sensory extension, this article demonstrates the relevance of technologically mediated observation to musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, and its contribution to the otherworldly orientation characteristic of romantic listening.

The Parisian premiere of Paisiello’s Nina, o sia la pazza d’amore on 3 September 1791 triggered a hostile reaction from French librettists and composers. Since the opéra comique on which Paisiello had based his opera remained in the active repertory of the Comédie-Italienne, Nina was considered an infringement of copyright legislation recently passed by the National Assembly. In the controversy that followed, matters involving intellectual property and opera aesthetics were linked to revolutionary struggle. At a time when clarity and transparency were identified as republican virtues in France, the carefully wrought balance between music and text that was associated with French operatic genres acquired new political resonance. Simultaneously, the perceived emphasis on sensual musical pleasure – at the expense of a coherent libretto – in Italian operas like Nina was eyed with suspicion, deemed a potential symptom of counterrevolution. In this way, the relative merits of French and Italian opera were superimposed on issues of revolution, reaction and national identity.

In this article I assert that our modern understanding of the singspiel as a genre has been shaped not by eighteenth-century principles but rather by nineteenth-century notions of ‘romantic’ German opera. In contrast to a later through-composed ideal, Johann Adam Hiller’s comic operas, often viewed as the prototype of the German comic genre, were designed precisely in order that the songs might easily be detached from the spoken dialogue, disseminated outside of the public opera house and sung by audiences in various other contexts. The express purpose of these songs, as articulated by librettist Christian Felix Weisse, was to promote communal singing in social circles across Germany. The genre was thus designed for circulation within what Habermas describes as the public sphere: a conceptual space between the State and the private home in which texts, ideas and musical works were circulated and debated.

Composed in what was called the German Volkston (in the manner of the Volk), Hiller’s melodies are recorded as being sung and played throughout the streets and parks of major German cities and became so popular that they became known as folksongs. This idea of the Volk as a collective entity and of the Volkston, however, was rooted in a deeper sense of the public as nation. Inspired by Le devin du village and J. J. Rousseau’s writings on politics, language and the fine arts, Weisse and Hiller’s operas employ the pastoral mode, in which idealized peasants sing in the manner of a folksong. The idyllic simplicity of these early German-language comic operas appealed to a diversified German audience by affirming their roots, the public use of their language and their morally upright character as a nation. Thus comic opera as a genre was circulated within the public sphere with the intention of transcending the boundaries of social class to unite the German nation in song.

Among the many unique features of the vocal music of Johann Sebastian Bach is the use of what has been called ‘free’ or ‘modified’ da capo form in roughly a third of the movements that have an overall ternary design. Bach's reason for adopting this distinctive form, used in duets and choruses as well as arias, has been the subject of frequent speculation by scholars, who have found precedents in works by Alessandro Scarlatti and parallel examples in the music of Handel. Through close analysis of text and music in numerous examples, this study demonstrates that Bach's version of this design is a defining element of his style; although it resembles early types of sonata form, it is distinct from anything in the music of his predecessors and contemporaries. No single explanation can account for his use of it, but most examples demonstrate Bach's close attention to particular formal or rhetorical features of their poetic texts. I propose a new term, ‘through-composed da capo form’, for this design. Its prominence in Bach's music is a product of his emergence as a composer during a period when German poets and musicians were adopting new approaches derived from the Italian tradition of opera seria but had not yet reduced them to formulae.

This article uses Mozart's unfinished singspiel Zaide (k336b, 1780) and its source singspiel Das Serail to reconsider the eighteenth-century Kindertruppen: wandering troupes of young singers, actors and dancers who performed in the court and commercial theatres of Europe. These troupes' repertoire often self-consciously addressed the blend of charm and impropriety that lay behind their controversial appeal. I consider the subgenre of seraglio opera – popular with both youth and adult troupes – and in particular the motifs of the audition scene and the captive's lament as metatheatrical commentaries on the cultural politics of operatic spectatorship. When young actors inhabited the fictional seraglio, their display offered compelling corroboration of contemporary discourse about propriety, naturalness and absorption in the theatre, as well as the new sense of urgency regarding the sheltering of youthful virtue.

Haydn's first visit to England in 1791 was accompanied by a publicity war waged between his supporters and detractors. The composer's friends were keen to present him as a musical genius while at the same time defending him against what they saw as reactionary criticisms over rules and taste. One such defence was in the form of a portrait by Thomas Hardy, probably the most famous image of the composer. While readily considered today as a matter-of-fact representation of an urbane Georgian gentleman, the portrait is in fact a sophisticated response to contemporary arguments surrounding Haydn, and presents him as an inventive genius of taste and judgment. By the manipulation of portrait conventions, Hardy created a visual representation of the composer analogous to written accounts by supporters such as Charles Burney. Haydn is shown as a man confident in his contribution to musical posterity, and the image reinforces advice from the time that repeated listening to and study of his music was required properly to appreciate it. The portrait has lost its original force as conceptions of genius changed from the early nineteenth century, reflecting a shift in the aesthetics of both music and visual art.

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.

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.

The terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have usually been thought of as having had rather limited significance, often being restricted in application to ‘picturesque’ or ‘realistic’ genres such as the romantic ‘character piece’ or ‘characteristic symphony’. Through a re-examination of Christian Gottfried Körner's 1795 essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’ and other contemporary texts, I argue that, on the contrary, these terms are conceptually fundamental to the classical German idealist project of defending music's dignity as a true and morally beneficial fine art. Although persistently misread during the twentieth century as a disguise for concerns with stylistic or thematic unity, the metaphor of ‘character’ was in fact a sophisticated hermeneutic tool and a means of equal discursive engagement for performers, composers and critics. It was only the rise of politically oriented criticism and Wagnerian polemics that undermined the legitimacy of the ‘characteristic’ – a concept that may have a better claim than ‘absolute music’ to be considered the leading idea of the classical and romantic eras in music aesthetics.

Nearly half a century after gaining a solid footing in the academic world, the achievements of Heinrich Schenker remain associated more with tonal structure and coherence than with musical expression. The focus of his published work, exemplified largely by instrumental music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, supports this view. There are just five short writings about music for voices: two essays on Bach’s St Matthew Passion, one on the opening number from Haydn’s Creation, and two on Schubert songs. To be sure, romantic lieder appear as music examples for the larger theory books, but there they serve as illustrations of harmony, voice leading and form, rather than the relationship of word to tone.

Louis-Guillaume Pecour’s couple-dance called L’Allemande introduced in 1702 a mode of dancing that in some respects was different to anything that had been seen before on stage or at court in France, and that was to influence a number of dances for the theatre and ballroom in the following years. Particular characteristics of Pecour’s dance were its unusual arm positions, which seem to have indicated a specifically ‘Germanic’ character, and some sequences of steps which, although also occurring in other dances of the time, nevertheless seemed to reinforce some notion of ‘Germanic’ dancing. Some of these characteristics also appeared in dances devised in London after 1714 for the Hanoverian royal family, perhaps as a deliberate allusion to their German ancestry. This article examines the structure and form of Pecour’s L’Allemande, and the extent to which it, and some of the dances it influenced, may have represented a stereotype of ‘Germanic’ culture as something outlandish or uncultivated unless redeemed by an overlay of French choreographic sophistication.

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.

From the nineteenth century onwards the stereotype of Haydn as cheerful and jesting has dominated the reception of his music. This study contributes to the recent scholarship that broadens this view, with a new approach: I set works by Haydn in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about melancholy, those of Edmund Burke, Francisco Goya, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Their conceptions of melancholy were dialectical, involving the interplay of such elements as pleasure and pain, freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and absorption. I consider the relevance of these dialectics to Haydn’s English songs, his dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos and two late chamber works. Musical melancholy arises, I argue, when the protagonist of a work – be it the vocal character in a song or the ‘composer’s voice’ in an instrumental work – exhibits an ironic distance from his or her own pain. The musical dialectics in these works prompt listeners, for their part, to take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication.

In 1739, two years before his death, Vivaldi sold a group of five psalms to the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. All but one of these psalms had been identified and located prior to May 2003, when the missing work, a Nisi Dominus in A major for three solo singers, five obbligato instruments and strings, turned up in Dresden as the unexpected by-product of a routine inspection. Like one of the other psalms belonging to the same group, the Beatus vir rv795, this new discovery, rv803, is attributed in its Dresden source to Baldassarre Galuppi. The misattribution appears to have been an act of deliberate falsification by the Venetian copyist Iseppo Baldan, who slipped the two Vivaldi compositions in to a large consignment of sacred vocal works, mainly by Galuppi, dispatched to the Saxon Hofkapelle in the late 1750s. The new Nisi Dominus is noteworthy for the high level of vocal virtuosity that all eight movements demand and for its use of rare instruments (viola d’amore, tenor chalumeau and violino in tromba marina) to lend added colour in individual movements. It is also a striking example of Vivaldi’s ‘late’ manner, which, although influenced by the galant style of younger composers, remains true to his personal idiom. At the same time, it rivals the oratorio Juditha triumphans as a showcase for the diverse talents of the Pietà’s female musicians.