Ignaz Holzbauer (1711–1783) is best known for his singspiel Günther von Schwarzburg (1777), a work that deeply impressed Mozart during his sojourn in Mannheim. A much earlier German opera by Holzbauer, however, has gone virtually unnoticed. In the summer or autumn of 1741 the composer’s full-length, three-act teutsche Opera entitled Hypermnestra was performed at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna. Following the death of Emperor Charles VI and the accession of Maria Theresia, the Kärntnertortheater Intendant Joseph Selliers commissioned a German-language opera, selecting Holzbauer, who had recently returned to Vienna from Moravia, to compose the music and the court printer Johann Leopold van Ghelen to write the libretto.

Although it is widely known that Holzbauer composed several operas in Italian before 1741, Hypermnestra appears to be the earliest opera by the composer for which a score survives. The music provides ample evidence of a mature composer in full command of opera seria style. Although Holzbauer had not yet found a satisfactory solution to the problem of narrative recitative, the opera nevertheless illustrates many of the virtues found in Günther von Schwarzburg: outstanding accompanied recitatives, a great variety in the treatment of da capo aria form and a rich array of orchestral colours.

Apart from the music, Hypermnestra is remarkable for historical reasons. It reveals that the composer had received a commission to compose an opera in the German language long before Günther von Schwarzburg. On the basis of current research it appears to hold the distinction of being one of the earliest, if not the first, full-length German opera produced in Vienna. Maria Theresia soon re-established the dominance of French and Italian styles. Nevertheless, Hypermnestra is an early example of an idea that would gradually gain acceptance and blossom during the reign of Joseph II.

Antonio Vivaldi's cycle of violin concertos dramatizing the four seasons marked a substantial shift in the way that the seasons were depicted in the arts. Moving away from religious and mythological allegory, they exemplify a growing interest in descriptive representation of nature's power and in humanity's complex physical and emotional relationship with elements beyond its control. Positing new connections to Arcadian reform ideals of verisimilitude, this article addresses important questions concerning Vivaldi's pairing of sonnets with concertos and the aesthetic factors behind his choice of narrative topics to depict in the music. The article also demonstrates how Vivaldi used diverse textures and sonorities to create powerful contrasts that heighten the emotional impact of the aural imagery while underlining recurring expressive and pictorial motifs throughout the cycle. These last aspects, in particular, provide a new understanding of the historical significance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons as a powerful demonstration of both the expressive potential of the concerto genre and the still underappreciated art of orchestration during the early eighteenth century.

In contrast to what its title suggests, Niccolò Jommelli's Cajo Mario (Rome, 1746) has little to do with the consul Caius Marius (157–86 BC). Instead, the opera transposes the myth of Iphigenia in Aulis to the Roman Republic, having Marius, his daughter, her lover and her villainous suitor assume the roles of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Achilles and Ajax respectively. Thus configured, Jommelli's opera held the stage until 1772, enjoying fifteen revivals with most of the original music intact – a record in the composer's oeuvre. This essay seeks to clarify the reasons for that remarkable success. By juxtaposing Jommelli's score and Gaetano Roccaforte's libretto with a set of six paintings by the contemporary artist Antonio Joli (c1700–1777), it aims to show how Cajo Mario shares compositional strategies with a connoisseur's genre in the fine arts: the capriccio. In keeping with Joli's capricci, which all deploy the same structural motif, Cajo Mario incorporates a narrative structure through which the ‘parallel universe’ of related works imposes itself on the opera's setting and action, making spectators wonder – as a character does in the course of the opera – whether they are gazing at an event from republican Rome or reliving a legend from ancient Greece.

The Sixteenth Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (ICBM) was held at the beautiful Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor Thomas Hochradner and his effective team of assistants, approximately 250 participants could choose from papers and lecture-recitals that covered a wide spectrum of topics and methodologies. These included new research on notable composers, geographical influences upon musical genres and interdisciplinary approaches. The organizers also offered guided tours on one of the afternoons, which allowed participants to trace the music of the city, learn about the autographs vault of the Mozarteum, listen to the organs at the Metropolitan Church or explore the cathedral quarters (Domquartier).

The last two decades have seen the opening of several new paths in eighteenth-century musicology, and Robert O. Gjerdingen has opened one of these: schema theory. Schemata are ‘stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ that function as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic frameworks for musical passages. Evidence of such schematic thinking has emerged through related studies on partimento and solfeggio. Solfeggio practice of the time manifests a schematic way of thinking about music, being mostly based on simple hexachordal patterns which, as studies progressed, could be embellished in different ways. Vasili Byros has addressed the ‘archaeology’ of hearing through reception history, and offered strong evidence that eighteenth-century ears did hear schemata. Interweaving corpus studies on music of the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), contemporary music criticism and reception history, as well as didactic documents from that era, Byros sheds new light on the ways in which schemata were perceived at the time. A recent contribution by Gilad Rabinovitch uses a live improvisation in the style of Mozart by Robert Levin to demonstrate the importance of conventional schemata for historical improvisation.

An unprecedented shift in the portrayal of Cupid took place in the Spanish mythological zarzuela during the years surrounding the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). For the first time ever, Cupid was depicted not as a god of chaste or erotic love, but as a god at war with other deities. And in every work, a female actor-singer, not a male performer, played the fiery but mournful character. In this article I first explore the cultural understanding of Cupid in early eighteenth-century Spain as articulated by Spanish mythographers of the era, and as seen in the earliest representations of Cupid in Spanish theatre. I then investigate the intersection of myth, allegory, war and music theatre in a case study – the zarzuela Las nuevas armas de amor (Love's New Weapons, 1711) – suggesting that in this work Cupid functioned as an allegorical representation of the Spanish king, and that the deity's struggles for power mirrored the monarch's plight during a time of great political instability. Moreover, I argue that the pre-existing local theatrical practice of cross-dressing allowed for the portrayal of a defeated and sobbing Cupid in the zarzuela.

Westernized Hungarian-Gypsy music (or the so-called style hongrois) has invariably been described as exotic. Although such a characterization is appropriate for later nineteenth-century compositions, I argue that it is inadequate for many of the earliest Viennese adaptations of Hungarian-Gypsy music. I focus in particular on representative examples from the sphere of Hausmusik, in which early adaptations were most numerous, yet which has received the least scholarly attention. Although these adaptations evoke a foreign place and foreign people through their descriptive titles, they are not, in most instances, exotic in style.

This article considers eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodism's relationship with art music through the original settings of poetry by Charles Wesley by five notable musicians: John Frederick Lampe, George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Battishill, Charles Wesley junior and Samuel Wesley. It argues that the strong emphasis on congregational singing in popular and scholarly perceptions of Methodism, including within the movement itself, masks a more varied engagement with musical culture. The personal musical preferences of John and Charles Wesley brought them into contact with several leading musical figures in eighteenth-century London and initiated a small corpus of original musical settings of some of the latter's hymns. The article examines the textual and musical characteristics of these the better to understand their relationship with both eighteenth-century Methodism and fashionable musical culture of the period. It argues that Methodism was not, contrary to popular perception, uniformly opposed to or detached from the aesthetic considerations of artistic culture, that eighteenth-century Methodism and John and Charles Wesley cannot be regarded as synonymous and that, in this period, sacred music encompasses rather more than church music and cannot be narrowly defined in opposition to secular music.

Among its various ancient and extra-European examples, the celebrated Plate N of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique includes a melody of Chinese provenance. Scholars have proposed three possible sources for the melody: Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde and the Abbé Prévost. By synthesizing the known sources and introducing additional archival evidence I establish that Rousseau took the melody from Du Halde, not Prévost – and definitely not Amiot. Along the way, I provide an account of Amiot's extant manuscripts and their circulation in Enlightenment Paris. These details begin to suggest the broader panorama of the French Enlightenment's encounter with China and the networks of trade, diplomacy and proselytization that facilitated it.

This article provides a new analysis, appraisal and aesthetic examination of Mozart's notated melodic embellishments. Whereas previous studies of Mozartean embellishment (including those undertaken by Frederick Neumann in the 1980s and Robert Levin in the 1990s) tend to focus on the local, individual gestures that make up the composer's vocabulary, this study examines broader issues in Mozart's art of embellishment – in particular, the larger-scale characteristics of his written embellishment models, including the rate at which figuration accumulates and the structural layout of that figuration within and between individual phrases. I then explore the aesthetic resonances of melodic embellishment in Mozart's oeuvre, touching upon topics including the relationship of embellishment to a movement's affect, the relationship of embellishment to the compositional persona encoded in a work, the use of embellishment to depict improvisation in operas, and the aesthetic of digressiveness in the composer's melodies.

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.

In a letter written in late August 1789 to the Parisian publisher Jean-Georges Sieber, Joseph Haydn either agreed or proposed that one of four new symphonies under negotiation ‘should be called The National Symphony’. In the end, Haydn never wrote any of the four symphonies for Sieber, yet the very notion of naming one of them in honour of the French nation at this particular juncture, six weeks after the fall of the Bastille, raises intriguing questions about the composer's political sympathies, his knowledge of recent events in France, the concept of the ‘national’ in contemporaneous discourse, the communal tone of the symphony as a genre and the strategy of marketing a new work by associating it with a term full of political implications. Reports of the French Revolution transmitted to Vienna in July and August 1789 had not sugar-coated the gravity or violence of the situation in Paris, making the proposed title all the more remarkable. While we can only speculate as to what form the ‘National’ Symphony might have taken, the idea itself points to the emerging potential of the symphony as a vehicle of political ideas.

In his 1720 poem ‘To the Musick Club’ Allan Ramsay famously called upon an incipient Edinburgh Musical Society to elevate Scottish vernacular music by mixing it with ‘Correlli's soft Italian Song’, a metonym for pan-European art music. The Society's ensuing role in the gentrification of Scottish music – and the status of the blended music within the wider contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment and the forging of Scottish national identity – has received attention in recent scholarship. This article approaches the commingling of vernacular and pan-European music from an alternative perspective, focusing on the assimilation of Italian music, particularly the works of Arcangelo Corelli, into popular, quasi-oral traditions of instrumental music in Scotland and beyond. The case of ‘Mr Cosgill's Delight’, a popular tune derived from a gavotte from Corelli's Sonate da camera a tre, Op. 2, is presented as an illustration of this process. The mechanics of vernacularization are further explored through a cache of ornaments for Corelli's Sonate per violino e violone o cimbalo, Op. 5, by the Scottish professional violinists William McGibbon and Charles McLean. The study foregrounds the agency of working musicians dually immersed in elite and popular musical traditions, while shedding new light on McGibbon's significance as an early dual master of Italian and Scots string-playing traditions.

The Anna Magdalena Bach Book of 1725 is a heterogeneous collection of virtuosic and profound keyboard suites, light and often insipid dances, and a number of sacred songs whose dominant theme is death. This striking juxtaposition of the sacred and secular is hardly lessened by the fact that the songs are written in a disarmingly fashionable style which at first seems incommensurate with the existential issues addressed by the poetry. While scholars have generally seen the notebook’s less demanding pieces, including the songs, as a testament to Anna Magdalena’s taste for the galant style, little has been said about her apparent penchant for reflecting on and preparing for death through the medium of her personal musical notebook. By reading these poetic texts and their musical settings against the voluminous writings on the art of dying to be found in the family’s theological library, this essay argues for the centrality of the ars moriendi in the Bachs’ domestic life and in their music-making.

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.