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.

It is well known that the instrumentation of eighteenth-century chamber music was highly flexible; composers frequently adapted their own works for a variety of instruments, and players often used whatever combinations they had available. One type of arrangement little used today but attested to in both verbal description and musical manuscripts of the period is that of trios and other chamber works adapted for two keyboard instruments. Players often executed such keyboard-duo arrangements on instruments with different mechanisms and timbres – for example, harpsichord and piano together – thus capturing something of the variety of timbres available in a mixed chamber ensemble.

Keyboard duos were often played by members of a single family, or by teachers and students together, a practice that allowed for the construction of a sense of ‘sympathy’ – mutual understanding through shared experience and sentiment – between the players. These players shared common physical gestures at the instruments, which reinforced the emotional content of the music; this fostered the formation of a sympathetic connection even as players retained their individual identities.

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.

The popular conception of the eighteenth century as The Age of Reason has perhaps obscured the values cherished by many people at the time. The strength of its ‘legitimist political movements’ is hard for a modern mind to grasp. Even harder is the ‘political fantasy’ of the ‘renewed empire’ prophesied by Virgil. But these ideas were very real to the eighteenth-century mind. To this must be added the sacred nature of the ancient Orders of Chivalry and their origins in the Crusades, as well as their connections with the Templars and ancient Freemasonry. All this must be taken into account when considering Farinelli, his patrons and his colleague Domenico Scarlatti.

On 7–8 October 1791, about two months before his death, Mozart wrote to his wife: ‘Right after you left I played two games of billiards with Herr Mozart (who wrote the opera for Schikaneder’s theatre); then I sold my nag for 14 ducats; then I had Joseph summon Primus and bring me black coffee, with which I smoked a wonderful pipe of tobacco; then I orchestrated almost all of Stadler’s rondo’. In orchestrating the finale of the Clarinet Concerto under the influence of caffeine and nicotine, Mozart was very much a man of his age.

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.

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.

Large-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century: Les deux chasseurs et la laitière (1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history of Les deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, like Les deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?

Anyone with an interest in Farinelli’s career is likely to be familiar with the sixty-seven surviving letters that he sent to his patron and friend Sicinio Pepoli of Bologna. They cover the years 1731 to 1749 and are now readily available in a scholarly edition prepared by Carlo Vitali. Although an examination of these letters makes it clear that Farinelli and Pepoli were acquainted with a circle of people who were closely connected with the Stuart, or Jacobite, court in exile, this has apparently gone unnoticed until now. Determining its significance will no doubt require further research, but my argument here is that the connection should henceforth be taken into account. In order to explain this point, the present article is divided into two parts. The first draws attention to the links between Pepoli, Farinelli and the Stuarts, and identifies the Italian members of the Jacobite court. The second recalls some well known facts about Farinelli’s later career which need to be reconsidered.

Beethoven's sketch leaves are so numerous and at times so impenetrable that they are bound to throw up the occasional surprise when studied in detail. Around ten thousand such pages survive; they are generally difficult to decipher, and often more than one work appears on a single page. Nevertheless, few surprises will have been as unexpected as the identification of a fragment of a little-known Bach cantata amongst Beethoven's early sketches.

1770s Berlin saw the birth of a new theory of rhythm, first stated in Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), and later labelled the Akzenttheorie (theory of accents). Whereas previous eighteenth-century theories had seen rhythm as built up from the combination of distinct units, the Akzenttheorie saw it as formed from the breaking down of a continual flow, achieved through the placing of accents on particular notes. In his Philosophie der Kunst (1802–1803) the philosopher Friedrich Schelling used Sulzer's definition of rhythm to suggest, astonishingly, that music can facilitate knowledge of the absolute, a philosophical concept denoting the ultimate ground of all reality. In this article I show how Schelling could come to interpret the Akzenttheorie in such extravagant terms by examining three theories of time and their relationships to rhythm: that of Sulzer and his predecessor Isaac Newton, that of Immanuel Kant and that of Schelling. I conclude by arguing that in Schelling's case – an important one, since his is the earliest systematic presentation of a view of music that came to predominate in the decades after 1800 – his view of music was driven neither by developments in contemporary music nor by changes in the philosophy of art as a discrete intellectual enterprise, but by revolutions in philosophy by and large unconcerned even with art in general.

Twentieth-century accounts of the life and musical activities of Ann Ford, later Mrs Thicknesse (1737–1824), have largely relied on the entry for her in the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography. The rediscovery of a fifty-four-page article on her in Public Characters (London, 1806) has led to a re-evaluation of other sources of information, including her semi-autobiographical novel The School for Fashion (London, 1800), the pamphlets published in the course of her dispute with the Earl of Jersey and her treatises on playing the English guitar and the musical glasses. These throw new light on her musical activities and help us to understand the context and significance of her public concerts in 1760 and 1761. Her public persona and her preference for soft, exotic instruments such as the viola da gamba, the archlute and the guitar are seen as embodying the cult of sensibility, at its height during her period of fame around 1760.