Between 1784 and 1809 more than forty composers dedicated works to Haydn, resulting in the largest group of offerings to a single composer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whilst Horst Walter has suggested that certain of these works reveal the ways in which composers received Haydn's style, a study of the larger collection of dedications illuminates the broader nature of Haydn's fame and the ways in which other composers and their publishers both contributed to and capitalized on that fame. Making Haydn into a kind of pseudo-patron, the title-pages, advertisements and dedicatory epistles for these works allow for an exchange of various types of capital ranging from the material to the symbolic, ultimately enabling both dedicator and dedicatee to improve their reputations in the eyes of the consuming public.

This article explores and contextualizes the thought of the religious author Richard Roach (1662–1730) from a musical perspective. Roach, a member of the Behmenist, millenarian Philadelphian Society in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, published little that relates directly to the subject of music, and has thus gone virtually unrecognized in this context. Nevertheless, in his more substantial religious oeuvre music emerges as a crucial component of his thought. In addition, his manuscript diaries and papers reveal their author’s interaction with some of Augustan London’s leading musical figures, and his participation in a previously unknown weekly musical meeting.

After reviewing the overall circumstances of Roach’s life and cultural milieu, the article outlines what can at present be established about his musical activities. As I demonstrate, evidence from the diaries clarifies the provenance of an early hymn collection, while other extant sources reveal an unsuspected connection between religious ‘enthusiasm’ and the reception in London of Italian opera. The integral place of music in Roach’s worldview is then related to aspects of his thought ranging from ‘spiritual gender’, eschatology and the Divine Magia to science and politics. Beyond this timely focus on a neglected individual, however, I draw attention to the continuing tendency to overlook contexts such as this one, in which music is a potentially important but not an obviously paramount ingredient. I suggest that conventional conceptions of an emerging ‘public sphere’ – secular, enlightened, rational – need to be modified to take account of supposedly marginalized, ‘enthusiastic’ religious groups such as the Philadelphians. Finally, the absorption of developing musical genres into the background of an age-old model of universal harmony is taken as an instance of the powerful historical interplay between change and continuity.

The three words ‘networking, influencing, facilitating’ encapsulate the aims and achievements of Bach Network UK (BNUK) in its first ten years. At the instigation of Reinhard Strohm and together with John Butt and Ruth Tatlow, BNUK was founded in Oxford in 2004. Our motivating vision was to create an interdisciplinary forum that would attract profound discussion of Bach's music and bridge the scholar–performer divide. We imagined an integrated structure, powered by specialized research discussions, feeding into larger-scale meetings and being disseminated through publication. These ideas are still loosely recognizable a decade later.

Although musicology as a discipline has expanded enormously over the past few decades, many of its core interests remain much as they were a century ago, when the primary task facing scholars was to take stock of what had been written and by whom. We now possess good if not yet definitive catalogues of many composers’ oeuvres and in some cases complete or near-complete critical editions. Less systematically organized performing editions of works by non-canonical composers have also begun to appear in increasing numbers in recent years to complement the pioneering surveys in publications like Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich and Musica Britannica. Systematic studies of contemporary documents relating to individual musicians and musical establishments have proved exceptionally useful, though much of the picture remains obscure. Thus, after a century of unremitting labour, we have a musical chart that is extravagantly detailed in some areas yet frustratingly blank in others. The chance survival of documents enables us, for example, to know how many coffee spoons Leopold Hofmann owned at the time of his death, yet few if any documents survive that shed light on his personal and professional life. None the less, in spite of the incompleteness of our knowledge we possess an incomparably more detailed understanding of music in the eighteenth century than seemed possible even twenty years ago.

‘Music and …’ is the concluding topic in Ludmilla Jordanova’s editorial in an earlier issue of this journal (Eighteenth-Century Music 1/2 (2004), 153–155), and in reverse it will be the starting-point in mine. I fell into writing about music as an active amateur (and briefly professional) cellist with a background in theory consisting of a year’s tutoring in old-fashioned species counterpoint as an unruly fourteen-year-old. In the autumn of 1979 I was writing about the origins of reverie – that is, of representations and discussions of unfocused or unconscious awareness – in writings of the 1780s, chiefly by Rousseau, Kant and William Cowper. It occurred to me that the drifting sensibility I was describing was perfectly captured by the introduction to Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet. It started as a footnote, but finally required a small essay to define the contexts and work out the details. Then, however, I could invoke the representation of a state of feeling not encumbered by the rational straitjacket of concepts. Whether they knew it or not – Kant certainly didn’t, Rousseau at some level certainly did – music was what my authors were after!

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.

Most of our modern Western institutions and precepts – democracy, individualism, subjectivity, secularism, science, the nation state and the modern apparatus of war – began to germinate in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. In musical life too these were formative years. The emergence of the canon, with the associated idea of the musical ‘work’, was one such development. The rise of the virtuoso and the transformation of audiences from unwieldy and fitfully attentive to enthralled, disciplined and devout, two more. And with these developments, music’s role as a medium of social differentiation was both enhanced and qualitatively revised.

This article examines the household of John Hunter, a London surgeon, and Anne Hunter, a poet, and its relevance for Haydn’s collaboration with Anne – the two sets of English Canzonettas (1794–1795). I interpret canzonettas by Haydn and several of his London contemporaries as artefacts of a context in which music and anatomy were pursued not only under the same roof but by the same people, who participated in shared discourses, medical and musical, regarding the nature of femininity. This perspective reveals ways in which John partook of his wife’s world, asserting the artful and beautiful of dissection and anatomy, and suggests new significance for aspects of the Haydn–Hunter canzonettas, especially their references to body parts, sighs, symptoms and death.

John Dryden famously bowdlerized Shakespeare, whose plays violated his reason-governed tastes. That the author of such verse as ‘Happy, happy, happy pair! / None but the brave, / None but the brave, / None but the brave deserves the fair’ (Alexander’s Feast) should have found the rather stronger temperament and the complex plot ambiguities of his predecessor indigestible should come as no surprise. Because our educational processes have long since held up Shakespeare as the pinnacle of English-language literature, we tend to find Dryden’s fastidious attitude somewhat quaint – if, indeed, we remember it at all.

The revival of early music performed on original instruments has resurrected the role of the violinist-conductor ‘maestro dei concerti’, one historical designation among many describing a conductor equipped with an instrument rather than a baton. Prior to this revival, one rarely saw an orchestra led without a baton, particularly if the orchestra was sizeable. Exceptions included a few historically minded ensembles – here I'd like to mention I Musici of Rome for the baroque repertory and, for a case involving a large symphonic orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic's 1996 New Year's Eve Concert, at which Lorin Maazel directed one of the popular Strauss encores from the violin. Yet the idea of having a violinist conduct a romantic symphony, let alone a nineteenth-century opera, seems hardly conceivable today. Such a lost practice, though common in the past, would be bound to baffle modern audiences.

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, composers and music theorists moved away from the system of the eight ecclesiastical modes that had been elaborated by medieval theorists and was later applied to polyphonic music (including the varied system extended to twelve modes in the sixteenth century) towards modern bimodal tonality. Although several modal systems coexisted within this time period, a distinct variant of the eight modes, often known in modern scholarship as the church keys, developed as a practical solution to problems associated with the performance of psalms and other recited formulas (especially the Magnificat) in alternatim practice between the choir in plainchant and the organ. A scarcity of research on this topic within investigations of Spanish music prompts us to outline an introduction to a matter so crucial to music theory of the baroque period in Spain. Thus we present an overview of the treatment of the church keys or tones in Spanish treatises over a long period of two centuries, and focus briefly on particular contributions made by individual authors.

With its intense drama and marked eroticism, the story of Judith's slaying of Holofernes was often represented in baroque visual art and music. The overwhelming majority of musical representations are found in oratorios, with only three cantatas known to have been devoted to the subject. The oratorio's dramatic framework was suited for emphasizing Judith's multifaceted figure through character depiction, contrast and conflict, while the cantata's epic nature and lack of direct character intervention made staging conflict in that genre more difficult. Yet precisely because of these limitations, the cantata constitutes a revealing case study for exploring the strategies composers employed to give agency to Judith.

This article focuses on the baroque cantata settings of the Judith story by Sébastien de Brossard and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (both from about 1708, both based on a text by La Motte). To illustrate their differing perspectives on Judith, I employ the concept of focalization – used in literary theory to mean point of view or filtered perspective – as a theoretical framework. The well-known Judith paintings by Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi (the so-called Uffizi Judith) provide a lucid example of focalization through the differing perspectives of the two maidservants and offer a valuable methodological tool for understanding the two differing compositional approaches. Whereas Brossard follows La Motte's narrative dutifully by emphasizing swiftness of action at the expense of character depiction, Jacquet de La Guerre bypasses it through instrumental accompaniments and independent symphonies that give voice to Judith, despite a text that downplays her character.

Mozart's canons are rather inadequately represented in the Köchel catalogue and the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. The same may be said about other music for his immediate circle of friends, colleagues and patrons, as well as his dance music and his contributions to pasticcios. Neglect of these ‘minor’ genres perhaps arises at least in part from anachronistic paradigms, for instance ‘masterpieces for posterity’. And the canons suffer additionally from the peculiar nature of their sources and transmission, from uncertainty about the position of canons in the ‘canon’ of Western art music and probably also from embarrassment over some of Mozart’s texts. Mozart’s canons have been studied not only less often than his operatic, church, chamber and orchestral music, but also less well.

Italian opera is increasingly receiving well deserved attention. Yet the process by which the chorus in opera seria was created remains largely unexplored. Between 1759 and 1769 Tommaso Traetta and Christoph Gluck composed path-breaking, reform-inspired opere serie for Parma’s Teatro Ducale which integrated chorus, dance and stage spectacle in the French manner. In an era when operatic choruses usually comprised amateurs and chapel singers, evidence from printed librettos and documents from Parma’s Archivio di Stato reveal that many of the Teatro Ducale’s choristers were professional singers hired from neighbouring Bologna. Perhaps in response to logistical and financial difficulties in engaging skilled personnel for Traetta’s choruses, Parma established a singing school to provide choristers for theatre. Gluck’s choruses employed a combination of students from this school and professionals. The evidence from Parma shows that the wide-ranging circuit within which Italy’s opera theatres functioned embraced not only leading soloists and other personnel, but choral singers as well. It demonstrates the impact of practical circumstances surrounding the production of Parma’s operatic choruses on the success of operatic reform in Parma.

Marie-Justine-Benoîte Duronceray was an extraordinary, multi-talented artist, described by Bruce Alan Brown as a singer, actor, dancer and dramatist. Her performances on the Paris stage between 1745 and 1771 met with general enthusiasm, and her pioneering of realistic stage costume was influential. Her mastery of the modern Italian aria, linked with Italianate acting style, was crucial to the development of modern opéra comique. Biographers and others have recounted her life, creatively linked with that of her husband, the dramatist Charles-Simon Favart, and images, sometimes capturing a role that she played, have been reproduced; a sculpted likeness can be found in the Louvre. Figure 1 celebrates Marie-Justine in 1753, an eventful year during which she even appeared at Fontainebleau opposite Marie Fel and Pierre Jélyotte, in La Coquette trompée (with music by Antoine Dauvergne and text by C.-S.

Around 1800 a group of critics worried that new music was in danger of losing its social relevance. In their eyes music had become severed from the religious practices which had formerly provided its purpose and now exhibited a mercurial style that threatened its intelligibility, leading to a host of anxieties about its role in the contemporary world. This article argues that these concerns form the basis of an elegiac discourse of musical modernity, one resonating with broader philosophical concerns of the period. Taking Hoffmann's ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ as the central text, my narrative explores how he and others sought to rehabilitate modern music in the wake of a perceived social upheaval. This rehabilitation chiefly occurred at the hands of critics, who approached the complexities of new musical works by attempting to elucidate them through analysis. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony belongs in this narrative as a characteristic attempt to secure new music's meaning.