Amanda Babington is a baroque violinist and recorder player. She is a visiting performance fellow at the University of Aberdeen, directs the baroque orchestra at the University of Manchester, is an academic lecturer at the Royal Northern College of Music and has published articles on Handel and Charles Jennens.

One of the first occasions I saw an opera lit (or partially lit) with candles was a staging of Rameau's Castor et Pollux at the Estates Theatre in Prague. Despite many imperfections, the effect – pardon the upcoming pun – was electric: the upward throw of light from the footlights, the sideways throw of light from the torchères and the variety of shadows created in the upper area of the proscenium were a revelation. Until recently, an often-given solution to historical theatre lighting was to invoke the Drottningholm candle (and related technologies), a device with a synthetic flame that hovers according to the heat generated by the light source, used at the baroque theatre outside Stockholm.

As is now generally agreed, so-called ‘authentic’ performances of baroque music are modern in conception and sound. The point was argued convincingly during the 1980s by Laurence Dreyfus, Richard Taruskin and others (Dreyfus, ‘Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century’, The Musical Quarterly 69/3 (1983), 297–322; Taruskin, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Nicholas Temperley and Robert Winter, ‘The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion’, Early Music 12/1 (1984), 3–25; Nicholas Kenyon, ed., Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)). Radically separated from nineteenth-century performance traditions, the reconstructed ‘old’ sound was exciting and new, and, for me at least, there have been occasions when these ‘authentic’ performances have been revelatory, shedding light on music I thought I knew (although, to be fully confessional in terms of the era in which it all began, I also loved the Swingle Singers and Wendy (Walter) Carlos's Switched-On Bach).

Pietro Metastasio's two librettos featuring ostensibly Chinese subject matter, Le cinesi (1735, revised 1749) and L'eroe cinese (1752), came into being during a period of crisis in the Holy Roman Empire, as the reigning Habsburg dynasty confronted a war of succession motivated by resistance to the Empress Maria Theresia's accession to the throne. This article investigates how Austria envisioned China and how this was used to voice notions of rightful political legitimacy at a time of grave threat to the continuance of a long-standing ruling house. It argues that idealized traits of the Chinese other such as loyalty, deference and wisdom furnished the basis for a reflexive critique that helped to bolster and renew a native imperial self. This stance of ‘dialogic monologism’ towards a foreign culture emerges in a detailed examination of the textual style of the two librettos, the musical characteristics of the settings performed in or near Vienna around the middle of the eighteenth century and the conditions of sponsorship of these performances.

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.

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.

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.

When Beethoven praised Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, he emphasized the multitude of musical styles and genres to be found in the opera, ranging from folk tunes to arias to hymn-like textures. The most extraordinary stylistic and generic allusions occur during the ‘Song of the Armoured Men’ in Act 2. This movement owes its extraordinary character to a ‘baroque’ accompaniment and a Lutheran-hymn quotation, the source and meaning of which continue to be discussed in Mozart research. While scholars have often suggested that Mozart took the hymn melody from Johann Philipp Kirnberger's Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik (where it is quoted without its text), Reinhold Hammerstein argues that because the composer also appears to have known the hymn's text, he must have encountered the melody elsewhere. This article, based on a study of Mozart's sketches for Die Zauberflöte and a close reading of Kirnberger's writings, supports the thesis that Mozart borrowed the hymn melody – and significant details of his setting of it in the ‘Song of the Armoured Men’ – from Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik.

In 1701–1702 writer and poet Peter Anthony Motteux collaborated with composer John Eccles, Master of the King's Musick, in writing the ode for King William III's birthday. Eccles's autograph manuscript is listed in the British Library manuscript catalogue as ‘Ode for the King's Birthday, 1703; in score by John Eccles’ and is accompanied by a claim that the ode had already reached folio 10v when William died, requiring the words to be amended to suit his successor, Queen Anne. A closer inspection of this manuscript reveals that much more of the ode had been completed before the king's death, and that much more than the words ‘king’ and ‘William’ was amended to suit a succeeding monarch of a different gender and nationality. The work was performed before Queen Anne on her birthday in 1703 and the words were published shortly afterwards. Discrepancies between the printed text and that in Eccles's score indicate that no fewer than three versions of the text were devised during the creative process. These versions raise issues of authority with respect to poet and composer. A careful analysis of the manuscript's paper types and rastrology reveals a collaborative process of re-engineering that was, in fact, applied to an already completed work. This article explores the problems of textual versus musical authority embodied in the ode and the difficulties faced by its creators in reworking a piece originally celebrating a foreign male war-hero for a female British queen during a period of political and religious fragility.

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.

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.

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.

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.