In 1058 Pope Stephen IX visited Montecassino, of which he had been made abbot only shortly before his elevation to the papacy the previous year. This German Pope was the former papal chancellor Frederick of Lorraine, the second northern abbot of Montecassino. On the occasion of this visit the Pope strictly forbade the singing at Montecassino of ‘Ambrosian chant’: ‘Tune etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista cantari penitus interdixit.’

The music of many cultures is characterized by lengthy musical repetitions, especially where ceremony, text and dance determine the amount of music needed. In Western Classical music, formal repetition is an especially prominent feature. Considering the number of pieces in the customary concert repertoire which include repeats, even the casual observer may be surprised to see only a dozen column inches devoted to the topic in The New Grove Dictionary of 1980, with only five bibliographical references, all to peripheral sources. The dictionary entry is, however, well focused, with examples to support its general theme that ‘the evolution of the notation, its exact interpretation and the practice of making repeats .. raise certain problems, not all of which have obvious solutions’.

Beethoven published two sets of bagatelles during the 1820s – op. 119 (11 pieces) and op. 126 (six pieces) – but it is known that he considered publishing several other bagatelles as well at this time. Exactly which pieces these were, and why he did not publish them in the end, are matters which have never been thoroughly investigated; but an examination of these and related questions helps to throw new light on the two published sets as well as revealing interesting features about the unpublished bagatelles, none of which was printed until long after his death.

On 18 July 1896 the 41-year-old Leoš Janáček left his native village of Hukvaldy in north-eastern Moravia to visit Russia. At the end of the first day of travelling he noted in his copy of František Vymazal's Rusky v devíli úlohách (Russian in Nine Lessons; Telč, 1896):

Twenty-Five years ago a prominent Mahler enthusiast could describe the finale of Mahler's Fifth Symphony as ‘a windy, uninspired stretch of note-spinning, literally scraping the barrel in search of music’. Few people nowadays would subscribe to this view: indeed the upsurge of interest in the work of other ‘late Romantic’ composers has perhaps served to sharpen our admiration for Mahler's exceptional powers of invention and his no less extraordinary mastery of large-scale form. Yet we are not really any closer to explaining just how such extended works are held together and given shape, particularly in the absence of specific extra-musical concepts such as those of the ‘Wunderhorn’ symphonies.

In 1975 the Wozzeck sketches were examined and commented on by Ernst Hilmar, having been made available to him by the composer's widow. Subsequently they were catalogued, along with all the manuscripts in the Berg legacy, by Rosemary Hilmar. It might appear surprising, then, that neither George Perle nor Janet Schmalfeldt makes more than passing mention of them in their important recent studies. In a sense the omission is not unduly sinful – not surprisingly, the majority of the sketches show Berg at work on constructional features of the opera which are already well known, and there is no evidence of hitherto undiscovered esoteric planning.