My title is as much a play on words, or even a choreographic flourish, as the statement of a thesis. After all, to say that theorists have, or should have, a sense of history is rather like saying that composers, singers or instrumentalists tend on the whole to be able to read music. Having a sense of history is not just a necessary preliminary to adequate professional attainment in all branches of musicology: it is what being a theorist, and an analyst, is all about. And that is just as true for the theorist as practitioner - as pedagogue promoting the perception of structures - as it is for the theorist who is primarily an historian of theory. For the theorist, having a sense of history means knowing something of the past, and being able to interpret that ‘something’ in ways which may be judged uncontroversially orthodox or wildly idiosyncratic, but which in the end enable theorists to make worthwhile contributions to the state of the discipline in their own time.

In September 1507, James IV of Scotland issued a licence to the Edinburgh printers Chepman and Millar to produce, among other books, mass books, manuals, matin books and breviaries ‘efter our awin Scottis use’. This same licence (see Appendix 1) prescribes that these new books be used throughout Scotland and that all imports according to Salisbury use be banned. This Scottish use, therefore, was considered to be a separate entity – but what was it?

Embedded into the approaches to their crafts adopted inescapably by the composers and performance directors of church polyphony in England during the century or so before the Reformation were a number of constraints imposed by extraneous factors over which they had no control, but which effected a decisive influence over both the resulting form and the sound of the music which they produced in their respective capacities. Looming large among these was the nature of the performing medium. Over most aspects of this neither composer nor director exercised any influence at all; in terms of, for instance, the simple number of executants, they were obliged to produce music for and from the medium which their ecclesiastical superiors saw fit to provide, and the principal priority of the latter was the realization not of occasional polyphony for the liturgy, but of its standard plainsong and ceremonial as laid down by the authorized service books. Within these predetermined numbers of priests, clerks and choristers, however, the principal musicians presumably enjoyed some scope for nominating the constituent numbers of executants of the various timbres of voice necessary for mounting a performance of polyphony. The decisions taken by the musicians themselves in an area such as this that lay probably within their discretion have much to reveal about the nature of the choral balance and of the vocal scoring that they envisaged as appropriate for their music, and also – by inference from the latter – its sounding pitch.

Lorenzo Da Ponte is our main witness as to how he and Mozart put together their three operas. His memoirs, first published in 1823, mystify the topic more than they illuminate it. Some additional light is shed by an earlier publication entitled An Extract from the Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, with the history of several dramas written by him, and among others, II Figaro, II Don Giovanni e La Scuola degh Amanti set to music by Mozart. Whoever translated this from Da Ponte's original Italian worked from a text different in many details from what was published four years later as the Memorie. The well-known passage about how the poet must rack his brains in order to invent situations for the buffo finales will be familiar to most readers from its version in the memoirs.

A few puzzling features in the text of Figaro have been discussed for a very long time within the vast literature on this opera. Nevertheless there is little in the libretto that Lorenzo Da Ponte based on Beaumarchais's revolutionary play La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, and in the music that Mozart then provided for it, which is really problematical. After all, almost the entirety of Mozart's long autograph score has come down to us, even though today Acts 1 and 2 are divided geographically from Acts 3 and 4 - the first two acts being in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (DDR), and the last two (which left the Berlin library in World War II) being at present in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska at Kraków in Poland. (The whole autograph is fortunately accessible today.) It would seem that the only portions that have not come down to us in Mozart's handwriting are a couple of passages for recitative, and some of the supplementary wind parts for the last act's finale; we have these merely in the handwriting of copyists, included inter alia in scores made for early performances, or for sale in Vienna and other cities. Several of these copyists' scores will shortly be discussed here.