Broadly speaking, we can divide Renaissance polyphony into five groups: works not using any pre-existent material, and pieces based on sacred monophony, secular monophony, sacred polyphony or secular polyphony. This is not the common way to classify Renaissance compositions. The more normal breakdown is by the technique applied to the pre-existent material – cantus firmus, paraphrase, parody – regardless of what that material was. Yet much is to be gained by starting with the original material, and that was, after all, what the composer probably did at least some of the time.

Throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a three-act structure prevailed in Italian opera. Spoken plays in Renaissance Italy had been in five acts, a structure which was maintained both when music was inserted into them (as in Guarini's Il pastor fido of 1584) and, later, when they were set entirely to music (as was Rinuccini's Orfeo of 1600). Whereas spoken plays generally continued to follow a five-act structure, the favola in musica soon assumed a different, three-act structure (T. de Cupis's Eumelio of 1606 set by Agostino Agazzari and Ottavio Corsini's Aretusa of 1620 set by Filippo Vitali were among the first to be in three acts) and this remained the norm until the 1770s.

History can often be read as story or drama, with the events of the narrative partitioned into scenes. As a play, the history of music theory in eighteenth-century France has Jean-Philippe Rameau as its main character. The scenes in which Rameau and his opponents debated his theory are filled with contentious dialogue. Even if the historian excludes Rameau and devotes scenes to his predecessors, contemporaries and interpreters, the plot still revolves around the story's protagonist who stands in the wings.

A sexual division of musical composition emerged in nineteenth-century Britain: during that period, metaphors of masculinity and femininity solidified into truths about musical style. Contemporary social theory, domestic sphere ideology, the new scientia sexualis, and aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful ensured that certain musical styles were considered unsuitable or even unnatural for women composers. Female creativity was also denied or inhibited by educational and socio-economic pressures born of ideological assumptions. In consequence, many women found themselves marginalized as composers, restricted to ‘acceptable’ genres such as the drawing-room ballad. Men, too, were affected by the sexual politics of the age, because the supposed revelation of biological truths in music meant that the presence of feminine qualities in their compositions could lead to invidious comparison with the less elevated output of women.

THIS, in a letter to Mary Anne Wood dated 7 February 1842, is the earliest specific mention of Bennett's last piano concerto, which was never published and for many years was missing. Only a ‘tantalising fragment’ of a two-piano reduction made by the composer's son and biographer, J. R. Sterndale Bennett, was known to researchers. Autograph manuscripts of two versions of the work, and two sets of orchestral parts copied for different performances, have recently come to light during the present author's research on Bennett. The discovery enables a fresh assessment to be made of an ‘unpublished work of outstanding importance’ by a composer of relatively few large-scale pieces, composed at the end of his most creative period and when he was arguably at the height of his powers. It also presents the possibility of the concerto's performance and publication, 150 years after its conception. A summary of all the sources now known is given in Table 1.