The focus of this study is an anonymous four-voice chanson of the early sixteenth century. On its own the piece is enigmatic at best, a densely contrapuntal arrangement of a simple monophonic song. The importance of Pastourelle jolie, however, transcends the apparent simplicity of these musical materials. Its ‘meanings’, according to this argument, are multiple, dwelling at once in the lyric traditions on which it draws, in its place in the history of French secular music around the year 1500, and in its important links with popular and aristocratic cultures of the day. This essay, therefore, reads and rereads this song in a series of related contexts. It dwells, for instance, upon the conventions of French pastoral poetry and the habits of composers who reworked the popular tunes with which songs like Pastourelle jolie are associated. But the piece has a highly specific meaning, too, one suggested by the only source to preserve this particular chanson and by the literary tastes of the ducal household that was its special audience.

A study of Johann Christian Bach's keyboard music prompts the obvious and important question: which of his sonatas and concertos were composed for harpsichord, and which for the piano? (Indeed, did he think of them as two distinct instruments at all?) And what sort of pianos did he have available on the occasions when he played them in public? Did he really play his ‘Solo on the Piano Forte’ at the Thatched House on 2 June 1768 (in a concert that consisted mainly of orchestral music) on a little Zumpe square, or was he already using a prototype English grand? When were these various models of piano first made in London, and what musical use did other composers and performers, as well as J. C. Bach, make of them?

According to one of his more heart-rending letters to Michael Puchberg, Mozart expected to receive 200 ducats from the directorate of the Viennese court theatres for composing Così fan tutte. This amount, equivalent to 900 gulden, would have been twice the usual fee paid for a newly composed opera at that time. Mozart's statement to Puchberg has long been accepted at face value, because the theatrical financial records for the season in which Così fan tutte had its première have been thought to be lost. Recently, however, an entry in a little-known theatrical ledger has come to light which shows that, in late February 1790, Mozart was paid 450 gulden for composing Così fan tutte, half of what he had claimed to expect. In attempting to account for the discrepancy between the documented payment and Mozart's expectation, this essay will investigate all fees and gifts received by composers and librettists for operas commissioned by the Viennese Nationaltheater from the founding of the German Singspiel in 1778 until the end of the theatrical season 1791–2. This investigation will not only help to suggest an explanation for the discrepancy, it will also illuminate the wider context in which Mozart's Viennese operas were commissioned, and will put into perspective the fees he was paid for them.

The years from 1795 to 1815, which separated the height of Cimarosa's career from the beginning of Rossini's, represent a watershed in the history of Italian opera, for they brought the final stages of the transition from Metastasian opera seria to nineteenth-century melodramma. Such now obscure composers as Simon Mayr, Ferdinando Paer, Niccolò Zingarelli and Stefano Pavesi – and their librettists – shaped this transition, and their works embody the continuities of development which link those very different operatic traditions. Consequently, these works hold the key to understanding the genesis of conventions which have habitually been attributed to Rossini and provide for modern scholars an essential context for assessing Rossini's particular role in establishing the new operatic prototypes.

Questions concerning Western art music's relation to language can be seen to arise directly from the most fundamental paradox of so-called ‘autonomous’ or ‘absolute’ musical works: that they seem to say something, the precise meaning of which remains concealed. It is the aim of this article to explore the ‘linguisticality’ of autonomous music – its similarity to, and yet difference from, language – through a close reading of certain motifs in the work of T. W. Adorno. Crudely stated, Adorno identifies the fundamental polarity underlying autonomous music's ‘language-character’ (Sprachcharakter) as that between the internal relations of the hermetically sealed musical work and the external social relations of music's production, reproduction, distribution and consumption. It is the tension between these extremes which generates music's dynamic context or ‘complex of meaning’ (Sinnzusammenhang). Implicit in the approach taken here, therefore, is the argument that linguistic (or indeed any other) theories applied to music make sense only in the context of a larger cultural theory.

The discourse of history can appear as a medium of proud self-portraiture, as the ritual of a culture in narcissistic self-contemplation, glorying in its uniqueness and superiority and in its descent from revered ancestors. This thought catches history as a kind of myth and opens history to anthropological, as well as to historiographical, description.