How old is music, and what are its most ancient forms? What is its origin, its source, and to whom shall we attribute its invention? Is music from man, from nature, or from God? Whom does it serve, in whose name is it sung? These are the questions that eighteenth-century writers asked themselves as they embarked on their histories of music; these are the questions they felt it necessary to answer on the first pages of their manuscripts. Today we have consigned the questions to comedy. Who but Barbra Streisand could fall in love with the professor who arrived at the congress of American musicologists with a suitcase filled with rocks that he claimed to be the earliest musical instruments? Innocent and unanswerable, the question ‘How did music begin?’ strikes us as childlike; it has fallen out of currency. In journalism, fiction, the testimony of musicians and composers, and in psychological and psychoanalytical literature, music's origin is still touched upon obliquely. Roland Barthes, inviting the postmodern reader ‘not [to] reject the delirium of origins’, proposes his own theory concerning certain ‘rhythmic incisions … on cave walls of the Mousterian epoch’ that point to ‘the intentional reproduction of a [musical] rhythm’. But the question of music's origin has vanished from histories of music. This being so, we might ask under what intellectual, institutional or professional circumstances the question was withdrawn: for a discourse on the origins of music continued to the middle of this century with the revised edition of the New Oxford History of Music.

Joseph Addison's Spectator is perhaps the best-known early eighteenth-century periodical, its title a byword for the period's acute critical sensibility, its pages of enthusiastic enquiry a fitting monument to what we like to call the ‘Age of Reason’. Of the many commentaries on opera included in its pages, Spectator no. 5 (6 March 1711), critiquing the inadequacy of attempts at scenic verisimilitude on London's operatic stage, is justly renowned. Addison's tale of the undesirable (and wholly unmusical) results of releasing quantities of sparrows inside a theatre derives much of its pungency from the consequences of what Addison feels to be an improper juxtaposition of 'shadows and realities': sparrows and castrati alike escape pastoral fantasy to invade more sordid reality, penetrating ‘a lady's bed-chamber’ or perching ‘upon a king's throne’.

Little attention has ever been paid to a pair of mid-career flops by Thomas Augustine Arne. Henry and Emma died in one night in 1749; Don Saverio struggled through three nights amidst hisses in 1750. Roger Fiske points out in a brief discussion that the latter is of some historical significance: it was a pioneering attempt to mount an English form of opera buffa on the London stage. Ten years later, Arne's Thomas and Sally was to succeed in persuading London audiences to accept such conventions, but in 1750 the time was apparently not yet ripe. These obscure failures have not attracted much critical notice, because while librettos of both survive, only the overture to Henry and Emma and one song from Don Saverio are extant.

On 22 July 1917 Maurice Maeterlinck wrote to the composer Lili Boulanger: