Handel's music was a key source for Drury Lane entertainments from 1728 to 1745. Ballad-opera writers regularly deployed Handel tunes, generating multiple performances of his music in low-style, native works that long preceded his oratorios. The soprano Kitty Clive, the biggest star of this genre, initially performed Handel airs both in ballad operas and as additional songs. From 1737, Handel compositions helped bolster Clive's ‘high-style’ reputation, while Handel benefited from Clive's audience-drawing power. In its politics, narratives and musical forms, the design of music Handel composed for Clive shows him adhering closely to the soprano's already established star persona.

Although it has long been known that Beethoven began composing a piano trio in F minor in 1816, scholarly examination of the extant sources for this unfinished project has only recently progressed beyond Nottebohm's brief remarks in the 1880s. The present article reveals the existence of numerous new sources evidently unknown to Nottebohm, including a leaf which forms the continuation of the draft score (Concept) of the first movement, the principal source for the trio. (Transcriptions of this score, including the new continuation, and of a newly identified draft which preceded it, accompany the article.) The trio project is contextualized in relation to other compositions, in particular the String Quartet in F minor, op. 95, the ‘Archduke’ Trio and the Piano Sonata in A, op. 101, and an attempt is made to understand the failure of the trio project in relation to Beethoven's limited compositional activity at this much-discussed point in his career.

This article addresses a subject long overlooked by students and scholarship – the musical annual. Emerging in London in 1829, this was an enormously popular brand of commercial publication conventionally produced for holiday sales. One particular copy – given as a present to an 11-year-old girl that year – proves a useful starting point from which to interrogate these items as a whole. Several avenues of inquiry suggest themselves: ideas of gift exchange and commerce, histories of the role such music played in adolescent upbringing and pianism, accounts of period notions of ‘the fair sex’, and considerations of the relation between authenticity and deception in annual poetics. In the end, the author attempts to recuperate some enigma or aura for the musical score -not by appealing to some allusive or metaphysical ‘work-content’ immanent in the text, but by exploring the sense in which these volumes were and are souvenirs – perhaps remote from traditional intellectual concerns, but redolent of a bygone and elusive ‘social life’.

This article focuses on the prominent anxieties generated by television broadcasts of musicians from the 1930s onwards. It explores three specific issues: first, a concern that television images of performing musicians are detrimental to the experience of music; second, negative judgments about the consequences of television sound quality; and, third, fears that musical value is undermined by the distracted character of television reception. Focusing on these particular points, the article also raises a series of more profound questions about how various strategies of looking and listening influence our understanding of music.