It has been generally recognized that the music of the Lock Hospital chapel was an important new influence in English and American church music during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapel attracted fashionable congregations and thereby disseminated an elegant, theatrical type of hymnody that was far removed from the norms of church music, whether in cathedral, town church, village parish or dissenting meeting-house. Many hymn tunes first used at the Lock Hospital became enormously popular; some still remain in common use; and their style became the model for a ‘school’ of hymn tunes that remained in vogue for several decades.

‘Multivalence‘ and ‘ambiguity’: these are the words that serve as the rallying cry in a recent group of essays that, with their strident, polemical tone, seem intent on dictating what is and what is not proper and acceptable in present-day opera analysis, at least as it is practised on opera from about Mozart's time to that of Puccini.

Liztanei, the third movement of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, op. 10, and the first of its two vocal movements, is cast in the instrumental form of theme and variations. Schoenberg's analysis of the movement in ‘An Introduction to My Four Quartets’ identifies ‘a total of five variations, a coda … [and] a short instrumental postlude’. His conception of variation form as ‘a very strict form’ in which freedom is ‘absolutely to be forbidden‘ underlay Schoenberg's decision to construct the movement as a series of interlocking variations, for this decision was motivated to a large extent by his concern to curb the expressionistic tendencies of Stefan George's text. In the same essay the composer writes: