In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:

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.

The emergence in 1756 of the Journal encyclopédique, published in Liège (later in Bouillon), encouraged an international readership to view cultural developments across national boundaries. An anonymous review of Rameau's new version of Zoroastre was prefaced by ‘Mémoires d'un musicien’, whose author recalls significant events in his musical education and life history to date. These include extended travels to England and Italy. The narrator describes meeting Handel and also Marie Sallé in London, and details various contents of Handel's library supposedly seen and discussed on more than one visit, deduced as occurring late in 1746. These accounts are analysed and contextualized, and a report on archival searches for the author's identity provided, together with an English translation of the 1756 text.

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.

Attempts to promote the aesthetic prestige of serial and post-serial music were grounded in theories of material and philosophies of history. As composers explored new aspects of sound and subjected these to rational organization, they saw themselves pushing history forward, with new musical materials providing physical evidence for each new stage of progress. The continual search for new material fashioned a thread that bound together vastly different personalities, and similar ideas about material and history linked a diversity of approaches to, and reactions against, serialism. Believing themselves to be renouncing a subjectivity made untrustworthy by the recent past, many post-war composers turned to something larger to guide their compositional decisions: to the objective dictate of historical progress. Such deference to a fictitious construction of history veiled subjective aesthetic preferences and provided a way to legitimate new techniques with the authority of ‘higher laws’. This article reconsiders post-war serialism in central Europe from the perspective of theories of material and examines how these theories coupled aesthetic and social concerns with philosophy of history to justify compositional techniques.

Since God so tender a regard is one of a small number of ‘domestic sacred’ pieces Purcell entered into his manuscript scorebook, London, British Library, Add. MS 30930. Its particular interest lies in its construction over a ground bass, and the range of artificial devices Purcell employs in its setting. Its background in seventeenth-century psalm settings, and its likely performance circumstances, allowed Purcell to turn these features to rhetorical advantage, with highly imaginative and individual results.

The subject of this paper deserves an entry in music dictionaries, yet it has received none, no doubt because the Hunt's Up has been studied not as an entity but as different things: a ground, a type of song, a few pieces of instrumental music, a musical genre, a custom. To my knowledge, no writer has discovered what if anything beyond a name relates the various aspects, though it is in the ways they are related that the importance of the Hunt's Up for the history of English music is to be found. The purpose of this paper is to establish what those relationships are. My indebtedness to the work of other scholars – William Chappell, Anne Gilchrist, and Claude Simpson, to name but three – will be evident to anyone who has worked with this subject.

In a major publication of 1983 Bruno Netti identified the explanation of musical style as a central problem in ethnomusicological research. This essay is intended to offer a partial solution of that problem, seeking to define musical style as an abstraction of the matrix of cognitive and physical aspects which constitute human music-making. In the cognitive part of this equation I include the critically important role played by social context, concurring with John Blacking's statement that ‘the creation of a musical style is the result of conscious decisions about the organization of musical symbols in the context of real or imagined social interaction’. However, in this category, I accord equal recognition to the body of musical and music-related knowledge held by a musician or any other member of society, whether this knowledge is implicitly assumed or explicitly acknowledged, historically conditioned or geographically referent, abstractly theoretical or firmly practical. The ‘conscious decisions’ Blacking points to are indeed made in the actual or perceptual domain of social interaction, but they are also considered from the cognitive perspective of acquired musical thought. Physical ingredients which help form the concept of musical style include the limits and possibilities of the human body and its movement patterns and material factors such as the parameters of any musical instrument (size, shape, posture, potential playing techniques, etc.) and performance location.

This round table grew out of two gatherings in 2018–19 that endeavoured to bring musicologists into dialogue with recent revisions in the history of international relations.1 Our specific focus was the interwar period, more often discussed in terms of nationalism – or perhaps at best transnationalism – than within the context of internationalism, a principle that lay behind the foundation of elite governmental organizations such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and others. As the historians Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin have shown, the construction of objects of global governance by these organizations ran alongside a broader sweep of non-governmental groupings that forwarded the interests of indigenous, working-class, anti-colonialist, anti-slavery and feminist causes.2 What role or roles did music play in these contexts? The case studies that follow illustrate the far-reaching implications of internationalist policies for musical institutions, groups and individuals.

This response to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's paper questions whether the (explanatory) movement between culture, nature, biology and music is as seamless as his argument suggests.

This article focuses on three twentieth-century composers – Weill, Krenek and Stravinsky – whose stylistic ‘voices’ underwent radical changes during their compositional careers. It reflects on how these transformations have been received by critics and musicologists, and asks how far the criteria of value found within musicological and compositional practice have been contingent upon the requirement that composers possess a distinctive, and original, personal style.

A few puzzling features in the text of Figaro have been discussed for a very long time within the vast literature on this opera. Nevertheless there is little in the libretto that Lorenzo Da Ponte based on Beaumarchais's revolutionary play La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, and in the music that Mozart then provided for it, which is really problematical. After all, almost the entirety of Mozart's long autograph score has come down to us, even though today Acts 1 and 2 are divided geographically from Acts 3 and 4 - the first two acts being in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (DDR), and the last two (which left the Berlin library in World War II) being at present in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska at Kraków in Poland. (The whole autograph is fortunately accessible today.) It would seem that the only portions that have not come down to us in Mozart's handwriting are a couple of passages for recitative, and some of the supplementary wind parts for the last act's finale; we have these merely in the handwriting of copyists, included inter alia in scores made for early performances, or for sale in Vienna and other cities. Several of these copyists' scores will shortly be discussed here.

The first movement of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) has been noted for its Beethovenian use of sonata form and shares a number of features with the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. This article examines the relationship between these two composers and these two works, starting with an examination of Bartók's use of sonata form. It attempts to establish whether Bartók borrowed gratefully from his predecessor in an attempt to ‘synthesize’ old and new, folk and art, or whether he misread Beethoven in the anxious process of carving a place for himself in the musical canon.

In the year 1954, two great Mozart scholars, Schmid and Giegling, brought to light a transcription for Harmonie of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail in the archive of Prince Schwarzenberg at Ceský Krumlov in southern Bohemia. Their reports caused no small excitement, even though they merely suggested the possibility that this was the long lost Harmonie transcription of the opera made by Mozart himself. They reported that the manuscript was in the hand of Haydn's copyist, Johann Elssler. It is the only anonymous Harmonie transcription of a Mozart opera in a group of five scored for pairs of oboes, English horns, bassoons and horns; all the others bear the name of Johann Went. Went is known to have made a transcription of Die Entfuhrung for pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns; this was advertised in the Wiener Zeitung in 1784 by Lorenz Lausch, and the Entfuhrung transcription now in Florence probably represents a copy of this version. Schmid and Giegling mentioned obvious similarities between the Florence and Krumlov transcriptions, and noted the possibility that Went had copied Mozart's transcription.

The subject of modern music presents us with some of the most actual, and at the same time controversial problems with which musicians are faced to-day, actual in the sense of affecting directly the livelihood of countless composers and instrumentalists, controversial as a result of the multiplicity of conflicting opinions expressed by musicians and non-musicians alike, and the heat with which they are contested. In such circumstances the consideration of the subject by a learned society such as the Musical Association is important in the very highest degree. Only musicians who are in the habit of looking at their art in a detached and scientific way and from a historical point of view can hope to throw any light on or provide any basis for the fruitful discussion of the questions involved. The present paper is an attempt to clear away some of the difficulties in understanding the trends which can be seen to exist in the music which is usually described as modern, and to provide some objective standards of judgment, which, while not entirely beyond the influence of personal opinion, are yet not merely the individual subjective reactions of like and dislike for any particular work, which are not infrequently dignified by the name of musical criticism.

The outlines of the history of Madama Butterfly are well known. The first performance took place at La Scala on 17 February 1904, and was one of the most spectacular flops ever seen at that famous opera house, or indeed at any other. Puccini immediately withdrew the opera and made a number of revisions. A few months later, on 28 May, the work was performed at Brescia, and was received enthusiastically by public and critics alike. Further alterations were made to the score during the next two and a half years or so, and by early 1907, following a series of performances in Paris, the version we know today had been arrived at.

In the early months of 1637, a Roman opera company of six singers with instrumentalists presented Francesco Manelli's Andromeda in the newly reopened Teatro San Cassiano at Venice. These performances marked the beginning of a vital period of development in opera: the new art form of drama in continuous music had hitherto been largely the privilege of the aristocratic few, but was now presented to a cross-section of Venice's richly varied population. Andromeda and its successor, La Maga Fulminata, given by the same company in the following year, aroused in Venetian dramatists, composers and audiences alike a voracious appetite for operas, and were the source of an almost continuous flow of such works presented in Venetian theatres throughout the rest of the century.