Composers are often regarded as ahead of their time. There is nothing new about this situation, indeed, the average listener's capacity for understanding is likely to be exceeded by precisely those composers who have most to offer in terms of the avoidance of cliché and the exploration of new possibilities, even if they by no means reject all aspects of tradition. One of the contributory factors to this seemingly inevitable time-lag is the fact that analysis, in its broadest sense as the establishment of an accepted and precise terminology to apply to musical compositions, rarely keeps pace with compositional practice. It is frequently bedevilled by the superstition that there must be something wrong with verbalizing about music, and in this situation a term may find favour because of its very vagueness. Still worse, the emergence and discussion of one such term can facilitate the uncritical acceptance of others. For example, the fuss over ‘aleatory’ in recent years has tended to prevent discussion of an even more misleading term, ‘athematic’. ‘Aleatory’ at least has the virtue of novelty, but ‘athematic’, like ‘atonal’, takes a concept already sufficiently vague, then deepens its obscurity by the simple addition of the negative prefix.

The study of a musical manuscript for its purely physical features—the paleographic and diplomatic study of a manuscript—may seem a far cry from the music it contains, which ought to be our main focus of study. But such investigation can inform us very precisely about the preparation and purpose of a manuscript. It can suggest a great deal more about the ways in which the minds of scribes, performers, even composers worked. (A second thought, for example, can be twice as significant if you have deciphered the first thought erased beneath it.) It is, in other words, the archaeology of music, and relates to the music itself as excavation does to our understanding of civilisation.

At no other time in its history has the Anglican Church had so many major composers writing polyphony for its services as in the century following the Edwardian Reformation. It is this abundance of service settings and anthems, many of which are of the highest artistic merit, which has earned for this period the accolade ‘the golden age’. It is dangerously easy to regard the epithet as referring to all aspects of church music-making at this time, not least the performance of the music and the conditions under which the musicians worked. As far as the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) is concerned, however, this is decidedly not so. Except for the Chapel Royal, and a few cathedrals and collegiate foundations, it seems certain that conditions of residence, pay and performance were of a very low standard indeed.

Although Dido and Aeneas is the first English opera which most people remember today, it is wrong to think that it was the first operatic work to be seen in London. That honour belongs to a through-composed French work, Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus. This opera was performed only once, and that was at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on 30 March 1674. The music was the work of the French composer, Louis Grabu, who at that time was attached to the English court as Composer of the King's Musick. Then, about the same period, two English operas were seen at The Duke's Theatre in Dorset Garden. One was a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the other was Psyche by Thomas Shadwell, but both of these pieces included spoken dialogue and do not concern us here. But a decade later, in 1685, the through-composed opera by Dryden and Grabu, Albion and Albanius, was given six performances at The Duke's Theatre. So it was Ariane and this work that were the predecessors of Purcell's opera.

Philip Hart has been hitherto not so much underrated as overlooked. Indeed, if one were to compile an anthology of Hart criticism prior to 1965, when I published what I would now describe as a preliminary survey of the Hart corpus, one would be hard pressed to enlarge upon the one sentence written by Louisa M. Middleton in 1891: ‘As a composer, Hart was no more than respectable’. A few words of Hawkins might find a place, though they are more historical than critical. They refer to Hart's last published composition:

There is never much danger of historians underrating the political, social or literary importance of the French Revolution. While that cataclysmic event is acknowledged to have affected the course of musical development, as of everything else, the music composed in Paris at the time has received little attention. This neglect has distorted our view of the past. We are apt to think of the romantic movement in music as a German development, stemming from Beethoven, who in turn built on tidy foundations laid by Haydn and Mozart. This view, fostered by German scholarship, contains an element of truth; but it is very far from being the whole story. If there was such a thing as a romantic breakthrough, it occurred in France in the early 1790s. before Beethoven had formed his style. It was largely a product of the Revolution, and like most other musical innovations during the baroque, classical and romantic periods—monody, the symphony, sonata form, the Mozartian concerto, the relaxation of tonality in Wagner—its origins must be sought in the opera house.

It is well-known that many of the airs of Dowland and his contemporaries were printed so that they could be performed either as solo songs or as part-songs. Every music student reads about the unusual way in which the extra vocal parts were disposed on the page, and simple airs like Ford's ‘There is a lady sweet and kind’ and Campion's ‘Never weather-beaten sail’ are probably best known to most of us in their part-song form. But on the whole modern scholarship has concentrated on the solo versions rather than the part-songs. E. H. Fellowes's English School of Lutenist Song Writers prints only the versions for voice and lute, and so do the smaller collections of Peter Warlock and Noah Greenberg. Of the part-songs, only those of Pilkington and Dowland have been reprinted in entirety, Pilkington's in the Old English Edition edited some seventy years ago by G. E. P. Arkwright and Dowland's in Musica Britannica. For the rest, only a selection is available in not always reliable sheet-music copies. This bias is reflected in most comment on the air: Fellowes and Warlock make only passing reference to the part-songs, and the same is mainly true of more recent work. Now I do not wish to suggest that, in the last analysis, this emphasis is mistaken. But I do think that the part-songs deserve closer examination, not only because of their own worth but for the deeper insight which this exercise offers into the nature of the air.

Several attempts to renovate the stage took place towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Goldoni was substituting written comedies of character for the improvised and stereo-typed roles of the Commedia dell' Arte. Diderot and Lessing were introducing serious contemporary subjects which perforce affected acting, setting and costume. Cahusac, Noverre and Angiolini were working, by precept or example, to create a more dramatic ballet. On English stages Garrick was perfecting a style of acting that broke sharply with the stately declamation and movement of the past. All these and other ‘reforms’ came to a head in the decade after 1750. I propose to consider some of them with a view to the light they may shed on the celebrated reform of opera.