Even the most enthusiastic admirer of fourteenth-century isorhythm would have to admit that the collection of French motets published in the series Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century must present a somewhat forbidding appearance to the casual reader. Certainly a large number of the surviving pieces are characterized by a uniformity of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic style which contrasts all too clearly with the remarkable diversity to be found in contemporary song repertories. And while, upon closer acquaintance, characteristics individual to particular works may increasingly be discerned, it remains surprising just how alike many of these pieces continue to seem to be. That this is not simply a failure on the part of the reader to distinguish more widespread differences between works becomes clear as soon as one begins to investigate their structures in more detail: far from each work being unique in itself, many of the motets surviving from the are nova are found to be related quite closely in matters of compositional detail. Thus instead of representing, as one might expect, widespread activity over a large geographical area, the motet repertory appears increasingly to be confined in matters of both form and content, and thus also, it might be argued, in place and date of origin.

That the English style of the early fifteenth century was crucial to the development of later music seems undeniable. The oft-cited, passages from the writings of Martin le Franc and Tinctoris, whatever their obscurities of detail, are unequivocal in their placing of the English in general and Dunstable in particular at the head of a completely new style, and to set against this, we have a large and varied corpus of music, especially music for the mass Ordinary, which amply testifies to the richness of the insular tradition. Not only was this music considered distinctive in its own day, but it has also proved readily recognizable to modern scholars despite the relative dearth of ascriptions. Even so, one feels that any suggestion that it is the English style as such which is so obvious remains surprisingly premature. The main reason for this is not hard to find; in fact, nearly all the most convincing evidence for assigning English authorship to anonymous works has turned out to be either essentially non-musical (e.g. the presence of a piece in an insular source, the use of a distinctively English variant of a given plainsong, the presence of telescoping in settings of the Credo, the use of characteristic notational procedures) or concerned with relatively superficial aspects of style (e.g. the use of a standard mensural scheme, the appearance of one or more of a handful of melodic clichés). Since there are clearly much easier ways of recognizing English music than from the niceties of musical style, efforts at more specifically stylistic analysis have lagged behind somewhat, despite the important work of such scholars as Brian Trowell and Margaret Bent. Certainly, it has not proved possible to tease out that arcane quality, the contenance angloise, which has sometimes been assumed to infuse the entire repertory from the Old Hall Manuscript onwards.

In the summer of 1539 Henry VIII was once again preparing for marriage. In June the French ambassador reported that;

At the end of the seventeenth century a Venetian chronicler by the name of Pietro Antonio Pacifico drew attention to the music in two of the Venetian ospedali with the words ‘… these young ladies make a great study of music, with singular success, and to the amazement of foreigners, who wonder at their art in the singing of the divine Office’; and again ‘instructed by the best salaried teachers, they sing with various instruments on all the great feasts of the year Mass, Vespers and Compline — especially in Lent, when many people come to hear’. If Mass and Vespers were principal liturgical functions, this particular mention of Compline — the final Office of the day which almost certainly took place at the same sort of time as today's secular concert and was thus convenient for people of culture and devotion to turn out to — gives a guide to its relative importance as a liturgical act. This is confirmed by a glance at the catalogues of music in stock which the Venetian publisher Vincenti issued in 1621 and 1649, both of which list a considerable number of musical settings of Compline in both old and new styles, with and without continuo — an indication of steady demand. Yet by comparison with Mass and Vespers Compline and its music have been little studied, whether in Italy in the Baroque or elsewhere in other periods, and there is scarcely any substantial information about it in the major musical or religious reference works. It may be less because the repertory consists largely of music by relatively little-known figures (though Legrenzi, Cazzati and Colonna hardly belong in that category) dian because the musical requirements of the liturgy are on the whole straight-forward, not offering musicological conundrums that call into being polemical tracts of the Monteverdi Vespers variety; in essence the Office of Compline is a religious act on an intimate scale, not a potentially grand liturgical occasion with showy ritual. Indeed, the virtual absence of ritual in this final act of tie day probably encouraged its development in seventeenth-century Italy into the spiritual concert of which our Venetian chronicler speaks. Such a development was facilitated, too, by the simplicity of its liturgy — unlike Mass and Vespers, nothing basic changes from day to day, be it Sunday or weekday, feast or ferial day; there is no Proper, nor are there any complex stipulations about psalm groupings, antiphons, and Gregorian tones. Only the concluding Marian antiphon (which did not belong specifically to Compline but was in practice often attached to it) changed four times a year according to the liturgical season. From the outset, therefore, a composer could devise a complete, self-contained ‘package’, either allowing the intrinsic variety of the liturgy to give balance and contrast to bis setting or, as with the more adventurous, to build upon the liturgical foundations a colourful construction that could succeed as a spiritual concert on its own terms.

Musical reminiscence or recall of the type that became familiar in nineteenth-century opera was not a common feature of the late Baroque opera seria. Any instances of musical recall that do occur seem to fall into one of two categories: firstly, those where a musical motive, with a particular association, is used to link a series of musical ‘numbers’; secondly, those instances where the repetition of a text later in a scene or act prompts a repeat, or partial repeat of the original music. From amongst the vast corpus of eighteenth-century Italian librettos, Metastasio's Alessandro nell' Indie (1729) is one such piece that contains a notable instance of textual repetition used for the purpose of increasing dramatic conflict. I am not the first to comment on the unusual qualities of this libretto. Several notable scholars, including Friedrich Chrysander, Michael Robinson and Winton Dean, have drawn attention to the musical reminiscences that portions of this libretto have engendered, particularly in settings by Leonardo Vinci and G. F. Handel. Yet there has been little attempt to explain this particular phenomenon in musico-dramatic terms, nor to compare the approaches of such diverse composers as Vinci, Handel and Hasse to the problems that the textual recall produces. This, then, is the purpose of my paper.

Béatrice et Bénédict is the last work of a great romantic. Yet, like Verdi's Falstaff with which it is tempting to make comparisons, it is a neo-classical comic opera. With both composers surprise at this last turn in their careers-is tempered by knowledge of admirable comedy in earlier operas (such as Un ballo in maschera and Benvenuto Cellini); and Berlioz's overt nec-classicism is perhaps, after Les troyens, hardly surprising at all. What is remarkable is that Béatrice et Bénédict is Berlioz's only Shakespearean opera, and one of only two full-length works based on the poet he idolized for more than forty years. It is not the first time, however, that Berlioz had dealt with Shakespeare's comedies. Although his first introduction to Shakespeare, and his profoundest experience of him in the theatre, concerned Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, he was also inspired by plays he had only read, and his first Shakespearean composition was the fantasy-overture The Tempest (1830), followed by the overture King Lear (1831). Lines from The Merchant of Venice appear in Les troyens (no. 37). Berlioz almost certainly never saw Much Ado About Nothing, but as early as 1833 he asked a friend to lend him a copy, as he planned ‘a very merry Italian opera’ on the subject. The idea resurfaced in 1852. A full scenario survives from that period, but it bears no relation to the opera which reached the stage at Baden in 1862 beyond the two principal characters. The opera reached its final form in 1863, just thirty years after its conception; after the first performances Berlioz added two new numbers, of which the first, the Trio no. 11, is his last substantial composition, his swan-song.

In a monograph entitled Zdenko Fibich published within a year of the composer's death, the musicologist Zdeněk Nejedlý asked the following question: ‘And who was more versatile than Fibich?’ The answer as far as Nejedlý was concerned was: ‘No one in the whole of the nineteenth century.’ Many of Fibich's contemporaries were quite certain that he occupied a position equal to his more internationally successful colleague Antonín Dvořák. Evidence of his contemporary standing is abundant, and his position in the firmament of Czech composers was characteristically summed up by William Ritter in 1896 when he described Fibich as the ‘Son’ in the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Czech music, in which Smetana was, naturally enough, the ‘Father’ and Dvořák the ‘Holy Spirit’. In an obituary article the critic Emanuel Chvála had no hesitation in putting Fibich next to Dvořák as ‘… the most eminent of our contemporary composers’. Nejedlý's assertion concerning Fibich's versatility is not entirely unworthy of examination. He contributed to many genres and expanded the scope of his theatrical activities with his cultivation of scenic melodrama. As a composer of opera Fibich stood aside from his Czech contemporaries in his deliberate avoidance of folk-orientated material and his compulsive interest in theatrical experiment. His intellectual demeanour led to collaborations with the finest Czech librettists of the time, and a close identification with the views of the aesthetician Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910). Believing strongly in the role of experiment in art, 4 and with a firm commitment to the principles of Wagnerian music drama, Hostinský was an ideal partner for the composer in the opera The Bride of Messina, the work which set the seal upon Fibich's position as an innovative force in Czech musical theatre.

A combination of critical fashion and political barbarism swept Schreker and his music from the stage of European culture at a particularly unfortunate time. The poor receptions of both Irrelohe in 1924 and Der singende Teufel in 1928 prepared the way for the Nazis' diagnosis of ‘degeneracy’ and subsequent ousting of the part-Jewish composer from his directorship of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in 1931. His enforced retirement from the Prussian Academy of Arts at the end of 1933 was the final blow, and he died after a stroke, shocked and disillusioned, in the following year. The problems now besetting the reinstatement in the annals of twentieth-century music of what was once a household name in Germany, are not entirely dependent upon the ironies of fashion - and historical misfortune, however. For Schreker, the associate of Schoenberg in Vienna during the first decade of the century, had achieved something that ran counter to the most cherished unspoken dogma of twentieth-century artistic radicalism. He had become popular. He had built a bridge between radical innovation and popular taste.

In May 1917 Paul Hindemith wrote to his friend Emmy Ronnefeldt: