Charles Koechlin showed little interest in silent films, and saw the film industry both at the beginning and end of his musical career as the worst aspect of the debased world of commercial art he so detested. According to his diaries, Koechlin first visited the cinema on i December 1912, and between this and his important visit to see Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel on 29 June 1933 he apparently went only eighteen times. Charlie Chaplin was the only silent film star that Koechlin really respected, for he represented eternal hope in misfortune, an escape from everyday problems into a world of fantasy, the ‘chimérique’ as Koechlin called it; all of this was relevant to his own existence as a composer. From the series of essays entitled Stars which he wrote in 1934 as a commentary to his Seven Stars' Symphony it is evident that Koechlin found silent film subtitles pretentiously banal, their stories conventional and superficial, often mutilating his favourite authors such as Jules Verne and Hans Andersen. With the arrival of the first sound films in the early 1930s, however, Koechlin suddenly found himself drawn to the cinema, and a curious, fascinating period of his life began, which brought to a head his inner conflict between the necessity to exist as a composer in real life despite serious financial difficulties, and his desire to escape into a private fantasy world in which he could compose. A passage from Tristan Klingsor's Scheherazade poem Le Voyage, which Koechlin set in 1922–23 and to which he often referred, summarizes his philosophy. The first phrase is the crucial one.

On Francois Couperin's own evidence we know of the loss of the six Leçons de Ténèbres required to complete the set of nine. How much more of his occasional music remains to be found is beyond conjecture, but the identification by the author of a number of his motets, hitherto unknown, in the library at St. Michael's College at Tenbury considerably augments the corpus of Couperin's sacred music. The six volumes containing these motets form part of the rich collection of some 450 volumes of music copied by Philidor and his team for the Comte de Toulouse, son of Louis XIV and Mme. de Montespan, in the first years of the eighteenth century. The greater part of the collection passed into the hands of the founder of St. Michael's College, the Reverend Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley, in the 1850s, while some 60 books from the original Toulouse collection were added in 1934, too late to be listed in the published catalogue. Among this second acquisition was the set of Couperin volumes, and their absence from the catalogue is no doubt the reason for their long obscurity. Furthermore, Fellowes's manuscript catalogue of additions at the library gives an incomplete list of contents.

The operatic reforms of Gluck and his subsequent conquest of Paris have received much critical attention, but discussion of his rival Piccinni tends to be anecdotal rather than analytical. The term ‘Piccinnisme’ is also liable to misunderstanding. Terry, for example, setting the scene for J. C. Bach's French opera, refers to Gluck's ‘heresies’ against Lully and Rameau, and states that his opponents summoned Piccinni as a champion of orthodoxy. Although the previous alternatives to Gluck, in the critics' eyes, were those representatives of a style since decayed, Piccinni was certainly not their champion and his supporters must be numbered among those who would gladly have buried the traditional French opera once for all.

The vocal music of William Byrd consists of the Latin Masses and motets, a comparatively small amount of Anglican church, music, and a substantial body of ‘secular’ compositions. Among the latter, settings of psalms and spiritual texts abound, but they were designed for a secular context and rarely taken over for church use; their musical style confirms their non-liturgical character. The numbers of works involved, though approximate on account of doubtful attributions and incomplete sources, are nevertheless instructive: there are three Masses and about 180 motets; the Anglican works comprise two complete services, two evening services, some smaller liturgical items and probably no more than twenty anthems; the secular vocal music amounts to almost 160 pieces. Often extending to two or more sections, the motets generally dwarf the songs, many of which are single-stanza settings. Even so, this last number indicates a degree of involvement sometimes not appreciated by those who comment on Byrd's music.

Writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, William Boyce described Pelham Humfrey's church music as ‘peculiarly expressive and affecting, the evident Productions of a masterly Genius’. It was this emotional immediacy, the desire ‘to move the affections or excite passion’, as Roger North put it, that was fundamental to the spirit of the Baroque. This spirit represents an exaggeration of the Renaissance humanists' desire for directness of expression; there are ways in which it can be said to have literally vulgarised the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance. The contrast is aptly illustrated by comparing Tallis's most familiar ‘Salvator mundi’, a setting of lofty beauty, with Blow's more immediately passionate setting of the same text. The English Baroque cannot really be said to come of age in music until the generation immediately after the Restoration in 1660, but from that time composition in the new style flourished in all mediums. Spanning the years 1663 to 1674 Humfrey's output represents, perhaps more influentially than that of any other member of his generation, the consolidation of a distinctively English Baroque style.

In 1969 the Institute of Verdi Studies in Parma convened an international congress on the subject of Don Carlos. Fifty-two papers were read, and the proceedings fill a fat volume of over 600 pages. Two speakers had looked beyond the printed sources: Ursula Gunther had examined the autograph of Act I, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and David Rosen had discovered, folded down in the conducting score used for the first performance, and still in the Paris Opera library, a hitherto unknown section of the Philip/Posa duet which Verdi had cut before the premiere. He also found evidence for other pre-performance cuts, in the form of stub-ends of pages which had been literally cut from both the autograph and the conducting score; some opening and closing bars remained. A few months later I found this ‘lost’ music, in the original orchestral parts, still preserved at the Opera: the cut passages had simply been stitched or pinned together, or pasted down; the same had happened in the singers' scores. Line by line, it was possible to reconstruct a good deal of totally unknown music by the mature Verdi.

Many of the pieces in Matthew Locke's seven sets of consort music, whose principal source is the great score-book in the British Museum, Add. MS 17801, were subjected to a process of careful and repeated revision. The changes Locke made were sometimes extensive, involving the restructuring of an entire movement, the introduction of new material, or the substantial modification of that existing already. The editor of such works must decide whether he is going to present a single version—in this case presumably the composer's final revision—or to embody the variant readings in a textual commentary, or to print such readings in their entirety as parallel texts. The usefulness of a textual commentary tends to be in inverse proportion to its length: the more variants there are to be listed the less easy it becomes to perceive the overall shape of that version of the text embodying them. In the case of Locke's music ‘For Several Friends’ and the movements of the Flat Consort which were subjected to much change the ideal solution is obviously to print both first and last versions in full. But Locke is after all not Beethoven, and in the recent Musica Britannica edition only the composer's final versions have been presented, with a few examples of movements from the early version of the Flat Consort to illustrate the extent and nature of the modifications. Nevertheless, Locke's revisions are worth considering in some detail, for they reveal a composer with a mind both restless and fastidious. The best point of departure is the autograph score-book itself which Locke entitled ‘Compositions for Broken, and whole Consorts, of two, three, Fower, Five, and Six Parts, made by Matthew Locke, Composer in Ordinary to his Majestye’.

When in 1710 or 1711 Joseph Anton Stranitzky's company of German actors took over the recently built Theater nachst dem Karntnertor in Vienna they established a tradition of plays with music that was to last for a century and a half. They were themselves heirs to various traditions—most notably the companies of strolling players (englische Comödianten) that had been popular in German lands from Shakespeare's time, but also assimilating features from the commedia dell'arte and the Parisian théâtres de la foire, and imitating (and frequently parodying) the Italian court opera, as well as developing even further the extensive comic scenes and intermezzi both of the opera and of the Jesuit drama. Music was an important component in the Viennese Jesuit dramas and the theatres de la foire, and collections like the Engelische Comedien und Tragedien … of 1620 and Liebeskampf oder Ander Theil der Engelischen Comoedien und Tragoedien … of 1630, containing the tunes as well as the words of a number of songs, indicate the extent to which music was readily available for ambulant troupes in seventeenth-century Germany. Parallel to the use of music in German plays at this time is the extent and nature of the comic scenes in operas and Jesuit dramas in Vienna. J. B. Adolph's carnival play of 1700, Carnisprivium proscriptum, with music by J. B. Staudt, includes three large-scale musical sequences, a light-hearted German song in praise of the joys of angling, and also a vernacular parody of a Latin lament. During the reign of Amalteo as court poet, and even more during that of Minato (1669–98), comic scenes and dialect interpolations reached such a height that the reforms of Zeno and Metastasio became entirely necessary. One example of Minato's methods must serve for many: in the Minato/Draghi La lira d'Orfeo of 1683 Orpheus is by no means Euridice's only admirer. When he leaves her after a tiff, she is forced to admit: ‘Lassa! Perdendo vo tutti gli Amanti’.

The many researchers who have transcribed Tudor music during the last half-century or so have been acutely conscious of the problems of interpreting accidentals in sources. Few, if any, scribes seem to follow a completely consistent or determinable set of conventions, and the difficulties are compounded when manuscripts of different date give significantly different readings. Some editors of Henrician music have taken the principal sources of that period at, by and large, their face value. Others have preferred the evidence of later (mainly Elizabethan) manuscripts on the assumption that they attempt to spell out earlier unwritten practices of various kinds. In a paper published in the last issue of this journal Roger Bray offered a case for the second of these views. The present article seeks, not to disprove his case, but rather to question some of his premises and methods of deduction, and to enter a plea for caution. It does not claim to do more than touch on some of the issues involved.