In a letter written in late August 1789 to the Parisian publisher Jean-Georges Sieber, Joseph Haydn either agreed or proposed that one of four new symphonies under negotiation ‘should be called The National Symphony’. In the end, Haydn never wrote any of the four symphonies for Sieber, yet the very notion of naming one of them in honour of the French nation at this particular juncture, six weeks after the fall of the Bastille, raises intriguing questions about the composer's political sympathies, his knowledge of recent events in France, the concept of the ‘national’ in contemporaneous discourse, the communal tone of the symphony as a genre and the strategy of marketing a new work by associating it with a term full of political implications. Reports of the French Revolution transmitted to Vienna in July and August 1789 had not sugar-coated the gravity or violence of the situation in Paris, making the proposed title all the more remarkable. While we can only speculate as to what form the ‘National’ Symphony might have taken, the idea itself points to the emerging potential of the symphony as a vehicle of political ideas.

Music is routinely held to be in a privileged position to reflect a particular historical consciousness of time and human temporality. This notion appears itself to be historical, in that it arises from the ‘temporalization’ of time widely attested to have occurred in Western Europe during the eighteenth century. Accordingly, numerous commentators have argued that music becomes increasingly temporalized across the century. Yet if music may convey human temporality without mediation, it remains unclear to what extent ‘pre-temporalized’ works from the early eighteenth century may be taken as temporally significant, given that the notion of time is not supposed to be such an issue during this period. This essay examines the methodological issues attendant to the claim for music's intrinsic historical temporality through an examination of a piece that appears explicitly to thematize the idea of time: Handel's oratorio-cantata Il trionfo del Tempo, which exists in three different versions spanning the fifty years between 1707 and 1757. Although my reading raises questions about the epistemological security of any claim for music's (or indeed language's) expression of historical temporality ‘as it really was’, I argue that a hermeneutic engagement with this problem is both valuable and indeed necessary for understanding music of the period.

The popular conception of the eighteenth century as The Age of Reason has perhaps obscured the values cherished by many people at the time. The strength of its ‘legitimist political movements’ is hard for a modern mind to grasp. Even harder is the ‘political fantasy’ of the ‘renewed empire’ prophesied by Virgil. But these ideas were very real to the eighteenth-century mind. To this must be added the sacred nature of the ancient Orders of Chivalry and their origins in the Crusades, as well as their connections with the Templars and ancient Freemasonry. All this must be taken into account when considering Farinelli, his patrons and his colleague Domenico Scarlatti.

It is well known that the instrumentation of eighteenth-century chamber music was highly flexible; composers frequently adapted their own works for a variety of instruments, and players often used whatever combinations they had available. One type of arrangement little used today but attested to in both verbal description and musical manuscripts of the period is that of trios and other chamber works adapted for two keyboard instruments. Players often executed such keyboard-duo arrangements on instruments with different mechanisms and timbres – for example, harpsichord and piano together – thus capturing something of the variety of timbres available in a mixed chamber ensemble.

Keyboard duos were often played by members of a single family, or by teachers and students together, a practice that allowed for the construction of a sense of ‘sympathy’ – mutual understanding through shared experience and sentiment – between the players. These players shared common physical gestures at the instruments, which reinforced the emotional content of the music; this fostered the formation of a sympathetic connection even as players retained their individual identities.

Three posthumous documents not taken into account in the secondary literature on Mozart may offer insight into the last few years of the composer’s life. While these reminiscences do not solve any mysteries, they could eventually help to shed new light on significant but as yet unresolved biographical questions.

The Anna Magdalena Bach Book of 1725 is a heterogeneous collection of virtuosic and profound keyboard suites, light and often insipid dances, and a number of sacred songs whose dominant theme is death. This striking juxtaposition of the sacred and secular is hardly lessened by the fact that the songs are written in a disarmingly fashionable style which at first seems incommensurate with the existential issues addressed by the poetry. While scholars have generally seen the notebook’s less demanding pieces, including the songs, as a testament to Anna Magdalena’s taste for the galant style, little has been said about her apparent penchant for reflecting on and preparing for death through the medium of her personal musical notebook. By reading these poetic texts and their musical settings against the voluminous writings on the art of dying to be found in the family’s theological library, this essay argues for the centrality of the ars moriendi in the Bachs’ domestic life and in their music-making.

On 7–8 October 1791, about two months before his death, Mozart wrote to his wife: ‘Right after you left I played two games of billiards with Herr Mozart (who wrote the opera for Schikaneder’s theatre); then I sold my nag for 14 ducats; then I had Joseph summon Primus and bring me black coffee, with which I smoked a wonderful pipe of tobacco; then I orchestrated almost all of Stadler’s rondo’. In orchestrating the finale of the Clarinet Concerto under the influence of caffeine and nicotine, Mozart was very much a man of his age.

Daniel Heartz was the first musicologist to link John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) with opéras comiques en vaudevilles, light musical theatre entertainments popular at the annual Paris fairs. Other scholars such as Edmond Gagey and Calhoun Winton had also suggested that French comédies en vaudevilles might have been models for Gay's ‘original’ new genre of the ballad opera, but were unable to find compelling evidence for their suspicions. This article shows that the music of Polly (1729), Gay's sequel to The Beggar's Opera, can finally provide a link between ballad operas and the comédies en vaudevilles, as four of the unidentified French airs in the opera can now be identified as popular French vaudevilles. I investigate the fruitful exchange between Paris and London in the early eighteenth century (despite prevailing anti-French sentiment in Britain), focusing on musical borrowings, translations and the performers who worked in both cities. We shall see that ballad opera and the comédies en vaudevilles share common ground, including vaudevilles finals, common tunes sung by actor-singers and the use of musical parody and double entendre. A closer examination of Gay's (and his contemporaries') knowledge of the comédies en vaudevilles illuminates previously unknown French contributions to eighteenth-century English popular musical theatre, and demonstrates the unique way in which French practices were appropriated in early eighteenth-century England.

Gluck has been hailed as the ‘first truly international opera composer’, but his internationalism is always understood in strictly European terms. This article seeks to expand our understanding of Gluck's international scope beyond Europe and specifically into the French colonial Caribbean. Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) enjoyed the most vibrant theatrical tradition of the entire Caribbean in the eighteenth century, and three of Gluck's Paris operas that had premiered in the 1770s were given there in the 1780s. Performances of these works are examined in turn, with an emphasis on performance practices in the context of local conditions, both social and practical. Gluck's operas are seen to have reached a mixed, though segregated, audience that incorporated some free people of colour, including a small number of black people, and the first documented performance of a singer of colour in a Gluck opera is uncovered. Our understanding of Gluck's reach, reception and status is thus broadened and deepened in some significant ways, and some new areas of research are opened up.

Among the gems buried in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s short-lived Berlinische musikalische Zeitung is a ‘Musikalischer Briefwechsel’ that appeared over three volumes in September 1805. The text, cast as an epistolary exchange between the fictional characters Arithmos and Phantasus, argues the merits of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. (The opera had recently returned to the Berlin stage after a thirteen-year absence.) The exchange has received little scholarly attention, and yet it is a remarkable document for the glimpse it gives both into Berlin’s musical politics and, most of all, the reception history of Mozart’s opera.

The authorship of the ‘Briefwechsel’, which appeared pseudonymously, has been attributed to Georg Christian Schlimbach, a frequent contributor to the journal. This article, in contrast, argues that Reichardt himself makes the more likely author: the correspondence more closely reflects his personality, his ambitions for the advancement of opera in the Prussian capital and his theory of art. Indeed, arising from his defence of Mozart’s opera is an extraordinary claim in the history of Così’s reception: that the work exemplifies romantic irony. E. T. A. Hoffmann is famous for his terse praise of the opera’s ‘ergötzlichste Ironie’. Reichardt, however, goes further by showing how the opera amalgamates, in quintessentially romantic fashion, the opposing forces of the comic and serious. Employing a Shakespearean conceit, he argues that Mozart’s music amounts to more than ‘much ado about nothing’.

Reichardt’s move is the more significant given that he builds his reading not on Da Ponte’s libretto but on German adaptations by Bretzner and Treitschke, translations that modern scholarship has widely faulted for lacking the original’s subtlety. Thus, although Così fan tutte has generally been viewed as a work that runs counter to romantic tastes, Reichardt’s ‘Briefwechsel’, along with some newly discovered material, provides a basis for revisiting that claim about the opera’s place in nineteenth-century thought.

1770s Berlin saw the birth of a new theory of rhythm, first stated in Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), and later labelled the Akzenttheorie (theory of accents). Whereas previous eighteenth-century theories had seen rhythm as built up from the combination of distinct units, the Akzenttheorie saw it as formed from the breaking down of a continual flow, achieved through the placing of accents on particular notes. In his Philosophie der Kunst (1802–1803) the philosopher Friedrich Schelling used Sulzer's definition of rhythm to suggest, astonishingly, that music can facilitate knowledge of the absolute, a philosophical concept denoting the ultimate ground of all reality. In this article I show how Schelling could come to interpret the Akzenttheorie in such extravagant terms by examining three theories of time and their relationships to rhythm: that of Sulzer and his predecessor Isaac Newton, that of Immanuel Kant and that of Schelling. I conclude by arguing that in Schelling's case – an important one, since his is the earliest systematic presentation of a view of music that came to predominate in the decades after 1800 – his view of music was driven neither by developments in contemporary music nor by changes in the philosophy of art as a discrete intellectual enterprise, but by revolutions in philosophy by and large unconcerned even with art in general.

Beethoven's sketch leaves are so numerous and at times so impenetrable that they are bound to throw up the occasional surprise when studied in detail. Around ten thousand such pages survive; they are generally difficult to decipher, and often more than one work appears on a single page. Nevertheless, few surprises will have been as unexpected as the identification of a fragment of a little-known Bach cantata amongst Beethoven's early sketches.

Twentieth-century accounts of the life and musical activities of Ann Ford, later Mrs Thicknesse (1737–1824), have largely relied on the entry for her in the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography. The rediscovery of a fifty-four-page article on her in Public Characters (London, 1806) has led to a re-evaluation of other sources of information, including her semi-autobiographical novel The School for Fashion (London, 1800), the pamphlets published in the course of her dispute with the Earl of Jersey and her treatises on playing the English guitar and the musical glasses. These throw new light on her musical activities and help us to understand the context and significance of her public concerts in 1760 and 1761. Her public persona and her preference for soft, exotic instruments such as the viola da gamba, the archlute and the guitar are seen as embodying the cult of sensibility, at its height during her period of fame around 1760.

Anyone with an interest in Farinelli’s career is likely to be familiar with the sixty-seven surviving letters that he sent to his patron and friend Sicinio Pepoli of Bologna. They cover the years 1731 to 1749 and are now readily available in a scholarly edition prepared by Carlo Vitali. Although an examination of these letters makes it clear that Farinelli and Pepoli were acquainted with a circle of people who were closely connected with the Stuart, or Jacobite, court in exile, this has apparently gone unnoticed until now. Determining its significance will no doubt require further research, but my argument here is that the connection should henceforth be taken into account. In order to explain this point, the present article is divided into two parts. The first draws attention to the links between Pepoli, Farinelli and the Stuarts, and identifies the Italian members of the Jacobite court. The second recalls some well known facts about Farinelli’s later career which need to be reconsidered.