Sergei Rachmaninoff is widely regarded as one of the great pianists of the twentieth century. In a research project that has stretched over two decades, I have compiled data on Rachmaninoff’s performance career, comprising research in archives as well as published sources in Russian and English languages. The resulting Rachmaninoff Performance Diary has been publicly available online since 2011. A missing link in the data has been the complete programmatic details of over 1,080 solo recitals. In 2006, I discovered research that was apparently unrecognized in its completeness in an archive of the Library of Congress, undertaken and donated by Rachmaninoff’s sister-in-law, Dr Sophia Satina. In this article, I examine the details of the 1924/25 season, which was a critical time for Rachmaninoff: after the collapse of his personal fortune caused by the Russian Revolution, he at last had achieved sufficient success and financial security from his hectic touring to allow him to return to composition the following year, his ‘sabbatical’ break of 1926. From the data, a clearer picture emerges of how Rachmaninoff varied his repertoire in his many concert appearances and recording sessions, showing how frequency of performance and, in instances, apparent self-assessment of his own music, were key factors.

Thomas Clayton’s opera Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (1705), while acknowledged as the first opera in the Italian manner produced in England, is also possibly the most reviled opera of the era, a reputation launched in 1709 by the anonymous author of ‘A Critical Discourse on Opera’s and Musick in England’. The opera’s success during its three-season run is at odds with its present reputation. This article offers a reconsideration of Arsinoe based on examining the historical sources and corrects misconceptions about Clayton’s authorship and attribution of the libretto to Peter Anthony Motteux. Examined are the opera’s recitative, aria forms, melodic style and dramaturgy. It argues that critics have been evaluating Arsinoe according to inappropriate criteria drawn from later eighteenth-century Italian-style operas of Scarlatti, Bononcini, and Handel.

After tracing the genesis of the opera, the article examines the recitatives and the structure and melodic style of the arias. The arias do not follow the usual forms of later opera. The melodic style of the short sectional arias is not ‘Italianate’ and is closer to the native multi-sectional English theatre song. Understanding of the opera’s dramaturgy has been hindered by the graphic layout of the 1705 London wordbook. To aid comprehension of the opera and its relation to its Bologna source libretto and to readily assess the work of the librettist, three online supplements to this article present: (1) parallel texts of the London and Bologna librettos (given in translation); (2) a facsimile of the London wordbook indicating text set by Clayton as aria, duet, or chorus; and (3) a reformatted version of the London wordbook.

The article argues that Arsinoe should not be seen as a failed Italian-style opera but as an innovative, sui generis realization of the ideal of an all-sung dramatic entertainment that would meet the expectations of a London audience that had not yet become familiar with the operatic style of Bononcini and Scarlatti. One feature added to the London libretto, the Epithalamium musical entertainment, shows the opera’s link to England’s dramatic operatic tradition.

Scholarship on early modern English Catholic music after the reformations tends to focus on the activities of male musicians and male institutions. Despite increased study of English convent culture by scholars of religious, social, and literary history, there remains little specialist examination of music at post-Reformation English convents in exile, and their role in wider musical networks in early modern Europe is markedly under-acknowledged. This article aims to highlight how complex miscellanies with links to English monastic institutions in exile can offer insight into the convents’ otherwise elusive musical world. Using a hitherto unanalysed miscellany – Douai Ms 785 – this article will show how codicological study of manuscripts, combined with study of concordances and unica, can illuminate the role of English convents in early modern musical networks. In doing so, it will demonstrate the need to understand miscellanies like Douai Ms 785 as witness to interacting, overlapping musical and religious ecosystems in early modern Europe.

This article explores creative processes in the many settings of the prosula BENEDICAMUS in laude ihesu, transmitted in a large number of European manuscripts during a period of at least three hundred years. The fourteen different polyphonic elaborations reveal a desire for multi-voiced performance shared across the whole period and geographical area under discussion. Moreover, while many of the compositional techniques are similarly widespread, the individual settings remain insistently discrete, suggesting that it was more common for a community to produce its own version of the chant than to absorb another community’s practices. This study includes a list of all known sources with polyphonic inscriptions of the prosula, highlighting the hitherto unrecognized prominence of BENEDICAMUS in laude ihesu in musical and liturgical traditions of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.

Western plainsong studies have typically focused on fully notated manuscripts, which provide the most complete witnesses to the repertories that have interested scholars in the field. Recent work, however, has shown that partially notated manuscripts, fragments, and marginalia can yield different kinds of insights into manuscript culture, as well as the uses and functions of musical notation. This article explores how a partially notated manuscript preserving the Old Hispanic rite, Toledo, Cathedral Archive, MS 35–6 (T6), can expand our knowledge of Old Hispanic chant, its scribal practices, manuscript culture, and notation. We identify the specific palaeographical traits and melodic dialects associated with each scribe. On this basis, we hypothesize that scribes used notation for a variety of reasons: to train in singing and writing, to practise writing, to correct particular melodies and notational forms, to preserve particular versions within a variant melodic tradition, and as an aide-memoire. T6 offers new insights into the various ways that the Old Hispanic oral tradition could be supported by writing.

If Paris was known as the capital of the nineteenth century, recent trends in musicology have encouraged some to turn their eyes away from this position in search of new scholarly frameworks. Many researchers have, on the one hand, moved away from capital-city studies and placed renewed emphasis on excavating the diverse regional cultural environments to fully account for a national musical landscape, in France and beyond.1 On the other hand, opera scholars in particular have championed a transnational approach to mapping performers’ careers, the circulation of repertoire, and the development of singing and staging practices.2 Neither approach entirely forsakes the capital, in fact, especially in the case of France. Rather, the highly centralized nature of nineteenth-century French cultural infrastructure has ensured that one of the tantalizing results of shifting the scholarly lens to different geographies is the revelation of new aspects of the significance of the capital’s musical practices when placed in relationship with others, and the parallel interrogation of the scope and source of Paris’s status and influence when inserted within a broader network.3 In other words, recent directions in French music history, in allowing for a more critical assessment of the place and function of the capital from new perspectives, still ignite rather than dim the lure of the musical context of Paris sui generis. Indeed, the monographs reviewed in this article highlight that this is for good reason. These three nineteenth-century studies unveil a multiplicity of the capital’s musical practices, sites, and figures that, just like new geographies, remain unfamiliar to musicologists despite the ubiquity of the capital in scholars’ eyes, and cast new light on Parisian musical history.