The entr'acte in the tragédie en musique is the site of compelling yet often overlooked musical and dramaturgical activity. The term refers to both spatial and musical categories: the space between acts in which rapid and potentially astonishing set changes occur and the instrumental music that accompanies these transformations. Practices in French classical tragedy established a precedent for opera; largely observing the ‘unity of place’ after 1640, spoken tragedy included brief instrumental interludes between acts while the stage remained unoccupied. These intervals punctuated the action and created suspensions in mimesis, allowing off-stage events to occur in unfixed temporal and spatial dimensions. Characterized by Mikhail Bakhtin as a ‘chronotope’ of theatrical time and space, the entr'acte exposes foundational issues concerning representation in opera and drama, including questions of illusion and the status of fictional actions and worlds. This article examines the role played by the spectator's reflection and rumination during operatic entr'actes and the use of narrative reference to shape the awareness of unseen actions presumed to transpire within them. These modes of representation and spectatorship are illustrated by Simon-Joseph Pellegrin's livrets for Jephté (1732) and Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). Parodies of Hippolyte et Aricie further demonstrate that the possibilities of unseen action had a vital effect on the reception of the tragédie en musique.

Modern writing on the troupe of Eustachio Bambini has encouraged different thinking about the ‘querelle’ and the ‘bouffons’. Andrea Fabiano, in particular, has intimated a fresh view of Bambini's Parisian repertory that aims to understand the various tactics of pamphleteers and free itself from received opinion. Recent writers have taken a harder look at the evidential assumptions that led to a long-held weighting of the bouffon narrative towards Pergolesi's La serva padrona on one hand and the departure of the Italian troupe on the other, politicized as this was by outraged reactions to Rousseau's Lettre sur la musique françoise. In the present account, the emphasis is on new evidence, both primary and secondary. It fills in new details concerning the institutional relationship between Bambini and the Paris Opéra, alerts us to hitherto unreported performances by the bouffons between Easter 1753 and February 1754 and tells us that a rearguard action for compensation was fought by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Rousselet of Rouen, whose original contract with Bambini had been severed in November 1752. The concluding picture is one of constructive support for Bambini by the Opéra; indeed, a creative collaboration between these two had been arranged before the querelle began. Mandated by the king in 1749 to recognize a public-interest function in running the Opéra, its directeur (Bernage de Saint-Maurice) may well have wanted to continue some form of binary programming between the two traditions, French and Italian, at the point when Rousseau's Lettre made it impossible. Box-office takings rose during the early success of his initiatives, especially before Easter 1753; after this juncture the extant financial records are not adequate to judge such profitability.

Beethoven imitated Mozart's String Quartet in A major K464 more openly than any other work by a fellow composer. Yet critics have never explained his fascination with the fifth ‘Haydn’ quartet. This article argues that Beethoven responded to a rare and unexplored transformation of sonata form in which the primary theme returns at its original pitch in the secondary area. This preserves the melody of the theme, but reinterprets its harmonic and schematic function. Mozart explored this device with unusual rigour in k464, recalling the primary theme at pitch in both outer movements. The two primary themes share a common chromatic line whose invariant return wittily probes late eighteenth-century tonal conventions.

Beethoven emulated Mozart's harmonic design in his own Quartet in A major, Op. 18 No. 5, and even intensified its more problematic features. He imitated k464 most literally in the finale of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, which provided a model for similar harmonic experimentation in the Sonata in G major Op. 31 No. 1, the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and the first ‘Razumovsky’ quartet. k464 suggests an important source for Beethoven's use of chromatic elements to problematize tonal and thematic function, a practice most evident in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony.

At the turn of the eighteenth century Jean de La Bruyère and many contemporary authors in diverse literary genres undertook intense studies of character that moved beyond popular portraiture to level moral critiques of the social dissimulation rampant in the era. The literary works from François Couperin's personal library and his musical character studies suggest that he too was intrigued with moral issues surrounding character. While musicologists have suggested connections between the character pieces of Couperin and the character studies of La Bruyère, existing comparisons between the two do not explore the moral dimensions of both literary and musical character studies. In this article, I argue that selected musical works from Couperin's four books of pièces de clavecin participated vitally in the moral discourse of the era, taking up similar subject matter to widely read moralistes such as La Bruyère but employing music to articulate social criticism. By making use of the media of music and performance, Couperin's musical portraits extend the scope and power of literary moralism, enlisting musical performance to critique the social performance of false identities.