Handel’s Theodora (1750, libretto Thomas Morell), an oratorio about a Christian martyr, does not have the religious-political import of his other English oratorios or the literary-critical stature of his English secular dramas and odes. A ‘sport’ among Handel’s oratorios, until recently Theodora resisted whole-hearted appreciation and elicited widely differing summaries of its meaning. This is the first extended study to be published since the chapter in Winton Dean’s Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques of 1959. Drawing on guidelines proposed in the appendix ‘Approaches to Oratorio’, the article examines the libretto’s sources, dramatization and relation to the librettist’s interests; positions the work with regard to the religious ideas of its time, identifying its religious-historical standpoint; and describes its kinship with contemporary drama, fiction and aesthetics. Connoisseurs among Handel’s audience appreciated Theodora but ‘the Town’ did not. It is suggested that both Morell and Handel were aiming for inclusiveness, comprehensiveness and breadth of appeal, and in so doing produced a work – more ambiguous and conspicuously open to interpretation than the biblical oratorios – that demands the listener’s active and discriminating engagement.

The elevation of the Portuguese Royal Chapel to the rank of Patriarchal Church in 1716 was part of a larger process of ‘Romanization’ – that is, of assimilation and adaptation of Roman models within Portuguese music and culture. This involved the training of numerous chaplain-singers and young Portuguese composers in Rome, as well as the importation of chant books, ministers, singers and even the maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia, Domenico Scarlatti. According to the anonymous ‘Breve rezume de tudo o que se canta en cantochaõ, e canto de orgaõ pellos cantores na santa igreja patriarchal’ (Brief summary of all that is sung in plainchant and polyphony by the singers at the holy Patriarchal Church) – a document written at some point between 1722 and 1724 – the repertory of the Patriarchal Church was a varied mixture of works by thirty-two identified composers, mostly Italian and Portuguese, from a period ranging from the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Some of the repertory for Holy Week is also extant in three large choirbooks prepared by a copyist from the Patriarchal Church in 1735 and 1736 for use in the Ducal Chapel in Vila Viçosa. These include ‘modern’ additions to late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century pieces and also some curious reworkings, made with the purpose of adjusting older works to newly ‘Romanized’ performance conditions and aesthetic ideals. The sources examined in this article thus show that Portuguese ‘Romanization’, far from being a simple transplantation of ideas and practices from the centre to the periphery, was a dynamic process of acculturation and adaptation rooted in emerging forms of historical consciousness.

It is as a classicist that Johann Adolph Scheibe has entered the annals of music history, either as a propagator of the principles of French literary classicism, or as a champion of a ‘galant’ style that later critics would view as a foundation for a German musical classicism. But if Scheibe insisted on a quality of striking simplicity, using words clearly indebted to those of Nicolas Boileau, the doyen of seventeenth-century French critics, he was no classicist according to the French model. While all classicists depend to a certain degree on the regulation of their material – for such regulation aids them in their quest for the perfect fit between parts and whole – they will differ in how they choose to balance the codification of technique and the regulation of style, on the one hand, with the evocation of emphatic or ‘sublime’ experiences, on the other. If Boileau sought the ‘marvellous’ quality that strikes like lightening, Scheibe wished for clarity. Drawing on scholarship in the history of literature, this article first examines the origins and point of French classicist literary aesthetics, then traces the fate of these aesthetics as they were transferred from France to Germany and from literature to music.

The image of the heroic Handel, typified by claims of immense physical and mental toughness, and rapid – even miraculous – recovery, may satisfy the credulous, but it needs considerable modification once we realize that Handel continued to suffer following the first acute paralytic attack in 1737. It is no coincidence that the onset of acute symptoms occurred during Handel’s last lengthy season of opera production and that oratorios came to dominate his composing and his shortened performance seasons thereafter.

Whatever the immediate causes for Handel’s decisions to write and publicly to perform the first few English-language works, the intensification of that practice after 1737 was due in large measure to the challenges posed by lead poisoning and its ensuing saturnine gout, and an increasing debility exacerbated by obesity. In other words, the illnesses should be considered as an integral element in the switch by Handel to writing his late works, the major oratorios.

Johann David Heinichen's treatise Der General-Bass in der Composition (Dresden, 1728) is the most comprehensive study of thoroughbass ever written, yet it has been continually overshadowed in historical accounts by works published in the same decade by Jean-Philippe Rameau (Traité de l'Harmonie) and J. J. Fux (Gradus ad Parnassum). Despite Heinichen's nuanced treatment of a wide variety of musical subjects, Der General-Bass has yet to receive wide acclaim, in large part because it lacks a reductive pedagogical framework that can rival Rameau's basse fondamentale or Fux's species in simplicity and immediate appeal. Yet fortunately, the ‘partimento renaissance’ of the last decade has brought renewed scholarly attention to the centrality of thoroughbass is the only acceptable break in eighteenth-century music-making. Thus the time is ripe for a reappraisal of Heinichen's monumental work. On at least one occasion, Heinichen does indeed outline a pedagogical method of eminent simplicity: his four-step instruction in how to improvise a prelude at the keyboard. According to Heinichen, this method, which seems to be completely unknown today, is to be understood not only as instruction in improvising, but also as training for beginning composers. In explicating the pedagogy of one of eighteenth-century Europe's leading composer-theorists, this article contributes to both the historically informed analysis and the practical teaching of baroque music today.

Haydn composed his ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 82–87, in 1785–1786 on commission from the Concert de la Société Olympique, whose orchestra gave the first performances, probably in 1787. This essay considers aspects of these first performances – the audience, the venue and the performers, about which there is all too little information and a certain amount of confusion.

This article outlines a number of potential contributions that a consideration of early eighteenth-century conceptions of musical expressivity might make to certain present-day philosophical and psychological accounts of musical emotions and their expression. Taking as its central case study a performance by Christian Gerhaher in Peter Sellars's 2014 staging of J. S. Bach's St John Passion, the article calls for closer attention to both the historical specifics of music's expressive capacities and the corporeal dimension of performance (past and present). It argues that a more sustained engagement with these domains can productively complicate some fundamental assumptions that underpin current approaches to musical expression.

Two further unknown sacred vocal compositions by Vivaldi, a Dixit Dominus and a Lauda Jerusalem, have turned up in a collection that has already witnessed two similar discoveries in recent decades: that of the former Saxon Hofkapelle, today in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek / Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden. Like their predecessors, the newly discovered works were acquired between the mid-1750s and early 1760s from the copying shop of Iseppo Baldan in Venice, who falsified the attribution on the title page to make the composer Galuppi instead of Vivaldi. Whereas the Lauda Jerusalem is an arrangement by Vivaldi of an anonymous stile antico setting of the same psalm in his own collection (and in turn the model for his own Credidi propter quod, rv605), the Dixit Dominus, scored for choir, soloists and orchestra, is an entirely original composition of outstanding musical quality that dates from the composer’s late period. This article explores the background to the Hofkapelle’s purchases from Baldan and provides a description of the new compositions, together with several arguments (based on musical concordances, general stylistic features and notational characteristics) for their attribution to Vivaldi.

Although the question of a connection between Bach’s music and the discipline of rhetoric has been raised repeatedly in the past, the proposed solutions have rarely taken into account the particular kind of rhetorical thinking prevalent in the eighteenth century. In this article, I show that a notion of rhetoric initially developed by Erasmus of Rotterdam and perpetuated in seventeenth-century writings, which focused on argumentative procedures involving variation and amplification, continued to underlie poetic and musical theory in Bach’s time. By articulating fundamental creative patterns that came to underpin a variety of disciplines, this Erasmian model can provide the starting-point for a reassessment of rhetorical techniques in Bach’s music, shifting the focus from isolated moments of affective decoration to the formal-expressive trajectories that shape the layout of whole pieces. Constituted in the interplay of compositional processes and their listening reception, these trajectories emerge as the result of the skilful arrangement of musical phrases into individual and flexible large-scale designs that often leave aside or undercut the supposed structural conventions of concerto or aria forms. The first movement of the third ‘Brandenburg Concerto’, bwv1048, serves as an example of how an awareness of these seventeenth-century rhetorical and musical legacies makes possible a thorough reconsideration of Bach’s compositional strategies.

We often read about the castrato Senesino's arrogant, self-absorbed personality, especially in relation to Handel and his London years. Concerns about Senesino's difficult character spread in London even before his arrival in September 1720. That this preoccupied the singer is shown in his correspondence with Giuseppe Riva, which reveals that Senesino was also apprehensive about working with the composer. Evidence shows that Senesino sought to control his debut through the choice of and involvement in a production of the opera Arsace. The selection of a libretto that exploits a subject drawn from British history, the poetic and dramaturgical revisions made by Rolli to the original text from 1715, and the changes and additions to Orlandini's original score all brought Senesino to the fore. That Senesino's voice stood as a strong argument in his rhetorical strategy may not be surprising; the aria type that he chose and the avoidance of ostentatious ornamentation are unexpected, however, and may reveal a more subtle plan of self-fashioning.

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.

While Rameau alluded to contemporary notions of musical expression in his theoretical writings, he devoted little effort to explaining how music acted on listeners expressively. This article reviews Rameau's writings to establish and clarify his beliefs about this process, finding that they less resemble what we would think of as the leading edge of contemporary thought – exemplified by Dubos, Estève and the Encyclopedists – than they do the earlier descriptions of Descartes and Malebranche. Following long-standing philosophical tradition, the latter privileged the passion wonder (admiration) as the structural basis for all passions. Rameau in turn staged his theoretical discoveries and responses to music in precisely the same way, as an initial, constitutive experience of wonder that then merged mimetically with subtler passionate responses. He assumed similar responses for those who listened to music. We can attribute Rameau's preference for an old-fashioned explanation of the passions to several factors. Notably, according to the principles of his theoretical system, he needed to isolate and describe music as an object that acted on the beholder's mind, whereas later writers concerned themselves more with the beholder's sensory and emotional responses. Moreover, Rameau's argument was an effective response to conservative music critics, who attacked him for introducing overly sensual elements into music.

On 16 March 1736 Giovanni Battista Pergolesi died from consumption at age twenty-six in the Franciscan monastery of Pozzuoli near Naples, leaving a considerable number of compositions in all genres: stage works, cantatas, instrumental music and sacred music. On account of the success these compositions had enjoyed in Italy during his life, and the extraordinary fame they achieved in the rest of Europe after his death, a multitude of works bearing his name continued to be disseminated, many of which had little, if any, connection with Pergolesi himself. This phenomenon invites us to question what mechanisms are at work when a piece of music is misattributed, for if spurious or doubtful works can be classified according to their origin, then the identification of recurring patterns may help disentangle similar cases. This essay aims to classify the origins of misattributed sacred works from the first decades of Pergolesi's posthumous reception.

In his article ‘Contrapunkt’ in the Musikalisches Lexikon (1802) Heinrich Christoph Koch described the intense, suspension-filled and motivically saturated style that he and his contemporaries knew from the music of J. S. Bach in a distinctly odd manner. To show how a composer might write such music, he took a relatively consonant passage in the ‘free’ style, as he called it, and then ornamented it to create a ‘strict’ appearance. By generating the strict from the free style, Koch unconsciously registered the eighteenth-century shift from intervallic counterpoint towards chordal harmony. But as he described the strict style in this and other articles in the dictionary, Koch also intimated that the ‘strict’ style meant something quite different to him than it had to theorists of preceding generations. No longer an icon of immutable law and harmony, it seemed bizarre and dissonant, knocked from its theoretical, pedagogical and symbolic pride of place. This article first examines the theoretical issues of pedagogy and style that Koch wrestled with as he sought to make the traditional terminology of the strict style fit the compositional environment of his time, then analyses the symbolic implications of Koch’s notion of the strict style. Finally, it suggests how the symbolism of the strict style, as implied by Koch, might be manifested in the chorale fantasy sung by Two Armed Men in Schikaneder and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. The law of the Temple of Wisdom is not immutable, but rather represents the law of the old order, commanding respect but admitting change.

The plagal cadence has long been a significant concept within musical discourse, but that discourse contains no convincing explanation of why the progression should be characterized as ‘plagal’. This article elucidates the meaning of the term ‘plagal cadence’ by examining its introduction into a mid-eighteenth-century Parisian debate over the nature of what would come to be called tonality instigated by Charles-Henri de Blainville's proposal of the ‘mixed mode’, a supplement to the major and minor modes. Owing to the properties of his new mode's scale, which corresponds to the Phrygian mode, Blainville identified the plagal cadence as the proper conclusion for pieces in the mixed mode. Curiously, although Blainville's work appears to contain the first published articulation of the term, he employs it as if his readers were already familiar with the ‘plagal cadence’. This article explains that oddity, finding that Blainville misread earlier accounts of plainchant as saying that plagal modes were characterized by the interval of the descending fourth. In conclusion, consideration of the controversy regarding the mixed mode and plagal cadence reveals that those historical disagreements bear striking similarities to current debates over the significance and function of the plagal cadence in theories of harmony.

Despite Rousseau’s condemnation of the ‘progress’ of civilization and his suspicions concerning the arts, he none the less articulates a redemptive role for aesthetic experience within modern life. In choosing music as his privileged aesthetic object, he suggests the possibility of an eighteenth-century aesthetic based on experience that anticipates later developments in romanticism and modernism. And by locating the possibility of redemption within aesthetic experience couched in terms of musical performance, he articulates a modern role for the work of art that looks forward to nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theory from the German Romantics to the Frankfurt School.