In 1739, two years before his death, Vivaldi sold a group of five psalms to the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. All but one of these psalms had been identified and located prior to May 2003, when the missing work, a Nisi Dominus in A major for three solo singers, five obbligato instruments and strings, turned up in Dresden as the unexpected by-product of a routine inspection. Like one of the other psalms belonging to the same group, the Beatus vir rv795, this new discovery, rv803, is attributed in its Dresden source to Baldassarre Galuppi. The misattribution appears to have been an act of deliberate falsification by the Venetian copyist Iseppo Baldan, who slipped the two Vivaldi compositions in to a large consignment of sacred vocal works, mainly by Galuppi, dispatched to the Saxon Hofkapelle in the late 1750s. The new Nisi Dominus is noteworthy for the high level of vocal virtuosity that all eight movements demand and for its use of rare instruments (viola d’amore, tenor chalumeau and violino in tromba marina) to lend added colour in individual movements. It is also a striking example of Vivaldi’s ‘late’ manner, which, although influenced by the galant style of younger composers, remains true to his personal idiom. At the same time, it rivals the oratorio Juditha triumphans as a showcase for the diverse talents of the Pietà’s female musicians.

Louis-Guillaume Pecour’s couple-dance called L’Allemande introduced in 1702 a mode of dancing that in some respects was different to anything that had been seen before on stage or at court in France, and that was to influence a number of dances for the theatre and ballroom in the following years. Particular characteristics of Pecour’s dance were its unusual arm positions, which seem to have indicated a specifically ‘Germanic’ character, and some sequences of steps which, although also occurring in other dances of the time, nevertheless seemed to reinforce some notion of ‘Germanic’ dancing. Some of these characteristics also appeared in dances devised in London after 1714 for the Hanoverian royal family, perhaps as a deliberate allusion to their German ancestry. This article examines the structure and form of Pecour’s L’Allemande, and the extent to which it, and some of the dances it influenced, may have represented a stereotype of ‘Germanic’ culture as something outlandish or uncultivated unless redeemed by an overlay of French choreographic sophistication.

Ignaz Holzbauer (1711–1783) is best known for his singspiel Günther von Schwarzburg (1777), a work that deeply impressed Mozart during his sojourn in Mannheim. A much earlier German opera by Holzbauer, however, has gone virtually unnoticed. In the summer or autumn of 1741 the composer’s full-length, three-act teutsche Opera entitled Hypermnestra was performed at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna. Following the death of Emperor Charles VI and the accession of Maria Theresia, the Kärntnertortheater Intendant Joseph Selliers commissioned a German-language opera, selecting Holzbauer, who had recently returned to Vienna from Moravia, to compose the music and the court printer Johann Leopold van Ghelen to write the libretto.

Although it is widely known that Holzbauer composed several operas in Italian before 1741, Hypermnestra appears to be the earliest opera by the composer for which a score survives. The music provides ample evidence of a mature composer in full command of opera seria style. Although Holzbauer had not yet found a satisfactory solution to the problem of narrative recitative, the opera nevertheless illustrates many of the virtues found in Günther von Schwarzburg: outstanding accompanied recitatives, a great variety in the treatment of da capo aria form and a rich array of orchestral colours.

Apart from the music, Hypermnestra is remarkable for historical reasons. It reveals that the composer had received a commission to compose an opera in the German language long before Günther von Schwarzburg. On the basis of current research it appears to hold the distinction of being one of the earliest, if not the first, full-length German opera produced in Vienna. Maria Theresia soon re-established the dominance of French and Italian styles. Nevertheless, Hypermnestra is an early example of an idea that would gradually gain acceptance and blossom during the reign of Joseph II.

This article examines various eighteenth-century sources to determine whether they confirm the present practice of calling a first-floor hall of the Fertőd (Eszterháza) palace the ‘music room’. While the answer is essentially negative, we learn that the neighbouring ceremonial hall was used by Empress Maria Theresia for a banquet with some music-making in 1773, and that two more spaces on the ground floor served regularly as the ‘summer music halls’. So where did the ‘real’, quality concerts take place? A whole body of documentary evidence clearly shows that the accademies took place in the opera house or Grosses Theater. Much of this evidence refers to the first opera house, which burnt down in 1779. The practice apparently continued in the new, bigger 1781 opera house, but by then the number of concerts would have been reduced substantially, owing to the Prince's growing addiction to opera. A survey of Haydn's last symphonies and concertos composed for domestic use confirms that regular concerts could not have taken place later than 1783 or, possibly, 1784. However, a long-neglected remark in a contemporary witness report provides direct proof of the inclusion of symphonies in the course of opera performances.

In contrast to what its title suggests, Niccolò Jommelli's Cajo Mario (Rome, 1746) has little to do with the consul Caius Marius (157–86 BC). Instead, the opera transposes the myth of Iphigenia in Aulis to the Roman Republic, having Marius, his daughter, her lover and her villainous suitor assume the roles of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Achilles and Ajax respectively. Thus configured, Jommelli's opera held the stage until 1772, enjoying fifteen revivals with most of the original music intact – a record in the composer's oeuvre. This essay seeks to clarify the reasons for that remarkable success. By juxtaposing Jommelli's score and Gaetano Roccaforte's libretto with a set of six paintings by the contemporary artist Antonio Joli (c1700–1777), it aims to show how Cajo Mario shares compositional strategies with a connoisseur's genre in the fine arts: the capriccio. In keeping with Joli's capricci, which all deploy the same structural motif, Cajo Mario incorporates a narrative structure through which the ‘parallel universe’ of related works imposes itself on the opera's setting and action, making spectators wonder – as a character does in the course of the opera – whether they are gazing at an event from republican Rome or reliving a legend from ancient Greece.

The last two decades have seen the opening of several new paths in eighteenth-century musicology, and Robert O. Gjerdingen has opened one of these: schema theory. Schemata are ‘stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ that function as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic frameworks for musical passages. Evidence of such schematic thinking has emerged through related studies on partimento and solfeggio. Solfeggio practice of the time manifests a schematic way of thinking about music, being mostly based on simple hexachordal patterns which, as studies progressed, could be embellished in different ways. Vasili Byros has addressed the ‘archaeology’ of hearing through reception history, and offered strong evidence that eighteenth-century ears did hear schemata. Interweaving corpus studies on music of the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), contemporary music criticism and reception history, as well as didactic documents from that era, Byros sheds new light on the ways in which schemata were perceived at the time. A recent contribution by Gilad Rabinovitch uses a live improvisation in the style of Mozart by Robert Levin to demonstrate the importance of conventional schemata for historical improvisation.

The Sixteenth Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (ICBM) was held at the beautiful Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor Thomas Hochradner and his effective team of assistants, approximately 250 participants could choose from papers and lecture-recitals that covered a wide spectrum of topics and methodologies. These included new research on notable composers, geographical influences upon musical genres and interdisciplinary approaches. The organizers also offered guided tours on one of the afternoons, which allowed participants to trace the music of the city, learn about the autographs vault of the Mozarteum, listen to the organs at the Metropolitan Church or explore the cathedral quarters (Domquartier).

The problem of tempering keyboard and fretted instruments has occupied the attention of musicians and theorists for hundreds of years. Since the sixteenth century most fretted instruments such as the lute and viola da gamba have employed equal temperament (or an approximation of it based upon the 18:17 rule) or an adaptation of mean-tone tuning, but these systems suffered from ‘tempered’, or ‘impure’, intervals. In 1705 the music theorist Thomas Salmon (born London, 1648; died Mepsal [now Meppershall], Bedfordshire, 1706) proposed a system of intonation for the viola da gamba that employed divided frets (that is, the frets were not tied across the fingerboard in a straight line but were in effect cut apart and glued or inset beneath each string as required) as well as interchangeable fingerboards for different keys (much like the set of crooks for the later Inventionshorn). It was Salmon’s intention to overcome the lack of purity associated with fretting systems that ‘falsify the proportions’ and thus ‘deprive us of that satisfactory pleasure which arises from the exactness of sonorous numbers’. In his system the C major scale was constructed of large and small whole tones having ratios of 9:8 for the intervals C–D, F–G and A–B, 10:9 for the intervals D–E and G–A, and 16:15 for the semitones E–F and B–C. The two sizes of whole tones were divided 18:17:16 and 20:19:18, resulting in the following scale:

This article provides a new analysis, appraisal and aesthetic examination of Mozart's notated melodic embellishments. Whereas previous studies of Mozartean embellishment (including those undertaken by Frederick Neumann in the 1980s and Robert Levin in the 1990s) tend to focus on the local, individual gestures that make up the composer's vocabulary, this study examines broader issues in Mozart's art of embellishment – in particular, the larger-scale characteristics of his written embellishment models, including the rate at which figuration accumulates and the structural layout of that figuration within and between individual phrases. I then explore the aesthetic resonances of melodic embellishment in Mozart's oeuvre, touching upon topics including the relationship of embellishment to a movement's affect, the relationship of embellishment to the compositional persona encoded in a work, the use of embellishment to depict improvisation in operas, and the aesthetic of digressiveness in the composer's melodies.

This article considers eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodism's relationship with art music through the original settings of poetry by Charles Wesley by five notable musicians: John Frederick Lampe, George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Battishill, Charles Wesley junior and Samuel Wesley. It argues that the strong emphasis on congregational singing in popular and scholarly perceptions of Methodism, including within the movement itself, masks a more varied engagement with musical culture. The personal musical preferences of John and Charles Wesley brought them into contact with several leading musical figures in eighteenth-century London and initiated a small corpus of original musical settings of some of the latter's hymns. The article examines the textual and musical characteristics of these the better to understand their relationship with both eighteenth-century Methodism and fashionable musical culture of the period. It argues that Methodism was not, contrary to popular perception, uniformly opposed to or detached from the aesthetic considerations of artistic culture, that eighteenth-century Methodism and John and Charles Wesley cannot be regarded as synonymous and that, in this period, sacred music encompasses rather more than church music and cannot be narrowly defined in opposition to secular music.

In 1755 a small vocal instruction book dedicated to the King’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was published in Paris under the name of [Jean-Antoine] Bérard. His role in this work was challenged a year later by l’abbé Jean Blanchet, who published a greatly enlarged version of Bérard’s book, claiming that he was its true author. Up to now, the lack of definitive source material has prevented a resolution of this question. New evidence clarifies its puzzling aspects, enabling us to reach a plausible conclusion. Investigating this matter leads also to insights in other areas, including the original meaning of the term amateur, the first known presentation of diaphragm breathing in print, the quality of singing at the Paris Opéra, contemporary views on the overuse of embellishment and audience behaviour.

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.

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.