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.

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.

As Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great (1729–1796) shaped not only history in general but also, as a member of its princely family, the history of Anhalt-Zerbst. Drawing upon little known eighteenth-century manuscripts housed at the Landeshauptarchiv of Saxony-Anhalt in Dessau and the Francisceumsbibliothek in Zerbst, this study assesses the impact of Catherine’s marriage in 1745 to Grand Duke Peter of Russia (1728–1762) on musical life at the court of Anhalt-Zerbst during and after the thirty-six-year tenure of Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688–1758). First the role of music at the court prior to 1745 will be considered – specifically the ‘Concert-Stube’, an inventory of the Hofkapelle’s musical library prepared according to Fasch’s specifications in March 1743. The second section of this article focuses on the celebrations held at the court in 1745 on the occasion of Catherine the Great’s wedding. The Hofkapelle premiered a large-scale serenata by Fasch, the music to which has been lost. However, an examination of the extant libretto and of other music by Fasch that was performed at the court during the 1740s sheds light on the musical forces he would have employed and the compositional approach he might have taken. The Hofkapelle also performed a secular wedding cantata for bass solo and instruments by an anonymous composer as part of a spectacular fireworks display in three acts, the ‘Anhalt-Zerbstisches Freuden-Feuer’ (Fire of Joy), chronicled by Zerbst headmaster Johann Hoxa. Finally, it is possible to reconstruct a performance schedule of sacred music premiered in honour of Catherine the Great from 1746 to 1773. Despite Fasch’s death in 1758 and the Seven Years War, which led to the town of Zerbst being occupied by 16,000 Prussian soldiers for three years until 1761, new music was commissioned by the court from Fasch’s successor Johann Georg Röllig (1710–1790), Catherine the Great’s keyboard instructor at the court of Anhalt-Zerbst. He not only provided occasional compositions to commemorate her birthday and accession to the Russian throne but also composed a new cycle of Sunday cantatas to reflect the changing artistic priorities and practices of the Hofkapelle in the early 1760s.

Hummel’s quoting of music by other composers has been mentioned briefly in a number of studies. While some of these quotations are explicit, others are a good deal more problematic. This article investigates explicit quotations that appear in two of Hummel’s string quartets dating from 1803–1804 and the finale of a piano sonata from 1807. The fourth movement of the String Quartet in G major, Op. 30 No. 2, twice quotes J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV988, the slow movement of Op. 30 No. 3 refers to Handel’s Messiah and the finale of the F minor piano sonata cultivates a complex relationship with the last movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. My objective is to demonstrate the sophistication and subtlety with which Hummel manipulates the quoted material in these three cases.

Hummel’s obvious quotation of Bach and Handel in particular is related to a multi-faceted preoccupation with archaic styles and earlier works that had taken root in the later eighteenth century and that continued to expand into the nineteenth and beyond. Although England was the first nation to develop a performance tradition around the ‘ancient’ musical repertory, it was the accumulation of a didactic tradition around the keyboard works of J. S. Bach in north Germany and its steady migration to centres like Vienna that is of more direct relevance here. And when one surveys the (supposed) quotations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi of works by Bach and Handel and compares them with Hummel’s, Hummel’s remain outstanding in their exactness and also in their frequent lightheartedness of tone. Whereas many straightforward quotations or instances of modelling appear reverential or seek to exalt the basic idiom, Hummel’s either are humorous or seem calculated to reduce the potency of the original in order to assimilate the earlier idiom into the later one. The three pieces considered here illustrate the spectrum of techniques used by Hummel to manipulate quoted material in his works. The quotations in the two quartets have drawn very little comment; the references to Mozart’s ’Jupiter’ Symphony in the finale of Op. 20 have been remarked on more frequently, but the relationship between the two finales is a good deal more intricate than has previously been shown. The ‘contrapuntal deconstruction’ that takes place late in the third movement of Hummel’s Op. 20, between the most explicit reference to the ‘Jupiter’ finale and the coda, is lighthearted in character – amusing, even – and is in some ways the most ingenious and vibrant episode in the movement.

Between 1784 and 1809 more than forty composers dedicated works to Haydn, resulting in the largest group of offerings to a single composer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whilst Horst Walter has suggested that certain of these works reveal the ways in which composers received Haydn's style, a study of the larger collection of dedications illuminates the broader nature of Haydn's fame and the ways in which other composers and their publishers both contributed to and capitalized on that fame. Making Haydn into a kind of pseudo-patron, the title-pages, advertisements and dedicatory epistles for these works allow for an exchange of various types of capital ranging from the material to the symbolic, ultimately enabling both dedicator and dedicatee to improve their reputations in the eyes of the consuming public.

During the early eighteenth century, music composed by George Frideric Handel began to circulate in miscellaneous publications of songs and arias. His music appeared in various forms. Some publications, such as four notable pocket collections published in the mid-1720s, preserve the music largely unchanged, although within a new sonic context. Other publications completely transform arias and even overtures into vocal works with new texts, creating layers of musical associations and meanings. Unauthorized appearances of Handel's music in songbook miscellanies and single-sided prints show alternative ways in which consumers may have heard and experienced the composer outside of the opera house or a concert setting. Examining these alternative sources for Handel's music allows for an enriched assessment of which works of the composer were critically and commercially appreciated during the early eighteenth century. Analysing appearances of Handel's music in songbook anthologies also offers insight into how musical miscellanies became ubiquitous forms of the production and reception of his works in the early eighteenth century.

The outstanding (though still insufficiently recognized) development of Maltese sacred music in the mid-eighteenth century culminated in the works of Benigno Zerafa (1726–1804), a highly talented priest-composer who served as maestro di cappella at the Cathedral of St Paul at Mdina from 1744 to 1786. Zerafa’s entire collection of sacred vocal works, with one exception, was discovered in 1969 by the then-curator of the Archives of Mdina, Mgr Rev John Azzopardi. The collection, comprising, among others, masses, Credo settings, psalms, graduals, offertories, litanies, hymns, sequences, antiphons, Holy Week responsories and motets, was transferred to the archives of the cathedral, where it was professionally catalogued and shelved. One work, a recently discovered Requiem Mass for four voices and organ, is preserved in the Archivio Crypta Sancti Pauli (CSP) at Rabat. The compositions, numbering 148, are divided into two categories – (1) for voices and instruments (104), and (2) for voices and organ (44) – and range, in scoring, from works for eight, five, four, three and two voices, to others for solo voice. This essay aims to provide information on Benigno Zerafa’s life.

Haydn's D major cello concerto has traditionally been associated with Anton Kraft, a performer in Haydn's orchestra at Eszterháza during the 1780s. Before Haydn's autograph came to light in the 1950s, many authorities had accepted apparent evidence that Kraft was the concerto's composer. Even after the autograph's rediscovery, the seeming connection of the concerto with Kraft appeared so compelling that it was widely assumed he participated in the compositional process. This article demonstrates that Kraft's connection with the concerto was actually fabricated in the 1830s. Contemporary reports show that the concerto was in fact composed for the distinguished virtuoso James Cervetto, who performed it in London in 1784. Both the distinctive characteristics of the concerto, often regarded by commentators as indications of compositional weakness, and also its exceptional technical challenges are here interpreted as responses to Cervetto's singular musical temperament and exceptional proficiency, communicated to Haydn through the commission.

Although Fedele Fenaroli's partimento and counterpoint pedagogy has been the subject of a number of recent publications, several aspects of its organization and contents require further research. Thanks to the recent discovery of multiple manuscripts, I am able to elaborate on two of them in this article. First I deal with Fenaroli's partimento curriculum. As several manuscripts illustrate, Fenaroli appears to have maintained a progressive method consisting of four parts (or books) almost throughout his entire career. A partimento student had to work through the first three books successively, which served as Fenaroli's basic partimento course. When these three books had been satisfactorily assimilated, the student could proceed with book 4, which was clearly intended by Fenaroli as his advanced partimento course. Secondly, I engage with Fenaroli's views on dissonance treatment and place them in the broader context of eighteenth-century Neapolitan pedagogy, and thoroughbass and music theory treatises in general.

William Bates, who died in 1778, was a prolific and, in his day, successful composer of stage music and concert songs performed in London in the 1760s and 1770s; but a scarcity of biographical information and uncertainties over his position vis-à-vis the new style introduced in the early 1760s by J. C. Bach and others have tended to disadvantage him in modern commentary. New facts about his life and background together with a recently discovered sale catalogue reveal him to have been a cultivated man of wide interests, with a sympathy for the ‘ancient’ style. His most substantial musical contribution, as regards its potential for modern revival, is a remarkable set of six concertos for strings with oboes, bassoons and horns (plus, in two concertos, trumpets and timpani) published in 1762. These concertos, related in style to contemporary overtures to stage works but making much greater use of concertante writing, form a high point in a peculiarly British tradition of concertos employing French horns. The cult of the horn in Georgian Britain that nourished this tradition is the subject of extended discussion.

The history of the Spanish musical press in the eighteenth century has usually been interpreted as an ongoing struggle against a narrow and underdeveloped market. Print itself has been seen as a superior technology that helps to secure stability and clarity of the musical text. In this light, José de Torres, prestigious organist and composer, music director of the Spanish Chapel Royal from 1720 and owner of an important musical press, has appeared to be a heroic modernizing figure. This article challenges this received image, underlining the effectiveness of censorship and the control of individual initiatives in the field of music publishing in early eighteenth-century Spain. This is demonstrated by newly discovered documents concerning a lawsuit brought against Torres, who owned a royal printing privilege from 1700 until his death in 1738, by Francisco Díaz de Guitián, who wanted to establish a music press of his own. Several musicians acted as witnesses, giving a detailed view of how the music press worked at the time, notably how the approbations customarily given by established musicians on behalf of music treatises intended for publication were used to promote or block a career. Based on these new insights, a general study of all the known prints by the Imprenta de Música is presented in a broader editorial, political and cultural context.