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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Music and …’ is the concluding topic in Ludmilla Jordanova’s editorial in an earlier issue of this journal (Eighteenth-Century Music 1/2 (2004), 153–155), and in reverse it will be the starting-point in mine. I fell into writing about music as an active amateur (and briefly professional) cellist with a background in theory consisting of a year’s tutoring in old-fashioned species counterpoint as an unruly fourteen-year-old. In the autumn of 1979 I was writing about the origins of reverie – that is, of representations and discussions of unfocused or unconscious awareness – in writings of the 1780s, chiefly by Rousseau, Kant and William Cowper. It occurred to me that the drifting sensibility I was describing was perfectly captured by the introduction to Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet. It started as a footnote, but finally required a small essay to define the contexts and work out the details. Then, however, I could invoke the representation of a state of feeling not encumbered by the rational straitjacket of concepts. Whether they knew it or not – Kant certainly didn’t, Rousseau at some level certainly did – music was what my authors were after!

The three words ‘networking, influencing, facilitating’ encapsulate the aims and achievements of Bach Network UK (BNUK) in its first ten years. At the instigation of Reinhard Strohm and together with John Butt and Ruth Tatlow, BNUK was founded in Oxford in 2004. Our motivating vision was to create an interdisciplinary forum that would attract profound discussion of Bach's music and bridge the scholar–performer divide. We imagined an integrated structure, powered by specialized research discussions, feeding into larger-scale meetings and being disseminated through publication. These ideas are still loosely recognizable a decade later.

While recent studies have explored the significance of the Polish style in the music of Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach, and the importance of Polish dances in Dresden has long been recognized, the eighteenth-century German polonaise remains a largely neglected area of inquiry. The restoration of the library of the Singakademie zu Berlin in 2000 has made it possible to explore an important collection of mostly unica sources of music by Saxon composers from c1740 to 1763 amassed by the Meissen porcelain mosaic artist Carl Jacob Christian Klipfel (1727–1802). Klipfel's collection includes music by Johann Christian Roellig (born 1716), possibly the most prolific composer of polonaises in Dresden during this period and one of the earliest German composers to write mazurs (mazurkas) in instrumental works. The first-hand knowledge of the Polish style that musicians employed by the Saxon electoral court and Count von Brühl gained as a result of frequent journeys to Warsaw resulted in Dresden polonaises that are relatively un-‘Germanized’. This article examines the social and musical contexts of the polonaise in mid-eighteenth-century Dresden, including the repertoire of the annual Redouten (masked balls), then examines the polonaises and mazurkas of Roellig and his contemporaries, including Johann Georg Knechtel, Georg Gebel and Gottlob Harrer. A survey of the use of the polonaise in Redoutentänze, symphonies and partitas reveals significant differences in style and structure between these genres.

Although musicology as a discipline has expanded enormously over the past few decades, many of its core interests remain much as they were a century ago, when the primary task facing scholars was to take stock of what had been written and by whom. We now possess good if not yet definitive catalogues of many composers’ oeuvres and in some cases complete or near-complete critical editions. Less systematically organized performing editions of works by non-canonical composers have also begun to appear in increasing numbers in recent years to complement the pioneering surveys in publications like Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich and Musica Britannica. Systematic studies of contemporary documents relating to individual musicians and musical establishments have proved exceptionally useful, though much of the picture remains obscure. Thus, after a century of unremitting labour, we have a musical chart that is extravagantly detailed in some areas yet frustratingly blank in others. The chance survival of documents enables us, for example, to know how many coffee spoons Leopold Hofmann owned at the time of his death, yet few if any documents survive that shed light on his personal and professional life. None the less, in spite of the incompleteness of our knowledge we possess an incomparably more detailed understanding of music in the eighteenth century than seemed possible even twenty years ago.

Alexander Malcolm (1685–1763) published his monumental Treatise of Musick in Edinburgh in 1721, one year before Rameau published his Traité de l'harmonie. Malcolm's was the first important work on music theory published in Scotland, and it established his musical reputation, influencing theorists and historians for almost a hundred years, both in Europe and in the American colonies. Sir John Hawkins deemed it ‘one of the most valuable treatises on the subject of theoretical and practical music to be found in any of the modern languages’. Malcolm's chapter 13 is often cited by music theorists for anticipating the writings of Rameau. However, Malcolm's Introduction states that the thirteenth chapter was communicated to him by a ‘modest’ friend. Identifying this friend necessitated first determining the author(s) of two rare anonymous contemporaneous treatises, remarkably similar to each other, and one nearly identical to Malcolm's chapter 13. Several writers have speculated on possible authors – two in particular, Alexander Baillie and Alexander Bayne – but none has provided actual evidence. This study identifies the author of these two hitherto anonymous treatises: Malcolm's modest friend.

This article explores and contextualizes the thought of the religious author Richard Roach (1662–1730) from a musical perspective. Roach, a member of the Behmenist, millenarian Philadelphian Society in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, published little that relates directly to the subject of music, and has thus gone virtually unrecognized in this context. Nevertheless, in his more substantial religious oeuvre music emerges as a crucial component of his thought. In addition, his manuscript diaries and papers reveal their author’s interaction with some of Augustan London’s leading musical figures, and his participation in a previously unknown weekly musical meeting.

After reviewing the overall circumstances of Roach’s life and cultural milieu, the article outlines what can at present be established about his musical activities. As I demonstrate, evidence from the diaries clarifies the provenance of an early hymn collection, while other extant sources reveal an unsuspected connection between religious ‘enthusiasm’ and the reception in London of Italian opera. The integral place of music in Roach’s worldview is then related to aspects of his thought ranging from ‘spiritual gender’, eschatology and the Divine Magia to science and politics. Beyond this timely focus on a neglected individual, however, I draw attention to the continuing tendency to overlook contexts such as this one, in which music is a potentially important but not an obviously paramount ingredient. I suggest that conventional conceptions of an emerging ‘public sphere’ – secular, enlightened, rational – need to be modified to take account of supposedly marginalized, ‘enthusiastic’ religious groups such as the Philadelphians. Finally, the absorption of developing musical genres into the background of an age-old model of universal harmony is taken as an instance of the powerful historical interplay between change and continuity.

John Dryden famously bowdlerized Shakespeare, whose plays violated his reason-governed tastes. That the author of such verse as ‘Happy, happy, happy pair! / None but the brave, / None but the brave, / None but the brave deserves the fair’ (Alexander’s Feast) should have found the rather stronger temperament and the complex plot ambiguities of his predecessor indigestible should come as no surprise. Because our educational processes have long since held up Shakespeare as the pinnacle of English-language literature, we tend to find Dryden’s fastidious attitude somewhat quaint – if, indeed, we remember it at all.

Most of our modern Western institutions and precepts – democracy, individualism, subjectivity, secularism, science, the nation state and the modern apparatus of war – began to germinate in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. In musical life too these were formative years. The emergence of the canon, with the associated idea of the musical ‘work’, was one such development. The rise of the virtuoso and the transformation of audiences from unwieldy and fitfully attentive to enthralled, disciplined and devout, two more. And with these developments, music’s role as a medium of social differentiation was both enhanced and qualitatively revised.

This article examines the household of John Hunter, a London surgeon, and Anne Hunter, a poet, and its relevance for Haydn’s collaboration with Anne – the two sets of English Canzonettas (1794–1795). I interpret canzonettas by Haydn and several of his London contemporaries as artefacts of a context in which music and anatomy were pursued not only under the same roof but by the same people, who participated in shared discourses, medical and musical, regarding the nature of femininity. This perspective reveals ways in which John partook of his wife’s world, asserting the artful and beautiful of dissection and anatomy, and suggests new significance for aspects of the Haydn–Hunter canzonettas, especially their references to body parts, sighs, symptoms and death.

Italian opera is increasingly receiving well deserved attention. Yet the process by which the chorus in opera seria was created remains largely unexplored. Between 1759 and 1769 Tommaso Traetta and Christoph Gluck composed path-breaking, reform-inspired opere serie for Parma’s Teatro Ducale which integrated chorus, dance and stage spectacle in the French manner. In an era when operatic choruses usually comprised amateurs and chapel singers, evidence from printed librettos and documents from Parma’s Archivio di Stato reveal that many of the Teatro Ducale’s choristers were professional singers hired from neighbouring Bologna. Perhaps in response to logistical and financial difficulties in engaging skilled personnel for Traetta’s choruses, Parma established a singing school to provide choristers for theatre. Gluck’s choruses employed a combination of students from this school and professionals. The evidence from Parma shows that the wide-ranging circuit within which Italy’s opera theatres functioned embraced not only leading soloists and other personnel, but choral singers as well. It demonstrates the impact of practical circumstances surrounding the production of Parma’s operatic choruses on the success of operatic reform in Parma.