The feast celebrated annually on 4 December as the Reception of the Relics is one that was peculiar to Notre Dame of Paris in the later Middle Ages. It commemorated the reception of relics of five saints into the still unfinished Gothic cathedral, including several hairs of the Virgin Mary, three teeth of John the Baptist, an arm of St Andrew the Apostle, some stones from the lapidation of St Stephen the Protomartyr and a large part of the head of St Denis. The event that prompted this feast in Paris took place during the reign of King Philip Augustus, who was on the throne from 1180 to 1223, and it has been the subject of occasional comment, debate and research ever since, with the most recent discussion coming in the excellent article by Craig Wright in the Festschrift for John Ward.

Vivaldi's indebtedness to Roman models in his formative years as a composer has generally been recognized, although the Roman link is often viewed simplistically and inaccurately as an apprenticeship, stylistically speaking, with Corelli. A more careful review of the evidence leads to the conclusion that the Corellian features in his first three published collections were acquired at second hand via a slightly older generation of Venetian composers (Gentili, Albinoni, Caldara) rather than through independent study of Corelli. Undeniably, the pioneering concertos of op. 3 (L'estro armonico, 1711) betray the strong influence of the Rome-based composer Giuseppe Valentini, whose Concerti grossi, op. 7, had been published the previous year in Bologna But the few manuscript works by Vivaldi that survive from this early period (notably the sonatas RV 60 and 779, and the concertos RV 402, 416 and 420) offer clear evidence that for ordinary purposes he remained as close as any of his Venetian contemporaries to the norms of the local tradition.

An extended, unaccompanied violin passage labelled ‘Capriccio’ occurs towards the end of the first and last movements of each of the 12 solo violin concertos, op. 3, by Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695–1764). These concertos, all of which observe the three-movement fast-slow-fast layout, were published in 1733 by Le Cène in Amsterdam under the title L'arte del violino, but were probably written in the late 1720s. The capriccios may last up to a few pages, and some are longer than the whole of the rest of the movement to which they belong.

In Classical sonata form, the second group - usually in the dominant or relative major - is normally recapitulated in the tonic. This means that a composer of sonatas must choose whether to transpose the second group in the recapitulation up or down a fourth/fifth or sixth/third. What advice, then, would Mozart have offered if his pupil Thomas Attwood had asked him how to decide whether the second group should come back transposed up or down?

Autographs survive for all of Mozart's symphonies from K.112 to K.551 with one exception: the ‘Linz’ Symphony, K.425, composed in October and November 1783. Alfred Einstein thought it might have been among the autographs sold by Constanze Mozart to the King of Prussia in February 1792; however, it also could have been one of the symphonies cited by her in a letter of 31 May 1800 to Breitkopf und Härtel, according to which the Grand Duke of Tuscany owned autographs of two Mozart symphonies and Capellmeister Stoll of Baden, for whom Mozart had composed the motet Ave verum corpus, K.618, another. In any event, it was not among the autographs and copies sold in 1799 to the Offenbach publisher Johann Anton André.

There are many aspects of nineteenth-century violin playing that have received little attention from scholars. The subject is a vast and complicated one, far beyond the scope of a short article to treat adequately, but there are a number of important areas in which problems have not even been recognized, let alone investigated. For instance, the most substantial recent work on this subject, Robin Stowell's Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985), provides a useful digest of what the major violin methods of the period say, but because it is mainly confined to these sources, ignoring for the most part journalism and other contemporary accounts, and because it has a rather artificial terminal date of 1840, it fails to illuminate major underlying patterns of continuity and change in nineteenth-century violin playing. It may be valuable, therefore, to put forward a few ideas and suggest a few fruitful lines of enquiry which have until now remained largely unconsidered.