When the subject of research into Italian solo song in the first half of the seventeenth century comes under discussion – in itself a rare enough event – such discussion is mostly limited to the Florentine style of solo song with chordal accompaniment, and its followers. The harmonic daring, the declamatory ideas, and the ornamental practices of such solo madrigals have proved more interesting to scholars than strophic, dance-like compositions, which have tended to be relegated to the sidelines as unimportant, at best entertaining, little tunes. Even Nigel Fortune, who argues in his highly convincing thesis, presented in several articles, that the Florentine style led only to a dead end, while the future of solo song lay in the strophic compositions, has not yet been able to rewrite the history books, immune as they seem to change.

Two centuries claim Beethoven for their own—two centuries which in the history of music will always appear as very opposites, close though their relations are: the eighteenth century with its worship of form, the nineteenth with its worship of the idea. In Beethoven both meet, in him both find their greatest representative—in him first, and in him alone, their leading principles become reconciled. He is the only composer in whose works the great ideas which were agitating his time, some of the problems which have occupied man's mind since the beginning of man's history, have found an echo. Not that he deliberately took as it were those ideas and problems as the text of his compositions, but so much had he thought about them, so deeply was he imbued with their importance, so much had they become keynotes of his mode of feeling, so much in fact part and parcel of his personality, that the freer the expression he allowed to the latter in his music, the more was it bound to reflect those ideas. At the same time, it was Beethoven who put the last finishing touches to the grand edifice of musical forms, the material for which had been brought together in hundreds of years of slow, persistent, and consistent work, till in Ph. E. Bach, in Haydn, and in Mozart arose the architects who with master-hands were to shape and fix its outlines for all time. Beethoven accepted the forms from them, but soon he began to alter and to extend them: again not because he deliberately wished to improve on his predecessors, but because he did not find these forms an adequate medium for the expression of his individuality. It was in obedience to the demands of the latter that the inherited forms gradually assumed a new aspect altogether, gradually gained that power and pliability which enabled them to give voice to every shade of feeling with a directness, an intensity and subtleness which they had never been thought capable of.

The work of the late Sir Charles Wheatstone was very varied in character, and was not limited to one, or even two, of the branches of physics. He investigated the laws of sound, of ordinary and polarised light, and he greatly advanced our knowledge of electricity and magnetism. But there is one characteristic, at least, which runs through all his investigations: he always sought to embody the results of his study of the laws of nature in a practical form, so that they might be beneficial to mankind. Thus he made use of the polarisation of the light of the sky to determine the correct solar time by means of his solar clocks; and again, in his electric instruments, he has enabled us to make electric measurements, and also to interchange ideas with our fellow-creatures all over the globe.

These Introductions, Directions, or Principles, as they were variously styled, contain what we should now term the Rudiments of Music, or at all events, as much of them as is needed for those who wish to sing a simple melody. They have an interest peculiarly their own, as illustrating the efforts made by the pioneers of congregational psalmody to secure an intelligent, as well as a general participation in its rendering.

Before I start on the main body of what I have to say, a few words of explanation are perhaps necessary.

First of all, with regard to the limits which I have set myself. You will have seen the dates—1870–1895—and possibly wondered at their apparent arbitrariness. But all I could hope to do here is to trace the main outlines of the first stage of France's musical revival. Debussy is only just on my map; Ravel, Roussel and even the later Fauré quite off it. But by 1895 all the main contributory elements which formed these later styles had made their appearance. Satie and Chabrier—the models acclaimed by a later generation—were active before Franck was dead: the Schola Cantorum was founded in the same year as Debussy's Après midi d'un faune appeared—in 1894. These twenty-five years are not the most glorious: much of the music was still tentative and the sense of national style was by no means complete. But because they were years of growth they are particularly worthy of sympathetic study.

Alfred, Dvořåk's first opera, has long hovered at the edge of our awareness of the composer. If there are signs of a growing realization that opera was to Dvořåk quite as important as other areas of his output, the detail needed to flesh out the picture of ‘Dvořåk the opera composer’ is to a large extent lacking. In the case of the composer's first six operas the inaccessibility of material has meant that an assessment of his early work in the area is still very much the province of specialist scholars. Published vocal scores exist for only three of these early operas, and none of them are in any sense scholarly editions; in the case of Krål a uhlíř (King and Charcoal-Burner) the available edition is of a revision of the score made 13 years after the work was composed, with an entirely recomposed final act. Vanda, the fascinating first version of Krål a uhlíř, and Alfred remain unpublished, although a vocal score of Krål a uhlíř has been submitted to the Czech publishing house Artia.

This article offers a contextual reading of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's and Richard Strauss's 1927 opera Die ägyptische Helena. For Hofmannsthal and Strauss, the marital rift between Menelas and Helena caused by her infidelity operated as the symbolic manifestation of a similar schism in pan-Germanic politics, society and the arts – thus highlighting the concomitant necessity for unity through recognition and celebration of a common culture. By recasting the story of Menelas's and Helena's homeward journey from Troy in order to create an aesthetic answer to the problems of the present, Hofmannsthal and Strauss pointed to the distinct similarities between the Trojan War and the recent conflict that had completely changed the political, geographical and social landscape in Europe. As this article demonstrates, Die ägyptische Helena stands as an artwork both expressly aware and uniquely representative of its historical moment through a multi-faceted literary and musical referentiality inherently characteristic of its creators.

This article interprets Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci (1892) as a voicing of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ – the problem of the underdeveloped and socially troubled Italian South. Pagliacci juxtaposes cultural symbols that include a commedia dell'arte figure representative of the Italian South and antique genres perceived to be emblematic of ‘civilized’ northern culture. By interpreting the interaction of costumes and musical styles, I argue that the work incorporates images of southern Italy – that ‘violent’, ‘uncontrollable’, yet ‘picturesque’ region – into a broader, northern-dominated conception of Italian nationhood (an interpretative mechanism typical of contemporary image-making media such as magazines and novels).

Those familiar with Herman Melville's last novella, published posthumously in 1924 and entitled Billy Budd, Foretopman, will know that one of the most memorable scenes is in fact barely there. In the so-called ‘missing’ scene, all that readers know with any certainty is that Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the warship Indomitable (later editions rename the ship Bellipotent), communicates to Billy Budd, a sailor, the verdict of a drumhead court. Billy is to die in the early hours of the following morning for the crime of striking and killing the master-at-arms, the malevolent John Claggart. Precisely what passes between Vere and Billy in the crucial scene — one pivotal for the denouement of the story — has remained for ever a literary mystery. Although the narrator provides some conjecture as to what may have happened in the compartment where Billy is held, all he can say for sure, in a sentence endlessly cited by Melville's critics, is ‘Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this interview was never known.’

It is generally accepted that women are the musical sex. It is taken for granted that nearly all women in the middle and upper classes are musically inclined, and practically every girl of these classes “learns music,” or better still, “studies music.” Our musical colleges have far more girls than men. Socially, ladies monopolise any performance there is; a man may sing a song, but that is generally all; he hardly ever plays the piano or violin. Some of us remember times when a man playing the piano was considered odd; it was essentially a lady's instrument. At a concert, especially a ballad concert, or a piano or fiddle recital, women fill most of the seats.

Carlo Goldoni left his native Venice to practise law in Tuscany for five years starting in 1743. Up to this point he had written some twenty comic librettos, most of them Intermezzi in two acts for two or three characters, but some of them full-length dramas in three acts for several characters. La Contessina, which ranks as the latest and finest of his dramas in the latter category up to this time, received its première in the San Samuele theatre at Venice during the Carnival of 1743. In his edition of the playwright's complete works, Ortolani suggests that Goldoni's model for La Contessina was a specific Neapolitan comedy, Madama Ciana, with text by Barlocci and music by Gaetano Latilla. The satire in both turns upon a poor family with pretensions to noble rank, manifested most appallingly in the person of the daughter and the question of her dowry. The music of the original production of La Contessina is lost; all we know is that the piece was a pasticcio, involving among others the young Jommelli. There were no revivals, which tells us something even so: Venice at this time was in no position to compete with Naples in the production of original comic operas.

I am sure that no one of the party of American visitors to which I have the honour to belong could open his lips on this occasion without first of all trying to express something of our hearty appreciation of the innumerable and overwhelming courtesies that have been heaped upon us ever since we set foot on English soil. It falls to others who can do it more gracefully than I to make the ampler acknowledgments that are due for most of these beautiful attentions. But I cannot begin this paper without tendering to the Council and the members of this famous Association a word of special recognition of the peculiar honour you have done us in asking us not only to be your guests this evening, but to participate formally in your deliberations. It would surely have been enough if you had permitted us to attend simply as listeners. But you have insisted with a cordiality which we cannot doubt that we should do more. And, while the duty is to us a most delicate and difficult one, we could not but accept it, believing that somewhere in the symphonic outburst of hospitable good-will with which we have been greeted, there would be the reassuring strain of kind forbearance for any failure on our part fittingly to discharge the obligation so courteously laid upon us.

Imagine yourselves in a tropical forest. You see here pendulous trails of brilliantly-coloured flowers; there, bunches of gaudy fruits: high up, above your heads, filmy fronds of foliage wave in the breeze; at your feet gnarled and far-rambling roots wander in every direction. You wonder if you are beholding some fabled creeper of monstrous growth, or whether fruit, flowers and foliage belong to different plants that have become inextricably entangled. You attempt to follow a young shoot to its parent stem, and thence to its root; you find yourself baffled and baulked at every turn. Set yourselves the task of tracing the history of the creations named Intermezzi, Intermedii, Intermèdes, or Interludes to their source or sources, and you will experience similar feelings.

The vocal music of William Byrd consists of the Latin Masses and motets, a comparatively small amount of Anglican church, music, and a substantial body of ‘secular’ compositions. Among the latter, settings of psalms and spiritual texts abound, but they were designed for a secular context and rarely taken over for church use; their musical style confirms their non-liturgical character. The numbers of works involved, though approximate on account of doubtful attributions and incomplete sources, are nevertheless instructive: there are three Masses and about 180 motets; the Anglican works comprise two complete services, two evening services, some smaller liturgical items and probably no more than twenty anthems; the secular vocal music amounts to almost 160 pieces. Often extending to two or more sections, the motets generally dwarf the songs, many of which are single-stanza settings. Even so, this last number indicates a degree of involvement sometimes not appreciated by those who comment on Byrd's music.

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.

This article explores the first attempt to reform Handelian oratorio, by the Revd John Brown, in 1763. Concerned about the waning popularity and literary flaws of Handel's works, Brown launched a reform campaign through his own oratorio The Cure of Saul, performed at Covent Garden Theatre, and the publication of A Dissertation on […] Poetry and Music. He also produced the first monograph of oratorio criticism, An Examination of the Oratorios which have been performed this Season, at Covent-Garden Theatre (1763). Published within weeks of one another, the three works shaped an intellectual offensive with aesthetic and moral goals mounted on an educational platform. Although a failure, Brown's attempt reflected Britain's national anxiety in the wake of the Seven Years War.

One of the less studied aspects of post-war musical life is private sponsorship of American modernist composers, such as that by the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) established in 1952. Using unpublished letters and documents from the FMF archives at Harvard and interviews with people who worked with the founder, Paul Fromm, this article discusses how Fromm's involvement in his foundation led to ventures that were influential on the development of American contemporary music and its relationship to academia. Unlike the Ford or Rockefeller foundations, Fromm sought the role of patron, fostering close relationships with composers and accepting their advice. Yet composers in Fromm's network often had aesthetic visions that were different from his. This article discusses Fromm's sponsorship of the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies and the journal Perspectives of New Music, and how the different, complex and contradictory visions held by Fromm and his advisers were representative of those in the larger American music scene.