Nel giorno, che sublime in bassi manti
Isabella imitava alto furore;
Estolta con angelici sembianti
Ebbe del senno altrui gloria maggiore;
Alhor saggia tra 'I suon, saggia tra i canti
Non mosse piè, che non sorgesse Amore,
Né voce aprì, che non creasse amanti,
Né riso fè, che non beasse un core.
Chi fu quel giorno a rimirar felice
Di tutt'altro quaggiù cesse il desio,
Che sua vita per sempre ebbe serena.
O di Scena dolcissima Sirena,
O de' Teatri Italici Fenice,
O tra Coturni insuperabil Clio.
Gabriello Chiabrera

In the spring of 1589, the commedia dell'arte company known as the Gelosi travelled to Florence in order to perform for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine. The Gelosi were among the very best commedia dell'arte players of the time, their fame heralded throughout the noble and royal households of western Europe.

Even though no medieval chivalric order was known to have patronized musicians, there was reason to believe that music had played a prominent role in the ceremonies of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece in the fifteenth century. The first two sovereigns of the Order, Dukes Philip and Charles of Burgundy, were enthusiastic patrons of skilled composers and performers. And the meetings of the Order were unusually splendid, to judge from contemporary accounts, chronicles and paintings. Chronicles describing the Feast of the Pheasant organized by the Order in Lille in 1454 to launch a crusade are especially full of details about the performance of polyphonic music.

Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, James II and the Stuart royal family lived in exile as the guests of Louis XIV at the Château de St-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. James II died in 1701 and was succeeded as king-in-exile by his son, James III. The court of these two kings remained at St-Germain-en-Laye for well over 20 years, until James III was expelled from France at the demand of the British government.

Mille regretz is today one of the best-known chansons attributed to Josquin des Prez. That fame is no doubt due in part to its inherent musical worth, but also owes not a little to the intriguing title which Luys de Narváez attached to it in the vihuela anthology Los seys libros del delphin de musica (Valladolid, 1538): ‘la cancion del Emperador’ (‘the emperor's song’). Narváez's testimony should certainly not be dismissed out of hand, for two reasons. First, he may already at the date of the publication have been close to the court of Charles V. Second, there exists corroborative evidence of a connection between the chanson and Charles in the form of Moralės's six-voice parody Mass based on Mille regretz: although the book in which this Mass was published is dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici, the Missa Mille regretz opens with a decorative woodcut showing Charles's coat of arms.

As a repertory where recitative and air were not always delineated and where lyrical, mellifluous recitative was the most essential element, eighteenth-century French opera confronts historians and critics with a situation rather different from that of other operatic repertories. Whereas we can delve with relative confidence into questions about the style, shape and content of da capo arias, for example, we are confronted in French opera with a host of nagging details that make even the simplest assertions problematic. How did composers and audiences think about recitative and air? How and to what extent did the distinction between the two matter to them? Given that purely musical values, the kind informing Italian arias, resided elsewhere in French opera – primarily in its divertissements – how did one judge the musical content of recitative and to what end?

A manuscript of late seventeenth-century English harpsichord music was sold to an anonymous private collector at Sotheby's in London on 26 May 1994 for £276,500, a record price paid for any British music manuscript. The 85-page oblong quarto, in its original covers, includes 21 pieces in the hand of Henry Purcell (1659–95), five of which were previously unknown, and a further 17 works by Giovanni Battista Draghi (c.1640–1708), also probably autograph, four of which were previously unknown. The manuscript is important because of the rarity of Purcell autographs: this is the first to be sold at public auction since the great collection of fantazias and sonatas (now British Library, Add. MS 30,930) was offered in 1826, and the only major source to surface this century.

In 1773 Johann Christian Bach filed a bill of complaint in Chancery for breach of musical copyright, initiating what was to become a landmark case in British copyright law. Bach claimed that the publishing firm of Longman, Lukey & Co. had brought out unauthorized editions of two of his compositions: a ‘new lesson for the Harpsichord or Piano Forte’ and a ‘new Sonata’ for keyboard and viola da gamba.

It is almost self-evident that the relationship between rhythm and metre must vary from one composer to another. Generalization in such matters is difficult and probably ill-advised. But it seems clear that for German/Austrian composers in the first half of this century, who customarily used divisive rhythms set within traditional metres, the interdependence of rhythm and metre was not as critical as it was in the music of composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók, whose typically additive rhythms were notated in those metres – often asymmetrical or constantly changing – that most clearly expressed their natural accents. In most cases the rhythms of a Schoenberg or a Webern, as well as-the choice of metre in which to express them, would seem not to have been intrinsic to the original musical idea in the same way that they were to a Stravinsky or a Bartók (even when folk music was not directly involved). This is not to say that rhythm and metre were not important to the two Viennese composers, but only that their conception seems initially to have been more concerned with pitch sequences and contours than with rhythm and metre, these being things that could be worked out later, as composition progressed. The surviving sketches of Webern, at least, appear to bear out such an assertion.