Based on a distant reading of key periodicals, this chapter investigates the music and musicians that received the most contemporary attention – and how recognition developed – throughout the era. It demonstrates in the first instance that the Reich had its own practical repertoire that transcended any one area, national tradition, or group of composers. Contemporaries often referenced musical titles without identifying a composer despite the fact that works could circulate in multiple versions by a single musician, in various settings by different composers, and as adapted texts by dramatists and musicians. But evidence suggests that the years around 1785 marked a moment of increasing normalization during which topics already set to music would be generally avoided and pieces circulating in multiple settings were increasingly linked to the work of just one composer. Establishing which music and musicians received the most attention, their relative importance to one another, and how associations between them altered in time, this chapter demonstrates that the Reich cultivated a shared repertoire that was formed and informed by networks of information and communication.

Chapter 2 is a meditation on the general conditions of our intercourse with the past, especially as engaged by its material forms, whether in buildings, artworks, literary works or musical works. Distinctions between the forms are of course necessary but, it is argued, continuities remain: the mute testimony of the material object concerning the agents of its creation; the role of the viewer or reader in realising the work; the hand of the editor-conservator; and the role of time in its successive forms of existence.

Lydia Goehr’s history of the work-concept in music is pushed further and the dilemma of conservation, witnessed by the restored Teatro La Fenice (Phoenix Theatre) in Venice, is explored. The work-concept emerges as a regulative idea rather than a transcendent ideal form.

From the 1980s a pincer movement on editorial prerogatives came into play. The post-structuralist movement gradually undermined the assumption that works required a single reading text based on final authorial intention. Texts were also revealed to have a social dimension, as the meanings of their versional, redesigned and reprinted forms are ‘realised’ by successive readerships. The inherited but rarely inspected work-concept was thrown into doubt.

Conscientious editors who nevertheless felt the need to intervene on behalf of a new readership seemed to be left with no ground to stand on.

This chapter argues that a failure to theorise the work-concept is at the root of the problem. It shows that we need a broader concept of textual agency and an emphasis on the role of the reader in the functioning of what may now be cast as the embodied or living work. The role of the reader applies also for the scholarly edition, which emerges as a form of argument, aimed at the reader, about the archival materials it deploys.

Other possible work-models are considered, especially those implied in the writings of Franco Moretti and Rita Felski, based on the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour.