Carlo Broschi, better known as Farinelli, arrived in Madrid on 7 August 1737. King Philip V and his wife Elisabeth Farnese were deeply impressed by his vocal qualities and invited him to remain in their service, on extremely rewarding terms. Although few sources concerning his first months in Spain are available, a newly discovered libretto, L'ombra di Luigi XIV il Grande, sheds light on his position at the Spanish court and his response to the privileged situation he enjoyed. The work is a short solo cantata commissioned by Farinelli and offered to Philip V for his name day in 1738. The title-page indicates Francesco Feo as the composer, but no sources for the musical setting have yet been located, nor any information about a performance of the work. This article examines the content of the cantata's text and situates it within what is known about the life of Farinelli. It also reconstructs in detail the literary career of the author of the text, Giuseppe di Rosa, who was also a magistrate and historian. Additionally, it links the genesis of this encomiastic piece with the activity of Giovanni Battista Filomarino, Neapolitan ambassador at the court of Madrid.

This article considers eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodism's relationship with art music through the original settings of poetry by Charles Wesley by five notable musicians: John Frederick Lampe, George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Battishill, Charles Wesley junior and Samuel Wesley. It argues that the strong emphasis on congregational singing in popular and scholarly perceptions of Methodism, including within the movement itself, masks a more varied engagement with musical culture. The personal musical preferences of John and Charles Wesley brought them into contact with several leading musical figures in eighteenth-century London and initiated a small corpus of original musical settings of some of the latter's hymns. The article examines the textual and musical characteristics of these the better to understand their relationship with both eighteenth-century Methodism and fashionable musical culture of the period. It argues that Methodism was not, contrary to popular perception, uniformly opposed to or detached from the aesthetic considerations of artistic culture, that eighteenth-century Methodism and John and Charles Wesley cannot be regarded as synonymous and that, in this period, sacred music encompasses rather more than church music and cannot be narrowly defined in opposition to secular music.