John Dryden famously bowdlerized Shakespeare, whose plays violated his reason-governed tastes. That the author of such verse as ‘Happy, happy, happy pair! / None but the brave, / None but the brave, / None but the brave deserves the fair’ (Alexander’s Feast) should have found the rather stronger temperament and the complex plot ambiguities of his predecessor indigestible should come as no surprise. Because our educational processes have long since held up Shakespeare as the pinnacle of English-language literature, we tend to find Dryden’s fastidious attitude somewhat quaint – if, indeed, we remember it at all.

Among the holdings of Hamburg’s Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky is an anonymous fifty-two-page score headed ‘Serenata à 4’, described in the corresponding catalogue entry by its former owner, German musicologist Friedrich Chrysander (1826–1901), as a ‘cantata for the funeral of the English king William III of Orange, 1702’. But both the work’s text and the recent identification of the manuscript as being in the hand of Johann Sigismund Cousser (1660–1727) call for a reassessment of this serenata’s provenance, situating it in either England or Ireland between Cousser’s arrival in London on Christmas Day 1704 and the end of Queen Anne’s reign in 1714. Over the course of the two decades he resided in Ireland, from 4 July 1707 until his death, Cousser was responsible for the composition and musical direction of one ode and more than twenty serenatas, the majority of which were commissioned by the viceregal court at Dublin Castle for state celebrations of the reigning monarch’s birthday. Taking printed librettos, contemporary newspaper reports, Cousser’s own commonplace book and two further surviving manuscript scores as its primary evidence, this study seeks to establish a likely location and occasion for the performance of the ‘William III’ serenata within Dublin’s musical life during the early eighteenth century. In their choice of terminology, compositional style and performance practices, Cousser’s serenatas, which may have incorporated elements of theatrical staging and dancing, reveal his extensive Continental experience, and they can be seen to have functioned in part as an operatic substitute, presumably reflecting the limited financial resources of Dublin high society.

Westernized Hungarian-Gypsy music (or the so-called style hongrois) has invariably been described as exotic. Although such a characterization is appropriate for later nineteenth-century compositions, I argue that it is inadequate for many of the earliest Viennese adaptations of Hungarian-Gypsy music. I focus in particular on representative examples from the sphere of Hausmusik, in which early adaptations were most numerous, yet which has received the least scholarly attention. Although these adaptations evoke a foreign place and foreign people through their descriptive titles, they are not, in most instances, exotic in style.

‘Meta-operas’, that is, operas portraying the world of opera and its protagonists (such as impresarios, music directors, librettists and virtuosi), became increasingly common during the eighteenth century. Most of the scholarly literature on meta-opera, however, concentrates on the operas' poetic texts, their librettos. Scholars have dealt with these operas about operas almost as though they were spoken dramas, without taking into account the many ways in which metatheatrical practices and conventions are made more complex by the presence of music.

What do meta-operatic scores look like? Are they similar to other ‘ordinary’ scores of the same time, or do their metatheatrical techniques set them aside as special? Considering a number of eighteenth-century works, this article points out how specific musical means can contribute to the overall effect of meta-operatic plots: the stratified nature of meta-narratives is, in fact, mirrored in the scores when realistic music is performed on stage. On these occasions, the presence of more than one layer of musical performance (of music and ‘music’) can be detected in the score. Furthermore, the presence of realistic music allows for a highly flexible treatment of standard operatic practices, and a number of passages work across conventional oppositions such as recitative/closed number, ‘real-life’/‘performed’ and ‘spoken’/‘sung’. Meta-operas, therefore, offer a special perspective on the presence of realistic music in opera.

In its opening representation of chaos and subsequent depiction of the creation of light, Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation famously begins with two forays into the musical sublime. But the work thereafter devotes itself to recalling the sublime, in the double sense of rescinding the sublime and of making it a matter of memory rather than of practice. This process is already under way in the depiction of light; its progressive advance may be measured in such ensuing episodes as the depictions of the first sun- and moonrise and Adam and Eve’s climactic hymn of praise, ‘Von deiner Güt’’. The withdrawal of the sublime gradually becomes coextensive with the creation itself and the place of humanity in the order of creation, reflecting (and refashioning) a historically specific understanding not only of the sublime but also, and more weightily, of the conditions of possibility for knowing the world and defining the human. Despite its forceful articulation in The Creation, however, this was an understanding already well on its way to becoming obsolete by the end of the eighteenth century.

Wilhelm Seidel was the first to regard Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s reformulation of metre in Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik as a watershed moment in the history of music theory. As we consider Kirnberger’s innovation and importance in regard to his break with the past, we might examine more closely the conditions that made his re-imagining of metre possible. Kirnberger’s vital treatise participated in a broad epistemological shift in the conception of time. Changing metaphysical notions of time, along with technological developments such as the mechanical clock and the marine chronometer, helped to reshape a wider public’s notion of temporal passage. Alongside these developments, the nature of metre and tempo in music underwent continual revision. This article will explore the impact of shifting temporal conceptualizations on metre in the eighteenth century.

Haydn's first visit to England in 1791 was accompanied by a publicity war waged between his supporters and detractors. The composer's friends were keen to present him as a musical genius while at the same time defending him against what they saw as reactionary criticisms over rules and taste. One such defence was in the form of a portrait by Thomas Hardy, probably the most famous image of the composer. While readily considered today as a matter-of-fact representation of an urbane Georgian gentleman, the portrait is in fact a sophisticated response to contemporary arguments surrounding Haydn, and presents him as an inventive genius of taste and judgment. By the manipulation of portrait conventions, Hardy created a visual representation of the composer analogous to written accounts by supporters such as Charles Burney. Haydn is shown as a man confident in his contribution to musical posterity, and the image reinforces advice from the time that repeated listening to and study of his music was required properly to appreciate it. The portrait has lost its original force as conceptions of genius changed from the early nineteenth century, reflecting a shift in the aesthetics of both music and visual art.

Among the operas on which Mozart and Da Ponte collaborated, Così fan tutte is a special case. In some ways, the libretto is more conventional than those provided for Le nozze di Figaro or Don Giovanni, and Mozart was not the first composer asked to set it. To understand the work best, it is necessary to read the text closely. This article concentrates on a few, highly significant characteristics – in particular, the locations in which the opera takes place. Such details provide the foundations for surprising insights into the opera. First, the libretto deals with central issues in eighteenth-century aesthetics, but the mechanist philosophy that informs the plot (reminiscent of that theorized by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L'Homme machine) defuses these issues over the course of the action. Secondly, the music that turns the libretto into an opera resonates with specialist issues of eighteenth-century music aesthetics, often to turn them, once again, on their heads. In the last analysis, Così fan tutte is an opera in which both text and music question truth and reliability, and the consequences are serious for the opera, for music and for the very Enlightenment itself.

This article examines the household of John Hunter, a London surgeon, and Anne Hunter, a poet, and its relevance for Haydn’s collaboration with Anne – the two sets of English Canzonettas (1794–1795). I interpret canzonettas by Haydn and several of his London contemporaries as artefacts of a context in which music and anatomy were pursued not only under the same roof but by the same people, who participated in shared discourses, medical and musical, regarding the nature of femininity. This perspective reveals ways in which John partook of his wife’s world, asserting the artful and beautiful of dissection and anatomy, and suggests new significance for aspects of the Haydn–Hunter canzonettas, especially their references to body parts, sighs, symptoms and death.