The entr'acte in the tragédie en musique is the site of compelling yet often overlooked musical and dramaturgical activity. The term refers to both spatial and musical categories: the space between acts in which rapid and potentially astonishing set changes occur and the instrumental music that accompanies these transformations. Practices in French classical tragedy established a precedent for opera; largely observing the ‘unity of place’ after 1640, spoken tragedy included brief instrumental interludes between acts while the stage remained unoccupied. These intervals punctuated the action and created suspensions in mimesis, allowing off-stage events to occur in unfixed temporal and spatial dimensions. Characterized by Mikhail Bakhtin as a ‘chronotope’ of theatrical time and space, the entr'acte exposes foundational issues concerning representation in opera and drama, including questions of illusion and the status of fictional actions and worlds. This article examines the role played by the spectator's reflection and rumination during operatic entr'actes and the use of narrative reference to shape the awareness of unseen actions presumed to transpire within them. These modes of representation and spectatorship are illustrated by Simon-Joseph Pellegrin's livrets for Jephté (1732) and Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). Parodies of Hippolyte et Aricie further demonstrate that the possibilities of unseen action had a vital effect on the reception of the tragédie en musique.

Daniel Heartz was the first musicologist to link John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) with opéras comiques en vaudevilles, light musical theatre entertainments popular at the annual Paris fairs. Other scholars such as Edmond Gagey and Calhoun Winton had also suggested that French comédies en vaudevilles might have been models for Gay's ‘original’ new genre of the ballad opera, but were unable to find compelling evidence for their suspicions. This article shows that the music of Polly (1729), Gay's sequel to The Beggar's Opera, can finally provide a link between ballad operas and the comédies en vaudevilles, as four of the unidentified French airs in the opera can now be identified as popular French vaudevilles. I investigate the fruitful exchange between Paris and London in the early eighteenth century (despite prevailing anti-French sentiment in Britain), focusing on musical borrowings, translations and the performers who worked in both cities. We shall see that ballad opera and the comédies en vaudevilles share common ground, including vaudevilles finals, common tunes sung by actor-singers and the use of musical parody and double entendre. A closer examination of Gay's (and his contemporaries') knowledge of the comédies en vaudevilles illuminates previously unknown French contributions to eighteenth-century English popular musical theatre, and demonstrates the unique way in which French practices were appropriated in early eighteenth-century England.

Modern writing on the troupe of Eustachio Bambini has encouraged different thinking about the ‘querelle’ and the ‘bouffons’. Andrea Fabiano, in particular, has intimated a fresh view of Bambini's Parisian repertory that aims to understand the various tactics of pamphleteers and free itself from received opinion. Recent writers have taken a harder look at the evidential assumptions that led to a long-held weighting of the bouffon narrative towards Pergolesi's La serva padrona on one hand and the departure of the Italian troupe on the other, politicized as this was by outraged reactions to Rousseau's Lettre sur la musique françoise. In the present account, the emphasis is on new evidence, both primary and secondary. It fills in new details concerning the institutional relationship between Bambini and the Paris Opéra, alerts us to hitherto unreported performances by the bouffons between Easter 1753 and February 1754 and tells us that a rearguard action for compensation was fought by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Rousselet of Rouen, whose original contract with Bambini had been severed in November 1752. The concluding picture is one of constructive support for Bambini by the Opéra; indeed, a creative collaboration between these two had been arranged before the querelle began. Mandated by the king in 1749 to recognize a public-interest function in running the Opéra, its directeur (Bernage de Saint-Maurice) may well have wanted to continue some form of binary programming between the two traditions, French and Italian, at the point when Rousseau's Lettre made it impossible. Box-office takings rose during the early success of his initiatives, especially before Easter 1753; after this juncture the extant financial records are not adequate to judge such profitability.

Commentators have long sought models for the decision by Bach and his anonymous librettist to spread the Christmas Oratorio's narration over twelve days. None of the most commonly proposed models can be shown with certainty to have been performed over more than two days; it appears that the supposed tradition of multi-day Christmas oratorios is invented. In fact there were models for this feature of the Christmas Oratorio: Passion settings designed for or adapted to presentation over Holy Week or all of Lent. The practice is documented in five places concentrated in Saxony and Thuringia and involved both newly composed and older works in both liturgical and devotional contexts. A new source reveals a previously unrecognized performance of this kind, of Reinhard Keiser's Brockes setting in Erfurt. Bach is likely to have known of this performance and others of the type, and they were probably a significant influence on the organization and conception of his Christmas piece performed ‘die Heilige Weyhnacht über’ in 1734/1735.

Beethoven imitated Mozart's String Quartet in A major K464 more openly than any other work by a fellow composer. Yet critics have never explained his fascination with the fifth ‘Haydn’ quartet. This article argues that Beethoven responded to a rare and unexplored transformation of sonata form in which the primary theme returns at its original pitch in the secondary area. This preserves the melody of the theme, but reinterprets its harmonic and schematic function. Mozart explored this device with unusual rigour in k464, recalling the primary theme at pitch in both outer movements. The two primary themes share a common chromatic line whose invariant return wittily probes late eighteenth-century tonal conventions.

Beethoven emulated Mozart's harmonic design in his own Quartet in A major, Op. 18 No. 5, and even intensified its more problematic features. He imitated k464 most literally in the finale of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, which provided a model for similar harmonic experimentation in the Sonata in G major Op. 31 No. 1, the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and the first ‘Razumovsky’ quartet. k464 suggests an important source for Beethoven's use of chromatic elements to problematize tonal and thematic function, a practice most evident in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony.

The spread of Protestant Christianity to Indonesia and Sri Lanka in the early modern period involved large-scale translation projects and, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the publication of metrical psalms in languages spoken by local communities: Portuguese, Malay, Tamil and Sinhala. Selected psalms from the Genevan Psalter, as well as complete versions, were translated and published in South and Southeast Asia on several occasions in the eighteenth century, representing the earliest printing of Western staff notation in Jakarta and Colombo. These psalters were issued in numerous editions, and some were prefaced with a short explanation of the musical scale. Christian communities in Indonesia and Sri Lanka appear to have used the psalters regularly in religious devotions and services. This article explores the processes involved in the translation, production and distribution of these psalters, considering musical and cultural aspects of their adoption into local communities.

Music is routinely held to be in a privileged position to reflect a particular historical consciousness of time and human temporality. This notion appears itself to be historical, in that it arises from the ‘temporalization’ of time widely attested to have occurred in Western Europe during the eighteenth century. Accordingly, numerous commentators have argued that music becomes increasingly temporalized across the century. Yet if music may convey human temporality without mediation, it remains unclear to what extent ‘pre-temporalized’ works from the early eighteenth century may be taken as temporally significant, given that the notion of time is not supposed to be such an issue during this period. This essay examines the methodological issues attendant to the claim for music's intrinsic historical temporality through an examination of a piece that appears explicitly to thematize the idea of time: Handel's oratorio-cantata Il trionfo del Tempo, which exists in three different versions spanning the fifty years between 1707 and 1757. Although my reading raises questions about the epistemological security of any claim for music's (or indeed language's) expression of historical temporality ‘as it really was’, I argue that a hermeneutic engagement with this problem is both valuable and indeed necessary for understanding music of the period.

At the turn of the eighteenth century Jean de La Bruyère and many contemporary authors in diverse literary genres undertook intense studies of character that moved beyond popular portraiture to level moral critiques of the social dissimulation rampant in the era. The literary works from François Couperin's personal library and his musical character studies suggest that he too was intrigued with moral issues surrounding character. While musicologists have suggested connections between the character pieces of Couperin and the character studies of La Bruyère, existing comparisons between the two do not explore the moral dimensions of both literary and musical character studies. In this article, I argue that selected musical works from Couperin's four books of pièces de clavecin participated vitally in the moral discourse of the era, taking up similar subject matter to widely read moralistes such as La Bruyère but employing music to articulate social criticism. By making use of the media of music and performance, Couperin's musical portraits extend the scope and power of literary moralism, enlisting musical performance to critique the social performance of false identities.