I clearly remember that when this journal was first devised there lay some niggling doubt behind my tremendous enthusiasm for this timely initiative. Wasn’t there something problematic about viewing the eighteenth century as a whole? Did I intuit some sort of fundamental divide, perhaps somewhere between the deaths of J. S. Bach and Handel, one that somehow cast this century into two irreconcilable worlds? The seventeenth century was perhaps enough of a mess for its disunity to become a historiographical topic in its own right, its separate threads providing at least some narrative potential, even if these could never convincingly be drawn into a single whole. And the nineteenth century was perhaps sufficiently punctuated with various revolutions and restorations, together with an overriding story of industrial progress, to fall into a coherent (if divisive) family of narratives. Even the twentieth century – that which surely saw the largest number of changes in the human condition and the exponential pluralizing of ‘legitimate’ musical traditions – seems to have a clear enough trajectory, much of the music at its end having a discernible genealogical connection with that of its beginning. So what was it that was worrying me about the eighteenth century?

‘Music and …’ is the concluding topic in Ludmilla Jordanova’s editorial in an earlier issue of this journal (Eighteenth-Century Music 1/2 (2004), 153–155), and in reverse it will be the starting-point in mine. I fell into writing about music as an active amateur (and briefly professional) cellist with a background in theory consisting of a year’s tutoring in old-fashioned species counterpoint as an unruly fourteen-year-old. In the autumn of 1979 I was writing about the origins of reverie – that is, of representations and discussions of unfocused or unconscious awareness – in writings of the 1780s, chiefly by Rousseau, Kant and William Cowper. It occurred to me that the drifting sensibility I was describing was perfectly captured by the introduction to Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet. It started as a footnote, but finally required a small essay to define the contexts and work out the details. Then, however, I could invoke the representation of a state of feeling not encumbered by the rational straitjacket of concepts. Whether they knew it or not – Kant certainly didn’t, Rousseau at some level certainly did – music was what my authors were after!

It is as a classicist that Johann Adolph Scheibe has entered the annals of music history, either as a propagator of the principles of French literary classicism, or as a champion of a ‘galant’ style that later critics would view as a foundation for a German musical classicism. But if Scheibe insisted on a quality of striking simplicity, using words clearly indebted to those of Nicolas Boileau, the doyen of seventeenth-century French critics, he was no classicist according to the French model. While all classicists depend to a certain degree on the regulation of their material – for such regulation aids them in their quest for the perfect fit between parts and whole – they will differ in how they choose to balance the codification of technique and the regulation of style, on the one hand, with the evocation of emphatic or ‘sublime’ experiences, on the other. If Boileau sought the ‘marvellous’ quality that strikes like lightening, Scheibe wished for clarity. Drawing on scholarship in the history of literature, this article first examines the origins and point of French classicist literary aesthetics, then traces the fate of these aesthetics as they were transferred from France to Germany and from literature to music.

In 1814, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his short story, Die Automate. The story concerns the dealings of two friends and a fortune-telling automaton, the Turk, whose prophetic utterances seem to reveal a supernatural and psychic ability. Although the story first appeared in the Allegemeine musikalische Zeitung, it has been mostly overlooked by music scholars. In addition to the lengthy passages dealing with artificial intelligence, the story includes an extensive discussion of music performance and music instruments. The instruments they discuss – machines capable of bringing forth the voice of nature – perhaps appear as fantastical creations of Hoffmann’s imagination. However, he refers to real instruments that played an established role in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture. This period saw the frenzied production of many novel and bizarre instruments such as the euphon, aiuton, aenomochord, xänorphica and the harmonichord. Though these instruments are all but forgotten today, they testify to a widespread preoccupation with timbre and instrumental sonority. The consolidation of the orchestra as a concept, musical body and institution in the eighteenth century went hand in hand with the notion that individual instrumental sonorities had distinct expressive characters. By the early nineteenth century, this idea manifested itself in two distinct traditions: an orchestral one, in which composers increasingly took advantage of the ever-growing palette of instruments, giving rise to the modern concept of orchestration and the romantic symphony, and an instrument-oriented one, in which musicians, scientists and inventors attempted to capture ‘ideal sonorities’ (usually timbres resembling the human voice) in specially designed instruments. These creations offer a missing link between idealist aesthetics of the period and musical practice. Though ultimately ephemeral, they represent a kind of ‘absolute’ music that was founded purely in ethereal sonorities rather than in musical formalism.

When the French critic Bernard Germain Lacépède identified minor harmony with inner pain, restlessness and torment (La poétique de la musique, 1785), he was recognizing what had evolved as a lopsided dichotomy within the tonal system: rather than viewing major and minor as equivalent, mutually defining opposites, later eighteenth-century musicians often viewed the latter as a site of disturbing associations and thus potentially problematic as the foundation for large-scale instrumental compositions. Against this backdrop, it is notable that Haydn ended most of his later minor-key works in major, and in the finales of his quartets Op. 76 Nos 1–3 he exploits modal reversal as a special theme by having each begin in minor before undergoing an artfully contrived switch to major. Because the tonality of two of these quartets was major to begin with, Nos 1 in G and 3 in C, this entailed a double reversal: from major to minor as the finale began, from minor to major at a crucial moment prior to the end. The finale of Op. 76 No.1 surpasses the others of this group in tonal range, intricate play of symmetries and palpable connections to its preceding movements. Crowning it is a coda that turns the movement’s stark opening unison into a cheerful rustic tune. Thus opening theme and coda, although diametrically opposed in topic and imagery, are heard to share the same underlying identity. The result may be read as a vividly evoked musical subject whose vicissitudes trace a path from darkness to light, from turmoil and confusion to a state of pastoral joy and contentment.

Although the question of a connection between Bach’s music and the discipline of rhetoric has been raised repeatedly in the past, the proposed solutions have rarely taken into account the particular kind of rhetorical thinking prevalent in the eighteenth century. In this article, I show that a notion of rhetoric initially developed by Erasmus of Rotterdam and perpetuated in seventeenth-century writings, which focused on argumentative procedures involving variation and amplification, continued to underlie poetic and musical theory in Bach’s time. By articulating fundamental creative patterns that came to underpin a variety of disciplines, this Erasmian model can provide the starting-point for a reassessment of rhetorical techniques in Bach’s music, shifting the focus from isolated moments of affective decoration to the formal-expressive trajectories that shape the layout of whole pieces. Constituted in the interplay of compositional processes and their listening reception, these trajectories emerge as the result of the skilful arrangement of musical phrases into individual and flexible large-scale designs that often leave aside or undercut the supposed structural conventions of concerto or aria forms. The first movement of the third ‘Brandenburg Concerto’, bwv1048, serves as an example of how an awareness of these seventeenth-century rhetorical and musical legacies makes possible a thorough reconsideration of Bach’s compositional strategies.

The pervasiveness of thoroughbass in eighteenth-century German musical pedagogy is illustrated by the way that it extends from continuo realization exercises and chorale harmonizations to complete fugues. This article seeks to demonstrate how partimento fugue can be construed as the missing link between thoroughbass exercises and fully fledged keyboard fugues, by expanding on ideas first advanced by William Renwick. Through an examination of partimento fugues from J. S. Bach’s Precepts and Principles, Handel’s Lessons for Princess Anne, the Langloz manuscript and Heinichen’s Der General-Bass in der Composition, this study outlines a progression from basic realization exercises, in which the emphasis lies on the recognition and execution of continuo figures, to advanced recomposition assignments in which the performer is expected to project a rich contrapuntal texture from a simple figured-bass line, a task which is crucially dependent on the ability to memorize and reuse thematic material. The pedagogical value of partimento fugues also hinges on the acquisition of commonplace patterns such as the scalar descent and the harmonization of a chromatic line in alternating thirds and sixths. Although these patterns are often merely implied, they are found repeatedly in specific musical contexts, suggesting that they may function as generative melodic lines from which the composer derived both the harmonic progression and the underlying bass line, in a striking reversal of the standard compositional paradigm proposed by eighteenth-century theorists such as Niedt. Finally, the occurrence of these formulas in thoroughbass exercises, as well as in masterpieces such as J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, points to their ubiquitous character and demonstrates that they were part of a common language shared by many German composers of the period, thus emphasizing the need for an increased familiarity with the German partimento repertory and its conventions.

Nearly half a century after gaining a solid footing in the academic world, the achievements of Heinrich Schenker remain associated more with tonal structure and coherence than with musical expression. The focus of his published work, exemplified largely by instrumental music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, supports this view. There are just five short writings about music for voices: two essays on Bach’s St Matthew Passion, one on the opening number from Haydn’s Creation, and two on Schubert songs. To be sure, romantic lieder appear as music examples for the larger theory books, but there they serve as illustrations of harmony, voice leading and form, rather than the relationship of word to tone.

Among the gems buried in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s short-lived Berlinische musikalische Zeitung is a ‘Musikalischer Briefwechsel’ that appeared over three volumes in September 1805. The text, cast as an epistolary exchange between the fictional characters Arithmos and Phantasus, argues the merits of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. (The opera had recently returned to the Berlin stage after a thirteen-year absence.) The exchange has received little scholarly attention, and yet it is a remarkable document for the glimpse it gives both into Berlin’s musical politics and, most of all, the reception history of Mozart’s opera.

The authorship of the ‘Briefwechsel’, which appeared pseudonymously, has been attributed to Georg Christian Schlimbach, a frequent contributor to the journal. This article, in contrast, argues that Reichardt himself makes the more likely author: the correspondence more closely reflects his personality, his ambitions for the advancement of opera in the Prussian capital and his theory of art. Indeed, arising from his defence of Mozart’s opera is an extraordinary claim in the history of Così’s reception: that the work exemplifies romantic irony. E. T. A. Hoffmann is famous for his terse praise of the opera’s ‘ergötzlichste Ironie’. Reichardt, however, goes further by showing how the opera amalgamates, in quintessentially romantic fashion, the opposing forces of the comic and serious. Employing a Shakespearean conceit, he argues that Mozart’s music amounts to more than ‘much ado about nothing’.

Reichardt’s move is the more significant given that he builds his reading not on Da Ponte’s libretto but on German adaptations by Bretzner and Treitschke, translations that modern scholarship has widely faulted for lacking the original’s subtlety. Thus, although Così fan tutte has generally been viewed as a work that runs counter to romantic tastes, Reichardt’s ‘Briefwechsel’, along with some newly discovered material, provides a basis for revisiting that claim about the opera’s place in nineteenth-century thought.

The summer and autumn of 1737 remain a foggy patch in Handel biography owing to poor documentation and Handel’s absence from London. We do not know whether his illness led to a rapprochement with the ‘Nobility’ opera, how his visit to Aix-la-Chapel complicated the new opera season or, especially, whether these developments relate to Farinelli’s defection to Spain. This shaky factual ground also restricts our understanding of later events such as Handel’s lucrative benefit in March 1738 and the celebrated Roubiliac statue in Vauxhall Gardens. Thanks to surviving issues of the Daily Advertiser, however, we now can replenish the documentary pool and re-examine Handel’s affairs and their context during this period.

While cataloguing the music manuscripts held at the Kunstsammlungen der Fürsten zu Waldburg-Wolfegg at Wolfegg Castle, Dr Gertraut Haberkamp discovered a complex of eight works by Leopold Mozart among its holdings. It consists of six symphonies, three of them previously unknown, and two further sets of parts, one for the widely known divertimento the Musikalische Schlittenfahrt, the other for the Oratorium pro quadragesima. RISM mentions the types of paper the manuscripts are written on, but only one, and does not identify them at all. In the case of Leopold Mozart copies, however, it is important to assess the closeness of a copy to the composer as there are only a few surviving autographs. And here two different complexes can be identified: the instrumental works on the one hand, and the Oratorium pro quadragesima on the other.