Nel giorno, che sublime in bassi manti
Isabella imitava alto furore;
Estolta con angelici sembianti
Ebbe del senno altrui gloria maggiore;
Alhor saggia tra 'I suon, saggia tra i canti
Non mosse piè, che non sorgesse Amore,
Né voce aprì, che non creasse amanti,
Né riso fè, che non beasse un core.
Chi fu quel giorno a rimirar felice
Di tutt'altro quaggiù cesse il desio,
Che sua vita per sempre ebbe serena.
O di Scena dolcissima Sirena,
O de' Teatri Italici Fenice,
O tra Coturni insuperabil Clio.
Gabriello Chiabrera

In the spring of 1589, the commedia dell'arte company known as the Gelosi travelled to Florence in order to perform for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine. The Gelosi were among the very best commedia dell'arte players of the time, their fame heralded throughout the noble and royal households of western Europe.

Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, James II and the Stuart royal family lived in exile as the guests of Louis XIV at the Château de St-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. James II died in 1701 and was succeeded as king-in-exile by his son, James III. The court of these two kings remained at St-Germain-en-Laye for well over 20 years, until James III was expelled from France at the demand of the British government.

As a repertory where recitative and air were not always delineated and where lyrical, mellifluous recitative was the most essential element, eighteenth-century French opera confronts historians and critics with a situation rather different from that of other operatic repertories. Whereas we can delve with relative confidence into questions about the style, shape and content of da capo arias, for example, we are confronted in French opera with a host of nagging details that make even the simplest assertions problematic. How did composers and audiences think about recitative and air? How and to what extent did the distinction between the two matter to them? Given that purely musical values, the kind informing Italian arias, resided elsewhere in French opera – primarily in its divertissements – how did one judge the musical content of recitative and to what end?

It is almost self-evident that the relationship between rhythm and metre must vary from one composer to another. Generalization in such matters is difficult and probably ill-advised. But it seems clear that for German/Austrian composers in the first half of this century, who customarily used divisive rhythms set within traditional metres, the interdependence of rhythm and metre was not as critical as it was in the music of composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók, whose typically additive rhythms were notated in those metres – often asymmetrical or constantly changing – that most clearly expressed their natural accents. In most cases the rhythms of a Schoenberg or a Webern, as well as-the choice of metre in which to express them, would seem not to have been intrinsic to the original musical idea in the same way that they were to a Stravinsky or a Bartók (even when folk music was not directly involved). This is not to say that rhythm and metre were not important to the two Viennese composers, but only that their conception seems initially to have been more concerned with pitch sequences and contours than with rhythm and metre, these being things that could be worked out later, as composition progressed. The surviving sketches of Webern, at least, appear to bear out such an assertion.