In 1058 Pope Stephen IX visited Montecassino, of which he had been made abbot only shortly before his elevation to the papacy the previous year. This German Pope was the former papal chancellor Frederick of Lorraine, the second northern abbot of Montecassino. On the occasion of this visit the Pope strictly forbade the singing at Montecassino of ‘Ambrosian chant’: ‘Tune etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista cantari penitus interdixit.’

My title is as much a play on words, or even a choreographic flourish, as the statement of a thesis. After all, to say that theorists have, or should have, a sense of history is rather like saying that composers, singers or instrumentalists tend on the whole to be able to read music. Having a sense of history is not just a necessary preliminary to adequate professional attainment in all branches of musicology: it is what being a theorist, and an analyst, is all about. And that is just as true for the theorist as practitioner - as pedagogue promoting the perception of structures - as it is for the theorist who is primarily an historian of theory. For the theorist, having a sense of history means knowing something of the past, and being able to interpret that ‘something’ in ways which may be judged uncontroversially orthodox or wildly idiosyncratic, but which in the end enable theorists to make worthwhile contributions to the state of the discipline in their own time.

The music of many cultures is characterized by lengthy musical repetitions, especially where ceremony, text and dance determine the amount of music needed. In Western Classical music, formal repetition is an especially prominent feature. Considering the number of pieces in the customary concert repertoire which include repeats, even the casual observer may be surprised to see only a dozen column inches devoted to the topic in The New Grove Dictionary of 1980, with only five bibliographical references, all to peripheral sources. The dictionary entry is, however, well focused, with examples to support its general theme that ‘the evolution of the notation, its exact interpretation and the practice of making repeats .. raise certain problems, not all of which have obvious solutions’.

In September 1507, James IV of Scotland issued a licence to the Edinburgh printers Chepman and Millar to produce, among other books, mass books, manuals, matin books and breviaries ‘efter our awin Scottis use’. This same licence (see Appendix 1) prescribes that these new books be used throughout Scotland and that all imports according to Salisbury use be banned. This Scottish use, therefore, was considered to be a separate entity – but what was it?

Beethoven published two sets of bagatelles during the 1820s – op. 119 (11 pieces) and op. 126 (six pieces) – but it is known that he considered publishing several other bagatelles as well at this time. Exactly which pieces these were, and why he did not publish them in the end, are matters which have never been thoroughly investigated; but an examination of these and related questions helps to throw new light on the two published sets as well as revealing interesting features about the unpublished bagatelles, none of which was printed until long after his death.

Embedded into the approaches to their crafts adopted inescapably by the composers and performance directors of church polyphony in England during the century or so before the Reformation were a number of constraints imposed by extraneous factors over which they had no control, but which effected a decisive influence over both the resulting form and the sound of the music which they produced in their respective capacities. Looming large among these was the nature of the performing medium. Over most aspects of this neither composer nor director exercised any influence at all; in terms of, for instance, the simple number of executants, they were obliged to produce music for and from the medium which their ecclesiastical superiors saw fit to provide, and the principal priority of the latter was the realization not of occasional polyphony for the liturgy, but of its standard plainsong and ceremonial as laid down by the authorized service books. Within these predetermined numbers of priests, clerks and choristers, however, the principal musicians presumably enjoyed some scope for nominating the constituent numbers of executants of the various timbres of voice necessary for mounting a performance of polyphony. The decisions taken by the musicians themselves in an area such as this that lay probably within their discretion have much to reveal about the nature of the choral balance and of the vocal scoring that they envisaged as appropriate for their music, and also – by inference from the latter – its sounding pitch.

Lorenzo Da Ponte is our main witness as to how he and Mozart put together their three operas. His memoirs, first published in 1823, mystify the topic more than they illuminate it. Some additional light is shed by an earlier publication entitled An Extract from the Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, with the history of several dramas written by him, and among others, II Figaro, II Don Giovanni e La Scuola degh Amanti set to music by Mozart. Whoever translated this from Da Ponte's original Italian worked from a text different in many details from what was published four years later as the Memorie. The well-known passage about how the poet must rack his brains in order to invent situations for the buffo finales will be familiar to most readers from its version in the memoirs.

On 18 July 1896 the 41-year-old Leoš Janáček left his native village of Hukvaldy in north-eastern Moravia to visit Russia. At the end of the first day of travelling he noted in his copy of František Vymazal's Rusky v devíli úlohách (Russian in Nine Lessons; Telč, 1896):

Twenty-Five years ago a prominent Mahler enthusiast could describe the finale of Mahler's Fifth Symphony as ‘a windy, uninspired stretch of note-spinning, literally scraping the barrel in search of music’. Few people nowadays would subscribe to this view: indeed the upsurge of interest in the work of other ‘late Romantic’ composers has perhaps served to sharpen our admiration for Mahler's exceptional powers of invention and his no less extraordinary mastery of large-scale form. Yet we are not really any closer to explaining just how such extended works are held together and given shape, particularly in the absence of specific extra-musical concepts such as those of the ‘Wunderhorn’ symphonies.

A few puzzling features in the text of Figaro have been discussed for a very long time within the vast literature on this opera. Nevertheless there is little in the libretto that Lorenzo Da Ponte based on Beaumarchais's revolutionary play La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, and in the music that Mozart then provided for it, which is really problematical. After all, almost the entirety of Mozart's long autograph score has come down to us, even though today Acts 1 and 2 are divided geographically from Acts 3 and 4 - the first two acts being in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (DDR), and the last two (which left the Berlin library in World War II) being at present in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska at Kraków in Poland. (The whole autograph is fortunately accessible today.) It would seem that the only portions that have not come down to us in Mozart's handwriting are a couple of passages for recitative, and some of the supplementary wind parts for the last act's finale; we have these merely in the handwriting of copyists, included inter alia in scores made for early performances, or for sale in Vienna and other cities. Several of these copyists' scores will shortly be discussed here.

In 1975 the Wozzeck sketches were examined and commented on by Ernst Hilmar, having been made available to him by the composer's widow. Subsequently they were catalogued, along with all the manuscripts in the Berg legacy, by Rosemary Hilmar. It might appear surprising, then, that neither George Perle nor Janet Schmalfeldt makes more than passing mention of them in their important recent studies. In a sense the omission is not unduly sinful – not surprisingly, the majority of the sketches show Berg at work on constructional features of the opera which are already well known, and there is no evidence of hitherto undiscovered esoteric planning.