The present article has two tasks: to define the essential features of a musical form widely known during the eighteenth century by its Italian name of serenata, and to give an account of its cultivation in Venice during the same period. We shall need to devote considerable space to the first task, since by no means all writers on music recognize the serenata as an independent genre, some viewing it as a species of miniature opera and others as merely a particularly elaborate type of cantata; further, not all commentators share our view that the term was once used - and ought still to be used for analytical purposes - in a generic sense, so as to include not only works actually termed serenata but also many others with original descriptions as diverse as azione, componimento, festa or introduzione. So we must start by identifying as precisely as possible the repertory under consideration. Subsequently, when we examine the occasions on which serenatas were performed and the ways in which their music, words and manner of presentation were made to fit those occasions, we shall limit ourselves to a single city, Venice, and its dominions. This restriction has the practical advantage of bringing our investigation within manageable proportions without demanding the sacrifice of too much detail. But it has another, more fundamental purpose. Since the serenata was the most ‘occasional’ of genres, any study of it in a local context will throw into relief the peculiarities of that locality's political and social life. Nowhere could this be truer than in Venice, a city unlike any other in government, institutions, economy, mores, and, not least, topography. By studying the Venetian serenata we can learn more about Venice itself.

Verdi was immensely popular in Italy because he brought to the accepted forms and idiom of opera just that touch of dynamic individuality which was needed; but there was a further reason only indirectly connected with the music itself. Italy during the risorgimento (1820–70) was seething with revolution, and Verdi's operas came to play an important part in the patriotic movements of the 1840s and 1850s. Though their scenes and characters ostensibly had no connection with contemporary events, the librettos were filled with conspiracies, political assassinations, appeals to liberty, and exhortations against tyranny, all of which were of course understood in the intended sense by sympathetic audiences.

Information on old Spanish keyboard instruments (excluding the organ) is scanty owing to the small number of surviving examples and the paucity of first-hand documentation. Secondary sources can thus provide useful data to fill in some gaps. This article is based on a study of the sales and wants advertisements appearing in the Madrid daily newspaper from February 1758 to December 1799.

This list of theses supplements the lists published in Research Chronicle 15 (1979, 38–116), 16 (1980, 110–34) and 17 (1981, 117–33). It has been compiled on the same principles as before, from information received since July 1982. An Index is again provided, to supplement the indexes of the previous lists. (For some account of the principles on which this list is compiled, see Research Chronicle 15 (1979), 38–9.)