In recent decades the interest in ‘period performance’ has moved beyond the Classical and early Romantic periods to embrace early twentieth-century composers, including Debussy. Beginning in the 1990s with recordings on pianos with which he would have been familiar, the movement has extended to his works in other genres. This chapter looks briefly at some of the major developments in period recordings of the composer’s piano music, mélodies, and orchestral works. The best of these recordings show that in hearing these pieces on the instruments of his day we may gain new insights into his compositional and scoring choices as well as his own performance practice. In short, hearing performances on these instruments allows us new insights into the composer’s sound-world and also throws potential light on reasons behind some of his compositional choices in particular works.

The separation of composer and performer that is now so common in musical performance was only slowly emerging in Debussy’s time. Debussy was a highly capable pianist and many might have and expected him to perform his music in. However, unlike most of his contemporaries, Debussy felt little inclination to perform, so there is a separation between his composing activities and the performance of his works. Singers played an intimate and important role in Debussy’s life, not just as executants of his music but also as lovers and for the last years of his life as his wife. His view of singers was telling, both in those he admired and those he disliked. Debussy also enjoyed close working relationships with a handful of instrumentalists and conductors some of whom came to consult with him or at least play for him. Discussion of Debussy’s attitude to performers reveals a composer who relied heavily on the innate musicality of his interpreters and who retained many aspects of the Romantic tradition in his approach to performance.

In 2017, as part of the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, the editors led a research team of scholars and artists in discussing, workshopping, rehearsing, and performing scenes and songs from Thomas Shadwell’s 1674 operatic revision of Davenant and Dryden’s The Tempest at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This chapter offers reflections on how scholar-artist collaboration in performing Restoration Shakespeare has functioned as sustained moments of what Rebecca Schneider (following Gertrude Stein) has called ‘syncopated time’ – in this instance, a collision of archival past and embodied present, in which each dimension punctured the other. Reflecting on their practice-based research, the authors propose that what can emerge through such syncopations are performance-generated insights that neither the recorded past nor the embodied present could fully apprehend on its own.

Cigoli’s sets for Euridice continued to be used in the Sala delle Commedie in the Palazzo Pitti, although by 1608 they were being replaced by a more complex stage and scenery intended for different kinds of entertainments (often involving dancing) that were better suited to princely tastes. Opera briefly gained a stronger foothold in different spaces, often in patrician residences (as with Marco da Gagliano’s new setting of Rinuccini’s first libretto, Dafne, performed in 1611 in the palace occupied by Don Giovanni de’ Medici). However, the genre’s history was patchy until the establishment of the first “public” opera houses in Venice from 1637 on. But this, in turn, raises questions about how “early” operas might best be staged today. So-called Historically Informed Performance – using the resources and techniques to create music as it might have sounded in the past – is now well established in musical circles, but less so in their theatrical equivalent. The search for relevance on the part of modern directors also makes opera production a fraught site of contest between the sources and what to do with them. Is any historical reconstruction of Euridice a mere archeological curiosity, or an opportunity to give it new life?

Chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s large-scale works ‘especially his symphonies’ were so prevalent in the nineteenth century that to ignore them is to miss an essential part of the reception or ‘life history’ of the works in question. The depth and dissemination of the arrangements of Beethoven’s works show that these arrangements, rather than the original versions, were an essential means by which Beethoven’s music took effect. In an era when concert performances were still relatively few, an arrangement was often the first instantiation of a Beethoven orchestral work that one would hear. This chapter explores these arrangements as nineteenth-century reception documents, looking at what they tell us not only about Beethoven, but also about the arrangers themselves and the processes of canon formation at the time. The chapter then considers the apparently new ways in which meanings are constructed for the symphony, through performance, and how these relate to Eroica myths and legends born in Beethoven’s day. It discusses ways in which the work has been performed, represented visually, and marketed in the twenty and twenty-first centuries, including the 2003 BBC production, Eroica.