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106 results in Eighteenth-Century Music

Page 1 of 6

Handel in Context
  • Edited by Annette Landgraf, Helen Coffey
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • A celebrity in his own time, Handel remains popular with performers, music-lovers and scholars today. The specially commissioned contributions to this volume will enable students, teachers and concert-goers to better appreciate his music through a deeper understanding of the world in which he lived. The chapters focus on key aspects of the composer's career within the different social, political, cultural and musical contexts he experienced in Britain and Europe. They explore Handel's lifestyle and his personal and professional relationships; the various musical establishments for which he worked; the styles, practices and personnel that shaped his compositions; and the influence, reception and legacy of his music during and since his lifetime. Writing from a variety of perspectives, authors shed light on each topic while helping readers to navigate the breadth of recent scholarship. This book is an essential reference work for anybody studying Handel's music or that of his eighteenth-century contemporaries.

Rethinking Beethoven and the Enlightenment
  • Edited by Nicholas Chong, Daniel K. L. Chua
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • In the history of Western music, no single figure has been as closely tied to the Enlightenment as Beethoven: he is regarded as the composer who embodies ideals such as freedom and humanism that many celebrate as the Enlightenment's legacy. This view, however, rests on a very narrow conception of the Enlightenment that aggressively stresses secularism and political liberalism. More recent historical research has shown that the Enlightenment's outlook on political and religious issues was more diverse and nuanced than traditional accounts have depicted it. The essays in this volume consider how new ways of thinking about the Enlightenment can alter the way we understand Beethoven and his music. By rethinking Beethoven and the Enlightenment, this book questions the Beethoven we know in both the popular and scholarly imagination and redefines the role the composer plays in the history of Western music.

George Frideric Handel
  • Collected Documents
  • Edited by Donald Burrows, Helen Coffey, John Greenacombe, Anthony Hicks
  • Published online:
    23 December 2025
    Print publication:
    29 January 2026
  • The life and career of George Frideric Handel, one of the most frequently performed Baroque composers, are thoroughly documented in a wide variety of contemporary sources. This multi-volume publication, the most up-to-date, fully annotated collection of these documents, presents them chronologically, providing an essential resource for anyone interested in Handel and his music. The collection also gives insights into broader topics such as court life, theatre history, public concerts, and music publishing. Volume 5 begins with the composition of Handel's last original scores for his London oratorio seasons – The Choice of Hercules and Jephtha. The death of the Prince of Wales curtailed his 1751 season and deteriorating eyesight delayed the completion of Jephtha. Nevertheless, his annual Lenten oratorios and Messiah performances at the Foundling Hospital continued. At the same time, his music was increasingly heard in the provinces and referred to in the new literary genre of the novel.

Haydn Studies 2
  • Edited by Nancy November
  • Published online:
    18 October 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025
  • Haydn scholarship has mirrored recent trends in musicological research with an increased interest in the cultural context and reception of his music, though he has not received the sustained consideration given to other canonical figures. Over the past decade, more consideration has been paid to Haydn's operas and oratorios which previously tended to be eclipsed by his chamber and orchestral music. These new perspectives are the focus of this collection which showcases recent approaches and allows us to re-evaluate the long-held notion that Haydn's era marked the rise of the concept of autonomous musical works. This book enriches understanding of cultural contexts in which Haydn's music is being understood, providing models for future contextual studies and allows for a more historically responsive understanding of his works. It includes analysis of less well-known compositions, especially the oratorio Il Ritorno di Tobia, Orfeo and the late canons, but also of works like the London Symphonies and The Creation.

Bach: The Cello Suites
  • Edward Klorman
  • Published online:
    02 October 2025
    Print publication:
    11 September 2025
  • Originally dismissed as curiosities, J. S. Bach's Cello Suites are now understood as the pinnacle of composition for unaccompanied cello. This handbook examines how and why Bach composed these highly innovative works. It explains the characteristics of each of the dance types used in the suites and reveals the compositional methods that achieve cohesion within each suite. The author discusses the four manuscript copies of Bach's lost original and the valuable evidence they contain on how the Suites might be performed. He explores how, after around 1860, the Cello Suites gradually entered the concert hall, where they initially received a mixed critical and audience reception. The Catalan cellist Pablo Casals extensively popularized them through his concerts and recordings, setting the paradigm for several generations to follow. The Cello Suites now have a global resonance, influencing music from Benjamin Britten's Cello Suites to J-pop, and media from K-drama to Ingmar Bergman's films.

Haydn's Minuets and Eighteenth-Century Dance
  • Joseph Fort
  • Published online:
    12 September 2025
    Print publication:
    02 October 2025
  • Audiences in eighteenth-century Vienna attended the city's popular public balls, where they danced the minuet. This book explores the public dance culture of Vienna in the late eighteenth century as an essential context in which to understand minuet composition from this period, focusing on the music of Haydn, and restores the array of kinaesthetic associations and expectations that eighteenth-century audiences brought to the listening experience through their knowledge of the dance. It reconstructs the choreography of the minuet as it was performed in the Viennese dance halls and examines the repertoire of minuets composed specifically for dancing, bringing new perspectives to the minuet genre. This recovered bodily knowledge allows the author to put forward an analytical method of 'somatic enquiry' and apply it to Haydn's symphonic minuets from the 1790s, revealing previously hidden features in this music that come to light when listening with an understanding of the dance.

Naples, Capital of Dance
  • The ‘feste di ballo' Tradition in the Long Eighteenth Century
  • Anthony R. DelDonna
  • Published online:
    10 April 2025
    Print publication:
    17 April 2025
  • Renowned as a city of entertainment, Naples was unequaled in eighteenth-century Italy for the diversity of its musical life. During the reigns of Carlo di Borbone and his heir Ferdinando IV, the sponsorship of feste di ballo, elaborate celebratory balls featuring social dance such as the minuet and contradance, grew increasingly lavish. Organized for carnevale, occasions of state, and personal celebrations in the lives of the royal family, the feste di ballo fostered both a public agenda and a personal rapport between the monarchs and local aristocracy. As the century progressed, the frequency of and resources accorded to the feste di ballo and its showcasing of social dance came to match those of stage drama and instrumental music. Based on extensive archival research, this book reveals the culture of social dance at the Bourbon court and how these spectacular events served to project images of authority, power, and identity.

Opera in the Viennese Home from Mozart to Rossini
  • Nancy November
  • Published online:
    18 February 2024
    Print publication:
    18 January 2024
  • Domestic musical arrangements of opera provide a unique window on the world of nineteenth-century amateur music-making. These arrangements flourished in especially rich variety in early nineteenth-century Vienna. This study reveals ways in which the Viennese culture of musical arrangements opened up opportunities, especially for women, for connoisseurship, education, and sociability in the home, and extended the meanings and reach of public concert life. It takes a novel stance for musicology, prioritising musical arrangements over original compositions, and female amateurs' perspectives over those of composers, and asks: what cultural, musical, and social functions did opera arrangements serve in Vienna c.1790–1830? Multivalent musical analyses explore ways Viennese arrangers tailored large-scale operatic works to the demands and values of domestic consumers. Documentary analysis, using little-studied evidence of private and semi-private music-making, investigates the agency of musical amateurs and reinstates the central importance of women's roles.

String Virtuosi in Eighteenth-Century Naples
  • Culture, Power, and Music Institutions
  • Guido Olivieri
  • Published online:
    13 January 2024
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • Drawing on extensive archival work, this book examines the crucial contribution of Neapolitan string virtuosi to the dissemination of instrumental music and to the development of string practices and musical culture in Europe. It presents a fresh look at the central place of instrumental music in early modern Naples and considers aspects of music pedagogy, performance practices, patronage, and musicians' social mobility. Music examples, paintings, and lists of personnel of major music institutions inform the discussion and illustrate the opportunities for social mobility afforded by the music profession. Music production and consumption are considered within their cultural, political, and economic contexts and in connection with the rapid political changes of eighteenth-century Naples. This substantial contribution to the understanding of a previously under-studied repertory places the cultivation of Neapolitan instrumental music at the centre of aesthetic and cultural developments across eighteenth-century Europe.

The Cambridge Companion to The Magic Flute
  • Edited by Jessica Waldoff
  • Published online:
    24 November 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • Since its premiere in 1791, The Magic Flute has been staged continuously and remains, to this day, Mozart's most-performed opera worldwide. This comprehensive, user-friendly, up-to-date critical guide considers the opera in a variety of contexts to provide a fresh look at a work that has continued to fascinate audiences from Mozart's time to ours. It serves both as an introduction for those encountering the opera for the first time and as a treasury of recent scholarship for those who know it very well. Containing twenty-one essays by leading scholars, and drawing on recent research and commentary, this Companion presents original insights on music, dialogue, and spectacle, and offers a range of new perspectives on key issues, including the opera's representation of exoticism, race, and gender. Organized in four sections – historical context, musical analysis, critical approaches, and reception – it provides an essential framework for understanding The Magic Flute and its extraordinary afterlife.

Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
  • Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858
  • Katherine Butler Schofield
  • Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023
  • Based on a vast, virtually unstudied archive of Indian writings alongside visual sources, this book presents the first history of music and musicians in late Mughal India c.1748–1858 and takes the lives of nine musicians as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British. It shows how a key Mughal cultural field responded to the political, economic and social upheaval of the transition to British rule, while addressing a central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the ephemeral experience of music once the performance is over? These rich, diverse sources shine new light on the wider historical processes of this pivotal transitional period, and provide a new history of music, musicians and their audiences during the precise period in which North Indian classical music coalesced in its modern form.

Sound and Sense in British Romanticism
  • Edited by James Grande, Carmel Raz
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • A radical re-imagining of the relationship between sound and sense took place in Britain in the decades around 1800. This new approach reconfigured sound as central to understandings of space and temporality, from the diurnal rhythms of everyday life in the modern city to the 'deep time' of the natural world. At the same time, sound emerged as a frequently disruptive phenomenon, a philosophical and political problem, and a force with the power to overwhelm listeners. This is the first book devoted to the topic and brings together scholars from literary studies, musicology, history and philosophy through the interdisciplinary frameworks of sound studies and the history of the senses. The chapters pursue a wide range of subjects, from 'national airs' to the London stage, and from experiments in sound to new musical and scientific instruments. Collectively, they demonstrate how a focus on sound can enrich our understanding of Romantic-era culture. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Haydn and Mozart in the Long Nineteenth Century
  • Parallel and Intersecting Patterns of Reception
  • Simon P. Keefe
  • Published online:
    08 August 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • The first extended study of the combined reception of Haydn and Mozart in the long nineteenth century, this book generates new, holistic understandings of their musical, cultural and historical significance in the Germanic, French and Anglophone worlds. It places a wide range of written sources under the microscope, including serious and popular biographies, scholarship, musical and non-musical criticism, and a diverse body of fiction, and evaluates the impact of anniversary commemorations. Haydn and Mozart in the Long Nineteenth Century determines how reputations, images and narratives for the two composers converge, diverge, develop at different speeds, and influence one another. Countering received wisdom about Haydn's reputational decline and reassessing Mozart reception through consideration of a broad spectrum of publications, we hear Haydn and Mozart speaking to the long nineteenth century in more nuanced, powerful, and persuasive voices than previously recognized.

Mozart's Operas and National Politics
  • Canon Formation in Prague from 1791 to the Present
  • Martin Nedbal
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • As both an in-depth study of Mozart criticism and performance practice in Prague, and a history of how eighteenth-century opera was appropriated by later political movements and social groups, this book explores the reception of Mozart's operas in Prague between 1791 and the present and reveals the profound influence of politics on the construction of the Western musical canon. Tracing the links between performances of Mozart's operas and strategies that Bohemian musicians, critics, directors, musicologists, and politicians used to construct modern Czech and German identities, Nedbal explores the history of the canonization process from the perspective of a city that has often been regarded as peripheral to mainstream Western music history. Individual chapters focus on Czech and German adaptations of Mozart's operas for Prague's theaters, operatic criticism published in Prague's Czech and German journals, the work of Bohemian historians interpreting Mozart, and endeavours of cultural activists to construct monuments in recognition of the composer.

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera
  • Edited by Jacqueline Waeber
  • Published online:
    08 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape – on stage and beyond – which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.

Telemann Studies
  • Edited by Wolfgang Hirschmann, Steven Zohn
  • Published online:
    14 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • Even as Georg Philipp Telemann's significance within eighteenth-century musical culture has become more widely appreciated in recent years, the English-language literature on his life and music has remained limited. This volume, bringing together sixteen essays by leading scholars from the USA, Germany, and Japan, helps to redress this imbalance as it signals a more international engagement with Telemann's legacy. The composer appears here not only as an important early Enlightenment figure, but also as a postmodern one. Chapters on his sacred music address the works' sensitivity to Lutheran and physico-theology, contrasting of historical and modern consciousness, and embodiment of an emerging opus concept. His secular compositions and writings are brought into rich dialogue with French musical and aesthetic currents. Also considered are Telemann's relationships with contemporaries such as Johann Sebastian Bach, the urban and courtly contexts for his music, and his influential position as 'general Kapellmeister' of protestant Germany.

Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire
  • The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
  • Austin Glatthorn
  • Published online:
    14 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • Packed full of new archival evidence that reveals the interconnected world of music theatre during the 'Classical era', this interdisciplinary study investigates key locations, genres, music, and musicians. Austin Glatthorn explores the extent to which the Holy Roman Empire delineated and networked a cultural entity that found expression through music for the German stage. He maps an extensive network of Central European theatres; reconstructs the repertoire they shared; and explores how print media, personal correspondence, and their dissemination shaped and regulated this music. He then investigates the development of German melodrama and examines how articulations of the Holy Roman Empire on the musical stage expressed imperial belonging. Glatthorn engages with the most recent historical interpretations of the Holy Roman Empire and offers quantitative, empirical analysis of repertoire supported by conventional close readings to illustrate a shared culture of music theatre that transcended traditional boundaries in music scholarship.

The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven
  • Erica Buurman
  • Published online:
    25 November 2021
    Print publication:
    02 December 2021
  • The repertoire of the early Viennese ballroom was highly influential in the broader histories of both social dance and music in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet music scholarship has traditionally paid little attention to ballroom dance music before the era of the Strauss dynasty, with the exception of a handful of dances by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. This book positions Viennese social dances in their specific performing contexts and investigates the wider repertoire of the Viennese ballroom in the decades around 1800, most of which stems from dozens of non-canonical composers. Close examination of this material yields new insights into the social contexts associated with familiar dance types, and reveals that the ballroom repertoire of this period connected with virtually every aspect of Viennese musical life, from opera and concert music to the emerging category of entertainment music that was later exemplified by the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss.

Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples
  • Politics, Patronage and Artistic Culture
  • Anthony R. DelDonna
  • Published online:
    04 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • The music of early modern Naples and its renowned artistic traditions remain a fruitful area for scholars in eighteenth-century studies. Contemporary social, political, and artistic conditions had stimulated a significant growth of music, musicians and culture in the Kingdom of Naples from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although eighteenth-century Neapolitan opera is well documented in scholarship, historians have paid much less attention to the simultaneous cultivation of instrumental genres. Yet the culture of instrumental music grew steadily and by its end became an exclusive area of focus for the royal court, a remarkable departure from past norms of patronage. By bridging this gap, Anthony R. DelDonna brings together diverse fields, including historical musicology, music theory, Neapolitan and European history. His book investigates the wide-ranging role of instrumental genres within late eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture and introduces readers to new material, including recently discovered instrumental works of Paisiello, Cimarosa and Pleyel.

Beethoven Studies 4
  • Edited by Keith Chapin, David Wyn Jones
  • Published online:
    26 September 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020
  • Did you know that Beethoven contemplated, however fleetingly, writing more than forty symphonies and that for the Missa solemnis he sought stimulus from a Latin-German dictionary? And what about the underappreciated sociable side of Beethoven's music to set alongside the familiar one of the heroic? Beethoven Studies 4 is a collection of ten chapters that approach the composer and his music from an appealing range of critical standpoints, aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical and performance. Alongside essays that offer new information on Beethoven's compositional practice and broaden understanding of the music's contemporary and posthumous appeal, there are essays on his interaction with specific environments, Bonn and post-Napoleonic Austria, and vocal and piano performance practice. The volume will appeal to cultural historians and practitioners as well as Beethoven enthusiasts.

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