The title of John Fuller Maitland's article ‘Wanted – An Opera’, in which he argued for the establishment in Britain of a state-supported national opera house, could almost be read as a statement of desire for an operatic work of British origin itself. The perception that composers produced little opera of value in the period of the so-called ‘British Music Renaissance’ has become a trope, despite research in recent years showing the extent of activity, both in terms of composition and performance, during the 20 years either side of 1900.

Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730–1792), an aesthetician and partisan of Jean-Philippe Rameau's harmonic theories, is most often remembered for his rejection of musical mimesis and for his separation of music and language. In doing so, he advanced one of the first – if not the first – aesthetic theories of musical autonomy. Yet despite this achievement, little has been written about how or why he came to this conclusion. This article provides a long-overdue reconstruction of Chabanon's claims for autonomy while simultaneously resituating him in eighteenth-century musical discourse. Through a sylleptic reading of his writings and the intertexts that underpin them, I show that Chabanon was an insightful critic of the French Enlightenment's aesthetic project. I accomplish this by reconstructing his argument about music's ability to provoke aesthetic experiences within listeners. As I contend, Chabanon's own encounter with this question articulates an aesthetic theory based upon music's materiality, grounded at once through the science of acoustics, novel theories of sensory experience and the musical theories that they engendered. Using his documented experience of Rameau's Pigmalion (1748) as a point of departure, I argue that Chabanon's transformation of musical aesthetics into an autonomous discipline helps to turn the early-modern subject into the modern listening self.

This article provides a new analysis, appraisal and aesthetic examination of Mozart's notated melodic embellishments. Whereas previous studies of Mozartean embellishment (including those undertaken by Frederick Neumann in the 1980s and Robert Levin in the 1990s) tend to focus on the local, individual gestures that make up the composer's vocabulary, this study examines broader issues in Mozart's art of embellishment – in particular, the larger-scale characteristics of his written embellishment models, including the rate at which figuration accumulates and the structural layout of that figuration within and between individual phrases. I then explore the aesthetic resonances of melodic embellishment in Mozart's oeuvre, touching upon topics including the relationship of embellishment to a movement's affect, the relationship of embellishment to the compositional persona encoded in a work, the use of embellishment to depict improvisation in operas, and the aesthetic of digressiveness in the composer's melodies.