This article gives a close reading of the “avvisi di Roma”—unpublished archival documents reporting on daily life in the city—that record the arrest in 1645 of famous Roman courtesan singer Nina Barcarola. Organized by the political enemies of Nina's main protector, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the arrest was orchestrated so as to compromise the public honor of both. The reports of the arrest reflect a growing elite interest in female vocal performance in Rome, and attest to a rise in the social value of courtesan singers. Examining details provided in these reports, the article explores various aspects of Nina's life and courtesan singing culture more generally: the public honor and social practices of courtesan singers; the positive effect of singing on courtesan honor; the types of gatherings hosted by Nina; and her politically satirical public performances. It also analyzes Nina's relationship to various areas of contemporary politics—social, state, familial, and gender. The reports reveal that, in the public sphere, Nina, like Barberini's male dependents, served as a symbolic extension of the cardinal. By introducing courtesan singers—a significant, marginalized population—into musicological discourse on seventeenth-century Rome, the article broadens our understanding of Roman singing culture in this period.

Written in the form and style of the popular “novel of circulation” (or “it-narrative”), this article examines and provides an experience of the performance practices of eighteenth-century amateur music. It tells the typically complex history of a minor hit, “Come Haste to the Wedding,” a tune that was sung in a 1760s Drury Lane pantomime, rewritten as a rondeau for London publishers, danced as a jig in Irish and Scottish halls, transcribed as a fiddle tune by a captain in the Continental Army, circulated as a flute or guitar melody as far abroad as Calcutta, and collected by a young loyalist in Charleston, South Carolina. I argue that common to all these versions—and among many similar and neglected amateur genres, including sectional variation sets and dance collections—was the practice of desultory reading. The term “desultory” itself comes from the period, and the practice suggested here extrapolates from evidence of readers' experience of approaching literature and periodicals out of order. Many musical texts asked readers to skip between pages and sections, rondeaux chief among them but also instructional treatises. Some of those same treatises, by C. P. E. Bach (1753–62) and Quantz (1752), hint at desultory reading in subtle admonitions. Through a lively engagement with period style, this article outlines a new definition of music reading informed by eighteenth-century language and practical context, a definition attuned to the ocular and physical habits of the era's most plentiful practitioners: domestic performers of domestic music.

This article examines the change in the Viennese reception of Donizetti's operas in relation to the internationalization of the city's theatrical life during the last fifteen years of the Metternich regime (1833–48), as well as the ensuing tensions between German nationalist ideology and the cosmopolitan aspirations of Habsburg cultural policies. While the transformation of Donizetti's image from Italian to cosmopolitan composer resulted in part from the development of his career in Paris from 1838, it was also inseparable from evolving ideas of cultural cosmopolitanism in Vienna's political landscape. As the Habsburg court sought to contain the dissemination of national ideologies in the Austrian Empire, the construction of a Viennese operatic identity was increasingly set apart from national discourses. In Vienna's press, discussions of Donizetti's two operas written specifically for the Kärntnertortheater, Linda di Chamounix (1842) and Maria di Rohan (1843), focused on the different ways in which these works combined Italian, French, and German elements, and aligned with conceptions of cosmopolitanism that advocated for the overcoming of national divides. Viennese attempts at reconciling operatic cultures, however, collided with the universalizing aspirations that German nationalists had reckoned as the mission of their own national culture. Charting the flow of ideas emerging from the Viennese reception of Donizetti's operas for the Kärtnertortheater allows us to rethink the relationship between opera and politics in Vienna in the 1830s and 1840s, and to reconsider our approach to “national” designations as focal concepts of nineteenth-century music historiography more broadly.