The ‘Sun of German Composers’, attributed to A. F. C. Kollmann, is a fascinating document in music historiography. With its all-seeing providential eye of Johann Sebastian Bach in the centre, a surrounding trinity of George Frideric Handel, Joseph Haydn and Johann Gottlieb Graun, and two circles of ‘rays’ that depict the remaining German composers as known to its author, this sun was a striking object for reproduction in Friedrich Rochlitz's Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. As Kollmann's original engraving is not extant, the design is known only through the replica in this periodical, where it is accompanied by a dubious anecdote related by Johann Nicolaus Forkel on the origins of the design and Haydn's alleged approval of it. Although only the sun was reproduced, it appears that there was more to the original engraving; according to Forkel: ‘Beneath the sun is an Italian owl that cannot bear the light of German composition; and to the side are an Italian capon and a German rooster, placed as if they were about to begin fighting one another’ (Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2 (1799), columns 103–104). Thus the Italian muse was depicted alternately as a creature of the night and a castrated delicacy, opposed in each case by a German figure of superior (re)productive capability. Given the comic associations of such zoological illustrations, it is not surprising that Forkel (or Rochlitz) chose to omit the owl, the capon and the rooster, leaving the quasi-religious nature of the compositional sun undisturbed. More recent reproductions of the sun, including that in the present volume, routinely omit mention of the Italian presence described by Forkel while continuing to cite Haydn's supposed approval of J. S. Bach's singular position. The processes that led to such an omission – the construction of Germanic music as a default or normative repertory and the necessity of having a major composer honour figures of the past – have, of course, played an important part in Western music history, and their consequences are addressed, albeit sporadically, in this book.

The Century of Bach and Mozart commemorates a conference held at Harvard University in September 2005 in honour of Christoph Wolff's sixty-fifth birthday. As one might expect from the title, the eighteen essays are concerned primarily with eighteenth-century German music, with the exception of a single contribution on Giuseppe Tartini. Topics covered include the history of music theory, source studies, hermeneutics, historiography and performance practice, while one of the finest contributions, by James Webster, actively questions the assumptions and preoccupations of the conference. The collection is further enriched by David Blackbourn's introductory essay setting the political and intellectual contexts of the subjects at hand.

Issues of compositional history and method are addressed in essays by Thomas Christensen, Peter Wollny, Daniel Melamed and Sergio Durante. Christensen, in ‘Fundamenta Partiturae: Thorough Bass and Foundations of Eighteenth-Century Composition Pedagogy’, explores the role of south German thoroughbass treatises and the art of extempore keyboard realization in the teaching of composition. Melamed discusses the complex history of a celebrated Bach chorale setting in ‘The Evolution of “Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär” BWV 80/5’. He notes the problems of vocal and instrumental disposition in the absence of a surviving autograph, and suggests possible contexts for the Latin contrafactum of the chorus prepared by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach in the 1760s. Wollny, whose edition of the fragments and sketches is soon to appear in the Neue Bach Ausgabe, contributes a chapter ‘On Johann Sebastian Bach's Creative Process’. In its discussion of the processes of inventio and elaboratio, together with quotations from Bach's cantata Jesu, der du meine Seele, bwv78, and Theile's Musikalisches Kunstbuch, the essay explores topics also addressed recently by Laurence Dreyfus and David Yearsley.

Durante, in ‘Tartini and His Texts’, discusses this composer's creative process and his use of literary texts as inspiration in the composition of instrumental music. Tartini would occasionally note incipits from these texts in his autographs, and although the work of Metastasio has been recognized as the source for some, a substantial number of them have remained unidentified. Durante, however, building on the work of earlier scholars, has been able to identify many of the incipits and musical settings of them that Tartini might have encountered. With the increasing digitization of archival information, there is a good chance that sources for the remaining unknown incipits will eventually be discovered. For example, with a short search I was able to identify a concordance for the incipit ‘Bagna le piume in Lete’, cited in the Concerto d56, in an anonymous aria for soprano and continuo at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (MU.MS.162.L, f. 99v).

Analytical issues form the primary focus of three essays in the volume. Eric Chafe, in ‘Bach and Hypocrisy: Appearance and Truth in Cantatas 136 and 179’, addresses issues of harmonic design in two cantatas and their later parodies, following the methodology of the author's two previous studies on tonal allegory. In ‘Bach's Passions and the Textures of Time’, John Butt explores the tension between cyclical and linear narrative structures in the Matthäus-Passion, bwv244, and the Johannes-Passion, bwv245, which were composed on the brink of an incipient modernity. Hermann Danuser's ‘Mishmash or Synthesis? On the Psychagogic Form of The Creation’ considers the place of Haydn's oratorio in German aesthetics of the time, taking as its departure the verdict of Schiller that The Creation was a ‘characterless mishmash’ (41). Danuser resists this judgment, arguing for a ‘deep structure’ based on approaches to and moves away from a climax, complementing the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful (51).

Questions of performance practice occupy a prominent place in the book, particularly in the discussion of keyboard music. Neal Zaslaw tackles a controversial topic in ‘One More Time: Mozart and His Cadenzas’. Confirming Constanze Mozart's statement that her husband wrote them ‘only for his pupils’ (239), Zaslaw argues that Mozart did not consider the notated cadenzas as integral parts of each concerto, but as mere models that were suitable for soloists of moderate ability. Novice virtuosos would play a generic formulation, while experienced practitioners would be expected to improvise their own. These suggestions are plausible, but the essay generally reads like an outline for a more detailed study, and at several points one wishes for more information on the early transmission patterns of the sources. In ‘Mozart's Working Methods in the Keyboard Concertos’, Robert Levin outlines what can be determined from a study of the autograph scores, although the conclusions of his chapter will already be familiar to students of this topic. In a number of cases where Mozart replaced a more difficult original with an easier passage for the solo instrument, Levin argues for the viability of performing the passage as originally notated. If the composer had notated one version as an ossia, there would, of course, be no objection to this way of proceeding, but we should note that Mozart explicitly crossed out the first version in the examples cited by Levin, and the choice to restore the original may take enthusiasm for early and variant readings a little too far. Gretchen Wheelock, in ‘Mozart's Fantasy, Haydn's Caprice: What's in a Name?’, considers the varied application of words like ‘fantasia’, ‘capriccio’ and ‘praeludium’, pondering whether composers understood them to have distinct meanings (Figure 1 might also have included Mozart's lost notebook of Capricci, k32a).

Through a number of articles and recordings, Christopher Hogwood has sought to re-establish the clavichord as a viable choice for the performance of eighteenth-century music. In ‘The Clavier Speaks’, Hogwood provides a useful summary of conventions for articulation, phrasing and ornamentation in the wake of new stylistic developments in keyboard writing. His evaluation of modern-day artists and their knowledge of older performance practices is, however, unduly negative: it is difficult to agree that evidence from treatises is ‘overlooked by all but a handful of modern performers and teachers’ (356), or that students in professional training are ‘brainwash[ed]’ and ‘schooled without reference to history’ (369). Ton Koopman's essay ‘Ten Years of Bach Cantatas’ sits rather uneasily with the remaining studies in the volume. A reflection on the author's experiences of recording Bach with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the essay suffers from a lack of supporting footnotes and from Koopman's rather glib responses to complex questions of performance practice. Whatever views one may hold on the notorious problem of the size of Bach's chorus, the issue surely deserves better treatment than Koopman's implicit accusation that technical manipulation is carried out by those who record the music with vocal concertists alone.

Some of the best essays in the collection address issues of history and historiography. Ulrich Konrad, in his chapter ‘On Ancient Languages: The Historical Idiom in the Music of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’, argues that the composer's occasional adoption of archaic stylistic characteristics in his Viennese works arose from a pragmatic sense of their utility in the creative process. He asserts that a sense of the historical imagination (at least in the form in which we would understand it), replete with homage to great figures of the past and an awareness of one's own historical position, was foreign to Mozart's thinking. Reinhard Strohm, in ‘Eighteenth-Century Music as a Socio-Political Metaphor?’, denies the claim of Theodor W. Adorno and his more recent musicological adherents that social phenomena are necessarily encoded in artistic productions themselves (as opposed to the people who produce them). Elaine Sisman examines the related concepts of ‘opus’ and ‘work’ in ‘Six of One: The Opus Concept in the Eighteenth Century’. Rejecting the influential theory of Lydia Goehr on the emergence of a ‘regulative work concept’ around 1800, Sisman proposes a model of rhetorical interaction between the constituent works of an eighteenth-century collective opus and explores the allure of its typical arrangement in groups of six.

Although Kollmann's ‘Sun’ figured prominently in the promotional literature for the conference and is reproduced on the cover of the book, the only contributor to engage with it explicitly is James Webster. In ‘The Century of Handel and Haydn’ Webster notes how curious the pairing of Bach and Mozart seems to be, given the relatively low contemporary popularity of the composers, not to mention their differences of musical style, geographical origin and religious confession. Webster rightly questions the story of Haydn's approval for the centrality of Bach in the design of the sun, and suggests that it was a nationalistic desire for a coherent narrative of Germanic music that made such anecdotes necessary. When Hans-Joachim Schulze states that the Neue Bach Ausgabe's documentary collections were explicitly designed to overturn ‘the mistaken belief that Bach's music vanished during the second half of the 18th century’ (214), the desire for historical continuity with ‘Classical’ composers appears with equal transparency.

The Century of Bach and Mozart has been well edited by Sean Gallagher and Thomas F. Kelly, and errors are few: one figure (122) has an incorrect date for Bach's Cantata bwv167, the reader is directed to a non-existent facsimile of Tartini's Concerto d117 (152) and an example from Bach's Cantata bwv78 has a number of pitch errors in the chorale melody (231). The collection contains many articles of great interest, and it is a worthy celebration of its dedicatee and his singular contribution to studies of eighteenth-century music.