From 1637 to the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was the world center for operatic activity. No exact chronology of the Venetian stage during this period has previously existed in any language. This reference work, the culmination of two decades of research throughout Europe, provides a secure ordering of 800 operas and 650 related works from the period 1660 to 1760. Derived from thousands of manuscript news-sheets and other unpublished materials, the "Chronology" provides a wealth of new information on about 1500 works. Each entry in this production-based survey provides not only perfunctory reference information but also a synopsis of the text, eyewitness accounts, and pointers to surviving musical scores. What emerges, in addition to secure dates, is a profusion of new information about events, personalities, patronage, and the response of opera to changing political and social dynamics. Appendixes and supplements provide basic information in Venetian history for music, drama, and theater scholars who are not specialists in Italian studies.

Two systems of timekeeping were in concurrent use in Venice between 1582 and 1797. Government documents conformed to the Venetian year (beginning 1 March), church documents to the papal year (from 1 January). "Song and Season" defines the many ways in which time was discussed, resolving a long-standing fuzziness imposed on studies of personnel, institutions, and cultural dynamics by dating conflicts. It is in this context that the standardization of timekeeping coincided with the collapse of the "dramma per musica" and the rise of scripted comedy and the "opera buffa," Selfridge-Field discloses fascinating relationships between the musical stage and the cultures it served, such as the residues of medieval liturgical feasts embedded in the theatrical year. Such associations were transmuted into lingering seasonal associations with specific dramatic genres. Interactions between culture and chronology thus operated on both general and specific levels. Both are fundamental to understanding theatrical dynamics of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Today, the names Bach and Mozart are mostly associated with Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But this volume of Bach Perspectives offers essays on the lesser-known musical figures who share those illustrious names alongside new research on the legendary composers themselves. Topics include the keyboard transcriptions of J. S. Bach and Johann Gottfried Walther; J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart's freelance work; the sonatas of C. P. E. Bach and Leopold Mozart; the early musical training given J. C. Bach by his father and half-brother; the surprising musical similarities between J. C. Bach and W. A. Mozart; and the latest documentary research on Mozart's 1789 visit to the Thomasschule in Leipzig. An official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives, Volume 14 draws on a variety of approaches and a broad range of subject matter in presenting a new wave of innovative classical musical scholarship. Contributors: Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Yoel Greenberg, Noelle M. Heber, Michael Maul, Stephen Roe, and David Schulenberg